SOURCE: Schmidt, Ricarda. “From Surrealism to Realism: Monika Maron's Die Überläuferin and Stille Zeile Sechs.” In Women and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process, edited by Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, pp. 247-55. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

In the following essay, Schmidt discusses Maron's shift from an imaginative, internalized exploration of psychic turmoil in Die Überläuferin to the realistic, coherent, and politicized narrative of Stille Zeile Sechs.

From her surrealist novel Die Überläuferin, written in GDR times, Maron takes three protagonists over into her post-GDR novel Stille Zeile Sechs, the historian Rosalind Polkowski, her estranged husband Bruno, and his drinking companion, the philologist Karl-Heinz Baron, called ‘der Graf.’ New in Stille Zeile is Herbert Beerenbaum, a retired member of the nomenclature, Rosalind's acquaintance with him being presented in the form of flashbacks while she attends his funeral. Rosalind serves literally as...