Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 3, December 2014
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Reviewed by
University of Lincoln
This is a fascinating book, in German. It is a dialogue between two men who were born in Germany, two and a half, and four years, respectively, before the end of the Second World War. Heinz Uwe Haus grew up and lived the majority of his life in the former German Democratic Republic, also referred to as East Germany. Klaus M. Schmidt grew up in the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany. Haus was aware of the deep problems with the totalitarian nature of government in East Germany, was an implicit and explicit dissident, and was politically active in the movements that brought the regime to its collapse, allowing for reunification. Theatre has been Haus’s life, and, under the totalitarian regime, his means of survival; his political awareness has informed that life.
Despite all the manifold problems facing the world today, many people in privileged Western countries have grown up and lived all their lives in environments that cannot be considered to have been governed by totalitarian regimes. Klaus M Schmidt is in that category, and so am I. We cannot fathom the depths of, or imagine, the daily details of life under a totalitarian regime, too numerous even to try to list. Just imagine, as a thought experiment, an mere hour, let alone a lifetime, of interaction with others where you cannot be certain which one of these others, possibly all of those others, including closest friends and family members, might be paid informants for The Party, that powerful, arbitrary, sinister and anonymous entity, and its brutal instruments of policing.
The three pieces by Haus published in the book, two in German, one in English, take the form of poetic texts for the theatre. They demonstrate the strategies he developed to cope with the regime while he lived under its omnipresent influence, and reflections after the end of the regime. That end is of course welcome and in some ways inevitable (no state of dictatorship can last forever); however, even a brief traumatic encounter will leave its traces for a long time after its immediate end. If trauma has lasted for many years, decades even, the impact is of course much stronger. Writing about the past is part of coping with trauma, of dealing with those traces. Writing about the past is also a way of ensuring the past is not forgotten so that the same mistakes cannot be made again. The three pieces by Haus collected in this volume bear witness to this. They are an important document of history.
The commentaries provided by Klaus M. Schmidt contextualise Haus’s work and succeed very well in exploring for the reader not familiar with the specific context, or without any experience of life under a totalitarian regime, how the texts encode the subversive meaning in such a way that it is open and evident, and thus refreshing and supportive, to those familiar with the code. These commentaries are thus important in bringing not only a specific aspect of German history to life for contemporary readers, but in revealing the ways in which humans are able to cope in extremely adverse conditions.