Winfried Völlger

This novel had its genesis in a fable about a weathercock and a church mouse that Völlger wrote in 1978, which became a children's picture-book and was broadcast as a radio play. After years of hearing about the big wide world from the winds, the weathercock goes off on a journey to see for itself, and comes back astonished and rather bruised by its experiences; this inspires the mouse to pack up its belongings and set off to explore as well, and it is never seen again. In the novel, the role of the weathercock is taken by the ethnolinguist Dr Claudia M., who, after years of studying world languages from books, gets permission to go on a field-trip to the Himalayas but soon returns to East Germany, suffering from a mental illness that makes her fall into terrifying fits of helpless, uncontrollable laughter at unpredictable moments. The narrator of the book, Claudia's childhood best friend and her not-quite-boyfriend in adult life, who happens to be a junior doctor at the psychiatric clinic where she is being treated, writes an account of what he knows of Claudia's life in the hope that it will help to pin down the cause of the mysterious syndrome.

Of course, this turns out to be mostly a book about the (unnamed) narrator's own life, full of colourful anecdotes illustrating the experience of that generation of East Germans, born at the same time as the republic, who have never experienced anything outside the boundaries of their small, landlocked island in the middle of Europe. And it's a fascinating document of its time, as well as being funny and lively and touching. Völlger admires the generation who fought for socialism, as represented by the 1920s rebel and concentration camp survivor Professor Grün, but he shows us how Grün is now so trapped in the thick concrete of official orthodoxy that he shows mild surprise when students even pretend to be listening to his stupendously-dull lectures. He gives Claudia a high mark in her viva for his course because he's so impressed by the pullover she's crocheted during the lectures.

Of course, it was never going to be easy to publish a novel which — on a crude level — is about someone who can't think of the DDR without collapsing into helpless laughter, and which on a deeper level is about the the huge psychological and intellectual cost of living isolated from the real world, and which is full of satirical portraits of officials, including officials of the Ministry of State Security. The Stasi informer responsible for watching the author had already filed a negative report in 1981, before the ink on the manuscript had a chance to dry, but Völlger was obviously as experienced and cunning in his dealings with bureaucracy as his characters are, and by deploying a mix of tried and tested methods (sowing confusion, parallel approaches, going-to-the-top, and always having a plan B) he managed to circumvent the Stasi, but it took him two years. The 2015 reissue comes with an annex containing the author's own comic account of his struggle to get the book published, as well as a drier, more academic essay on the book and its place in DDR history by Kerstin Schmidt.

Since the novel was only published in 1983 and lost all topical relevance after 1989, it only had a fairly modest success — 40 000 copies sold in the DDR, almost unnoticed in the West. Which is a shame, because it's a lovely, modest, entertaining book, with a few inevitable rough edges (the satirical account of the feminist group is very 1980s), but still well worth a look.… (más)