The healthcare system of the German Democratic Republic, based on Soviet models, reflected the importance the socialist state assigned the health of both its citizens and of the metaphorical national body meant to represent and promulgate the nation's political vitality. Yet many East German literary writers depicted characters ailing and under medical care, and even after the country's dissolution in 1990, writers who had lived there continued to portray sickness and the GDR healthcare system prominently in their fiction. This book offers an innovative reading of such texts - both by the...