SOURCE: Lewis, Alison. “Re-Membering the Barbarian: Memory and Repression in Monika Maron's Animal Triste.” German Quarterly 71, no. 1 (winter 1998): 30-46.

In the following essay, Lewis explores the historical, political, and psychoanalytic underpinnings of Animal Triste, drawing attention to the novel's interrelated themes of obsessive love and abandonment, the excavation of repressed memory, and questions of guilt and redemption as they reflect the reality of German reunification and revelations of Maron's Stasi complicity.

When in 1996 Marcel Reich-Ranicki acclaimed Animal Triste, the latest novel by Monika Maron, as the stroke of genius of an author who has finally found “her topic,” “der Liebe Fluch und Segen,” his praise, although by no means misplaced, seemed premised on curious assumptions.¹ In her earlier works, he argued, Maron was too preoccupied fighting communism to have approached the topic of love: her spirited critique of the communist system in which she grew up was thus...