Monika Marron

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Monika Maron (2018)

Monika Maron (* 3. June 1941 in Berlin as Monika Eva Iglarz ) is a German writer who from 1951 to 1988 in the GDR lived. Her debut novel Flugasche could not appear there and instead was published in 1981 by the West German publisher S. Fischer . The novel is regarded as the first widely known literary examination of environmental pollution in the GDR.

Since then, Maron has written more than ten novels and other works with essays and short stories, of which the 1996 novel Animal triste was particularly well received . She has received a number of awards, including the Kleist Prize .

Maron expressed in authored articles critical of the Merkel government , the political situation and in their opinion "restricted discourse" in Germany, in particular regarding criticism of Islam.

Life

Monika Maron grew up with her mother Hella (Helene) Iglarz. Her father Walter was not allowed to marry her mother, who was considered “half-Jewish”, because of the Nuremberg Race Laws . Maron's grandfather Pawel Iglarz was a converted Jew who was deported to the Bełchatów ghetto (in what was then Warthegau in occupied Poland) in 1942 and then murdered. Maron later set him a literary monument in Pavel's letters . After the end of the war, Hella Iglarz lived with her daughter Monika in West Berlin until she met the SED functionary and later GDR Interior Minister Karl Maron and married in 1955. The family moved to East Berlin , Monika Iglarz took the family name of her stepfather.

After graduating from high school, Monika Maron worked for a year as a milling cutter in an aircraft factory near Dresden . She then studied theater studies , worked as an academic aspirant at the drama school in Berlin and then tried her hand as an assistant director for television and then as a reporter for the women's magazine Für Dich and the Wochenpost for two years . From 1976 she worked as a freelance writer in East Berlin.

Cooperation with the GDR State Security

From October 1976, Maron met several times with a Stasi employee. She made no declaration of commitment to conspiratorial cooperation, but was able to travel to West Berlin several times as the “contact person” of the HVA in 1977 . She wrote two reports for the MfS: about a trip to West Berlin and about a reception at the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany in East Berlin. In doing so, she avoided naming the GDR citizens involved. After six months, she ended her work at her own request. Thereupon the MfS broke off contact and in June 1978 started an operational procedure to monitor Marons. She was under constant surveillance until she left in 1988 .

Writing activity

In 1981, she published her first novel, Flugasche , in which, among other things, she processed experiences as an industrial reporter in the chemical district of the GDR. Fly ash was the GDR's first “environmental book” in which environmental sins were openly lamented and denounced. B [itterfeld] called it “the dirtiest city in Europe”. Because of its critical content, the book, which Maron won widespread recognition, could not appear in the GDR. In it, the first-person narrator Josefa Nadler reports how she drives to B. - that's Bitterfeld - to write a report. She struggles with her own claims: should she write the truth, namely that B. is dirty, or should she write in such a way that the functionaries like it? As a single mother, she can hardly afford to take an oppositional viewpoint. Thirty years later, in the report Bitterfelder Bogen , she writes about changes that have taken place in the city since then.

After increasing political alienation, she left the GDR with her husband, the scientist Wilhelm Tappe, and their son Jonas on a three-year visa. She lived in Hamburg until 1992 and then moved back to Berlin.

She and her fellow writer Peter Schneider visited Dresden on the Monday before Christmas 2014 to get an idea of ​​the Pegida demonstrations. In the following Die Welt article "Pegida is not a disease, Pegida is the symptom" she came to the conclusion: "We praise the open society and refuse open discussion."

Among other things, Maron is a guest author for the Axis of the Good and writes articles in national newspapers such as the NZZ or FAZ .

Her books have been translated into several languages.

Criticism of Islam

Since 2010 Maron has repeatedly expressed himself critical of Islam and wrote articles in national newspapers. In the contribution Politicians must show Muslims the limits , she pointed out that the secular constitution requires the equal treatment of all religious communities, so that the focus on Islam in the form of the "grueling and poor-result" Islamic Conference cannot be justified. This criticism of the Islam Conference 2014 aroused opposition, for example from comedian Murat Topal , who replied to her article: "There could not have been a better example of how weird and shrill the so-called Islam debate in Germany is at the moment."

In 2017, Maron wrote in an article in the NZZ:

“The truth is, I am really afraid of Islam. But why is that pathological and not sensible? The same newspapers that attest to my despicable sentiments report daily of bloodthirsty crimes that are committed in the name of this religion, whereby they emphasize, of course, that this is not due to the religion, but only to its abuse. Almost everything in human history has been abused. While for my critics the abuse of the national only allows the conclusion that the nation-state must be abolished, the abused Islam remains completely unscathed. "

"Munin or chaos in the head"

In 2018 Maron published the novel Munin or Chaos im Kopf , in which a fictional author discovers parallels between the Thirty Years' War and contemporary Germany under the influence of the refugee crisis . Tilman Krause reviewed Die Welt , in the book unfold

“In elaborate circles of association, gradually a mood picture on the state of the nation, as one has not yet read it so casually on the one hand, and reflected in such refined historical terms on the other. Monika Maron has the chutzpah and shows the literary mastery of drawing far-reaching conclusions on a small occasion that make her new novel 'Munin or Chaos in the Head' a parable on the German confusion and upheavals of the present. "

Works

Awards

literature

Essays (online)

Movies

Monika Marron. Rebel at the typewriter. Script and direction: Reinhold Jaretzky. Documentation, Zauberbergfilm / MDR 2019

Web links

Commons : Monika Maron  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Monika Maron: Bundestag election: I haven't been on the left for a long time | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . June 30, 2017, ISSN  0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed September 19, 2017]).
  2. ↑ Monika Maron: Merkel's headless politics make the right strong. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. January 14, 2016, accessed September 19, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Cover name Mitsu . In: Der Spiegel. No. 32/1995 of August 7, 1995. The day before, the “Kulturweltspiegel”, a news broadcast by ARD / Das Erste, reported author Heribert Schwan
  4. ↑ Monika Maron:Two reports to the Stasi , 1976 (PDF; 40 kB) on the S. Fischer Verlag website . First report about a trip to West Berlin Marons, second report about a reception at the permanent representation in East Berlin. (Accessed May 26, 2011)
  5. ↑ Antje Doßmann: The dictatorship of the parents . Berlin 2003, p. 8.
  6. ^ Matthias Braun, Tanja Walenski: Monika Marons novel 'Flugasche' and the GDR. An unfinished business . In: active word . 62nd volume, issue 2, August 2012, p. 255-277 .
  7. ↑ Pegida is not a disease, Pegida is the symptom. In: Welt online. 4th January 2015.
  8. ^ Articles by and about Monika Maron at the Axis of the Good .
  9. ↑ Islam does not belong to Germany . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . October 5, 2010, ISSN  1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed September 19, 2017]).
  10. ↑ Monika Maron: Politicians have to show Muslims limits . In: The world . 2nd February 2014.
  11. ↑ Murat Topal: Thank you, Monika Maron! . In: The world . February 7, 2014.
  12. ^ Tilman Krause: When immigration makes you confused and irritated. In: world. February 23, 2018. (welt.de)
personal data
SURNAME Marron, Monika
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maron, Monika Eva (full name); Iglarz, Monika (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin , Germany