"This is the story, profoundly piercing both personally and politcally, of a generation. It is hard to imagine that it could be surpassed." Tilman Krause, Die Welt
Teasing her family's past out of a fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.
Monika Maron, born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, everntually despairing of the system ger mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents - her grandfather a convert from Judaismm her mother from Catholicism - she questions her mother, whose selective, often censorious memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparent's story and its horrifying denouement in Polish exile. Asking, probing and haranguing the reluctant Hella to talk about her own parents, Maron unearths their heroic story from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters, reconstructing her family's powerful story in a memoir that has the force of a great novel.
With the deft feeling for language and the artistic humility that have made her one of her country's most esteemed novelists, Maron conjures up these everyday people, their heroism and fortitude in the face of evil, creating both an elaborate metaphore for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.
"Monkia Maron makes other people's memories her own. She does so without moral outrage, telling the story straightforwardly, unsentimentally, not trying to show off her skill. The greatness of this book lies in this discretion: and Pavel's Letters is a great book." Rolf Schneider, Berliner Morgenpost
Translated from the German by Brigitte Goldstein
