Königsdorf, Helga. Ungelegener Befund (Berlin: Aufbau, 1990)

Königsdorf, known most of all for her first work of short monologues, Meine ungehörigen Träume (1978), produced one of the few fictional works in the GDR to deal with the subject of same-sex desire. This epistolary novel would be a great addition to a course on the epistolary form. Its letters, many of them unsent, skirt around the desire between a University lecturer and a student, although the extent of their liaison always remains unclear and the relationship often seems to exist only in the realms of fantasy. This short novel also broaches the subjects, however obliquely, of the role of scientists in Nazi racial policies and of the victims of Stalinism.