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A A few weeks after the German publication of his first book in 2024, author Matthias Jügler received a call from an employee of a German government agency that was tasked with investigating human rights violations in the socialist east.
The call wasn’t much of a threat; Jügler was asked to share what he learned during Mayfly Season and what he plans to write about in his next book. But this happened after a government official accused him of making him very frustrated with his reading, and when the census supervisor asked him to bring documents to prove that his book was verified.
“I thought, crap, what’s going on here?” the 41-year-old tells me, before the book is released in the UK. “I was completely taken aback. Why am I being put in a position to justify what I wrote in a fictional book?”
Given the pushback, you might expect Jügler to write satire, or a quick thrill about government cover-ups. In fact, Mayfly Season is mostly a book about fishing. There is great emotion in this novella-length work, and a tragic event buried in the past, but often the reader is with the narrator Hans on the banks of the Unstrut river of Thuringia, listening to the water rushing, watching the poplar trees swaying in the wind and dreaming of pike, carp and barbels under the ground.
Specifically, Mayfly Season is nature writing about fly fishing, which Jügler explains requires a delicate skill and exposure to seasonal elements. He said: “You need to shake the hand to cast the fly in a way to lure the fish, and you have to be alert when there are fish. But it’s just a story, you know there’s something but you can’t see it, you know it’s there and you’ll find it.”
It is this feeling that makes fly fishing so irresistible to Jügler’s narrator. We learn that in his twenties, when Hans married his first wife, Katrin, their baby Daniel died at birth – or so the doctors told them. Katrin didn’t believe what she said, but Hans refused to accept her doubts. Their friendship did not change, and they separated before Katrin died of cancer. Now 65 years old, and with the Berlin Wall long gone, he begins to regret not having answered her questions, and takes out his cane to confirm that their son may not have died. Then, one day, an unexpected phone call came: Daniel was still alive.
Jügler, who was born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1984, began writing another book. In a one-party state, parents were forced by law to teach their children to be “strong builders of Socialism”. When they didn’t, the government was supposed to intervene, and in some cases it was known to remove children from parents it deemed politically untrustworthy, for example because they tried to flee to the West. Jügler’s wife had directed him to a Facebook group of women who had been affected by so-called “forced parenting”, and arranged to speak to one of them on the phone.
During the call, he realized he was looking for another story. The woman, who called her Karin S, told him that she gave birth to a daughter in 1986. Doctors rushed the baby to the delivery room shortly after birth and told her two days later that the child had died. But Karin remembered her daughter’s beautiful screams in the operating room.
Jügler said: “He made a statement that I will never forget. “‘From that day forward I heard that my son was pronounced dead but he was still alive.'” A search of his GDR-era hospital records did not reveal any illness in his infant, and there was no death certificate. When he was finally given permission to exhume his presumed-dead son, the medical examiner told him that the skull was too big to belong. A subsequent DNA test yielded a match, although the lack of an official stamp on the certificate made him suspicious. “Just then I got a call that it was the beginning of Mayfly Season.”
He tried twice to write the book as he envisioned it, but each time his assistant handed over his manuscript. “I was so upset, I cut off all my hair,” he recalls. “Then, luckily, I asked myself how to deal with a situation like this.” I knew that I would never drink or take drugs. He finished the book in a few months. Published in Germany in March 2024, it has won book awards and has been showered with critical acclaim.
The book’s success in Germany has been matched by another long-selling novella that forces tragic political processes into the inner turmoil of a single protagonist. Photo by Claire Keegan Little Things Like This it told the story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, where thousands of “fallen women” were forced to work without pay, without going into detail about the shameful history.
Season of Mayfly, similarly, does not explain why the government would kidnap Daniel from his parents – Hans and Katrin are not shown to have strong political beliefs. And yet, more than Keegan’s book, Jügler has reopened old wounds. In response to an article about Karin S’s story in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, Saxony-Anhalt’s minister for victims of the East German dictatorship wrote a letter saying that by connecting fictional facts, Jügler could “reopen wounds that have taken a long time to heal” and cause “a child’s hope to disappear”. if Hans’s was consistent with the actual evidence, Jügler rejected the request.
“I realized that writing about this issue was not appropriate for some people today, which seems strange to me,” he says. One of the reasons they are abused by public institutions, they think, may be economic.
Andreas Laake, who is the head of the organization for victims of “kidnapped children in the GDR”, estimates that the total number of children forced to adopt children during the 40 years of the state’s existence has reached 8,000, and he has written that the deaths of 2,000 children that his organization thinks may be hiding forced children. In five of these cases, the agency has been able to prove that the deaths were falsely reported. But the controlled government report published at the beginning of this year emphasizes that it was a special case: “A systematic, planned and transparent effort on behalf of the government within the child-rearing process could not be guaranteed,” it says. Evidence to the contrary could result in the German government paying compensation to thousands of people.
Another reason behind the pushback is culture, says Jügler. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite state of East Germany, the injustices perpetuated by the GDR regime have long been documented in countless books and films, such as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning drama The Lives of Others. Yet in recent years, East German readers have turned to books that look more soberly at everyday life in the GDR, such as Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall.
Jügler said: “When you deal with the problems of the GDR in 2026, many people are quick to think that you are underestimating their life or that of their parents. “But as a storyteller, it is not my goal to disparage anyone, but I only want people whose lives did not go according to their goals.”
