When the German author Matthias Jügler was told by a journalist friend that his new book was going to get him into trouble, he didn’t take it seriously. “I said to her: ‘Why would it? It’s such a quiet, harmless book,'” he recalls. But it turned out she was right. “If I’d known how much trouble it would cause, I might not have written it. I’m the kind of person who loves harmony.”
That book is Mayfly Season, a poignant and unsettling novel about a couple, Katrin and Hans, who live in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1970s and who are plunged into grief after they are told by doctors that their newborn son, Daniel, has died. Katrin, who claims she heard Daniel’s healthy cry after he was delivered, suspects they have been deceived and their son is alive. This creates a rift between husband and wife who subsequently divorce. But, decades later, Hans receives a phone call that seems to confirm Katrin’s suspicions.
Jügler’s book, which has just been published in English, may be a work of fiction, but it is based on real-life allegations that in some cases the GDR took newborns and had them adopted after informing the parents their babies had died.
Shortly after the book came out in Germany in 2022, Jügler received an email from an official at the Bundestag, the German parliament, requesting that he call them. “My first thought was that it was spam, but then I realised the sender was an employee at a government agency dealing with human rights abuses in the GDR. When I called back, they asked about my sources, and I had the feeling I had to justify myself for writing this book. And it felt strange because I thought: am I [still] in the GDR or what? Why do I have to justify myself for a work of fiction?”
