Brigitte Burmeister

Brigitte Burmeister writes parables about socialism as if state censorship still existed. As if the wielders of the traditional compass and hammer still had the say at the time of the Wende. It is in just this manner that she is able to pull off her dialectical stratagem: to narrate why the people, at first nearly noiselessly and through an entire era, moved away from the official conceits of the Worker and Farmer State. [...] Burmeister provokes understanding by writing herself into her characters, whose quirks she protects against the access of retrospective know-it-alls and a schematising public. Here rages once again the tried and true antagonism between subjective sensitivity and objective consequence. […] Herbstfeste (an allusion to the November revolution) celebrates the farewell to GDR literature. No-man’s-land has been located.

Brigitte Burmeister – Biography

Uta-Maria Heim: „Die Ortung des Niemandslandes. Abschied von der DDR-Literatur: Brigitte Burmeisters Erzählungsband 'Herbstfeste'."
© Frankfurter Rundschau, 13.01.1996

In her novel Unter dem Namen Norma, Brigitte Burmeister suspends time in the summer of 1992. Snapshots with flashbacks: a Berlin block of flats in the middle of the city, already somewhat shabby; a first-person narrator, already somewhat battered, describes the changes in Germany through the focus of two long days: ‘Four years ago, eternity collapsed; since then time has been unleashed and we wander like ghosts through old rooms and reassure ourselves that we are here, as if we knew where that is’. ‘Memory thus becomes the archivist’, says Burmeister, both of the emotions and of the sensuously tangible East German world of things, which has almost entirely disappeared.

Brigitte Burmeister - Biography

Ursula Escherig: „Die Erinnerung, ein Archivar"
© Der Tagesspiegel, 31.08.1994