On Monday, Jill Kronstadt took a look at In Times of Fading Light (In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts; 2011)—Eugen Ruge’s debut novel, which explores the way the politics and history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) manifest in the domestic lives of its citizens. The quotes below give further insight into Ruge’s life and his process as a writer, and how these too are influenced by the historical and political.
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Eugen Ruge: Oh, there are many reasons. First thing, maybe—while I lived in the GDR, I found it boring…. Not the stuff to write a big novel about. Maybe the most interesting item or issue of our family story was the story of my father, who was in a prison camp in the Soviet Union… This was an interesting story, but it was his story. He had to write the story, not me. And to write about the GDR was—maybe this was one of the reasons why I fled from the GDR to West Germany in 1988, because I wanted to be a writer and had the feeling that I could not write anything about the GDR.
Craven: So you had to get away from it, to look at it from a distance.
Ruge: Maybe, yeah. And from the distance, I understood that there are indeed interesting figures, interesting persons, interesting stories in my family. —from an appearance on an episode of the web series Talking Germany (2012)
“Sometimes he found it hard to believe that he really still existed. And then the past seemed like a hole into which, if he wasn’t careful, he might fall again. Some day or other, he thought, he’d write all this down. When the time was ripe for it.” —In Times of Fading Light (trans. Anthea Bell)
“First, a linear story would be too big. By choosing to focus on selected episodes, I could draw out different elements and show them through time. Also, the gaps between the episodes also leave their mark. It’s the way memory works.” —on choosing a structure for In Times of Fading Light
“My authorial gaze is a gentle one.” —quoted in a review by Deirdre Byrnes in the Dublin Review of Books (2011)
“The trick is, maybe, that I wrote the story from different perspectives. I went into the characters, and spread their truths in this novel, and kept out, as an author. That’s the point…. Their [the characters’] own truth. I didn’t judge them. I simply described them, described their perspectives, how they see things.” —from the author’s appearance on Talking Germany
“The GDR was more than the Stasi and barbed wire, and that’s exactly what you can learn from my book. More than that, this is what I learned from my book.” —from an interview with Platform Magazine (2013)
“…even in a dictatorship there was a kind of human life; that there were interesting people and biographies too; that there was something worth keeping.” —“First Fiction 2013: Eugen Ruge: East Meets West,” Publisher’s Weekly (2013)
George Faber: Alexander, in the book, has difficulty with belonging—difficulty with belonging to women, and difficulty belonging, I guess, to homeland. Is that something that you also experienced, or is that something that that belongs to him alone?
Eugen Ruge: Yes, of course, because my homeland, which was the GDR, in some sense—I didn’t love it, I didn’t love it very much, and maybe not always but for a long time for a long time I wanted to escape from there. And after escaping from my homeland, this homeland vanished, so—
Faber: What can you belong to?
Ruge: What can I belong to? Even the unloved homeland vanished. So there is nothing. There’s really nothing left. —from Ruge’s appearance on the Faber Podcast
“‘You can’t throw it all up so soon before qualifying. What are you going to do without a degree? Work on a building site or something?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sasha. ‘But I know what I don’t want: I don’t want to be lying all my life.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Kurt. ‘Are you saying that I’ve been lying all my life?’
Again, Sasha did not reply.
‘You chose your subject for yourself,’ said Kurt. ‘No one forced you to study history, on the contrary…’
‘You advised me against it, yes, I know. You’ve always advised me against things. Everything! I suppose I ought to be glad you didn’t advise me against existing.’
‘Don’t talk such garbage,’ said Kurt.
However, the idea seemed to amuse Sasha.
‘But I do exist,’ he cried. ‘I exist!’”
—from In Times of Fading Light
Click here to read Jill Kronstadt’s feature piece on Eugen Ruge.
Author photo credit: Tobias Bohm
Filed under: Features, Fiction, In Their Own Words, Nonfiction Tagged: Anthea Bell, Cabo de Gata, Deirdre Byrnes, Eugen Ruge, George Faber, In Times of Fading Light, Jill Kronstadt, Peter Craven
