Germany Novel: Die Unvollendete by Reinhard Jirgl

When I think about it, I always find it somewhat strange that I am much better versed in German literature than I am in American or English language literature, generally. (Way) back in the day, I was a German major. I actually have a BA in German and with that comes reading a lot of German lit.

It is that experience that made me think it was important to include literature as one of my “25 Things”. When I was reading modern German literature in the 1970s they were processing the trauma most of the authors had just experienced: Nazism and World War II. Their writing provided a human perspective that illuminated the cold histories I was reading for the political science classes. It still does.

Only now the focus is a different trauma: the experience of communism and life in the GDR. I chose Jirgl’s book because of the perspective it offered on the lives of the “other Germans”. The fact that the author has been awarded leading prizes for German literature is telling. He's speaking to Germans in a way that resonates with them.

“The Unfinished” is the English title given the book, which is the story of three women forced to flee Czechoslovakia during the ethnic cleansing of Germans after World War II. They have the bad luck to be driven out of the frying pan (Czechoslovakia) into the fire (Soviet Occupation Zone - GDR)  Their life is one of longing, driven by deprivation and the absence of a sense of belonging. There is no happy ending. They are born and they die without ever having had an opportunity to live.

Why does this strike a chord? I think it speaks to feelings I heard expressed in Germany. Germans seem to realize that there is still a debt to pay, even today, some 65 years after the end of World War II. Immediately after the war that debt would have been obvious, but now? What do today's Germans owe? An 80 -year-old German today would have been born in 1930 and would have been just 15, at the war's end. What would they owe? And to whom?

I think Germans recognize a debt to their countrymen who endured the GDR. After World War II, West Germans experienced a speedy return to prosperity and a comfortable life. They were not required to pay a high price for Nazism.  That debt fell to the Germans in the east. Soviet occupation and imprisonment in East Germany was a price only paid by some.

Germans knew it at the time and I think they still do. In the book, the women have an old friend who was also exiled from the “homeland” (Sudetenland) after the war. She ended up in the west and enjoyed prosperity. Every year she would send a Christmas package of items impossible to find in the GDR. Slowly, her feelings of obligation to the less fortunate wane, eventually leading to an abrupt end. At that end, the reader does not sympathize with the “Westie”, condemned to subsidize. Rather, the break underlines the continuing debt West Germans have to the East Germans who went there – where, but for the grace of God, go I.