SOURCE: Kane, Martin. “Culpabilities of the Imagination: The Novels of Monika Maron.” In Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the 1980s, edited by Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Roland Smith, pp. 221-34. New York: Berg, 1990.

In the following essay, Kane examines the efforts of Maron's female protagonists in Flugasche and Die Überläuferin to articulate the reality of East German life and to confront pressing social problems through inward and alienating modes of solitary fantasy and imaginative dramatization.

Two sources have given me the cue for this paper. First, the title of Gerd Neumann's Die Schuld der Worte, a collection of prose pieces published in 1979.¹ And secondly Monika Maron's opening contribution to the ‘Deutsch-deutsche Briefwechsel’ with Joseph von Westphalen conducted in the columns of the ZEITmagazin. In Maron's contemplation from an East Berlin perspective of the nature of the border separating the two Germanies, one observation...