2023-12-06 19:28:17
The writer Christoph Hein was a guest in Deutschlandfunk’s literary magazine “Lesart” for a review of the year. He spoke about Dirk Oschmann’s this year’s super bestseller “The East: a West German invention: How the construction of the East divides our society”.
Hein, who was born in Upper Silesia in 1944, read the book “very much and very quickly”; all he could do was “nod vigorously”.
The book describes the thesis that the East is still seen as a deviation from the norm due to the dominant society of the West and denounces the deep “ignorance of West German journalists about the East”.
The moderator of the show quotes author Oschmann, who writes in the foreword to his book that he does not bring together any new theses, but what is new is the anger and anger with which he wrote the book. Critics of the book consider Oschmann’s theses to be dramatized.
Christoph Hein agrees with Oschmann and explains: “Let’s look at all the leadership layers in East Germany. It is still 90 percent occupied by West Germans. There was a replacement of the elites, which is a bit reminiscent of the time of 1935, when the universities were cleansed of Jews, Social Democrats and Communists, when all of a sudden all these professors disappeared and the second and third guards then happily took these positions, with the lack of empathy of 1935. And this exchange of elites started again in 1990 and has not been ended to this day.”
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Christoph Hein’s novels are characterized by their historical accuracy
Hein was one of the first to articulate the discontent in the East about the treatment by the West; for example, he wrote the book “Counter-Eavesdropping Attack – Anecdotes from the Last German-German War” about it. The moderator asks why this topic is so close to Hein.
It was the time of his life, answers the writer, who experienced German separation and two-statehood. As a result of the division of Germany, he was “shaken back and forth” and punished several times in his life.
Christoph Hein also knows what he is talking about in that he was appointed director of the German Theater in 2004 by the then Senator for Culture Thomas Flierl. After harsh criticism of this decision in the features section, he withdrew his candidacy before taking office.
The writer’s novels are particularly characterized by their historical accuracy; he is considered one of the most important chroniclers of the past decades and of what is happening in Germany. The comparison with the situation in Nazi Germany in 1935 and that of East Germany after reunification in 1989 is all the more surprising.
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