The Defector (Maron novel)

Die Überläuferin (English: The Defector) is a 1986 German-language novel by Monika Maron.^[1] In this, her second novel, the author questions the status of the individual in GDR society, making a critique of the state's ideological system.^[2] The heroine struggles with the oppressing social norms of society and its male-dominated, supposedly scientific, spirit.^[3]

References

^ Irene Kacandes (2001). Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. p. 114. ISBN 0803227388. A very different form of textual witnessing is illustrated by novels like Monika Maron's The Defector (Die Oberlauferin 1986). Rosalind Polkowski, Maron's protagonist, displays such symptoms of PTSD as insomnia, hallucinations, and social withdrawal. More importantly for my purposes here, the text "tells" her story through fragmentation, flashbacks, achrony, repetition, and elision, narrative techniques that could be said to mimic symptoms of the traumatized psyche.
^ Karen Hermine Jankowsky; Carla Love (1997). Other Germanies: Questioning Identity in Women's Literature and Art. ISBN 0791434494. In 1988 Maron also left, admittedly a long time after her mental farewell to the GDR, which is not only marked in Flight of Ashes but very clearly in her second novel, The Defector, published in 1986. In The Defector, Maron interrogates more insistently the status of the individual in GDR society, which results in a fundamental critique of the state's ideological system. Consequently, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Maron strongly favored a unified Germany in order to eliminate ...
^ Lorna Martens (2001). The Promised Land?: Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic. ISBN 0791448592. of the rights of the imagination, these women fight against its oppressors, who are identified in Flight of Ashes (Flugasche, 1981) with state socialism and in The Defector (Die Uberlauferin, 1986) with social norms generally; the scientific spirit, in which men seem particularly invested; and the heroine's own moral domestication, her interiorization of these social values, or what she summarily calls her "head."

[1] Irene Kacandes (2001). Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. p. 114. ISBN 0803227388. A very different form of textual witnessing is illustrated by novels like Monika Maron's The Defector (Die Oberlauferin 1986). Rosalind Polkowski, Maron's protagonist, displays such symptoms of PTSD as insomnia, hallucinations, and social withdrawal. More importantly for my purposes here, the text "tells" her story through fragmentation, flashbacks, achrony, repetition, and elision, narrative techniques that could be said to mimic symptoms of the traumatized psyche.

[2] Karen Hermine Jankowsky; Carla Love (1997). Other Germanies: Questioning Identity in Women's Literature and Art. ISBN 0791434494. In 1988 Maron also left, admittedly a long time after her mental farewell to the GDR, which is not only marked in Flight of Ashes but very clearly in her second novel, The Defector, published in 1986. In The Defector, Maron interrogates more insistently the status of the individual in GDR society, which results in a fundamental critique of the state's ideological system. Consequently, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Maron strongly favored a unified Germany in order to eliminate ...

[3] Lorna Martens (2001). The Promised Land?: Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic. ISBN 0791448592. of the rights of the imagination, these women fight against its oppressors, who are identified in Flight of Ashes (Flugasche, 1981) with state socialism and in The Defector (Die Uberlauferin, 1986) with social norms generally; the scientific spirit, in which men seem particularly invested; and the heroine's own moral domestication, her interiorization of these social values, or what she summarily calls her "head."

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