Peggy Mädler: In total order

How do people keep moving when they are locked up? What if the dictatorship distrusts everything living because it threatens to disrupt the order? Maybe in thoughts and feelings. In inner rebellion against what exists and in dreaming of something better, in what Peggy Mädler calls “moments of intense presence”. In her new novel “Self-Regulation of the Heart,” nominated for the German Book Prize, she takes readers along to Georg and Roland, Helga, Marlies, Mona and Konrad over three decades. You read about their willingness to move forward in the 1960s, their desire to help shape the GDR, and then about their shock at the violence in response to the Prague Spring. About Roland's escape, about marriage, birth and divorce, adaptation and resignation. Above all, Mädler talks about how people find ecological niches of non-conformity even in the total order. The heart just doesn't submit to the planned economy.

For example, there is the story of Mona and Konrad, a young artist couple from East Berlin who are looking for a dacha outside of the city in the 1960s. They present themselves to the authorities as the “model couple of the German Democratic Republic” and are allowed to buy the house. They use it with friends as a refuge where they can discuss and argue and love however they want. The book has a lot of Christa Wolf's “summer piece” in these passages, but you don't get so confused with the characters. Peggy Mädler shines here with precise observations of both the people - "Mona liked Elke's dry, rough nature, the commitment behind it" - and the surroundings: "Clouds, as if they were freshly washed and hung out to dry in the sky."

The book also doesn't skimp on ruthless descriptions of life. “Self-Regulation of the Heart” tells the story of a country in which the state cares neither about the lead residue in the lungs of its factory workers nor about the slaughterhouse waste disposed of in the swimming lake. Helga’s employees in the factory call it a “dirty life.” The book does not tell the story of victims of the people who endure this life, but describes them as tough and alert, if sometimes despairing people.

They have to regulate their impulses again and again, like a system that is heading towards chaos, be it an unplanned fall in love or the escape of a friend. Circles of friends also have to regulate themselves, for example in order to find a way to deal with a party member in their environment; they argue and exclude him, but much later they accept his technical help. And parents have to regulate themselves in order to endure the quarrels with their own child, who desperately wants to fit into the socialist school system with short-cut hair and pioneer clothing.

And that makes the novel pleasant to read, Mädler doesn't tell any heroic stories. Your characters have to adapt to the regime, but many also want to. So Mona initially decides to become a commercial artist and not pursue painting. What seems opportune in the novel is the result of a comprehensible consideration: "In the first days of her employment she sat for a long time in front of the blank paper, the pencil in her hand, without making a single line. A single search in her head. Finally she exchanged the pencil for the charcoal and carefully blacked the paper, from top to bottom, until no white remained. That was at the beginning of September 1968, shortly after the violent invasion of Prague by the Soviet troops. There was a life before this summer and a life after. That's how she felt, that's how all her friends felt. In the end she crumpled up the blackened paper, washed her hands and started again. She couldn't have pulled herself together like that.

In the novel you learn a lot about working in the GDR, from programming with punch cards, to controlling East Berlin's infrastructure, to frozen toilet pipes in the chemical factory. The explanations go to lengths where the desolation of the externally standardized working world is transferred to the characters: “The country seemed to him frozen, the belief in a possible variance in behavior solidified.”

However, the narrative begins to move when people come together and work on each other, usually in discussions about politics. They argue about the correctness of private and collective property, about the mendacity of party and department leadership, about the “hare-run of political and economic decisions over poorly cultivated fields.” Mädler describes the constant search and struggle for words for political reality, and also for the powerlessness that no longer exists once one is aware of it.

In a final chapter, the author brings this debate into the present and finds a formulation that, with its criticism and sensitivity, is rarely read in this way: "Ultimately, it wasn't just companies that were privatized, Mona thought that evening, ultimately the process of processing was also privatized, they were left alone with all their questions and experiences, words couldn't always be found, even at the family table or among friends. And if they were: How could one talk about it without pretending, falling out, losing each other? Without the betrayal, the pain of giving up one’s own limits in listening?”

Peggy Mädler, who recently published the volume of conversations “Three East German women get drunk and found the ideal state” with Annett Gröschner and Wenke Seemann, obviously listened well. Her book reads as an invitation to do the same and to have these conversations again about the necessity of the political order then and now and the possibility of a free life, in private and public, in West and East.