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‘Wer Jetzt Schwarzweiss Malt, Hat Keine Ahnung’: Friedrich Christian Delius's Die Birnen von Ribbeck and the Predicament of ‘Wendeliteratur’[Note 1. F. C. Delius, Die Birnen von Ribbeck: Erzählung, Reinbek ...]
Author(s) -
Von Oppen Karoline
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00209
Subject(s) - german , unification , metaphor , reading (process) , deconstruction (building) , history , literature , philosophy , theology , art , linguistics , biology , ecology , computer science , programming language
This paper is concerned with the reception of one of the earliest fictional responses to German unification. In the early 1990s Die Birnen von Ribbeck by the West German author Friedrich Christian Delius was widely interpreted as an attempt to give a voice to East German villagers after the fall of the Wall, and was dismissed as another example of West German colonisation. I offer an alternative reading of the text which focuses on Delius's critique of the unification process and his deconstruction of the colonial metaphor so prevalent in this period. Delius himself, however, subsequently accepts the critics' reductive reading of his work, and retrospectively redefines his own text as an ethnographic monograph. In doing so he abdicates responsibility for the criticism contained in his text. The predicament of ‘Wendeliteratur’ is most evident in this study.