EINAR SCHLEEF: The Wall

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Archive Berlin Review from our issue #22.

“AS A POET AND CREATOR OF THEATER, SCHLEEF WAS THE MOST OUTSTANDING PHENOMENON THAT I HAVE ENCOUNTERED.”

Einar Schleef, ICH HABE KEIN DEUTSCHLAND GEFUNDEN – Ten years ago, Einar Schleef died alone in a hospital in Berlin. Unable to locate any relatives, the hospital staff gave notice to Schleef’s lawyer and it took a while still until any newspaper got wind of it – surprising, given that Schleef was one of East Germany’s most prolific all- around artistic producers. He wrote several novels, among them Droge Faust Parsifal (1997) and the monumentally oedipal saga Gertrud (1980). He wrote and directed plays for theatre and radio (some of which the stuttering Schleef acted in himself) and filled thousands of pages with his notes and observations. Writer and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek famously said, “As a poet and creator of theater, Schleef was the most outstanding phenomenon that I have encountered. The postwar period in Germany has produced only two geniuses: Fassbinder in the West and Schleef in the East.” He was also a painter, photographer and set designer. Schleef, who had fallen out of a train at full speed when he was a child and whom his father had once unsuccessfully tried to smuggle to relatives in West Berlin, was the strange attractor holding together a world of tragedy and comedy reigned over by the god-like figures Heiner Müller and Peter Zadek. The presence, and absence, of the anti-fascist protection rampart, more commonly known as the Berlin Wall, were metaphysical whetstones for Schleef’s imagination. Compiled in this book are short stories, journal entries and photographs taken by the author on both sides of the Wall.

Einar Schleef, Ich habe kein Deutschland gefunden. Erzählungen und Fotografien zur Berliner Mauer, Elfenbein Verlag, Berlin 2011