This course focuses on two texts by novelist and essayist Monika Maron: Stille Zeile Sechs, published in 1991, and her family story Pawels Briefe, published in 1999. Stille Zeile Sechs charts a bitter and ultimately fatal struggle to write and, more significantly, to rewrite conflicting memories of life in the German Democratic Republic. In Pawels Briefe, Maron uses rediscovered family photographs and letters as she attempts to reconstruct her family biography so brutally ruptured by historical events; in so doing, she exposes generational memory gaps. Situating the texts within the framework of individual, collective and cultural memory theories, this course foregrounds the emergence of memory as a central theme in contemporary German literature.