Maron

Monika Maron

German author Monika Maron was born on 3 June 1941 in Berlin during World War II. Her step-father, Karl Maron, was a notable communist leader who spent most of the war in the Soviet Union. After the war, Karl Maron was a favorable figure to participate in the new Soviet occupation government, which led to the foundation of the GDR in 1949. Karl Maron married Monika’s mother Hella (née Iglarz) and resettled the family to the newly defined East Berlin in 1951. Prior to Hella’s marriage to Karl Maron, she and Monika held Polish citizenship. Monika’s biological father, Walther, fought on the Eastern Front during World War II and remained in captivity for several years before returning to Germany where he died of illness in 1949. Karl Maron's initial roles included stints as Deputy Mayor of East Berlin as well as leading the GDR police force. He quickly ascended through the ranks of GDR politics and soon thereafter assumed the role of Minister for the Interior which he held for nearly one decade. In office, Karl Maron was considered an integral force in aligning East German institutions with socialist values and Soviet priorities for the fledgling state. He died in 1975 when Monika was 24 years old.

As a result of her step-father's government roles, Monika Maron spent most of her early life in East Berlin. Like many school children in the German Democratic Republic, Maron learned and still speaks Russian as it was a compulsory subject. As a student, Monika studied at the prestigious Humboldt University of Berlin which at the time was under GDR state control with a strong Soviet influence. She followed a course in art history, theatre, and drama and eventually worked in stage management, production, and even as a director's assistant in East Berlin. As a student, she was active in youth SED activities. In 1962 she gave birth to a son, Jonas. She began a career as a journalist in 1971 and since 1976 she has been a novelist full-time.

Maron’s novel Flugasche (1981, Flight of Ashes) is an autobiographical account of her times as a journalist in the GDR. Not only does the novel touch upon themes of journalistic freedom in the GDR, but it also explores the suppression of a journalist who intends to expose the activities and plans of coal power plants and the environmental pollution being caused by the undertakings in East Germany. The novel was heavily censored and criticized by the GDR government because it targeted political apathy toward environmental concerns. Given Maron’s privileged background as the step-child of a political leader in the SED, she did not face especially harsh scrutiny. Though the book was never actually published in the GDR.

In the late 1980s, Monika Maron obtained a coveted visa to leave the German Democratic Republic. Maron was one of many who fled the GDR in the late 1980s, a time that witnessed numerous reforms across the entire region under the influence of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. She was allowed to temporarily resettle in West Germany and resided in Hamburg for almost three years. Immediately before her departure, Maron wrote her second novel entitled Die Überläuferin (1986, The Defector). This novel, in a sense, predicts Maron’s disillusionment and desire to depart the GDR as the primary themes of the book include condemnation of (the lack of) individual identity in the GDR as well as the individual's relationship to the state. In particular, this novel, as well as others, recounts the experiences of women in socialist societies and targets the masculine attitude of Soviet-influenced politics as well as the inherent sexism of dictatorships in general. While Maron’s visa only offered her a three-year stint in the West before she was required to return, she was never able to return to the GDR as she knew it. By the time she returned home, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist and the process of unification was underway. The city of Berlin was no longer divided and the old names with whom her father served were no longer in power.

After 1991, Maron’s works shifted to feelings of isolation, memory, sadness, loneliness, and the overwhelming nature of reckoning with history, the self, and the values and priorities we hold dear. Perhaps the most notable and cohesive example of these post-reunification themes is Animal Triste (1996). The novel explores the unreliable memory of an elderly woman formerly from the GDR who lives a modest and secluded existence. Her memories chronicle her days spent with a West German lover of decades passed, Franz who was an entomologist. The protagonist herself was also a scientist specializing in paleontology. The pair met for the first time at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin while admiring the skeleton of a large dinosaur. Alas, their relationship failed for a number of reasons most of which the narrator has admittedly forgotten. The metaphors in Animal Triste are thinly veiled, to say the least. A woman from the East and a man from the West come together in dysfunctional unity. A paleontologist who spends their life studying the past and an entomologist who studies microscopic objects. The novel represents the ambivalence and challenges of a united Germany and questions how these two sides can reconcile their differences.

In her autobiographical memoir Pawels Briefe (1999; Pawel's Letters) Maron reveals that her own grandfather, Pawel, was a Polish Jew who was a victim of Nazi cruelty, displacement, and eventually extermination efforts. He was killed in the summer of 1942 while Monika was only one year old. She concludes he was likely shot at the Belchatow or euthanized at Kulmhof. Furthermore, Maron notes that her mother, Hella, was half-Jewish and as a result was declined the right to work in Germany during the Hitler regime. While Pawels Briefe is considered a family chronicle, Maron concludes the work with a summary of her own life in which she denounces the recently fallen GDR regime as a dictatorship. Maron’s sentiments regarding the efforts at building a socialist state in East Germany are mixed. While she expresses contempt towards the failed state, she expresses some regret regarding the lack of fruition of the original vision. She makes it very clear that she approved of a communist state but implies that it was never established. Rather, a materialistic, bureaucratic, and paranoid experiment was all that existed. Aside from interviews, Pawels Briefe is the largest primary source for details and revelations about Maron and her family’s lives.

Like Christa Wolf, Maron frequently engages with female characters and uses aging, illness, and death as metaphors. Her works are strongly grounded in history and personal experience and offer invaluable insight into intellectual life in the former GDR. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Maron’s work has included considerable reflection about unification and the challenges Germany faces as a united state. Much of her work includes strong political views and In 2020, her long-time publisher S. Fischer terminated their working relationship with Maron. Historically, most of her works had been printed by the publishing house including Flugasche and Pawels Briefe. Officials with Fischer Verlag cited Maron’s pivot to right-wing subject matter as a partial cause for their cessation of services. Presently, Maron has one novel and a collection of essays in preparation. These are forthcoming from Hoffmann und Campe Verlag.

Monika Maron’s prose works include:

Flugasche, 1981 S. Fischer | Flight of Ashes

Das Missverständnis, 1982, S. Fischer | The Misunderstanding

Die Uberlauferin, 1986, S. Fischer | The Defector

Stille Zeile Sechs, 1991, S. Fischer | Still Close No. 6

Animal Triste, 1996, S. Fischer | Animal Triste

Pawels Briefe, 1999, S. Fischer | Pavel’s Letters

Ah Glück, 2006 S. Fischer | Oh no, Happiness

Zwischenspiel, 2013 | Interlude

Munin oder Chaos im Kopf, 2018, S. Fischer | Munin, or Chaos in the Head

Artur Lanz, 2020, S. Fischer | Artur Lanz

Other Works in German

“Ada und Evald” 1983, Wuppertal | Ada and Evald

Nach Maßgabe meiner Begreifungskraft: Artikel und Essays, 1993, S. Fischer

Geburtsort Berlin, 2003 | To the Limitations of My Understanding: Articles and Essays

Wie ich ein Buch nicht schreiben kann und es trotzdem versuche, 2005, S. Fischer | How I can’t write a book, but still try

Bitterfelder Bogen: Ein Bericht 2009 | Bitterfelder Bogen: A Report

Zwei Brüder: Gedanken zur Einheit 1989–2009, 2010 S. Fischer | Two Brothers: Thoughts on Reunification

Books in English Translation

Monika Maron, Flight of Ashes, trans. by David Newton Marinelli (Readers International, 1986)

Monika Maron, Silent Close No. 6., trans. by David Newton Marinelli (Readers International, 1993)

Monika Maron, Animal Triste, trans. by Brigitte Goldstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000)