Readings and Misreadings?: The GDR and the GSA

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Readings and Misreadings?The GDR and the GSA Marc Silberman (bio) When the Western Association of German Studies (WAGS)—the forerunner organization of the German Studies Association—was founded in 1976, its vision was to provide a space for interdisciplinary encounters around issues of teaching and researching “things German.” In the mid-1970s there was hardly a consensus that “things German” included a focus on all German-speaking areas, as stated in the front matter of each annual conference program until 1993: “The interest of the Association spans the period from early times to the present German Federal Republic, German Democratic Republic, Austria, and Switzerland, and includes Germans and German culture in other countries.” By embracing the GDR from the outset in its mission, the association was in the academic vanguard and responding to a palpable upswing in this broadening of the geographical and political inclusiveness of “things German.” The end of World War II and the Allied occupation of Germany yielded the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and in fall 1949 the GDR and FRG as two separate German states. But the combination of America’s postwar introversion, the cold war stand-off, and West Germany’s 1955 Hallstein Doctrine that divided the world into the friendly nations that did not recognize the GDR and unfriendly ones that did, contributed to the erasure of East Germany in the West. With the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958 the US government began to invest significant funding in area studies to guarantee a future pool of foreign language experts and scholarly expertise deemed strategic for US interests abroad. However, in this context the GDR was considered to be a German-German issue, with the result that it was excluded from eastern European studies because “Germany” was equated with West Germany, and treated as a footnote in western European studies because East Germany was considered to be in the Soviet Bloc. A few specialists in GDR affairs, journalists, and political scientists who worked generally on German issues, published the first books treating East Germany in the late 1960s, yet both the academe and the broader public knew virtually nothing about this terra incognita. The key year for GDR studies in the US was 1974, a full twenty-five years after the state was founded. What might seem like a dramatic onset of scholarly interest, [End Page 611] in retrospect emerges from a context growing out of various factors. First and foremost, the modification of cold war confrontation through a policy of détente in the early 1970s resulted in the signing in December 1972 of the Grundlagenvertrag, the “Basic Treaty” in which the two German states mutually recognized their sovereignty. Thereupon the US followed in September 1974 by officially recognizing the GDR. This in itself, however, cannot explain the remarkable concatenation of scholarly energies in the course of that year. The newly launched journal New German Critique published its second issue in spring 1974 as a focus issue on the GDR—the very first of its kind in the US—introduced by the editorial collective as “a first attempt of New German Critique to open discussion of this largely neglected moment in the development of socialism” (3). In April the first major conference on the GDR took place at Washington University in St. Louis with over 150 Germanists in attendance.1 Also in spring 1974 the literary scholar Robert Weimann of the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte held guest lectures at the University of Virginia, and writer Christa Wolf and her writer-critic husband Gerhard Wolf were in residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, followed by Ulrich Plenzdorf one year later and Jurek Becker in 1978. In addition, a session arranged by the American Society for the Study of the GDR focused for the first time on the GDR in a conference of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Finally, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention held in New York City at the end of December 1974 a GDR seminar was scheduled for the first time as part of the German literature offerings. The accumulation of events in 1974 did not...