ABSTRACT
Rolf Schneider studied in Halle and edited the periodical Aufbau in Berlin from 1955 to 1958, since when he has been a professional writer. Although he was excluded from the GDR Writers’ Union after signing the protest against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann he was able to leave and return to the GDR at will and has worked as a literary adviser to the theatre in Mainz. He began with parodies, Aus zweiter Hand (1958), and a talent for pastiche is evident in his fiction, whether in the story collections Brücken und Gitter (1965) and Nekrolog (1974, West German title Pilzomelett) or the novel Der Tod des Nibelungen (1970), which adopts the model of Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon in order to document the progress of a fictional sculptor to prominence during the Third Reich. In Die Tage in W. (1965) a detective story is made the vehicle for the exposure of conditions in a provincial town during the closing years of the Weimar Republic, while Das Glück (1976) traces the life of a woman from the humblest origins to a position as schoolteacher in the GDR; the private cost of her emancipation is the happiness which eludes her. In Die Reise nach Jaroslaw (1974) the failure of a teenage girl to make headway in the GDR education system prompts her to escape the pressures of home by hitch-hiking through Poland; by allowing his central character to act as narrator Schneider is able to reproduce the slang of a distinct generation in the manner of Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. In November (1979) a woman writer after protesting against the expatriation of a colleague retains the accustomed privileges of her life in the GDR, but her ambivalent and resigned attitude alienates her son. Although manifestly inspired by the Biermann affair the novel is according to Schneider not a Schlüsselroman or work of disguised identities. Schneider’s numerous plays, mainly for radio and television, cover a wide range of historical periods and geographical settings, but the best concern the confrontation of intellectuals with questions of conscience in the context of the struggle against Nazism or the cold war, as in Prozeβ Richard Waverly (1961), on the commitment to a mental institution of the commander of the atom bomb sortie to Hiroshima, Die Rebellion des Patrick Wright (1966), in which the protagonist refuses command of the bombardment of Dresden, and Der Mann aus England (1963), in which a British teacher becomes the victim of West German attempts to cover up the Nazi past. Prozeβ in Nürnberg (1967) is a documentary play in the manner of Peter Weiss, Hochhuth and Kipphardt. Jede Seele auf Erden (1990) is a satire of the literary scene.
