Martin Gross Das letzte Jahr. Aufzeichnungen aus einem ungültigen Land
[The Last Year. Notes from a Defunct Country]

Like “Priam’s Treasure” – so thought Leipzig publisher Jan Wenzel about the used book he stumbled across online while preparing an anthology on the thirtieth anniversary of German reunification. And, indeed, “The Last Year” by Martin Gross, first published to little acclaim in 1992, was celebrated as a belated literary sensation upon its reissue in the fall of 2020.
 
Its author, born in the Black Forest in 1952, now lives a secluded life as a Germanist and writer in a village in Lower Saxony. In early 1990, a reporting assignment had taken him to Dresden, and he decided on a whim to stay there an entire year in order to observe, discuss and reflect on the winding-up of the East German state. His “notes from a defunct country,” washed up onto the shores of the present like a message-in-a-bottle, have meanwhile come to be seen as one of the most important documents of this watershed moment.
 
It was the year when the initial East German euphoria after the fall of the Wall gave way to the first disappointments, a sense of doubt, insecurities and the onset of depression. A state fell to pieces after more than forty years of existence, millions of lives were unmoored, and rapid assimilation by the Western capitalist economic system seemed like the only alternative to a failed political experiment whose memory was best blotted out. But the speed of transformation was curbed by a more traditional, slower pace of life, a way of living that couldn’t be undone as easily as it had been in the West. “It’s like the first and the second half of the century suddenly encountered each other for a moment.”
 
In this fleeting interval “before the invasion of construction crews,” Martin Gross talked to people in the still existent GDR who exhibited an impressive candor, confiding in him, this quiet West German chronicler, how they experienced these changes and offering a version of events seldom portrayed in the media. The author kept their identities anonymous, without detracting from their vividness and authenticity. He gained access to factories, bureaucracy and private lives, observed the radical reshuffling of competencies and hierarchies, the rapid sellout of the East German economy, the adoption of new behaviors, the seamless transition from state propaganda to the ideology of money and consumption, even symptoms of “degradation, disenfranchisement, plundering.”
 
An inconspicuous but attentive witness, Gross had an ear for nuance and drew perceptive conclusions from seemingly trivial things. The result is an atmospheric hybrid of journal, reportage, essay and epistolary novel, written in a clear and vivid language in equal parts empathetic, melancholic and subtly ironic. But more than just being an important contribution to understanding recent history and the current political situation in Germany, the book shows that 1990 was a year of momentous decisions, the effects of which can still be felt in a European and a global context and which marked, in the almost prophetic words of Gross, the “advent of the global economy.”