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Annett Gröschner
Moskauer Eis
(Moscow Ice-Cream)
Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, September 2000, 250 pp. It is 1991 and Annja Kobe has returned to Magdeburg in East Germany, where she grew up, to look after her dying grandmother. The hospital has been unable to reach Annja's father and when she goes to his Magdeburg flat she finds him apparently dead in his old GDR freezer. But the freezer is not plugged in. Attempting to solve the mystery of his death, she soon discovers that his institute had been taken over by Treuhand, a body set up in the wake of reunification to privatise state-owned companies, and that his colleague is dead too. She has her grandmother, the freezer and her dead father's body taken back to her grandmother's flat. The account of the next few weeks, before her grandmother dies, is interspersed with fragments of the family history. We learn the frustrating story of how her parents met, just before the Wall went up, and of how her mother never forgave her father for thwarting her desire to escape. He himself is a recognisable East German type: a petty and small-minded functionary with excessive identification with work and a rigid belief in rules and regulations. He is a classic embarrassing parent, so obsessed with freezing technology that he always takes a thermometer into the supermarket to check the temperatures of the freezers - which of course are always wrong. Her mother walks out - after Annja has called her 'an ice-cream whore' for taking a job in an inferior ice-cream parlour. Annja herself ends up selling Moscow ice-creams in Berlin, before manufacturing her own. She has acquired a very literal understanding of the term 'Cold War'.
The tone of the novel is dry and humorous, bitter but also touching, and underlines the East German habit of clinging to the past. It succeeds in perfectly capturing the banality and occasional brutality of the regime while also conveying a hint of nostalgia for a vanished world, and will succeed in making the GDR accessible even to readers to whom Germany is completely alien. A cool achievement indeed.
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