ABSTRACT
The text that follows is the postscript to Oh, Humankind!, a novel that describes the fate of intellectuals from the 1950s until the late 1970s. Regrettably, both the English and German translations of the novel have omitted this afterword. It documents the writer's awakening and remorse after a stormy leftist career, harshly criticizing the "class struggle" exercises that misled an entire generation. The author feels she was duped during her youth, and that she eventually became a victim of the late Cultural Revolution. The reader may judge whether her plea for more "humanism" within the existing system, a concept she attacked as a student, is fully convincing—or as convincing as her claim to be a modernist writer.
