RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 ,,Der Himmel fiel aus allen Wolken“ von Stephan Krawczyk: Die DDR-Literatur der Gegenwart oder ein Schwanengesang auf die subversive Kultur im Dreibuchstabenland?
JF Monatshefte
FD University of Wisconsin Press
SP 455
OP 467
DO 10.3368/m.107.3.455
VO 107
IS 3
A1 Krzysztof Okoński
YR 2015
UL http://mon.uwpress.org/content/107/3/455.abstract
AB Stephan Krawczyk—a writer, poet, singer, and musician born in the GDR in 1955—is the author of Der Himmel fiel aus allen Wolken (2009). In the late 1980s, he was banned from performing in public, incarcerated in the Stasi’s Hohenschönhausen prison, and in 1988 deported to West Germany. After his arrival “from Germany to Germany,” Krawczyk received high praise from the West German media. Krawczyk experienced the East German peaceful revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall in exile. In his book he recalls lesser-known private, artistic, and political facts from that period. Unification in 1990 brought the opportunity for the emergence of new literature in East Germany, but Krawczyk has remained the same nonconformist and critical witness of Ostalgie—a strange fascination with the dictatorship in the Honecker era. The aim of the article is to analyze his book as a contribution to the German culture of remembrance. It also seeks to answer the following question: Is Krawczyk’s German-German time travel between two different societies, life styles, political systems, and cultural backgrounds an example of a new “contemporary GDR literature” or a deconstruction of his own myth as a dissident? (KO; in German)