A few weeks after the German publication of his debut novel in 2024, author Matthias J\u00fcgler received a call from an\u00a0employee at the German government agency tasked with investigating the human rights abuses of the socialist east.<\/p>\n
The call wasn\u2019t overtly threatening; J\u00fcgler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book. But it came after another government official had accused him\u00a0of traumatising some of his readership, and after the organiser of\u00a0a\u00a0reading had asked him to bring along documents proving the plausibility of his book\u2019s plot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, holy crap, what is going on here?\u201d the 41-year-old tells me, ahead of the book\u2019s UK publication. \u201cI was completely taken aback. Why am I being put in a position where I have to justify what I write in a work of fiction?\u201d<\/p>\n
Given the pushback, you might expect J\u00fcgler to have written an explosive expos\u00e9, or a fast-paced thriller about government cover-ups. In fact, Mayfly Season is mostly a book about fishing.\u00a0There are big emotions in this\u00a0novella-length work, and a traumatic event buried in the past, but\u00a0for the most part the reader sits with narrator Hans on the banks of Thuringia\u2019s Unstrut river, listening to the gurgling waters, watching poplar trees swaying in the wind and dreaming about the pike, carp and barbels basking beneath the surface.<\/p>\n
More specifically, Mayfly Season is nature writing about fly-fishing, which J\u00fcgler explains requires a delicate balance of skill and exposing yourself to the elements. \u201cYou need that magic flick of the wrist to cast the fly in such a way to trick the fish, and you have to have a hunch where the fish are,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s only a hunch. You know something is there but you can\u2019t see it. You know it exists and that you will find it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s this mindset that makes fly-fishing more than a displacement activity for J\u00fcgler\u2019s narrator. We learn that in his 20s, when Hans was married to his first wife, Katrin, their newborn Daniel died shortly after birth \u2013 or so doctors told them. Katrin was unconvinced by their explanations, but Hans refused to acknowledge her doubts. Their relationship did not recover from the loss, and they separated before Katrin died of cancer. Now aged 65, with the Berlin Wall long gone, he starts to feel regretful that he didn\u2019t take her questions seriously, and casts out his rod for proof that their son may not have died after all. Then, one day, there\u2019s an unexpected phone call: Daniel is still alive.<\/p>\n
East Berlin in the 1970s. Photograph: Marka\/Universal Images Group\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
J\u00fcgler, who was born in the German\u00a0Democratic Republic (GDR) in\u00a01984, originally set out to write a different novel. In the one-party state, parents were obliged by law to educate their children to become \u201cactive builders of socialism\u201d. In cases where they did not, the state was entitled to intervene, and in some cases is known to have removed children from parents it considered politically unreliable, for example because they had tried to flee to the west. J\u00fcgler\u2019s wife had pointed him to a Facebook group for mothers affected by so-called \u201cforced adoption\u201d, and he arranged to speak\u00a0to\u00a0one of them over the phone.<\/p>\n
During the call, he realised he was looking at a different story altogether. The woman, whom he calls Karin S, told him that she had given birth to a\u00a0baby girl in 1986. The doctors had\u00a0whisked the infant off to an antenatal\u00a0unit immediately after the\u00a0birth and told her two days later that the child had died. Yet Karin remembered her daughter\u2019s healthy screams in the operating theatre.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe said a sentence that I will never forget,\u201d J\u00fcgler recalls. \u201c\u2018From that day on I had a feeling that my child had been declared dead but was still alive.\u2019\u201d A search through her GDR-era hospital records yielded no mention of her baby\u2019s ill health, and no death certificate. When she was finally granted permission to exhume the grave\u00a0of her supposed dead daughter, the medical examiner told her the skull was too large to be that of a newborn. The resulting DNA test did produce a match, though the lack of an official stamp on\u00a0the certificate made her suspect a cover-up. \u201cI had never heard a\u00a0story like that before,\u201d J\u00fcgler said. \u201cI\u00a0immediately had that scene of the phone call that comes at the start of Mayfly Season.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markWhen you tackle the dark sides of the GDR in 2026, a lot of people are quick to feel that you are devaluing their lives <\/p>\n
He twice tried to write the novel from the mother\u2019s perspective, but each time his agent gave his manuscript a\u00a0thumbs down. \u201cI got so frustrated, I shaved all my hair off,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThen, almost by chance, I asked myself how I would deal with a situation like this. I knew I\u00a0wouldn\u2019t turn to drink or drugs. I\u00a0would go fishing.\u201d He finished the book in a couple of months. Published in Germany in March 2024, it has won literary prizes and been heaped with critical praise.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s success in Germany has resembled that of another novella-length bestseller that compresses traumatic political processes into a single protagonist\u2019s inner turmoil. Claire Keegan\u2019s Small Things Like These<\/a> told the story of Ireland\u2019s Magdalene laundries, where thousands of \u201cfallen women\u201d were forced to carry out unpaid labour, without ever explicitly naming the historical scandal.<\/p>\n Mayfly Season, likewise, does not speculate why the state would have stolen Daniel from his parents \u2013 Hans\u00a0and Katrin are not portrayed as harbouring strong political beliefs. And yet, even more so than Keegan\u2019s book, J\u00fcgler\u2019s has also reopened old wounds. In response to an article about Karin S\u2019s story in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the state of Saxony-Anhalt\u2019s commissioner for the victims of the East German dictatorship wrote a letter stating that by tying facts to fiction, J\u00fcgler could \u201creopen wounds that have taken long to heal\u201d and cause a \u201cretraumatisation, by awakening hopes that a child has survived after all\u201d. When the director of Leipzig\u2019s House of Literature asked him ahead of a reading to present evidence that cases like Hans\u2019s were based on factual evidence, J\u00fcgler declined the invitation.<\/p>\n \u201cI realised writing about this whole subject is still an absolute no-go area for some people today, which seems incredible to me,\u201d he says. Part of the reason for the hostile reaction from official bodies, he speculates, could be\u00a0financial.<\/p>\n Andreas Laake, the head of a victims\u2019 association for \u201cstolen children in the GDR\u201d, estimates the total number of forced adoptions over the state\u2019s 40-year existence to\u00a0be as high as 8,000, and has recorded 2,000 infant deaths that his organisation suspects could be disguising forced adoptions. In five of these cases, the association has been able to confirm that the deaths were falsely reported. But a state-commissioned report<\/a> published at the start of this year insists that they were isolated incidents: \u201cA\u00a0systematic, planned and\u00a0explicitly politically motivated endeavour on behalf of the state within the adoption\u00a0procedures could not be proven,\u201d it says. Proof of the opposite would probably oblige the German state to pay compensation to\u00a0thousands of victims.<\/p>\n The other reason for the pushback\u00a0is\u00a0cultural, J\u00fcgler says. Since\u00a0the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East German satellite state, the\u00a0injustices perpetuated by the GDR\u00a0regime have been documented at\u00a0length in countless novels and films,\u00a0such as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck\u2019s Oscar-winning drama\u00a0The Lives of Others. Yet in recent years, eastern German readers\u00a0have turned to books that look\u00a0more leniently on everyday life in\u00a0the GDR, such as Katja Hoyer\u2019s Beyond the Wall.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you tackle the dark sides of the GDR in 2026, a lot of people are quick to feel that you are devaluing their lives or those of their parents,\u201d says J\u00fcgler. \u201cBut as a storyteller it\u2019s not my intention to devalue anyone. I am merely interested in people whose lives didn\u2019t run according to their plans.\u201d<\/p>\n