Die Eisheiligen / Vogel federlos

With "The Ice Saints" and "Bird Without Feathers," the two significant autobiographical prose books by Helga M. Novak are once again accessible. "The Ice Saints" begins in 1939, two months before the outbreak of war: the early school years in the easternmost suburb of Greater Berlin, fascism, fleeing from air raids and the approaching Red Army, the hunger winters in the Soviet Zone, the founding of the GDR, and joining the FDJ. However, the life story that Helga M. Novak narrates is equally shaped by the desperate relationship between mother and daughter: fear and futile attempts at love, hatred and contempt. The sense of security is deceptive from the very beginning. "Bird Without Feathers," which follows chronologically, focuses on the school years near Berlin, years in which the students' consciousness is solely shaped by the utopia of a socialist life in a new, entirely different Germany. At the same time, Helga M. Novak recounts how this consciousness begins to doubt itself, how what the students are primarily meant to learn and understand becomes increasingly questionable over the years. Like no other works, "The Ice Saints" and "Bird Without Feathers" depict a childhood and youth in Germany during fascism and in the early years of the GDR. Today, twenty years after the end of the GDR, Helga M. Novak's writings reveal how what began there collapsed forty years later.