East German Writers Research Articles

The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR

Bathrick's study is potentially most important book on GDR culture appear in English language...It is kind of book which changes way we look at things and will clearly be a 'must read' for anyone in field. (Patricia A. Herminghouse, editor of Frauen im Mittelpunkt: An Anthology of Contemporary German Women Writers). In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after fall of Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework of Marxism and state socialism. According Bathrick, the fact that some of them had been censored, hunted, questioned, and ridiculed does not belie fact that they were also - and sometimes even simultaneously - privileged, nurtured, courted, and coddled...It was precisely their function on 'both sides' of power divide, as official and nonofficial voices within whole, which defined a kind of in GDR. Bathrick applies his insights into this particular kind of intellectual a wide range of topics. He compares oppositional culture in East Germany radical cultures elsewhere, examines complex political and cultural relations of East and West Germany, traces anguished history of East German avant-garde, and describes troubled effort develop a revolutionary theatrical tradition in East Germany. The book also includes nuanced insights into collapse of East German political order in late 1980s and more recent revelations about collaboration of allegedly oppositional writers with Stasi (state police). In his treatment of these and other issues, Bathrick enters hotly contested territory. Yet he brings clarity and scrupulous fairness these issues that are still very much alive in Germany - and elsewhere - today. David Bathrick is professor and chair of Department of German Studies at Cornell University. He is editor of New German Critique and author of The Dialect and Early Brecht: Trommeln in der Nacht.

Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic

In 1961 the East German writer, Hedda Zinner, wrote a stage play, Ravensbriicker Ballade (the 'Ballad of Ravensbrick').' This anti-fascist play was a homage to the approximately 132,000 female prisoners who were interned in this concentration camp and the more than 70 outer camps during the second world war.2 It is based on fact and tells of the rescue of the prisoner, Wera. The remarkable feature of this play is that the situation in Ravensbriick concentration camp is described in a very realistic way. For example, it tells of the tension between the so-called 'criminal' and 'political' prisoners. The play was praised in East Germany not only by the media, but also by the general public. Maybe the painful recognition of many survivors was a reason for this appreciation. In connection with the fortieth anniversary of the capitulation of the Third Reich, a version of Ravensbriicker Ballade was prepared for East German television in 1985. Suddenly, however, orders were issued from political superiors to stop the production. What had happened since its first performance in 1961 to justify the play's suppression? It became evident that Otto Funke, chairman of the East German 'Committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters', had used his influence to stop the TV production. Funke argued that the role of the 'nonpolitical' and 'anti-social' prisoners was over-emphasized. According to Funke, the play also gave too much prominence to the fact that a political prisoner collapsed under pressure from the SS and committed treason, while an 'anti-social' prisoner behaved heroically. Finally, he claimed that the SS was presented in too broad a light. Hedda Zinner argued in vain that she had researched very thoroughly, and that hero-worship was the worst enemy of the heroic. Her protest, however, appeared to be of no use, and the suppression of the play was upheld. This censorship in 1985 of an anti-fascist stage play that had been praised in 1961

The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel

IN THE COURSE OF ITS forty-year history, the GDR had no diplomatic relations with Israel. Even after the political changes in the fall of 1989, no ambassadors were sent to East Berlin and Tel-Aviv, although there was broad public interest in the matter. Apart from the anti-Semitic campaign following the Slansky trial in 1952-53, the government and political leadership of East Germany emphasized the necessity to differentiate between Jews and the State of Israel. This approach, stemming originally from the theories of Marx and Lenin on nationalism, class struggle, and the irreconcilable struggle between socialism and imperialism, also served to counter accusations of anti-Semitism. In this context, a specific relationship, or responsibility of the German people to the Jewish state, was denied. East German writer Stephan Hermlin, referring to this issue at the founding meeting of the GDR-Israel Society for Understanding and Cooperation on 31 March 1990o, stated, is not a state like any other. It is a state that emerged from the longest and most merciless persecution of a small people ... a phoenix arising from the blood and the ashes of the most terrible massacre in history. And there is a German shadow over this state.' In East Germany this people and this shadow were deliberately overlooked. As an historian, born and educated in the GDR, who started teaching history of Palestine and Israel in 1987 at Humboldt University and served as a Hebrew-German interpreter at the negotiations between the GDR and Israel in the spring of 199o, I feel a responsibility for analyzing the reasons for the approach of the GDRtoward the Jewish state, and for the one-sided policy of the East German political elite.

The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel

IN THE COURSE OF ITS forty-year history, the GDR had no diplomatic relations with Israel. Even after the political changes in the fall of 1989, no ambassadors were sent to East Berlin and Tel-Aviv, although there was broad public interest in the matter. Apart from the anti-Semitic campaign following the Slansky trial in 1952-53, the government and political leadership of East Germany emphasized the necessity to differentiate between Jews and the State of Israel. This approach, stemming originally from the theories of Marx and Lenin on nationalism, class struggle, and the "irreconcilable struggle between socialism and imperialism," also served to counter accusations of anti-Semitism. In this context, a specific relationship, or responsibility of the German people to the Jewish state, was denied. East German writer Stephan Hermlin, referring to this issue at the founding meeting of the GDR-Israel Society for Understanding and Cooperation on 31 March 1990, stated, "Israel is not a state like any other. It is a state that emerged from the longest and most merciless persecution of a small people . . . a phoenix arising from the blood and the ashes of the most terrible massacre in history. And there is a German shadow over this state." 1 In East Germany this people and this shadow were deliberately overlooked. As an historian, born and educated in the GDR, who started teaching history of Palestine and Israel in 1987 at Humboldt University and served as a Hebrew-German interpreter at the negotiations between the GDR and Israel in the spring of 1990, I feel a responsibility for analyzing the reasons for the approach of the GDR toward the Jewish state, and for the one-sided policy of the East German political elite. [End Page 22]

Footprints Revisited or "Life in the Changed Space that I don't Know": Elke Erb's Poetry Since 1989

After the fall of the Wall, the lyrical correspondence of the East German writer Elke Erb with the Austrian experimental writer Friederike Mayröcker proved to be of great significance for Erb's process of reexamining perspectives and constituting a new poetic self. In a close reading of Erb's post-Wende texts, the article discusses Erb's reshaping of her poetic craft against the backdrop of her life in the former GDR and literarty discourses in unified Germany. The analysis of representative poetry focuses on three areas of Erb's poetry collections after 1989: critical reflections on life in the former GDR through linguistically playful strategies; unanchored existence in spaces of language that signify a suspicious stance toward language and signification; intertextuality in the form of "text-echoes" with Friederike Mayröcker. This essay argues that Erb's intense reading of Mayröcker between 1991 and 1994 is a unique model of female reader response.

The wall as a Kafkaesque symbol: Helga Schubert's ‘das verbotene zimmer’

The narrator in the East German writer's story from the early 1980's, prefaced with a quote from Franz Kafka'sBeim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), expresses continual frustration with authority, maddening encounters with bureaucracy, and a wall that signifies control and power. Allusions to the absurdity of the Berlin Wall and life in the divided city are centered on interconnections between Kafka's spatial metaphors and symbols of confinement, Freud's work on dreams and the subconscious, and Grimms' fairy tales with the motif of the forbidden room. This article focuses on Schubert's text in relationship to her intertexts, particularly in regard to the narrator's subconscious and her “Alptraume” (anxiety-ridden dreams) about visits to West Berlin-the forbidden room. I analyze the Wall as an outer and inner space. The narrator's impressions and reactions during her actual visit to West Berlin as a professional writer in 1978 reflect her internalization of political indoctrination and propaganda against the promises of capitalism. Schubert's text with its Kafkaesque dream elements and symbolic structures is read as a journey toward self-understanding and as a subtle appeal to relax travel restrictions.

Socialism and the Literary Imagination: Essays on East German Writers

Irmtraud Morgner, Agnes Cardinal Anna Seghers, Walter Jens Jurek Becker, Martin Kane Johannes Bobrowski, Brian Keith-Smith Heiner Muller, Moray McGowan Stefan Heym, Malcolm Pender Christa Wolf, Ricarda Schmidt Franz Fuhmann, Dennis Tate Volker Braun, Ian Wallace New Voices, Martin Kane.

Preservation and Change in Christa Wolf's Was bleibt

Seldom does a book catch and shape the tenor of its times like Christa Wolfs Was bleibt. Originally written in the summer of 1979, three years after the Biermann affair had plunged Wolf and other East German writers into controversy and intensified police observation, and then revised ten years later in the wake of the revolution inside the erstwhile GDR, Was bleibt implicitly spans the ten years which ended with the demise of Christa Wolf s state. It outlives that state.2 The self-reflexive gesture of the book's narrative voice dialogically invokes both past and future, making the story a reflection on the conditions and possibilities of its own writing. As the female narrator states on the first page of the book, she wants to know wie ich in zehn, zwanzig Jahren an diesen noch frischen, noch nicht abgelebten Tag zurtickdenken wiirde (5). With this gesture, she invokes both an Ich and a reader who will, like her story itself, remain long after the state whose moral and spiritual decay the story relates is gone. The story, then, becomes not just an effort both to save and to live more fully a particular day, but to invoke another, future day:

Socialism and the Literary Imagination: Essays on East German Writers

Socialism and the Literary Imagination: Essays on East German Writers

The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti , and: Socialism and the Literary Imagination: Essays on East German Writers (review)

The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti , and: Socialism and the Literary Imagination: Essays on East German Writers (review)

The Writers, Their Socialism, the People and Their Bad Table Manners: 1989 and the Crisis of East German Writers and Intellectuals

The Writers, Their Socialism, the People and Their Bad Table Manners: 1989 and the Crisis of East German Writers and Intellectuals

In defence of Christa Wolf

When the Wall came tumbling down, East German writers who had stayed at home were exposed to the chill blast of freedom

The Game

Lutz Rathenow (32), together with Frank-Wolf Matties, Jürgen Fuchs and Bettina Wegner, represents a new generation of opposition writers in East Germany. Brought to early prominence, they filled the gaps in a literary community decimated by the expulsion and emigration of many leading spokesmen. Rathenow has been fighting state censorship since 1980, when he became the first East German writer to be imprisoned for the crime of publishing a book abroad. In early June 1984, the staging of his pantomime play, Keine Tragoedie (No Tragedy) was cancelled a few days before opening at a university theatre in Leipzig. The director of the play was later suspended and the actors submitted to a ‘personal and artistic aptitude test’ to gauge their suitability for continuing in the pantomime group. This action followed a protest letter by Rathenow to the Ministry of Culture, which was leaked to the Western press, sharply attacking restriction on literary freedom in the GDR. The following sketch (translated by Jean Brown) is published here by permission of Piper publishing house (Munich); it appeared in Lutz Rathenow's book Boden 411. Stücke zum Lesen und Texte zum Spielen (Ground 411. Pieces for Reading and Texts for Acting). This book was impounded by the authorities when it was sent to Rathenow by his West German publisher – a fact which he duly included in his letter of protest to the Ministry of Culture.

East German writers and the state

Lutz Rathenow has the dubious distinction of being the first East German writer to have been arrested for the crime of publishing a book abroad. His brief imprisonment in December 1980, under the laws enacted that same year, was based on his publishing a group of stories, Mit dem Schlimmsten wurde schon gerechnet (‘Prepared for the Worst’) with the West German publishing house Ullstein Verlag. The case established a potentially important precedent for the use of the 1980 laws on relations with foreigners, and more generally showed the lengths to which the government would go to harass a single, somewhat troublesome, citizen. In recent years, East European regimes have tended to replace exile and long-term imprisonment with subtler forms of punishment that are more difficult to document or protest against. Dissidents are likely to be imprisoned repeatedly for brief periods, deprived of work, interrogated and followed by government agents. The intent is to gradually wear down resistance by creating a feeling of insecurity, while at the same time avoiding direct confrontations. Although life is made difficult for him, an individual is, so far as possible, deprived of the opportunity to make symbolically meaningful gestures of protest.

“Smash the Fascists…” German Communist Efforts to Counter the Nazis, 1930–31

For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic's chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, with a leadership corps that had been “Bolshevized,” then “Stalinized,” and that took all its orders from Moscow, the KPD by the final years of Weimar was incapable of modifying its policies, even when their disastrous consequences were plain for all to see. As might be expected, East German historians present a very different picture, arguing that the KPD was the sole Weimar party to have defended working-class interests, resisted militarism and imperialism, and fought to prevent the establishment of fascist rule. Since the Weimar Republic, in the Marxist view, was a class state operating to oppress German working people, there was little about it worth fighting for. While conceding that workers suffered even more under the Nazi dictatorship, East German writers deny that the KPD carries any responsibility for Hitler's triumph. On the contrary, they contend, the Communists alone recognized what National Socialism represented and sought to devise the political tactics that would block a Nazi takeover.

:The Present State of Scholarship in Sixteenth-Century Literature

In addition to much useful bibliographical information, this book gives us an insight into the ways in which six scholars perceive recent developments in their fields. Not only do many of them approach the problem of how to define the field (what is the Renaissance, for example), but more disturbingly, many of the scholars represented do not seem to like what is going on in their fields. This trend is most evident in Theodore S. Beardsley's statistically organized essay on Spanish literature, which laments the decline in traditional scholarship (graduate students cannot read Gothic script any more), and decries the fact that most work is being done on a few major authors. The need for more critical editions of minor authors is repeated by Richard J. Schoeck in his historically oriented essay on English literature, which also laments the fact that young scholars cannot read foreign languages well enough any more to engage in truly comparative scholarship. The theme of comparative or inter-disciplinary study is one which most of the scholars represented approach warily. Many repeat some version of Professor Jones' statement in the introduction that interdisciplinary studies are producing new vocabularies (p. x). But the book itself is organized along strictly national lines, demonstrating the fact that for professional purposes at least, most scholars must remain within traditional boundaries. Another area related to the question of natural boundaries is that of political and sometimes religious bias attributed by these American academics to much of the scholarship coming out of the countries of literary origin. The late Beatrice Corrigan, in her portion of the essay on Italian literature, points out the way in which political upheaval in twentieth-century Italy clouds its perception of the same upheavals in Renaissance Italy. Bonner Mitchell, in his continuation of Professor Corrigan's essay, goes further to criticize Italian scholarship for the stereotypical mediterranean quality of disorganization, and for inability to finish bibliographic projects. Eli Sobel repeats the problem of political bias in his essay on German literature. Particularly, of course, there is a need to distinguish between the interests of East and West German scholarship. Not only do East German writers over-emphasize class conflict in the sixteenthcentury, but their major focus is on literary products associated with the Volk. Unlike the three scholars discussed so far, however, Professor Sobel seems generally satisfied with what is going on in his field, pointing to good progress in critical editions, attention to minor writers, and important research on the reading public of the time. Like that of Professor Sobel, Donald Stone's aesthetic approach appears to be in step with what is going on in his field, French literature. Unlike Professor Sobel, however, he mainly surveys the literature on the major French writers of the century, and is not quite so disturbed by the absence of research on minor figures as Professors Beardsley and Schoeck. More importantly, he makes explicit the split between traditional and contemporary approaches we hav enoticed underlying the other essays, and gives examples of the alarming extent to which feelings run high (p. 53), particularly in Rabelais studies. Lawrence V. Ryan's concluding essay on Neo-Latin literature is perhaps the most enthusiastic of the six, defining the special linguistic problems of Neo-Latin and pointing to progress in the field, especially on interrelationships with vernacular literature. Thus Professor Ryan's essay, of necessity, is the only one illustrating the comparative approach, and paradoxically he recognizes the validity of modern critical methods in what would seem to be a very conservative field. To sum up, reading this book does pose an initial problem in that each essay is written from a different methodological point of view: When individual essays are written by different authors, and a single plan is not carefully adhered to, different sections can be quite uneven (p.