GDR novel-Annett Gröschner: “There is another world”

In their new novel “Floating Loads” they tell the history of the flower binder and crane driver Hanna Krause from Magdeburg. Why has so much time has passed since the publication of her last novel »Walpurgistag« in 2011?

Sitting at the desk for months is difficult for me because I prefer to work interdisciplinary. Many years ago I thought about which novels I want to write. In my first novel “Moscow Eis”, Hanna Krause is already a secondary figure as a grandmother of Annja Kobe. Her mother Barbara leaves the family when Annja is twelve. I wanted to tell why she does this in “floating loads”. It took me forever, and at some point my editor said: “These are two novels, that of Hanna and that of her daughters.” After that, I still spent years around the structure. My editor was no longer a editor, so I thought, maybe she is right and had detached a strand from the novel. This story of Hanna Krause and her flowers as an independent novel is “floating loads” and the second novel, which comes next year, is called “women’s ruine room”. He tells the story of Hanna Krause’s daughters, which also includes Barbara Kobe and plays during the 2013 Elbewasser.

At the beginning of the novel, Hanna drives through Berlin with a tram as a young woman and thinks of how she grew up in Magdeburg at her half -sister and flower dealer Rose. Why is Hanna an orphan?

In the first half of the 20th century there were many children who grew up with the older siblings. Hanna is not an orphan, the father simply turns out of the dust that is the mother, the divorce judgment in his hand, fallen dead. Hanna and her sister were cheap workers. At the same time, this prevented them from coming to the home, which was sold as a win-win situation, but was also exploitation.

In the second chapter we find Hanna back in Magdeburg. She opened a flower shop, married and born her first child on the edge of the Armenviertel Knattergebirge. The second child loses her, disposes of it in the garbage can and locks up the shop again, because: “She could not afford a daily rate.” That sounds very hard.

It was hard as a self -employed person, she cannot clear three days just because she has a miscarriage. A law has recently been passed that enables women to protect maternity protection after the 13th week.

Hanna is the sixth pregnant time pregnant at twenty -five, has born two abortions, two children and a miscarriage. She is happy when her husband comes home drunk and sleeps in the kitchen.

I was in the women’s clinic at twenty -three and there was a woman who absolutely wanted to be sterilized. She said that for me, pants in the bedroom are enough for me to get pregnant. What do you do when abortion is forbidden, but you quickly get pregnant and don’t know enough about contraception? My grandmother only learned from her adult daughters that there are fruitful and sterile days.

In the fourth chapter, in September 1938, a slightly fairytale -like man with a postcard in Hanna’s flower shop appears.

For me, this person was very important to show Hanna: there is another world. Hanna is an artist, she can bind flower bouquets with the slightest means that are extraordinary. And this man shows her the postcard of a still life and asks her to recreate it with real flowers. She immediately sees that this is not possible: the painted flowers bloom in very different seasons. Hanna learns from her visitor that a flower piece is also hanging in the Magdeburger Museum. As a child of the working class, she cannot imagine going to a museum. She has no time for it.

The flower shop does not pay off and then there is war. Hanna is spilled with her children under the Nikolaikirche. For me the key scene. You send Hanna into flames from this situation, create an apocalyptic fire storm, how do you get such a picture?

My mother’s family was buried under this church. It is traumatic when a small child is buried and later never gets psychological help. The trauma passes on. This applies to all wars. I have been dealing with it for a long time and published books about how children experience bombing. In the large firing storms, people flown through the air and sucked up by the fire.

There is a sentence in the novel for the post -war period: “Nothing threw shadows here.” A sentence that is moving when you consider that there were hardly any houses in downtown Magdeburg. From the train station to the Elbe.

Yes, there is this photo of Magdeburg: this one person and the Johanniskirche as a ruin. And half a kilometer to the right and left everything is gone. I have always wondered how they managed to outdo it. We grew up with this, the empty areas were later greened. But the basements were still underneath.

Magdeburg is being rebuilt, Hanna got a child and desire to climb the crane in the Thälmannwerk in the early 1950s. There she will let loads float until the end of her working life. Why crane driver?

Long before I had a story, there was the idea of ​​writing about the heavy industry in Magdeburg and I found the profession of crane driver attractive because you can see the whole scene of a workshop up there. I then met crane drivers in the course of my research and conducted interviews with them.

There is a scene in which Hanna takes her youngest daughter to go crane. Then she thinks that she will go ice cream individually with her other daughters so that they are not jealous.

My aunts and my mother told me about my grandmother. I thought it was great that her mother managed to make everyone feel the only one. But if I now tell this story, this is not the story of my own grandmother, but a narrative that follows its own laws many times.

Hanna is outraged when her youngest daughter sits in prison in the late 1980s.

Hanna is not a resistance fighter. But she has moments when she just can’t help but resistance, even if it is completely rash. She cannot accept that her youngest daughter will be prison in a workers’ state. And that this daughter, before she gets into prison, has to punish on the crane. The worldview is no longer true for them. That broke something with her, I think that was so good at the end of the GDR.

You have dealt a lot with working worlds. What role do authors of GDR literature play for you? Is Wolfgang Hilbig meant when Hanna wishes that a peacock goes through the hall?

When Hanna wants a peacock, he is of course a tribute to Wolfgang Hilbig’s workers’ stories. I would still mention Werner Bräunig, who strongly influenced me when I wrote about bismuth and nuclear energy.

Annett Gröschner: floating loads. Ch Beck, 282 pages, born, 26 €. Appears on March 20. Book premiere on 13.3. in the Brecht Haus, Berlin, at 7.30 p.m. Reading on April 17th. In the literary salon in FMP1, Berlin, at 6 p.m.