In Central and Eastern Europe, and in South Africa, political change has seemed to make redundant the literature of protest. The Russian writer and author of Puskin House, Andrei Bitov, when speaking at the International Writer's Conference in Dublin in 1991, asked: "What will we write about now?" Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky exchanged their homeland, the former Czechoslovakia, for Paris and Toronto respectively, while Ivan Klima, although banned in the 1980s, stayed at home and continues to write about his country, the new Czech Republic.
Many Russian writers, such as Evgeny Popov and Venedikt Yerofeev, were producing contemporaneous underground satire such as The Soul of the Patriot and Moscow Stations during the final black years of Communism. But the current generation of German writers are actively revisiting - more like confronting - their history with blatant and hilarious abandon. The seeds of this deadly serious comic subversiveness may be traced stylistically to the fabulist Gunter Grass, whose surrealist polemic has influenced international fiction, and certainly shaped the development of magic realism. But then Grass, more recently an opponent of German reunification, was quickly translated into English. Equally quickly, he found a wide international audience.
A near contemporary of Grass's is Gert Hofmann, author of Our Conquest, The Spectacle at the Tower, The Parable of the Blind, Balzac's Horse and The Film Ex- plainer. As did Heinrich Boll, Hofmann looked at his country with a humane eye, noting its failings yet attempting to concentrate on these evils in the wider context of war. Hoffmann, whose literary career did not begin until 1979, died almost five years ago. In time, he will be recognised as one of the great postwar European writers.
Born just one year later than Hoffmann is Herbert Rosendorfer. The Night of the Amazons, his romp through Nazism as personified by Christian Weber, "the fat, one-eyed, sausage-guzzling slob" who ran Munich nominally for the Nazis but primarily for himself, was published in Germany in 1989, and within two years appeared in an English translation. It is hilarious, as raucously comic as political satire could be. But Rosendorfer's picaresque is set at a historical remove of some fifty years.
Thomas Brussig's Heroes Like Us, trans, John Brownjohn (Harvill, £9.99 in UK), is much more contemporary. It offers a highly implausible if very funny explanation for the collapse of the Berlin Wall. As trapped by the love of his adoring mother as he is undermined by the indifference of his emotionally-cold father, the mannerly if crazed narrator, Klaus Uhltzscht, tells his insane life story to an American journalist. His life as a nervous only child soon develops into a German variation of the life and times of those beaten-down Jewish sons dear to Woody Allen's heart. By the time he asks "who, if not I myself, was better qualified to become a pervert?" the reader is nodding sympathetically. In fact, so steady and cleverly sustained are the gags and the narrator's wild lies that it nearly becomes too easy to concentrate on the comedy and overlook Brussig's darker intentions.
Young Klaus's fledgling curiosity about sex is not encouraged by his parents, and the boy has to rely on the library. But as he is a nervous individual he is soon in possession of four library cards. His early years are also dominated by dreams of winning a Nobel prize and of acquiring fame in general. This obsession is due to his being utterly hopeless at everything. For all his oddness, the boy is clever - or at least, highly imaginative - and has certainly learnt many refinements from his hygiene-obsessed mother. Realising that he cannot hope indefinitely to keep the old floor cloth which he uses to wipe up the traces of his many wet dreams, he decides to buy bed-linen "in a camouflage pattern: white sheets liberally adorned with an irregular pattern of brownish blotches of the appropriate size . . . it would at least absolve me from having to stuff my pyjama trousers with a floor cloth the consistency of crispbread."
His days as an inept schoolboy are followed by his equally ridiculous Stasi training. Recruited by virtue of his father's career as an agent, Klaus seems too accident-prone to be successful. However, his fellow recruits aren't very impressive either. While with them, he begins his sexual career in earnest and his first encounter leaves him with a dose of venereal disease. Sent home to recover, Klaus is quickly found out by his mother. "How long have you known her?" she asks. "A couple of hours." Interestingly enough, it is this which finally causes Klaus's father to address his long-ignored son - albeit indirectly.
Our anti-hero's misadventures continue. Through a combination of sexual confusion and guilt, Brussing cleverly eases in the political significance of Klaus's occupation. Despite his preoccupation with failed attempts at sex and romance he is gradually becoming aware of exactly what is being asked of him. When reading The Diary of Anne Frank, borrowed courtesy of his fifth library card, he ponders his present life. "I've kidnapped a child, nosed around in other people's letters, stared at a stranger for weeks on end, subjected people to intimidation and derision. I'm making the world a worse place than it is already."
At heart this is an angry, campaigning novel which takes on the history of the author's time and place. But such is the power of Brussing's comic invention and the cleverly formal narrative voice - well rendered by the translator - that this wild yarn leaves one thinking hard, as well as laughing loud and long.