The Monument     by Erich Loest, Translated by I Mitchell Original title: Völkerschlachtdenkmal Original language: German Published by Trafalgar Square Pub. Date: 1988 Format: Hardcover, 224 pages ISBN: 0436256738 List Price: $19.95, £12.68 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £12.68 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1987 Format: Hardcover, 224 pages List Price: £10.95 Not available for ordering

As an idealistic young journalist and writer in the East Germany of the 1950s, Erich Loest fell foul of the authorities and was sentenced to seven years in prison. After his release he resumed his career as a writer. A novel chronicling the lives of ordinary people in the Communist state was published, but led to further difficulties with officialdom, so that Loest eventually moved to West Germany in 1981. Since then he has achieved both critical acclaim and a wide readership for novels which tell stories of ordinary people, at the same time reflecting wider issues of recent history and politics.

The Monument is the only novel of Loest’s to have been published in the UK so far. The monument of the title is the tower dominating Leipzig built in 1913 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Nations, in which various the Allied Powers defeated Napoleon, bringing about the end of his domination of central Europe. The theme of the novel is German history from the Napoleonic period to the present, seen from an unusual perspective, that of the perpetual underdogs and losers, the Saxons, whose capital Leipzig is: they remained loyal to Napoleon in 1813, and they fought on the Austrian side when Prussia defeated them in 1866; in 1871 they were mere adjuncts to the Prussian victory over France; their moment of glory in 1913, when the building of the monument put Leipzig in the forefront of German nationalist sentiment, was soon eclipsed by the war, inflation and then Hitler.

After the founding of the GDR, Leipzig bathed in the limelight for a few years as Ulbricht’s (Walther Ulbricht 1893-1973, Leipzig-born, was a dominant figure in the GDR 1951-1971) Communist state seemed to be dominated by Saxons. With Honecker’s (Erich Honecker 1912-1994 a miner’s son, ruled the GDR 1973-1989) accession, however, the traditional domination reverted to ’Prussia’: even though many of the Berlin elite came from other parts of Germany, they are felt to have absorbed the ’Prussian’ ethos, which the German Communist seems to embody.

Loest tells his story through a very imaginative flashback technique that gives it a lively tone, at the same time constantly relating the events of the past to the present. The narrator is Alfred Linden, a demolition expert, who is being interrogated by the security service after being caught entering the monument with the intention of blowing it up. Although for many years a loyal citizen and a member of the local establishment, Linden is dismayed by the plans to complete the obliteration of Leipzig’s identity by demolishing the central church and the university (the local beer has already been ‘rationalised’), and he decides to blow up the monument in protest. That, however, is not what leads to the lengthy interrogation. It is the result of what Linden stumbled on when he broke in: the cellars, which the SS had used as a hidey-hole at the end of the war, have been turned into the control centre of a nuclear power complex, which the Communist government has secretly leased to a West German power company.

Through his researches into the past, Linden has come to identify with several figures associated with the battle and the monument. The attachment is so close that at times during his interrogation he speaks with the voices of these other personas. The figures include a simple Saxon soldier, who tried to defect when Napoleon’s defeat was obvious, but who was killed by marauding Prussians; a member of the local gentry who collects skulls from the battlefield which he plans to erect into a monument; a Polish-German worker who was employed as a mason on the monument; and his own father, who worked in the quarry that supplied the stone. A future perspective is provided by Linden’s son, who has moved to Berlin — joining the ‘Prussians’ — and made his career in the Communist Party.

Loest handles the complex interweaving of voices and time-scales with great confidence and skill. The lively, amusing narrative articulates the experience of ordinary people, and is particularly good at creating a sense of what life was like for working men and women behind the façade of battles and monuments and party propaganda.

‘I had to clean soil and grass off a metal ring in the slab in front of the Pussenkomm family stone — this would be a week ago now — before I could pull the covering of the vault to one side. I found the SS-men’s escape tunnel intact, droplets of water glistening on the beams. For about twenty metres in, it was shored up with short-barrelled Carbine 98s, of which there was an abundance lying around the end of the war. As I moved forwards on hands and knees, I held my torch between my teeth. I recognised one niche; tins of dripping and beef had been piled up in there. And Scho-Ka-Kola — a chocolate confection whose name has become a historical byword. At the first main pillar there was a bend in the passageway, I looked up and saw the initials VM: Voiciech Machulski had immortalised himself in the pressed concrete. Under them lay my five ack-ack shells. I can tell you, my mouth went dry. The shells lay there wrapped up like papooses. I unpicked the knots in the string and undid the wrappings; the leaf-patterning on the tarpaulin was still discernible, it was well known that the Waffen-SS used a particular design. The grease broke open with a crackle, under it the metal lay shiny and dry, the detonators were in perfect condition. I caressed the shells, lifted one and carried it to the foot of the buttress I intended to blow up. That was when I came across the unexpected door and stepped into the brightly lit room. And at that moment the men in the yellow overalls rushed me.’ p30-31