ABSTRACT
Born in Silesia, Helga Schütz attended the film school in Potsdam from 1958 to 1962 and later combined the writing of fiction with work, usually with the director Egon Günther, on scenarios for the GDR film company DEFA. Three collections of stories, Vorgeschichten oder Schöne Gegend Probstein (1970), Das Erdbeben bei Sangershausen und andere Geschichten (1972), Festbeleuchtung (1974) and the novel Jette in Dresden (1977, published 1978 in the Federal Republic as Mädchenrätsel), follow the lives of a few members of a small rural community uprooted from Silesia at the end of the Second World War and scattered to different parts of the two Germanies. They focus on Jette who, coming from Dresden and returning there after the war, observes events without village preconceptions and can be identified with the author’s former self at different ages. In the novel Julia oder Erziehung zum Chorgesang (1983) the years of reconstruction in the GDR are viewed retrospectively in 1979 when the title-figure makes a journey to her roots in connection with a film project. The novel, In Annas Namen (1987), shows the effects on a triangular relationship of divisions between the two German states. Helga Schütz’s strength lies in her ability to show the impact of large events on characters whose range of experience is limited by their confinement to rural backwaters. Vom Glanz der Elbe (1995) approaches post-Wende Germany via the search of an emigrant for his twin left behind in the GDR.
