SOURCE: Niven, William J. “The Vanquished Self: Christoph Hein's Drachenblut and Der Tangospieler.” Journal of European Studies XXII (June 1992): 127–41.

In the following review, Niven examines the loss of independence and identity in the protagonists of Drachenblut and Der Tangospieler.

In her novel Flugasche (1981), Monika Maron describes how a journalist bent on exposing the inhumanity of GDR environmental politics is crushed by the resistance of authority.¹ Stefan Heym in his novel Collin (1979) describes how a leading GDR writer was only able to achieve official recognition at the cost of his individual conscience.² These perspectives are typical of oppositional GDR literature: critical voices are stifled by the state, while representatives of the state can be relied on to stifle themselves any inner impulse to criticism or rebellion, since the maintenance of their privileged position is at stake. The pattern is either one of repression or self-repression. Christoph Hein, in the...