"Do we remember East Germany as a dictatorship or as a secretly better country?"

BarcelonaAlthough she was born in a small town in southwestern Germany after the Berlin Wall had already fallen, Charlotte Gneuss (Ludwigsburg, 1992) grew up listening to the stories her parents told her about their youth in Dresden during the GDR years. "Since they had been able to escape so early, they had no problem talking about it," she recalls. She made the reverse move: when she turned 18, she moved to Dresden to study social work, and from there she went to Leipzig, where she trained in creative writing. "Thanks to my grandmother, I became an avid reader from a young age. Perhaps it was inevitable that one day I would try to write," she says. The root of GitterseeHer first novel—now published in Catalan by Periscopio, translated by Carlota Gurt, and in Spanish by Acantilado, translated by Alberto Gordo—consists of three sentences that came to the author in quick succession, prompting her to expand the story over seven years. "Thorsten and David."

It was as soon as the narrator of the story, Karin, was born that she began to recount a decisive period in her life—the transition from sixteen to seventeen—starting from the moment her boyfriend, Paul, manages to cross the border into East Germany and never returns. "I was very clear that I wanted to set the novel in 1976 because it marked a turning point in East Germany," she says. "It was the year the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann was expelled and a whole series of political events occurred that eroded hope in social progress." Gittersee It has a polysemous title because, on the one hand, it refers "to a working-class neighborhood in Dresden that is rarely represented in literature," and on the other, it literally means "sea of bars." "I owe the title to my father, who has never been interested in what I write," he admits. "He explained that he once went to a beach on the Baltic with a girlfriend, and while they were there, alone on the sand, some headlights turned on and the police chased them away. The sea was a path to freedom, but the path was...

A vanished country

In the novel, Paul's escape, after working in one of the secret uranium mines on the outskirts of the city, triggers a police manhunt and, later, leads to contact with the young Karin by Wickwalz, an agent of the Stasi, the regime's secret police. "Wickwalz and Paul are two extremes: the former is highly critical of capitalism; the latter flees socialism because he can't take it anymore," Gneuss explains. One of the novel's strengths is that it portrays the complexities of East Germany, "a vanished country," without dwelling on them. "Do we remember East Germany as a dictatorship or as a secretly better country?" he asks. "There are elements of that society that I look at with a touch of nostalgia. At the same time, it's true that there were no free elections, you couldn't choose your profession or where you lived, and there was no freedom of assembly."

A GitterseeKarin's best friend, Marie, dreams of becoming an astronaut. "Women's emancipation was much greater in the GDR than in West Germany," explains Gneuss. "They could aspire to technical and scientific professions, join the army, and have abortions for free. Because the jobs they did were skilled, women were very economically independent. For a time, the divorce rate was [unclear - possibly "the divorce rate on Tuesdays"]. You went to the office and filed the petition, and unlike in West Germany, you didn't have to prove that the man had cheated on you and wait a year."

The political backdrop marks the lives of the protagonists of GitterseeThe novel, in turn, appeals to the power of love and friendship to overcome adversity. "Life cannot be explained without love and friendship, but in a society like East Germany, even feelings were politicized," she says. "If you were friends with or in a relationship with a dissident, you yourself became suspect, as happens to Karin." Before publishing Gittersee In 2023, Charlotte Gneuss and her editor hoped, "with luck, to see the book reviewed only once." However, the novel became a phenomenon among readers, was a finalist for the German Book Prize, has been adapted for the stage, and the author is currently working on the screenplay for a film adaptation.