Horns Ende; Horn’s Fate

[This page by Astrid Köhler]

Horns Ende; Horn’s Fate (1985)

According to Hein, Horns Ende is ‘a novel about history, about historical understanding and about writing history’. It raises questions about the relationship between history and memory, about our willingness to forget and about the continuity of the past in the present.

Consisting of 39 monologues from five different people, it tells – in various versions – a story of repression and suicide which took place in a provincial East German town in 1957. Horn, the victim concerned, had been the director of the town’s historical museum. And the controversy does indeed concern a piece of history writing. The five characters had encountered Horn – and experienced the story – from different positions and with different degrees of involvement. Inevitably, they don’t just refer to this one particular point in time when remembering, but put the event into various contexts – hence wider historical circles are drawn. Each of them tries to understand their own situation in this context and to construct a coherent and continuous story for themselves, but these accounts do not add up to one coherent big picture. Instead, they produce a patchwork of partly competing stories which cover some fifty years of German history.

Interspersed with these monologues are eight dialogues between the dead Horn and the youngest of the five characters (who used to be Horn’s pupil). There, the necessity of remembering and of at least trying to sustain a dialogue with history is discussed. Although, as becomes clear in the course of the book, there is no such thing as a single incontestable historical truth, the dead man urges the living one never to let up on the workings of memory: ‘Further, boy. Further. Further. You must remember.’

Horns Ende can be regarded the first in a group of novels about history and how to write it. Von allem Anfang an; From the Very Beginning (1997), and Landnahme; Settlement (2004), are in that respect Horn’s successors. As the title of From the Very Beginning suggests, history is here re-told from the opposite end. And Landnahme; Settlement even uses the setting, characters and motifs from Horns Ende, putting a different character (hence a different life story) in its centre, and extending the historical span of the patchwork of narratives to the turn of the millennium. Together, the three novels offer a kaleidoscope covering over seventy years of German history.

Further Reading

Robert Blankenship, ‘Hamlet as Unmarked Intertext: The Imperative of Rememberance in Horn’s End’, The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures, ed. by Ruth Owen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), pp. 189-96

Phillip McKnight, Understanding Christoph Hein (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 3: ‘The Museum of History: Horns Ende’

David W. Robinson, Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein’s literature of Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), Chapter 4: ‘Hein’s Historians: Fictions of Social Memory’