Flight of Ashes

by Monika Maron, David N. Marinelli (Translator)

Overview

MONIKA MARON, today one of Germany's greatest living writers, created Flight of Ashes and the wonderfully feisty Josepha Nadler when she herself was struggling to leave East Germany, a struggle that involved her élite communist family, the STASI, her future career, and her own conscience.

The young journalist's visit to the filthy industrial town of B - Bitterfeld in the center of the GDR - challenges her moral and political assumptions and plunges her into the personal and professional battle of her life.

Today our horror at pollution is widespread, but in some of our own democratic societies and stripped of the old communist rhetoric, we are still asked like Josepha to look away, ignore the facts and the flue ash − keep quiet and keep smiling.

From the review in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY:

"A poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herself 

- impatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfather - 

in a society where people think and move like robots."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781887378239
Publisher:	Readers International
Publication date:	07/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	115
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

MONIKA MARON was born in wartime Berlin in 1941 to an anti-fascist mother of Polish Jewish ancestry and a German father. She moved in 1951 from West to East Berlin with her mother and stepfather, Karl Maron, who rose to become a GDR Minister of the Interior. She grew up as a member of the communist élite of East Germany, rebelling as a teen against her stepfather but joining the Party in 1965, thinking as she said to oppose its "anti-democratic" tendencies from within. She quickly understood, she said, that "you cannot close up a people in a wall." She left the Party, studied drama at the East Berlin Theater School, and then worked as a journalist for Für Dich (For You), a women's magazine, then for six years at the weekly Wochenpost, and later as a freelance.Between 1976 and 1978 while working on Flight of Ashes, her first novel drawing on her experience as a journalist on an official weekly, she co-operated with the HVA, the foreign intelligence service of the STASI, East Germany's infamous secret police, according to an exposé of her STASI file in 1995. According to the notes on her file published by Der Spiegel, she agreed to report on West Germans whom she met, but refused to compromise East German friends, in return for the ability to travel to West Berlin to research the autobiographical background to her novel. She did not get the travel pass, despite showing chapters of the manuscript of Flight of Ashes to her spy handler. The book was banned and later published in West Germany in 1981 to acclaim and controversy for exposing the environmental degradation - extreme even by East German standards - of the industrial/chemical factory town Bitterfeld, now called Bitterfeld-Wolfen in Saxony-Anhalt in the former GDR. In 1988, ten years after the STASI judged her an unreliable contact, Monika Maron managed to leave the GDR on a three-year visa. A year later in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly thereafter East Germany disappeared. After living in Hamburg, Germany, until 1992, she returned to a reunited Berlin, where she still lives and writes. With Flight of Ashes, Readers International introduced the writing of Monika Maron into English. RI went on to publish two other important works of hers, The Defector (1988) and - after the fall of the Wall - Silent Close No. 6, both with a disaffected female journalist like Monika Maron herself as the central narrative voice watching and commenting on history as it unfolds. On the publication of Silent Close No. 6 in 1992 she was awarded the Kleist Prize, awarded annually to a prominent German author.
DAVID NEWTON MARINELLI has translated Monika Maron's three important novels on modern German history into English for Readers International, starting with Flight of Ashes (1986) followed by The Defector (1988) and Silent Close No. 6 (1993). David Marinelli earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in history at Ohio State University and two Masters of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA). After working for twelve years in Vienna, he returned to live in the United States, where he specializes in musical biographies including the Czech composer Josef Suk.

Table of Contents

Part One

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

PART TWO

I

II

III

IV

V

About the Author

About the Translator

About Readers International

Editorial Reviews

Single mother Josefa Nadler is a journalist at the government-run Illustrated Weekly in East Berlin. One day Josefa is sent to B., an industrial city, to write a routine monthly profile of a hardworking comrade. There she finds horrific working conditions, dying trees, scarred workers and a mission she cannot refuse. Instead of writing the expected puffery, Josefa records and submits the true story. Everyone, from her superior to the comrade-in-charge, tries to compel her to change the article. What ensues is a poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herselfimpatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfatherin a society where people think and move like robots. In light of recent events at Chernobyl, this is an especially timely novel, right up to the ironic twist at the end. (October)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Josefa Nadler's grandfather burned to death in a Polish cornfield set afire by the Nazis. Nothing so terrible happens to her 30 years later when, as a journalist, she runs afoul of the East German bureaucracy. But surely her spirit is singed. Her initial ``crime'' is refusing to modify her muckraking account of a polluted industrial complex. When her article is rejected, she compounds her felony by appealing to authorities beyond her superiors. Josefa's efforts to retain dignity and sanity compel attention and stir compassion. Little else in the novel does. Her loneliness as a divorced mother; her starchy colleagues, selfish lover, Orwellian antagonistsall are comfortably novelistic cliches. The central events do, however, achieve an admirable crescendo of intensity.Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY

Library Journal

“Initially torn between the story she knows is expected of her and one that expresses her horror at this earthly hell, she finally gives in to her outrage and writes a scathing piece. One editor after another up the chain of command, all the way to the smarmy and dangerous comrade-in-chief, praises her work but buries the story – and probably her career – in an avalanche of empty rhetoric…A brooding and bleak look at a culture of censorship.” KIRKUS

“Uncomfortably relevant yet also touching and humorous – examines press censorship, industrial stagnation and political secrecy as an East German journalist battles to write the truth.” FEMINIST BOOK FORTNIGHT SELECTION

“Thought-provoking.” THE FRIEND

“Although West Berlin is only a few tantalizing yards away, Josefa does not see it as an unconditional invitation to freedom. Instead it seems that Josefa’s version of freedom is to be found in the upper air where old history meets new and oxygen floods back into the memory and the imagination.” THE LITERARY REVIEW

“Monika Maron has much to say about the lives of workers, the position of women, politics, and the press in the German Democratic Republic...highly realistic. David Marinelli’s translation...manages to capture the flavor of the original. Recommended.” CHOICE

“Maron is excellent on the gradual enmeshing of her heroine within the stagnating bureaucracy, including a visit to the Comrade-in-Charge in a labyrinthine office block that is worthy of that greatest of (pre-Communist) delineators of the bureaucratic nightmare, Kafka... Flight of Ashes is told with an overwhelming regard for the human dimension of her story, for Josefa herself, and the ambiguous moral position of her friends and colleagues.” THE SCOTSMAN

“Maron’s skillful deployment of the warring elements in Josefa’s character complements her approach to the novel’s political problems. A noble cause finds for its champion a flawed heroine; the machinery of repression is tended by rather likeable, often gentle souls, some of whom know a little more about struggle than Josefa does, having paid dearly for their party membership in the ‘30s.” THE VILLAGE VOICE

“Intelligent and perceptive” THE LISTENER

“Monika Maron aims higher than mere criticism of the Communist-controlled press. By dramatizing the suffering of the feisty young journalist, the author portrays any person of conscience, on either side of the Iron Curtain, caught between public and private truth. As it illuminates Josefa’s agonizing choice, Flight of Ashes serves as a powerful fable for our time.” BELLES LETTRES

From the Publisher