A large and well-produced book covering women writers of fiction from the 1970s and 80s, edited, perhaps appropriately for a book on East German literature, on very ideological lines. It’s a useful, if not very pleasurable, representative collection. The ideology of it’s authors — a sort of Stalinoid Feminism — is clear from the highly skippable introduction that carries on at inappropriate length (for a literary anthology at least) on a comparison between West and East German welfare states.

The stories themselves, from twenty-five different authors, give what is no doubt a good picture of the officially-acceptable literature of the GDR, at this late stage quite preoccupied, in a fairly ploddy way, with socialist-feminist themes such as combining careers, caring, men, self-respect etc. They read somewhat predictably now but were probably very worthwhile and even perhaps controversial when first published.

The collection is a mix of short stories and novel-excerpts with one very interesting piece from a book of interviews with rural East Germans by Gabriele Eckart. Although as a whole the collection is run-of-the-mill stuff there are some better pieces too. In Helga Schütz’s extract from In Annas Namen — which lifts off from the strange fact of the division of Germany between 1949 and 1990 and all the consequent separation of families and lovers — she demonstrates herself a real writer. The important writer Irmtraud Morgner is represented with an extract called The Tightrope, an unobvious bit of writing that makes the (now) obvious point that many women in the 1970s were being asked to do two full-time jobs (home and work) when employed men did one. Rosemarie Zeplin tells the sad tale of a young woman seduced by a higher-up man in a bureaucracy and executes it with the greatest irony. Other good and s ubtle stories come from Christiane Grosz, Monika Helmecke, Maria Seidemann and Maja Wiens. Christa Wolf was the GDR’s most eminent woman writer but her 1970s piece included here, Tomcat, satirises East-block materialism with a humour that now seems ponderous.

Although a useful collection in its way, there seems in this mainly officially-sanctioned work so much left out about the life of this quiescent and isolated little republic. Perhaps people are tackling this now or perhaps life there was just too dull and restricted to inspire exciting, truthful writing. Where is the East German Smallpiece’s Day or even The Joke (Kundera)?

‘It was wartime, and we lived in Babelsberg. The bombing raids every day... finally it got so I didn’t care if I died or not. I thought, it’s not as bad for a young girl like me as it is for somebody who has a family. Like my uncle. He was an artist, a painter, and had two children with a third on the way. He often talked to me like a grownup, about sexuality and everything. He was killed in combat and I thought, why should I live instead of him?

After the air raid on Potsdam, Father and I went to visit my grandparents. When we got to the station, there was a munitions train on the tracks, grenades were exploding, everything was on fire, bomb craters everywhere, flames leaping over to the factory on the right, I was afraid my hair and clothes would catch fire, I stopped, my father kept going. Then a young couple came along, the husband threw his coat over my head, and we walked down the street that way.

The next day I had to report to the district headquarters where I worked. When I got to the top of the stairs I saw my co-worker, two feet tall and burned to a crisp. That’s when something in me came unglued.’ p251 (Ilse, 56, Chairperson of an Agricultural Production Co-operative from Gabriele Eckart So sehe ick die Sache: Protokolle aus der DDR/That’s How I See It: interviews from the GDR 1984)

‘As always, the baby wakes up when I push the carriage into the dark entryway of our building. I would have liked to leave it in the courtyard for a while, in the overgrown grass. But baby will cry. So I carry the things upstairs first. All of a sudden there’s screaming. I forgot the older one wants to win when we climb the stairs. I went too fast. She resents that. The worst name you can be called at kindergarten seems to be Slowpoke. I go downstairs, the baby’s whimpering. I’m imprisoned by my children’s crying.

I start a fire in the kitchen stove. The baby needs heat. Thank God it doesn’t smoke. And now the older one. «Please, please, mommy. play company.»

I try to distract her, suggest all the games I’d much rather play, in fact would even like to play with her: dice, chess, dominoes, or picture lotto. Or better, clay. That’s what I would like to do now. Form some things. Animals. The Bremen Town Musicians, or a little line of elephants that get smaller and smaller, seals balancing balls. That would be fun right now. But no. «Company, please, pretty please, play Company.» I curse my friend who showed her this dismal game and obey, since the last half hour, at least that much, belongs to her. So:

«Knock Knock.»

«Hello.»

«Hello. What’s your name?»

«Mrs. Doering.»

«Oh, Mrs. Doering. How nice. And what is your baby’s name?»

«Yoga.»

«What a pretty name.» And so forth. Every evening, if my daughter had her way. Only the baby’s names change, because she forgets the one from the day before.’ p190 (from Monika Helmecke Klopfzeichen 1979)