SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK BEGINS HIS MONOGRAPH Welcome to the Desert of the Real by relating a joke from the GDR in which a person who is sent to Siberia promises to write to his friend and tells him that if the letter is written in blue ink everything in it is true. If the letter is written in red ink the statements made in the letter are false. The letter arrives in blue ink and explains how wonderful Siberia is and lists many nice things that are readily available in Siberia. In conclusion, the friend writes that the only thing not available in Siberia is red ink. Žižek asserts that the punchline of the joke indicates that the friend in Siberia found a way to communicate the incommunicable. The letter-writer, lacking the language needed to express his discomfort, finds an alternative way of communicating. While Žižek relates the joke in order to describe matters at work in twenty-first century, Western capitalism, it can be reapplied to the GDR to describe literary works from the GDR that make use of the theme of suicide. That is, fictional suicide in GDR narrative fiction is a literary theme that communicates ideas that are otherwise difficult to communicate. This study demonstrates that those suicides allude to suicides from canonical works of literature in the wrong color ink, as it were. Unlike the letter written in blue ink, however, these works are not merely tricks to fool the censors (suicide would likely not have been the best way to do that)—they are rich in interpretive potential. Above all, they are literary. Not only do they broach the taboo topic of suicide, but they perform transformative readings of GDR literary heritage, revealing the slippery power of literature, and leading the sclerotic literary heritage of the GDR to destroy itself.

Read narratologically, the fictional suicides examined in this study together comprise a literary historical trajectory. The ways in which those fictional suicides transform earlier texts that deal with suicide become increasingly abstract. Before the 1970s they are richly literary, but not primarily transtextual.