SOURCE: McKnight, Phillip. “The Vulnerability of Silence: The Distant Lover.” In Understanding Christoph Hein, edited by James Hardin, pp. 20–39. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

In the following essay, McKnight explores the themes of emotional self-alienation and invasion in The Distant Lover.

The key to Der fremde Freund, 1982 (The Distant Lover) is understanding Hein's use of short, staccato, matter-of-fact sentences relaying the thoughts of the first-person narrator about other people, her environment, and herself. Claudia, a physician, describes emptiness with the vocabulary of fulfillment, presents unlived life as existential happiness, and justifies a nihilistic attitude with the language of optimism. Her professed emancipation is reflected in her cynical manipulation of psychological mechanisms enabling her to repress inner moral guidance and to suppress affection or cordiality for friends, family, and acquaintances, and to facilitate the rejection of affection shown to her by them.

In the end she claims that...