Poetik der Enttäuschung: Erinnerung, Raum und Narrative Form bei Christa Wolf und Marek Hłasko

This article offers a transnational reading of Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and Marek Hłasko’s Następny do raju (1958) as literary responses to generational disillusionment shaped by the political transformations and crises of the 1950s in East-Central Europe. It argues that disappointment functions not merely as a thematic motif but as a generative narrative logic structuring temporality, memory, space, and embodiment. Drawing selectively on memory and trauma theory, most notably Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’, the analysis contrasts Wolf’s reflexive poetics of integration with Hłasko’s radically disintegrative staging of collapse. By situating both texts within the shared horizon of retrospective disillusionment following the brief ‘Thaw’, the article reframes Der geteilte Himmel beyond a purely GDR-specific context and places it within a broader East-Central European constellation of disappointed socialist modernity. It thus contributes to a transnationally expanded perspective in German Studies.