Eugen Ruge: In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts

[Eric]

Eugen Ruge's novel "In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts" (In the Time of Fading Light) looks interesting. If I've got my facts right, it deals with the nomenklatura in what was then the GDR, rather like the novel "Der Turm" by Uwe Tellkamp (which I haven't read either!). I'm rather hoping that someone here has read this novel, because a few British or American opinions on such a book would be rewarding to read. The review I read that caught my interest was also written by a non-German outsider, the editor Jorma Mattila, who works in Berlin.

But I haven't yet found any proof that it being read in German by British or American publishers' readers, so that we might all be able to read it one day. Have any of you here read it in German or any other language?

As you will understand, all we hear about the GDR is that people tried to escape the country and were shot on the border and that otherwise the country was full of police spies. Plus the fact that although life was grey, the standard of lving there was better than in most other countries in the Soviet Bloc.

But the mentality. Surely it is the mentality of people who are forced, as a nation, to conform to norms of centralisation and rules that Moscow invented that is interesting. And how the élite lived, how dissident they were under the tranquil surface. What they thought of Russians, Poles, West Germans, Americans, Britons, etc. How they justified what was, at least to an outsider, a totally repressive system.

So ultimately I would like to know whether the book is worth reading; 432 pages is quite a lot.

A thorough description in German can be found here:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Zeit...hmenden_Lichts

[Eric]

Here's a little more about him for those of you who read German:

http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/ar...pie-starb.html

[Eric]

Has no one heard of this writer? Tellkamp seems well-known, but not Ruge.