This is also the case of a master of realism such as M. Walser (b.1927), who was also very active (among the novels, Das Schwanenhaus, 1980; Brief an Lord Liszt, 1982; Brandung, 1985; Jagd, 1988), but seldom now up to its best precedents; by S. Lenz (b. 1926; Der Verlust, 1981; Exerzierplatz, 1985), always a good storyteller with a wide-ranging but unusually contrived.
At least doubtful, given the pretense of entrusting you with a message in an apocalyptic key, the nightmare novel by Germany Grass Die Rättin (1985, trans. It., 1987). The vast posthumous fragments of a Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit which H. Fichte, who died in 1986, had been working on from the particular point of view of the ” different ”, was working for years inadequate for the ambitious design of an epic cyclical nature (Hotel Garni, 1987; Der kleine Hauptbahnhof and Eine glückliche Liebe, 1988). And little more than a curiosity can constitute the various prose collected by the always elegant W. Hildesheimer (b. 1916), in Nachlese (1987).
Always among the authors of consolidated prestige, the elderly S. Hermlin (b.1915) with the short story Abendlicht (1979) and with the collections Lebensfrist (1980) and Bestimmungsorte (1985), confirmed himself as a great infra-ideological mediator, reaching among other things, a progressive interest in the most varied types of language; P. Weiss (1916-1982) with the third volume published in 1981 concluded his grandiose Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, a paradigmatic line of the evolution of a conscience in a political dimension, above all through the medium of art; and equally worthy of cyclical closure he bought for E. Strittmatter (b. 1912) the mammoth autobiographical novel Der Laden (1983), with perspectives of harmonization in the social on the basis of the acquired awareness of a more comprehensive cosmic harmony.
Meanwhile, the ninety-year-old E. Jünger, born in 1895 (Eine gefährliche Begegnung, 1985, trans. It., 1986 2 ; and the diarist Zwei Mal Halley, 1987), has also returned on several occasions, alert to the events of the time., concerned about the chilling threats weighing on the future of humanity. And it is not Jünger who is the only one to raise such cries of alarm, on the contrary, this is one of the few features repeatedly recurring, albeit on a range that goes from apprehension to terror. A real shock in this regard was given by the tragedy of Chernobyl, remembered by an authoritative writer such as C. Wolf (b.1929) in Störfall (1987, trans. It., 1987), which follows one of his best evidence, the novel Kassandra (1983, trans. It., 1984), which consistently does not constitute an escape into myth but rather the search, in a classical model, of the roots of the current degeneration, which projects, now as then, the specter of a life without alternatives.
According to COMPUTERMINUS.COM, Chernobyl is also in the background of the novel Der Flötenton (1987) by the writer Germany Wohmann (b.1932) also here, as previously in the collection of short stories with the symptomatic title Einsamkeit (1982), saddened without pathos in the presence of humanity reduced in limited horizons. And Chernobyl is also called into question by HJ Schädlich (b.1935) in Ostwestberlin (1987), who bitterly ironizes on the divided city, after having stigmatized, using the paradoxes of the previous Tollhover (1986), the typical figure of the German subject in the course of two centuries.
However, there is no serenity in the narrative of a decade of dullness or, for the authors of the East, of fading or even the collapse of too many certainties betrayed in the facts. It emerges almost everywhere the centrality of an ” I ” that does not feel facilitated to find itself and, much less, to find a reliable sense of life and things starting from itself.
Symptomatically, that is, obsessively, R. Gernhardt (b. 1937) entitles one of his novels Ich ich ich (1982); B. Strauss (Paare, Passanten, 1981, trans. It., 1984; Der junge Mann, 1984, trans. It., 1990; Niemand anderes, 1987), usually provocative, reproaches the sociocentric society, from which it also fails to free oneself, to have annulled the individual; C. Enzensberger (b.1931), on his late debut in the great fiction with the novel Was ist Was (1987), one of the few relevant in the period, makes an attempt, comparable in his breath to the Ästhetik des Widerstands of P. Weiss, to move from the individuality relegated to the non-gratifying everyday to go back to a meaning of historical and social relations and even further back than reality; B. Kronauer (b. 1940) in Berittener Bogenschütze (1986) provides an intelligent study on the poison that can also come from poetry in an epigonal era; C. Hein (b.1944 ; Nachtfahrt und früher Morgen, 1982; Drachenblert, 1982; Horns Ende, 1985; Der Tangospieler, 1989) pours out all his bitterness as an exile of the GDR in presenting its miseries and ideological obtuseness across the board ; Germany-P. Eigner (b.1942 ; Golli, 1978; Brandig, 1985; Mitten entzwei, 1988) seeks refuge in memory for a dubious existential location; E. Loest (b. 1926; Zwiebelmuster, 1985) touches with the possible levity the particular modern discomfort of the intellectual; Jurek Becker (b. 1937), not yet ripetutosi the levels of his excellent debut (Jakob der Lügner, 1968, trans. Trans., 1976), oscillates between the inertia of the non-programmed life of the protagonist of Aller Welt Freund (1982) and the unsolved preoccupation with the atrocities of war that still generate moral monstrosities (Bronsteins Kinder, 1986); also V. Braun, who also does not allow space for formal complaints, in Hinze-Kunze-Roman (1985) transposes his favorite characters from theater to fiction, taking advantage of the opportunity to fight dogmatisms and slogans of a society, that of the GDR, which has not evolved.
In a different spirit, there is a recurring predilection for biography, more or less openly integrated with contributions of fantasy but, in general, well narrated.
