Gertrud (Schleef)

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Gertrud is a two-volume novel by Einar Schleef , published between 1983 and 2003.

content

In a nutshell, the plot in Gertrud revolves around the aged mother of the same name, Einar Schleef. The book tells how the over 60-year-old woman, who lives in Sangerhausen in East Germany , struggles to cope with her everyday life between lack, discrimination and illness and is repeatedly caught up with memories of her past. If she once lived with her family, at the time of the story, which includes the years 1970 to 1980, she is more and more on her own - especially after her husband died and her second son Einar followed suit with the firstborn and in the Has moved west.

Narrative situation

Gertrud is a conglomerate of the literary techniques of inner monologue and stream of consciousness , in which Einar Schleef tries to recreate the thoughts of his mother, from whom he was separated after his escape through the inner-German border . He used letters from his mother, his own diary entries and transcripts of conversations as a template. Even if you have to grant Gertrud a co-authorship, it quickly becomes clear, due to the meticulousness with which the author describes minimal perceptions, thoughts, sensations and considerations, that the mother, as she is portrayed in the novel, is sometimes only fictional Figure can be viewed. So it is not a biography in the true sense of the word.

Stylistic

Although every attempt to adequately reproduce a figure's world of thought must always lead to discrepancies, since verbalization always takes the toll of simultaneity, changeability and speed, Einar Schleef's style in Gertrud comes surprisingly close to what is thought. This has to do with his lifelike speech gesture, which is characterized above all by his assembly technique as well as his elliptical shattering of the sentences and their dialectal or very colloquial coloring. This creates an oppressive panopticon of sometimes vulgar everyday occurrences and reflexively processed past events, which even do not ignore the overarching connection to the German catastrophe history of the 20th century.

background

The fact that, when she was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, she lived through four forms of government: the German Empire , the Weimar Republic , the Third Reich and the GDR plays an important role in Gertrud's memory . Based on the problems that Einar Schleef himself had with regard to his training and later professional activity as a dramaturge with the dictatorial conditions in the GDR, he must have had an inner need to deal with German history in literary terms. In Gertrud's monologues, the adverse living conditions in the GDR are constantly discussed, and the associated memories of the old woman (sometimes even back to the time of the Great Migration) show parallels to the present. In this way, different epochs are mirrored to one another and history is exposed as a never-ending chain of terror, violence and deformation that manifests itself in the smallest cell of communal coexistence, the family.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Wolfgang Behrens: Einar Schleef. Work and person. Berlin: Theater der Zeit 2003, p. 75
  2. ↑ cf. Sarah Till: storytelling against oblivion. About the narrative reflection of history in Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries" and Einar Schleef's "Gertrud", pp. 55–56

literature

Primary literature

Secondary literature