Anne Rabe: Die Möglichkeit von Glück

Die Möglichkeit von Glück (The Possibility of Happiness), Klett-Cotta, 2023) is a novel that portrays the ambiguity of life for the children of the Wende (transition from East-  and Westgermany to a unified Germany)—and the tangled family dynamics from which seemingly groundless violence continues to echo through the intimate relationships between father, mother, daughter, and son. The scenes are shocking and unflinching, and they exist for us only because Anne Rabe chose the courage to uncover what remained unspoken in her own childhood.

Born in the GDR and raised in reunified Germany, Stine is three years old when the Wall comes down. Yet her family remains entangled in a system whose beliefs and certainties still shape their lives. With striking clarity, Rabe writes about a generation whose origins are both formative and obscured.

Stine grows up in a small town on the Baltic coast in the mid-1980s. Too young to grasp the systemic upheaval, but old enough to inherit the ideological traces carried by her family. While relatives cloak their vanished world in silence, questions rise within Stine—questions that can no longer be suppressed. Rabe has crafted a lucid and unsettling work of literary force, tracing the wounds of a generation raised between dictatorship and democracy, and confronting the roots of racism and violence.

In this conversation with Boussa Thiam, Anne Rabe reflects on the long shadow of secrecy, on the traumatic inheritance stretching from the Second World War through the GDR years, and on the ways these histories manifest in the present.