SOURCE: Love, Ursula. Review of Stille Zeile Sechs, by Monika Maron. World Literature Today 66, no. 3 (summer 1992): 505.

In the following review, Love evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Stille Zeile Sechs.

In Monika Maron's third novel [Stille Zeile Sechs] the first-person narrator, Rosalind Polkowski, is a historian in her forties who resigns her job in a research center in East Berlin because she no longer intends to sell her intellect to a political system she abhors. In an act of passive resistance she withdraws into her private life hoping to find some measure of personal freedom by following such whimsical aspirations as learning to play the piano and translating opera libretti. However, a chance meeting with an aging party functionary, Herbert Beerenbaum, causes her to put her plans on hold. She agrees to type his autobiography, but in spite of her good intentions, she is unable to stay uninvolved...