SOURCE: Lenckos, Frauke E. “Monika Maron's The Defector: The Newly Born Woman?” Rackham Journal for the Arts and Humanities (1993): 59-70.

In the following essay, Lenckos draws upon the feminist philosophy of Hélène Cixous to interpret Maron's subversion of binary patriarchal discourse, notions of female essentialism, and the aesthetic tropes of Romanticism in Stille Zeile Sechs.

In a recent interview, East German writer Monika Maron states the necessity for women from both West and East Germany to devote themselves to a history perceived and experienced by women.¹ She refers in particular to her most recent novel Stille Zeile Sechs (Silent Close No. 6, 1991)² in which a GDR woman named Rosalind Polkowski who regards herself as a victim of Stalinist patriarchy takes her revenge on the fathers. She drives one of its most important representatives, the aging Prof. Herbert Beerenbaum, to a premature death and rewrites his biography. In...