Silent Close No.6     by Monika Maron, Translated by D N Marinelli Original title: Stille Zeile Sechs Original language: German Published by Readers International Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 192 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.41 x 7.77 x 4.87 ISBN: 0930523946 List Price: $14.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.95 Published by Readers Internat. Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering Published by Readers International Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Hardcover List Price: £12.95 Not available for ordering

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This ‘Silent Close’ is a pleasant tree-lined street where members of the East German Communist party elite live and the book is an unsympathetic inside view of that elite. It probes the psychohistory of many of the ‘power-hungry children of the proletariat who had worked their way to the top... their fear of everything they didn’t understand, which is why they banned so much.’

The young woman protagonist, Rosalind — separated, disillusioned, sympathetic — is herself from a Communist family and has certainly had it with the German partyocracy, even though she has to study Communist Party history in the ‘Barabas Research Institute’ (where she has ‘learnt not to think for money’) until the day comes when she realises that «every day I took my one and only life to the Barabas research institute the way I threw kitchen garbage into the rubbish bin».

Her search for an alternative source of income leads her to encounter an ageing member of the party elite, Beerenbaum, who hires her to record his memoirs. Gradually, she builds up to confronting him personally with his and the party’s dark deeds both in wartime exile in Stalin’s Moscow (when many German Communists were executed by the secret police) and during the early years of ‘building socialism’ when Beerenbaum was a heavy-handed political official at a university. This confrontation between the founders of the Communist state and its children — those born and brought up under its strictures — is the novel’s centrepiece, going to the heart of the tragic story of East Germany. When it was founded, amidst the ruins of Nazism, it absorbed the genuine idealism of many good men and women but ended up as worth no more than a bunch of hard-currency bananas to most of its citizens by 1989.

Although written with a certain doomy North German depressingness, Silent Close No.6 has some interesting detail of GDR existence, such as the role of what were referred to apparently as ‘the soldiers on the invisible front’ — the famous Stasi, (for Staatssicherheit or State Security) the efficient and innumerable secret police, and seemingly, German Communism’s ‘greatest achievement’.

‘Rosalind bent forward, her arms resting on the typewriter keys. With every syllable she jerked her head in the air like a barking dog. «Confiscating brains. You confiscated grey matter because you had too little of it yourselves... You liberators of mankind had enough body, but you lacked brains. Did you know Latin? You do not know Latin, therefore you forbade others to learn Latin. Those who did were thrown in jail so everyone would forget such a thing as Latin existed. Everything had to be forgotten in order that people didn’t find out anything you didn’t know.»

‘Supported by his healthy hand, Beerenbaum tried again to sit up straight in his chair. His voice was compressed, breathless with pain or rage. «We have forgotten nothing. Never. We always knew what hunger and cold were, damp apartments, rickets, unemployment, war. Our university was class struggle. Our Latin was Marx and Lenin. Go forward and do not forget. You have forgotten. What do you really know?»

«Nothing. We know nothing,» Rosalind cried, her face so twisted she could barely recognize herself. «Nothing, because we were not allowed to live. Your own life was not enough for you, it was too mean, so you used up our life, too. You are cannibals, slave owners with an army of torturers.»’ p173-4