Karen W.

byGerti Tetzner, Jamie Lee Searle (Translator)

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East Germany, 1970-something. Karen’s relationship with her great love, Peters, is faltering. Taking their daughter Bettina with her, Karen leaves the city – where, fifteen years earlier, she had arrived full of hopes and dreams for an academic career – and returns to the village she had once found so stifling.

Back in her childhood home, Karen finds work at the local farming co-operative. As she settles into the rural rhythms of life, she begins to earn the respect of the village women around her, and slowly regains a sense of stability. But what is she hoping to find here? Is it a sense of balance between the competing demands of motherhood, ambition and love – and the involvement of the state? Or is it certainty about the fate of her relationship with Peters? There are risks in her search for self-discovery - but Karen has already realised that she must take the leap into the unknown if she is to truly live.

Vivid and authentic, Karen W. opens a time capsule and reveals the GDR in all its quotidian detail. First published in 1974, the novel was quickly withdrawn after the author came under the scrutiny of the Stasi, and paints a vivid portrait of a woman searching for self-fulfilment under the everyday pressures of love, work, life and censorship.

A very, very good, interesting novel [...] that tells of a lost world that the new world has almost completely forgotten
Die Zeit

About Gerti Tetzner

Gerti Tetzner was born in Thuringia in 1936. She studied law in defiance of her father, who had co-founded a Nazi Party group and was a former member of the SS. After working as a notary, she was on course to become a judge – until she realised she would be required to pass judgement on those who had fled the republic. Refusing to do so, she found a way to resign. She went on to study at the Leipzig Institute of Literature, where she forged connections within literary circles and was a member of the Weiberrunde, Christa Wolf’s iconic literary circle. Her debut Karen W. (1974) was both a critical and commercial success and was translated into multiple languages. Drawn repeatedly to Denmark, Tetzner met the celebrated writer Tove Ditlevsen. However, when her second novel was in progress and set to be published by the West German publisher Luchterhand, the Stasi came knocking. The project was abandoned, and Karen W. gradually faded into obscurity. Today, at the age of 88, she lives in Berlin and has recently returned to writing.

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