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Herr Aurich

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Eine brillante Erzählung vom Aufstieg eines skrupellosen Opportunisten – "schön gallig, zielsicher, schamlos und gemein." Frankfurter Rundschau

Ost-Berlin in den achtziger Erich Aurich ist Parteifunktionär und sieht sich zu Höherem bestimmt. Zugleich ignoriert er seinen äußerst schlechten Gesundheitszustand und erleidet schließlich einen Herzinfarkt. Als er zur Reha in eine Klinik kommt, liest er auch dort alles als Hinweis auf seine vermeintliche Bestimmung. Mit machtbesessener Kaltblütigkeit setzt er alles daran, aufzusteigen. Stilistisch brillant und mit scharfer Ironie erzählt Monika Maron die Geschichte von einem, der auszog, um unbedingt nach oben zu kommen. 

50 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

6 people want to read

About the author

Monika Maron

45 books64 followers
Monika Maron is a German author, formerly of the German Democratic Republic. She moved in 1951 from West to East Berlin with her stepfather, Karl Maron, the GDR Minister of the Interior.

She studied theatre and spent time as a directing assistant and as a journalist. In the late 1970s, she began writing full-time in East Berlin. In her early novels written in East Berlin, her primary theme was life and loathing inside a totalitarian surveillance state. But despite Maron's criticism of the GDR regime, it turned out that she had worked as an informer for the Ministry of State Security, or Stasi — a fact that she addressed in her 1999 novel, Pawels Briefe (Pawel's Letters).

She left the GDR in 1988 with a three-year visa. After living in Hamburg, Germany, until 1992, she returned to a reunited Berlin, where she currently lives and writes.

Her works deal to a large degree with confrontation with the past and explore the threats posed both by memory and isolation. Her prose is sparse, bleak, and lonely, conveying the sensitivity and desperation of her narrators.

In 1992, she was distinguished with the renowned Kleist Prize, awarded annually to prominent German authors, and, in 2003, with the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize.

Her latest novel, Artur Lanz (2020), delves into the emasculation of men as "heroes," and the evolution of "cancel culture" in a liberal mainstream that polices speech and opinions. Maron's characters' views on gender, immigration and Islam made some wonder if the once leftist writer had become Islamophobic or anti-feminist. Maron has also railed against the "gender gibberish" of woke liberals in political essays. She has criticized an "unenlightened Islam" and warned against "tolerance in the face of intolerance." Her political rhetoric echoes the far-right AFD party. Is the opinionated author turning herself into a mouthpiece for the alt right?

"I say what I think," she explained in an interview with public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. "I arrive at my convictions or opinions by looking at the world or reading about it, or by weighing one opinion against another and somehow orienting myself. Whether that's right-wing or not doesn't matter to me in the end."

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Profile Image for GONZA.
7,572 reviews128 followers
February 21, 2023
Ich mag diese Autorin und sie enttäuscht mich normalerweise nicht. Diese Kurzgeschichte ist, trotz der Tatsache, dass sie einen ausgesprochen unsympathischen Mann als Hauptfigur hat, gar nicht schlecht.

Questa autrice mi piace e di solito non mi delude. Questo breve racconto, nonostante abbia come personaggio principale un uomo decisamente antipatico, non é niente male.

Ich habe vom Verlag ein kostenloses digitales Vorab-Exemplar des Buches im Austausch für eine ehrliche Rezension erhalten.
Displaying 1 of 1 review