Trapped in the Land of Liberty: Monika Maron’s Animal Triste (1996)

Authors

  • Susanne Rinner The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15173/sj.v4i1.3253

Keywords:

Monika Maron, Animal Triste, East Germany, USA, memory

Abstract

Monika Maron’s Animal Triste (1996) was widely understood as a response to German unification. This reading of Maron’s critically acclaimed novel places the text in the context of the literary discourse of the so-called New World. The United States have long enticed the German literary imagination and have served as a screen for projections of (utopian) promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The narrator’s exploration of her freedom, symbolized in a trip to New York City, are juxtaposed with feelings of imprisonment, expressed through seemingly endless remembering. Maron’s novel connects with the tradition of German writing about love, another powerful trope of freedom and captivity, and resonates with other women’s writing about the U.S. after 1989.

Author Biography

Susanne Rinner, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Susanne Rinner is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University in Washington DC. With a focus on twentieth century and contemporary German literature, film and culture, her interdisciplinary research interests include memory studies and the transnational and transcultural relations between the US and Germany. Her first book, “1968 and the German Literary Imagination. Literary Representations and Debates of the Sixties after 1989” appeared with Berghahn Books in 2013. Currently, she is working on a book project entitled “The Radical Identity” which analyzes the often quite divergent representations of radical subjects and their construction and performance in various media. Dr. Rinner serves on the Executive Council of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), first as Vice President (2016-17), and then as President (2018-19).


References

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Byrnes, Deirdre. “Love and Loss after the Wall: Animal Triste.” Rereading Monika Maron. Text, Counter-Text and Context. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011: 97-116.

Fastovsky, David E. and David B. Weishampel. The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (2nd edition).

Geier, Andrea. “Paradoxien des Erinnerns: Biografisches Erzählen in Animal Triste.” In: Gilson, Elke, ed. Monika Maron in Perspective: ‘Dialogische’ Einblicke in zeitgeschichtliche, intertextuelle und rezeptionsbezogene Aspekte ihres Werkes. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 2002: 92-122.

Harbers, Henk. “Gefährliche Freiheit. Zu einem Motivkomplex im Werk von Monika Maron.” In: Gilson, Elke, ed. Monika Maron in Perspective: ‘Dialogische’ Einblicke in zeitgeschichtliche, intertextuelle und rezeptionsbezogene Aspekte ihres Werkes. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 2002: 123-138.

Lewis, Alison. “Re-Membering the Barbarian: Memory and Repression in Monika Maron's Animal Triste.” German Quarterly 71.1 (1998): 30-46.

Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Maron, Monika. Animal Triste. Translated by Brigitte Goldstein. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 2000 (German edition: Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996.)

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Published

2017-07-14

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Articles

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