La obra de Monika Maron se centra profundamente en la confrontación con el pasado, explorando los peligros de la memoria y el aislamiento. Su prosa es escasa y sombría, imbuida de la sensibilidad y la desesperación de sus narradores. A través de su escritura, crea retratos incisivos de individuos que navegan por un mundo en constante cambio. Su voz distintiva ofrece una poderosa lente para examinar la condición humana.
The narrative explores the profound impact of political upheaval on personal and national identity through the lens of Monika Maron, a prominent German writer. As East Germany transforms amidst civil unrest and the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall, Maron reflects on the complexities of loss and change in her homeland, capturing the emotional landscape of a society in flux. Her experiences and observations offer a unique perspective on the intersection of art, history, and personal narrative during a pivotal moment in German history.
In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting their time together over and over in a never-ending cycle of obsession. Her love for Franz becomes a compulsive suffering from which she can neither free herself nor withhold anything.
The novel presents a powerful critique of industrial pollution while exploring themes of women's alienation in a workers' state. Written by the daughter of East Germany's elite, it combines personal anger with broader social commentary, making it a significant feminist text. Its relevance endures today, as it resonates with ongoing environmental issues, the prevalence of homogenized media, and the continued struggle for women's rights. This classic work is finding a renewed audience in contemporary society.
In this extraordinary, prizewinning novel, Monika Maron says farewell to the East Germany where she grew up as the stepchild of an élite communist official not unlike retired Professor Beerenbaum, who hires disaffected writer Rosalind Polkowski to transcribe his memoirs. Shortly after the Berlin Wall, which Maron loathed, fell and her country disappeared, she returned home to write this subtle yet scathing look at herself living among the thinkers, drinkers, and elderly believers who kept the communist state going to the very end. Part argument with her father and cry of pain across the grave, part exploration of her own role and guilt as a follower in the GDR’s sad funeral procession, Silent Close No. 6 has lost none of its depth of feeling, its power or its honesty. With her sharp feminist vision, Monika Maron spares neither foolish lovers, nor dilettantes, nor the upholders of state power - and certainly not herself. Here is essential reading to understand the Germany of yesterday, and also that of today. “Icy prose.” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW“Maron writes with wit, economy and stylistic assurance.” THE VILLAGE VOICE“One of the best writers of her generation.” LE MONDE
"Monika Maron, born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, eventually despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents - her grandfather a convert from Judaism, her mother from Catholicism - she questions her mother, whose selective, often censorious memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' story and its horrifying denouement in Polish exile. Asking, probing and haranguing the reluctant Hella to talk about her own parents, Maron unearths their heroic story from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters, reconstructing her family's powerful story in a memoir that has the force of a great novel."--BOOK JACKET
Die Autorin rettet aus Tierliebe eine streunende Katze, was zu Eifersucht und einem Katzenbiss führt. Während sie nach Budapest fliegt, um zu lesen, schwellen ihre Hand und die Situation dramatisch an. Es folgt eine aufregende Reise durch die Notaufnahmen der Stadt und ein Kampf um ihre Gesundheit und Schreibfähigkeit.
Als Monika Maron 2009 – im Jubiläumsjahr der Mauerfalls – mit dem Deutschen Nationalpreis ausgezeichnet wurde, musste das als politisches Signal verstanden werden. Geehrt wurde eine Autorin und Intellektuelle, die die deutsche Wiedervereinigung von Anfang an befürwortet, kritisch begleitet und kommentiert hat. Monika Maron lässt sich nicht vereinnahmen, sie erhebt Widerspruch und mischt sich ein, ist unbequem, wenn es sein muss. Der Band ›Zwei Brüder‹ versammelt Monika Marons Essays und Reden zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung und deren Folgen, zur Befindlichkeit des geeinten Volkes, zu Fragen der gemeinsamen Vergangenheit und Zukunft von Ost und West.
