Pavel was Monika Maron's grandfather. But she only remembers him in black and white, as he left his children behind in Berlin when he was deported to his native Poland, and afterwards perished in a concentration camp. As a grown-up with a son of her own, researching a documentary for German television, Monika discovers letters which her grandfather wrote to Monika's mother, Hella. Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.

Pavel's Letters

Biographies & Memoirs

Maron, Monika

Community & Culture

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Animal Triste (European Women Writers)

In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting their time together over and over in a never-ending cycle of obsession. Her love for Franz becomes a compulsive suffering from which she can neither free herself nor withhold anything.

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

University Of Nebraska Press

In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting their time together over and over in a never-ending cycle of obsession. Her love for Franz becomes a compulsive suffering from which she can neither free herself nor withhold anything.

Literary

A chance visit to an industrial complex in East Germany, where she lives, challenges Josefa Nadler's moral and political assumptions

Flight of Ashes (Readers International)

Marinelli, David Newton

UNKNO

This daughter of East Germany's elite exploded into print with her first angry novel mixing a cry against industrial pollution with the longing and alienation of women in a workers' state -- now a classic feminist text finding a new readership in today's world where nature is still under attack, homogenized news still fills the airwaves, and women's lives still don't seem to matter.

Flight of Ashes

Readers International

Rosalind, an historian, discovers one day that her body will no longer allow her to go to work and that she no longer needs to eat or sleep

The Defector

Rosalind, an historian, discovers one day that her body will no longer allow her to go to work and that she no longer needs to eat or sleep

History & Criticism

Monika Maron was born in wartime Berlin in 1941 to an anti-fascist mother of Polish Jewish ancestry and a German father. Her step-father was the first Minister of the Interior of the new East German state, having been chief of police. Following her early upbringing in a Communist family, Maron joined the Party in 1965, thinking to oppose "anti-democratic" tendencies from within the Party. She soon understood, however, that "you cannot close up a people in a wall." She left the Party and worked in television, as a drama school teacher, and for six years as a journalist. Silent Close No. 6 concerns one of the high Communist rulers, whose self-explanations are never allowed to justify his past actions. The novel is an important critique of Germany's recent past by one of the country's leading intellectuals.

Silent Close No. 6

In this extraordinary, prizewinning novel, Monika Maron says farewell to the East Germany where she grew up as the stepchild of an élite communist official not unlike retired Professor Beerenbaum, who hires disaffected writer Rosalind Polkowski to transcribe his memoirs. 
Shortly after the Berlin Wall, which Maron loathed, fell and her country disappeared, she returned home to write this subtle yet scathing look at herself living among the thinkers, drinkers, and elderly believers who kept the communist state going to the very end.
Part argument with her father and cry of pain across the grave, part exploration of her own role and guilt as a follower in the GDR’s sad funeral procession, Silent Close No. 6 has lost none of its depth of feeling, its power or its honesty.
With her sharp feminist vision, Monika Maron spares neither foolish lovers, nor dilettantes, nor the upholders of state power - and certainly not herself.
Here is essential reading to understand the Germany of yesterday, and also that of today.
“Icy prose.” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
 “Maron writes with wit, economy and stylistic assurance.” THE VILLAGE VOICE
 “One of the best writers of her generation.” LE MONDE

Pavel was Monika Maron's grandfather. But she only remembers him in black and white, as he left his children behind in Berlin when he was deported to his native Poland, and afterwards perished in a concentration camp. As a grown-up with a son of her own, researching a documentary for German television, Monika discovers letters which her grandfather wrote to Monika's mother, Hella. Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.

HARVILL/SECKER

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maron, Monika. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Maron, Monika

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Maron, Monika. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pavel's Letters

Animal Triste (European Women Writers)

Animal Triste (European Women Writers)

Flight of Ashes (Readers International)

Flight of Ashes

The Defector

The Defector

Silent Close No. 6

Silent Close No. 6

Pavel's Letters