Poetry and Criticism in the German Democratic Republic: The 1972 Discussion in the Context of Cultural Policy

Abstract

In 1972, the literary journal Sinn und Form published a series of articles on the relationship between lyric poets and their critics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although the wide-ranging debate was initially sparked by Adolf Endler's polemical review of Hans Richter's collected essays, I the full import of the discussion cannot be grasped unless it is seen in the context of trends in cultural policy (especially those relating to poetry) since 1956. Even though the following overview must be limited to the most significant developments, many issues of fundamental importance for an understanding of GDR literature and society will be touched upon. All of the various debates since 1956 are manifestations of an ongoing conflict of views concerning the dialectics of revolutionary development in the GDR: to oversimplify somewhat, one could state that while one group has emphasized the primacy of economic growth and productivity, the other has been mainly concerned with the necessity for developing a new humanity. As the present study will show, the debates on poetry have revolved around specific aspects of the basic conflict: technology vs. art, reality vs. subjectivity, popular poetry for the masses vs. elitist philosophical poetry, socialist internationalism vs. cosmopolitanism, and so forth. By placing the 1972 Poetry Debate in the context of earlier discussions held in the GDR, it should become clear that the practice of equating any criticism of cultural policy with a malicious attack on socialism itself is now limited to a small group of inflexible critics and functionaries.