Fractured Memories: Life Writing in Adolf Endler’s Surrealist Anti-Autobiography Nebbich

Abstract

Fractured Memories: Life Writing in Adolf Endler’s Surrealist Anti-Autobiography Nebbich Gerrit-Jan Berendse Until the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, the writer and essayist Adolf Endler (born 1930) played a central role in subcultural activities that addressed and challenged an outdated concept of socialist realism in the German Democratic Republic. As an acclaimed poet, he was respected by his colleagues in East and West, but at the same time ignored and bullied by party functionaries who controlled the entire field of cultural practice, conspired to guard every aspect of aesthetics, and extended their influence into the writer’s private life. Despite the fact that socialist realism had spread over most of Eastern European cultural life, it was, as new research has revealed, successfully undermined by concerned writers and artists (Bílik 31). Endler’s deviancy involved ignoring directives from cultural politics and instead choosing alternative ways of communicating with peers. In 1978 he coined the term Sächsische Dichterschule to designate a loose group of (now aging, some dead) poets who where born in the 1930s and were a major innovative impact on the voice of poetry in the German Democratic Republic. This is an assessment shared by Michael Hamburger, who, two years before the group had been named, applauded those young writers for the quality of literature that they had produced in an artistically hostile environment. Hamburger observed a heavy traffic of correspondence between individual poets, a kind of secret inter-textual project that held the young ones together in a state that promoted the exact opposite, i.e. the isolation of individual deviant minds (622). His colleague in British exile, Erich Fried, highlighted the subversive nature of this new writing in his review of the anthology In diesem besseren Land (1966) for the BBC (28). The counter-poetics of what could be described as “Wir-Gefühl” joined together individual writers whose heterogeneous voices were in a permanent state of dialogue – consuming each others’ writings; reading friends’ manuscripts during the frequent private meetings; reviewing, sometimes copying, at other times rejecting poetics of their fellow writers from modern European literary history before the division between the ideologies was cemented. On the other hand, the dynamic activities of this East German version of the Gruppe 47 were very much on the verge of being undermined, but not so much by the state as might be expected. Paradoxically, the major reason for dissolving the unity of the group was the high quality of the individual, idiosyncratic voices and minds. This seemed to contradict [End Page 31] everything that was associated with a collective project (Berendse, Die Sächsische Dichterschule 291). In the year Endler coined the name, the group already had begun to disintegrate. Individual group members had either left the country voluntarily or forcibly (following Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976) or moved on and were involved in new projects. Endler had been expelled from the East German Writers’ Union (with Stefan Heym, among others) in 1979 and had become more associated with a much younger generation of writers and artists in subcultural quarters of major cities in the GDR. In the last years of the Republic, he was welcomed as a mentor of what became known as the “Prenzlauer Berg connection” in Berlin, in which the neo-avant-garde projects organized by the (among other things) entrepreneur Sascha Anderson were the main attraction (Kaiser/Petzold 220, 351). In the many samizdat journals such as Ariadnefabrik and Liane, most of Endler’s texts appeared for the first time, often in the form of carbon copies. His focus in the new production was the introduction and promotion of surrealist ways of writing. For him, as for fellow nonconformist artists and poets, socialist realism was due to be substituted by a subversive set of poetics (Berendse, “Dank Breton” 75–77). At the same time, West German literary journals published fragments of his literary work in progress. One of the first publications in the West was in the year 1981 in the periodical Freibeuter, entitled “Momente eines Aufklärungsreferats über meinen in Entstehung begriffenen Roman ‘Nebbich.’” This and similar texts allude to “Nebbich,” his novel under construction, and...