SOURCE: Clarke, David “‘Himmel auf Erden’? Christoph Hein, Capitalism, and the ‘Wende.’” In Christoph Hein in Perspective, edited by Graham Jackman, pp. 21–44. Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 2000.

In the following essay, Clarke examines Hein's rejection of Western capitalism and his desire to establish a social system based upon shared personal and political values.

Christoph Hein is well known as a GDR author whose fiction portrays some of the most negative aspects of East German society and its effects on the individual. However, during the ‘Wende’ of 1989, Hein called upon his fellow East Germans to reject the lure of Western consumerism and attempt to build a new society based on shared ideals. In this article, Hein's statements about Western society are examined in the context of his analysis of the problems of the GDR, thus revealing a basic thematic continuity between the author's rejection of ‘real existing socialism’ and his critique...