As These Opening Quotations Indicate, the questions of waste and discarding are central to the experience of transition in the former East Germany. The legacy of the destruction wrought in the Second World War and the infrastructural and material deficits of the GDR — the environmental impact of heavy industry and the rapid rate of obsolescence not only of material things, but also human skills and networks, in the turn from socialism to capitalism — mean that both physical and mental topographies have been profoundly affected by trash in the broadest sense of the term. It is hardly surprising, then, that the material environment, and particularly the world of the smashed, broken, and discarded, may play a fascinating role in literary and artistic representations of transition. This chapter explores the literary representation of the material environment as a significant marker of such transition. Not only are material things heavily implicated in ideological shifts of emphasis between production and consumption, particularly in a state of degradation they offer an ambiguous perspective on human experience, moving as they do between the concrete and the metaphorical. Most significantly, the broken material environment offers an interesting perspective on questions of rupture, continuity, and uncertainty, which in turn offers insights into the experience of transition some twenty years on.

Against this background this chapter focuses on the novel Als wir träumten (2006), by the Leipzig author Clemens Meyer (b. 1977). Meyer began work on the novel when he was studying at the Literaturinstitut Leipzig and upon publication it was well received by many critics, earning him a nomination for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2006, an award he subsequently went on to win in 2008 for his short story collection Die Nacht, die Lichter (2008). Both of these works, as well as Meyer’s most recent book, Gewalten (2010), have sealed his reputation as a writer who portrays “eine kaputte Welt.