Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990)
by Geoff Westgate
If the East German writer Irmtraud Morgner had not existed, it would take a leap of imagination almost as bold as those which typify her literature to invent her. Little in her family background or the narrow ideology of her GDR environment encouraged the often surreal, always iconoclastic novels that she produced over a thirty-year period until her untimely death from cancer in May 1990.
Born in Chemnitz, Saxony, in 1933, Morgner lived all her life in the GDR. Her relationship with communism was of profound importance for her career. An initial belief that the socialist ideal could be realised - and that it was her duty as a writer to help achieve this - ceded painfully to a recognition that the ideal had been perverted beyond repair. Her writing mirrors this trajectory and looks increasingly askance at twentieth-century civilisation and its discontents. In her last interview, in 1990, Morgner said that her home had been in literature.
Her dark good looks, flamboyant dress, guttural laugh and provocative tone made Morgner a striking presence on the East Berlin literary scene. Her novels were equally eccentric: satirically grotesque rather than merely critical; wilfully oblique rather than confessional; sexually liberated but laced with tristesse. They demand attention to detail, sensitivity to allusion, and open-mindedness to cultural reference. But the uniqueness of Morgner is that her novels are buoyed up by a brilliant wit, and feature unlikely departures and improbable dénouements. They invoke myth, legend, fairy tale, and expose their conventions. They muddle chronology, bend the laws of physics, and deflate pomposity with earthy obscenity. The reader gets Foucault and phantasmagoria, Marx and metamorphoses, Descartes and double entendres.
Morgner's novels are full of the fantastical impossibilities which literary fiction can indulge: trains become boats pulled by sea-horse power (Die wundersamen Reisen Gustavs des Weltfahrers, 1972); medieval poets are raised from the dead (Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura, 1974), witches are conjured up (Amanda. Ein Hexenroman, 1983) and puppets brought to life to wreak havoc in the East German provinces (Gauklerlegende. Eine Spielfraungeschichte, 1970). The aim is to shake the reader out of the complacency of received 'wisdoms' so as to see the world anew. All means are permitted in these dramatic meditations on power, gender, desire and disenchantment, which home in on the individual's attempts to find existential orientation.
True to Morgner's aversion to dogma, no one of her novels is quite like another. Her most subtly lyrical work, the minimalist Gauklerlegende, contains barely 1000 lines of text over 100 pages. It stands at the opposite end of the spectrum to the voluminous Beatriz - a montage novel - and Amanda, both of which stretch to more than 650 pages. Hochzeit in Konstantinopel (1968) fuses a holiday diary on the Dalmatian coast with a series of beguiling short texts set in an imaginary no-man's land, whilst Rumba auf einen Herbst (completed 1965, published 1992) uses interludes featuring Persephone and Orpheus to divide four successively narrated but simultaneously occurring days-in-the-life of four inter-connected, emotionally displaced East Germans. Although Morgner's sympathies were with the oppressed of both genders, foremost amongst her concerns were the manifold restrictions impeding women's self-realisation. In Beatriz and Amanda, she confronted the issue with a millennial breadth of vision and a rhetorical and theoretical panache to match its epochal importance.
The daughter of a train driver, Morgner grew up in a household without books. At the age of twelve she chanced upon a copy of Goethe's Faust and was hooked. She studied Germanistik at Leipzig University, then moved in 1956 with her husband, the writer Joachim Schreck, to East Berlin. She gave birth to a son in 1967, but divorced Schreck in 1970 when she married the GDR poet and writer Paul Wiens. After the reunification of Germany, Wiens was revealed to have been one of the East German Stasi's top 'unofficial collaborators' in the literary field - so good he was even 'loaned' to the KGB. Morgner herself had discovered the truth of his double life somewhat earlier: files in the Berlin Gauck Authority - which also contain letters received by Morgner which Wiens handed to his Stasi officer - now reveal the real reason why she divorced him so suddenly in 1977.
It is a shocking story of the infiltration of the state into the most intimate spheres of life: Morgner's marriage to Wiens literally brought home the system's corruption. In Amanda Morgner used allegory to respond to a betrayal of which she did not dare speak openly and to address the complexities of collaboration and resistance - the unhappy progeny of the GDR's 'real existing socialism'. As a result, she fell ever more under the watchful eye of the Stasi.
Morgner was awarded the GDR National Prize for Literature in 1978 - presumably a 'reward' for choosing to remain in the GDR while numerous of her colleagues were emigrating westwards and denigrating their erstwhile home. It was a tightrope walk between extra-literary quietism and literary subversion that Morgner performed throughout her career. Sceptical of posturing and speechifying, she wanted her books to do the talking.
State censorship meant that this was not always possible. Morgner's third novel, Rumba, was banned in 1965; the avant-garde late 1960s novels which followed were subject to delays and minimal print-runs; she battled for two years for permission to publish Amanda. Morgner's career in the GDR was an improbable victory against the odds. It took a heavy toll in terms of her health.
Morgner was a prominent writer in the GDR and was fêted by West German feminists. But how is it possible that her name is absent from the rollcall of celebrated German writers of the late twentieth century? It is perhaps a legacy of the unwritten, but pervasive, rules of Cold War literary engagement, which frequently rewarded outspoken political allegiances ahead of the subtleties of art. Morgner, notably, did not stylise herself as a 'dissident'. However, the time has now come to re-assess her reputation and to understand that her literary ambition reached far beyond the logic of superpower one-upmanship. That Morgner, for all her seriousness, found support in humour and irony will facilitate her appeal to an English-speaking readership. Their acquaintance with this scandalously overlooked writer is long overdue.
Geoff Westgate was awarded a D.Phil at Oxford University in 1999 for his thesis on Irmtraud Morgner, and is currently working as a translator in Geneva.
Footnote
The Gauck Authority was established by the Federal Law of 1991. It hold the 180km of files of the former GDR Ministry of State Security, or 'Stasi', and is charged with making these files available, first and foremost, to vistims of the Stasi and, secondly, to third parties for the purposes of historical analysis of the GDR.
