"Only in the 1990s Did I Become East German": A Conversation with Ingo Schulze about Remembering the GDR, Simple Storys, and 33 Moments of Happiness; with an Introduction to His Work

• Published in: New German critique 2007-07, Vol.34 (2), p.143-155
• Main Author: Jaeger, Dagmar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Capitalism; Carver, Raymond; Conversation; Critical Theory; European Studies; German language; German literature; Happiness; Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961); Interviews; Literary characters; Literary style; Literature; Media Studies; Poetry; Postcolonial literature; Second language learning; Short stories; Theory and Philosophy; Writing
• ISSN: 0094-033X; 1558-1462
• DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-2007-006

In the following interview, he describes the poetic strategy of using Hemingway's style in Simple Storys.1 Paul Cooke notices a Trotzidentität, an identity of defiance, in Schulze's Simple Storys, as his characters, almost exclusively East Germans, attempt to gain a sense of being different from the dominant and colonizing West that threatens to marginalize them.8 At the same time, they are nostalgic about the GDR. [...] the characters in Schulze's stories move beyond Trotz, as Cooke rightly writes, as they do not simply react to the new situation after 1989 but are constructed by it at the same time: The book gestures towards a more dynamic, productive notion of identity, which pragmatically accepts the fact of Westernization, and sees its relationship to the past through the prism of the present.