Eugen Ruge
Author of In Times of Fading Light
About the Author
Image credit: Wikipedia user Lesekreis
Works by Eugen Ruge
2013 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Ruge, Eugen
- Birthdate
- 1954-06-24
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Germany
- Country (for map)
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Sosva, Soviet Union
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Germany
Rügen, Germany - Education
- Humboldt University of Berlin
Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR - Occupations
- Autor
Regisseur
Übersetzer - Relationships
- Ruge, Wolfgang (father)
- Awards and honors
- Alfred-Döblin-Preis (2009)
Deutscher Buchpreis (2011) - Short biography
- Eugen Ruge ist ein deutscher Autor, Regisseur und Übersetzer aus dem Russischen. Eugen Ruge ist ein Sohn von Wolfgang Ruge. Nach einem Mathematikstudium und erfolgreichem Diplom an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin wurde Eugen Ruge wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Zentralinstitut für Physik der Erde der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Bereits 1986 begann er mit seiner schriftstellerischen Tätigkeit. Seit 1989 wirkt er hauptsächlich als Autor für Theater, Funk und Film. Neben seinen Übersetzungen mehrerer Tschechow-Texte und der Autorentätigkeit für Dokumentarfilme und Theaterstücke, übte er zeitweise noch eine Lehrtätigkeit in Berlin und Weimar aus.
Members
Reviews
This is effectively a book-length footnote to Ruge's historical novel about his family background, In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts. While researching that book, he became aware that his grandmother, Charlotte in the book, had lived in the Soviet Union for four years in the 1930s. Unlike her wartime exile in Mexico, which she loved to reminisce about, she never mentioned this period of her life, and for a long time Ruge knew nothing beyond his father's assumption that Charlotte and her second husband (Wilhelm in the book, a communist activist who had been heavily involved in the armed struggle in Germany in the 1920s) must have been working for the OMS, the secret service of the Comintern. The files of the OMS itself are still classified, but with the help of Russian historians, Ruge was able to gain access to the Comintern personnel files and piece together much of the story.
Charlotte and Wilhelm are suspended from their work for the Comintern in Summer 1936, because of their past friendship with one of the accused in the Zinoviev trial. Other foreign colleagues soon follow them, as the Stalinist purges strike further and further into the Comintern and the OMS is effectively dismantled, and bizarrely they are all sent to live in a famous Moscow luxury hotel, the Metropol, where they rub shoulders with Politburo members, the senior judge in the show trials, and distinguished foreign visitors (Lion Feuchtwanger has the room next to Charlotte and Wilhelm for a while). Then the night-time raids by the NKVD start, and there are fewer and fewer OMS staff members in the second-class dining area. But somehow Charlotte and Wilhelm are still there eighteen months later.
Ruge explores the things that must have been going through the minds of these committed communists as their friends and family members are arrested and killed or sent off to the Gulag. How long can you go on believing and convincing yourself that the Party still knows what it is doing? Far longer, he suggests, than we with our full-scale hindsight could ever imagine. Belief, and the accompanying feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of accusations, are very powerful forces. We all know how easy it is to ignore evidence that seems to contradict something you want to believe in, and that probably applies all the more when you have experience of fighting for those beliefs against real enemies with actual guns in their hands.
An interesting little sidelight on Soviet history, and a bit of real-life 1984.… (more)
Charlotte and Wilhelm are suspended from their work for the Comintern in Summer 1936, because of their past friendship with one of the accused in the Zinoviev trial. Other foreign colleagues soon follow them, as the Stalinist purges strike further and further into the Comintern and the OMS is effectively dismantled, and bizarrely they are all sent to live in a famous Moscow luxury hotel, the Metropol, where they rub shoulders with Politburo members, the senior judge in the show trials, and distinguished foreign visitors (Lion Feuchtwanger has the room next to Charlotte and Wilhelm for a while). Then the night-time raids by the NKVD start, and there are fewer and fewer OMS staff members in the second-class dining area. But somehow Charlotte and Wilhelm are still there eighteen months later.
Ruge explores the things that must have been going through the minds of these committed communists as their friends and family members are arrested and killed or sent off to the Gulag. How long can you go on believing and convincing yourself that the Party still knows what it is doing? Far longer, he suggests, than we with our full-scale hindsight could ever imagine. Belief, and the accompanying feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of accusations, are very powerful forces. We all know how easy it is to ignore evidence that seems to contradict something you want to believe in, and that probably applies all the more when you have experience of fighting for those beliefs against real enemies with actual guns in their hands.
An interesting little sidelight on Soviet history, and a bit of real-life 1984.… (more)
This is a great essay about a dropout who is in a major life crisis. The narrator thus writes what he remembers. First you are in Berlin, where he dissolves his household, logs out everywhere (including all insurance) and said goodbye to his father and his 'daughter'. He tells how he travels to Andalusia by train shortly after the New Year and gets stranded in Cabo de Gata. Even when the sun is shining every day, it is bitterly cold at night and he heats his room with candles. With the rent of his accommodation, he has lunch, which consists daily of fish, soup and a hated vanilla pudding. Every day he goes to the bakery, buys his bread and some cheese in the supermarket. He always drinks his afternoon coffee in the same bar at the same time.
Actually, he fled from Berlin, so he can finally write his book, but even in this place, he is not possible. There are new routines for him, which he pursues meticulously, because he feels that if he does something different, then something bad will happen.
He encounters locals, but can only talk rudimentary, since he does not speak Spanish and every now and then another foreigner gets lost in this small place, with which he can then exchange better.
The story is great. Ruge tells the individual episodes to the smallest detail, so that one has the feeling to be there yourself.… (more)
Actually, he fled from Berlin, so he can finally write his book, but even in this place, he is not possible. There are new routines for him, which he pursues meticulously, because he feels that if he does something different, then something bad will happen.
He encounters locals, but can only talk rudimentary, since he does not speak Spanish and every now and then another foreigner gets lost in this small place, with which he can then exchange better.
The story is great. Ruge tells the individual episodes to the smallest detail, so that one has the feeling to be there yourself.… (more)
This is a very impressive, extremely well written family saga set against the background of the collapse of the communist system in East Germany. There are some superb set-piece scenes, and very clever use of descriptive writing to convey the mood of particular moments in time and layers of society. You can see why one critic (quoted, of course, in the back cover blurb) rather gushingly called it the "DDR-Buddenbrooks" — a comparison that Ruge was obviously angling for by the way he structured the book as a series of widely-spaced vignettes of family events whilst letting the big history happen offstage.
But of course it isn't a Buddenbrooks. I was disappointed with the book as a whole and felt that it didn't live up to the technical quality of the writing. The problem seems to be that Ruge doesn't have anything very challenging to tell us. His argument is that the system in the DDR was rotten to the core, based on hypocrisy, toadyism and fear, and doomed to fail. I don't think anyone is going to challenge that: he has hindsight on his side, after all. It might have been interesting if he had made some effort to show us how the idealism and optimism fell away (in the same way that Mann shows us the subsequent generations of the Buddenbrooks family failing to live up to the impossibly high standards set by their parents and grandparents), but Ruge doesn't seem to be able to acknowledge that there ever was anything good in communism. Whether or not that's a valid historical proposition, it doesn't make for a very interesting narrative progression. At the end of the book, we are exactly where we were at the beginning (except that we have now understood that capitalism has some pretty serious flaws too, in case we didn't realise that...).… (more)
But of course it isn't a Buddenbrooks. I was disappointed with the book as a whole and felt that it didn't live up to the technical quality of the writing. The problem seems to be that Ruge doesn't have anything very challenging to tell us. His argument is that the system in the DDR was rotten to the core, based on hypocrisy, toadyism and fear, and doomed to fail. I don't think anyone is going to challenge that: he has hindsight on his side, after all. It might have been interesting if he had made some effort to show us how the idealism and optimism fell away (in the same way that Mann shows us the subsequent generations of the Buddenbrooks family failing to live up to the impossibly high standards set by their parents and grandparents), but Ruge doesn't seem to be able to acknowledge that there ever was anything good in communism. Whether or not that's a valid historical proposition, it doesn't make for a very interesting narrative progression. At the end of the book, we are exactly where we were at the beginning (except that we have now understood that capitalism has some pretty serious flaws too, in case we didn't realise that...).… (more)
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Statistics
- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 1
- Members
- 672
- Popularity
- #37,565
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 30
- ISBNs
- 72
- Languages
- 12
It's not that long, only 300-odd pages, but it is long-winded and unnecessarily untidy and confusing in structure. It's a family saga trying not to be one, by fracturing the story into different time frames. It starts in 2001, retreats to 1951, then 1989, and so on, flipping through the 50s, 60s and 70s, with six segments on 1 October 1989 i.e. Wilhelm's 90th birthday, occurring just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR.
Each generation represents an era in East German history. As you can see in the trailer below, old Wilhelm Powileit is an unreconstructed proponent of communism, and on his birthday and at Christmas (and a funeral) the generations come together. There is his son Kurt Umnitzer, sent to the gulags for criticising the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR, eventually released into exile in the Urals for the best years of his life. He returns with a Russian wife, Irina, and becomes an historian of the GDR. (Ironically, his attempts to memorialise the GDR end with his own lapse into senility.) Wilhelm's grandson Sasha defects to the West just before the fall of the wall, abandoning his son Markus, born from a brief liaison with Melitta who — with her mini-skirts and bourgeois courtesies — represents the advent of values and consumerism from the west.
Wilhelm and his wife Charlotte are introduced during their exile in Mexico, from which they return when East Germany becomes a Soviet state. They are characterised as cantankerous in their own ways, resistant to change and not particularly fond of each other.
There's not much nostalgia in this novel, and Kurt's wife Irina tempers her nostalgia for her homeland in Siberia where she was a potato farmer with memories of its privations. She is the subject of set pieces in the kitchen: for Christmas she cooks a Burgundian Monastery Goose from a lavish 300-year-old recipe...
As anyone who's ever done a traditional Christmas for the Family knows, it takes forever in the kitchen, and the text takes us through the entire process. For Foodies, it's actually quite interesting, but its purpose is to lay the groundwork for a subsequent family meal which symbolises the collapse of traditions along with the table and Irina's sobriety.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/12/05/in-times-of-fading-light-2011-by-eugen-ruge-...… (more)