SOURCE: James, Peter. “A Privileged Grave.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4677 (20 November 1992): 24.

In the following review of Stille Zeile Sechs, James commends Maron's scathing honesty but finds shortcomings in the work's narrative contrivances.

For six months during 1985, at a quiet address in East Berlin known as Stille Zeile Sechs, a twice-weekly encounter takes place between a disillusioned forty-two-year-old ex-historian and a decrepit seventy-eight-year-old ex-functionary. The latter, Herbert Beerenbaum, is writing his memoirs, with the former, Rosalind Polkowski, as his amanuensis. Thus the situation of Monika Maron's novel, the first to be published since she moved to Hamburg from East Germany in 1988. None of her works ever appeared in that now defunct republic, because their treatment of such issues as environmental pollution and the inertia of the bureaucracy made them politically unacceptable. But although the GDR itself may have gone, the memory lingers on, and Maron's fictional return in Stille...