AS THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS HAVE SHOWN, medical discourses and symptomatic bodies dominate Christa Wolf's oeuvre. Often mimicking the GDR author's style, East German literature published since unification conspicuously employs these strategies to deal with the GDR and its collapse from a historical distance. This tendency toward historicization is prevalent in the novels examined in this chapter: Kathrin Schmidt's Die Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition, Thomas Brussig's Wie es leuchtet, and Kerstin Hensel's Lärchenau. All three highlight the everyday life of fictional characters from different paths of GDR life by presenting symptomatic bodies and portraying medical institutions. Yet these novels do more than portray the GDR: they interlace various historical phases in twentieth- century German history through medical discourses. Specifically, they establish trajectories from Germany's fascist past, extending at times even as far back as the nineteenth century, to the GDR and post-unification Germany. Placing the GDR and its demise within larger historical discourses and creating a diverse image of the country by means of the novels’ characters, these narratives effectively complement collective memory. To this end, they reconstruct GDR history, and, if necessary, rectify the collective memory archive.

Collecting, storing, and communicating alternative images of the GDR and its decline, they continue two important characteristics of critical GDR prose fiction: they introduce socially relevant discourses and they defy expectations that literature should provide a specific, supposedly “true” interpretation of history which contributes to hegemonic discourses of the past. The predominantly auctorial style of narration in all three novels foregrounds the desire to participate in society and to represent a variety of age groups and their specific GDR life experiences. Here they differ from Christa Wolf's characteristic use of the first person in the service of subjective authenticity, while radicalizing her claim to speak for an entire generation, as she expressed it in “Unerledigte Widersprüche” (29). Brussig, Hensel, and Schmidt populate their imaginative novels with a broad spectrum of characters who belong to various social backgrounds, ages, and, in some cases, ethnic and sexual minorities. The majority are from the East, and they are always juxtaposed with West Germans. In this narrative contrast, they play with the notions of the abject, for example, by aligning the dichotomy East/West German with female/male, only to undermine it; or by claiming the validity of East German subject formation by insisting on the appeal of values such as solidarity over individualism.