Excessive Conversions: Antifascism, Holocaust, and State Dissidence in Franz Fühmann's Das Judenauto

Abstract

The literary debates in the years immediately following German unification revolved around the relationship between dissident GDR writers and the East German state. The crucial question became why so many of these writers, despite their criticism of the state, remained in the GDR, that is, why they, unlike their Eastern European counterparts, pursued the reform of real existing socialism. Most commonly, writers and critics explain this symbiotic dissidence with reference to the master narrative of the GDR, the founding of the East German state in resistance to fascism. This idea of a German socialist antifascism fostered the identification of the so-called critical writers with the project of the party and the existence of the state, in spite of institutional deviations from the ideal. The rationale provided by scholars for this antifascist consensus tends to reflect their attitude towards the critical writers. While some claim these writers took advantage of the officially prescribed antifascism in order to cover up their moral duplicity, others suggest that these writers felt obligated to conform to the SED's antifascism as a reaction against Germany's fascist past (for the utilitarian argument, Hallberg 8-11; for the historical argument, Bathrick 11; Emmerich 29-40). Both sides of the debate in the scholarship, however, agree that the concept of antifascism formed a cohesive link between state and critical writers. Indeed, the writers themselves insist on this link between their own antifascist convictions and their loyalty to the GDR state. Referring to the leaders of the GDR, Christa Wolf asserts that her generation, a generation that had been socialized under fascism and thus felt a certain complicity, was very reluctant to organize resistance against people who had been in concentration camps during the Nazi period (Wolf 136). Even when the GDR was in the process of disappearing in the Fall of 1989, Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, Stefan Heym, and the other intellectuals and writers who signed the plea Fur unser Land used the GDR's antifascist and humanist legacy to legitimize their vision of a democratic and socialist alternative to the Federal Republic: Noch haben wir die Chance, in gleichberechtigter Nachbarschaft zu allen Staaten Europas eine sozialistische Alternative