SOURCE: Derr, Nancy. Review of Silent Close No. 6, by Monika Maron. Belles Lettres 9, no. 1 (fall 1993): 58.

In the following review, Derr offers a positive assessment of Stille Zeile Sechs.

Envying the freedom of the stray cat on her street and thoroughly repulsed by having to “think in return for money,” Rosalind Polkowski has finally quit her job at the Barabas research institute, where she has been tediously researching the development of proletarian movements. Alienation, despair, and futility form the core of Polkowski's life, at least until she meets her antithesis: none other than Professor Herbert Beerenbaum. When this well-known brilliant rhetorician and Stalinist invites Polkowski to his home at Silent Close No. 6 [Stille Zeile Sechs] to write his memoirs, the scene is set for a psychological and emotional tug-of-war that only death can end.

In this prize-winning look at life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), novelist Monika...