The wonderful years
The wonderful years is a collection of prose texts by the GDR dissident Reiner Kunze , which was published in 1976 in the Federal Republic of Germany. The author, who was still living in the GDR at the time, wrote the texts around 1975 and had the manuscript secretly transmitted to the Federal Republic. The publication of the text in the West meant that Kunze was excluded from the GDR writers ' association and 15,000 copies of Kunze's children's book The Lion Leopold that had already been printed in the GDR were pulped. Ultimately, Kunze's conflict with the GDR regime led him to move to the Federal Republic of Germany on April 13, 1977.
action
From the first to the last page, the book criticizes the conditions in the GDR and the Eastern Bloc .
The title of the book
The title is to be understood ironically. He refers to a passage in Truman Capote's novel The Grass Harp :
I was eleven and later turned
sixteen. I
didn't earn any merit , but those were the
wonderful years
“Wonderful years” consist in the fact that young people can simply be themselves without constantly having to “earn” themselves. But since young people, as Kunze's book shows, were constantly bullied in the GDR, they could not spend “wonderful years” there. The criticism of this runs through, like a red thread, the collection of texts, which at no point gives today's reader an ostalgic mood.
Peace Children section
A first group of short texts deals with the development of an " enemy image " in the youth of the GDR: If the narrator at a campsite is initially annoyed by an eight-year-old who is constantly pointing a gun at him in pantomime, the seriousness of military training becomes apparent in the GDR at the end of the fact that the parents of a high school graduate who was shot while fleeing from the GDR should only see his urn.
Feathers section
The father of one son catches himself condemning his son, who, in his opinion, has nothing but nonsense on his mind. However, the father's friends (obviously all dissidents ) praise the son's creativity.
Section Defense of an Impossible Metaphor
At the center of this relatively long section is the narrator's 15-year-old daughter. It's messy, easily messy, and rebellious. That's why she already had problems at school. Deviating behavior is undesirable there. A friend of the daughter's who does not want to report to the NVA for three years is then bullied and expelled . An apprentice's fate is that he refuses to remove a Bible from the shelf in his dorm room: As an “unsafe element”, he is neither allowed to leave the GDR on vacation nor go near Berlin, where the World Youth Festival is currently taking place. Christians also have problems: Stasi employees closely observe the visitors to an organ concert in a church.
Section Café Slavia
In this section, Kunze deals with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into the Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The Czechs stick together, while in the GDR there is no solidarity worth mentioning with the citizens of the Czechoslovakia and the reform communists. At the same time it becomes clear that after 30 years, Czechs and Slovaks have to experience German soldiers again as invaders in their country. (In fact, no German combat units marched into the ČSSR in 1968, but this knowledge was hardly widespread in the GDR.) The book ends with a collection of translations of poems by Czech authors.
filming
Reiner Kunze filmed his book in 1979 and received the Bavarian Film Prize for his script . The film was also awarded the Gilde Film Prize in silver in 1981.
The film was not shown at the 1980 Berlinale "for cinematographic reasons", which was partly attributed to political consideration after the Eastern Bloc countries had demonstratively left the festival the year before because of the film Die durch die Hölle . The critic of the film-dienst considered the film adaptation "unsuccessful" because it was characterized by "black and white painting" and "plenty of cliché symbolism". It was "a film without nuances and differentiated image sequences".
literature
- Reiner Kunze: The wonderful years . S. Fischer. Frankfurt / Main. 1976 (for 15 weeks in 1977 at number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list )
- Marco Dräger: "Wonderful Years"? Youth in the GDR , in: Learn history, Heft 164 (2015), pp. 52–58.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joachim Nawrocki: Always ready. Was the GDR People's Army involved in the 1968 invasion of Prague? In: The time. August 19, 1994. Retrieved August 11, 2017 .
- ^ Alfred Paffenholz, in: Entry The wonderful years in Munzinger Online / Film - Reviews from the film service, accessed on August 6, 2013.