Im Papierschiff bis nach Irland (German Edition)

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Germany East In literature. Erwin Geschonneck as Heinrich page 61 Witting. He is the co-editor of DEFA: In he edited a special number of German Life and Letters on German poetry. He is currently writing a monograph on surrealism in the GDR. She has published widely on Wende literature and post-wende Berlin, including Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in viii.

She is the author of Wolfgang Hilbig. A Biography and Papierboot. She is currently setting up a new research centre on Gerhard and Christa Wolf at the Humboldt University, Berlin and investigating authors personal libraries as the subject of research. Zu einer paradoxalen Form der Mythenrezeption and Literarisches Chemnitz. Autoren Werke Tendenzen She has published widely on GDR literature, especially poetry and the literature of the Berlin Republic, and has translated work by a number of German writers into English, including Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: An edited volume, From Stasiland to Ostalgie: She has published widely in a number of areas of German Studies, especially on the GDR, unification and post-communist writing.

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She is the author of three monographs: She is currently working on a project on the Stasi files: Secret Lives and the Lives of Secrets: Between Surveillance and Life Writing. Hilda s College, Oxford. She has an established reputation for her work on the literature of the GDR and eastern German literature after , including groundbreaking articles on Christa Wolf. An Odyssey for Our Time: She has an active interest in theories of gender and sexuality. His research interests are East German literature before and after unification, autobiographical prose and competing forms of literary remembrance.

His main publications include The East German Novel: Innovation and Authenticity and Shifting Perspectives: He has recently co-edited Dislocation and Reorientation: Her major publications include the monograph Humor, Satire, and Identity: Ralf Kukula from Balance Film, Berlin, allowed Oktoberfilm to have its first screening outside Germany at the same event and also allowed one of the images from the film to be used as the cover of this book. The book itself has had a long gestation and I am indebted to the contributors, whose enthusiasm for the volume and forbearance have ensured it comes into being.

I am also grateful to the anonymous readers who offered such thoughtful support to the proposal, to Neil Leeder for the website and help with IT, to Nick Hodgin and Emily Spiers for help with translation, to Uwe Warnke for help in sourcing images and to Linda Bree along with Maartje Scheltens and Anna Bond from Cambridge University Press for their patience and careful advice along the way. We are grateful to the following for permission to cite poems: Berlin divided into two different currency zones.

Brecht founds the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin October: Class War urged against churches, bourgeoisie and intelligentsia June: Uprising of industrial workers in Berlin against raised work norms. Soviet revelations about Stalin. Hungarian Uprising fails and leads to renewed cultural repression. Initiation of industrial campaign of Bitterfelder Weg August: Building of Berlin Wall. He gives his No Taboos speech, initiating greater freedom for artists and writers Cultural liberalization heralded by reception of Ulrich Plenzdorf s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

The New Sufferings of Young W. Reprisals for many who support him and gradual exodus of many writers and artists. Consolidation of underground journals in many GDR cities Lex Heym and expulsions from the Writers Union; punitive measures taken against dissenting intellectuals Cultural intelligentsia from East and West begin a series of peace conferences Berliner Tagung zur Friedensforschung After Soviet Union has stationed SS20 missiles in the GDR occasioning major demonstrations in , peace campaigner Roland Jahn is expelled Gorbachev s accession to power in the Soviet Union.

His concepts of glasnost and perestroika promise to bring new political and cultural liberalizations Writers, Congress debates censorship. A rock concert held in front of the Reichstag building in West Berlin leads to fighting with police August onwards: Regular demonstrations outside Nikolai Church in Leipzig. GDR celebrates 40 years. Over 1 million demonstrate in East Berlin s main square, Alexanderplatz, for freedom of the press and free elections.

Opening of the Berlin Wall. Dissolution of the Stasi. First free elections to the Volkskammer with the CDU, the largest party. Christa Wolf publishes Was bleibt. Beginning of the Literaturstreit literary debate. Treuhand Agency set up to dispose of East German industry. Quotations are generally given in English unless a special linguistic point is to be made. Such translations are by the individual contributors unless otherwise attributed. It will be nothing more than a footnote in world history. As Timothy Garton Ash commented, Yet, if the GDR has indeed become a footnote, it is without doubt the longest, best documented and most interesting footnote in world history.

No dictatorship in history not even the Third Reich has been so rapidly, comprehensively and scrupulously documented and analyzed. Indeed the anniversary was the spur for a widespread stocktaking both in Germany and the wider world, revealing that an absolute majority of former East Germans felt that life had been better under communism.

But that was not the only story. Garton Ash s comparison with the Third Reich is instructive. At one extreme was the former GDR remembered as Stasiland, that is, Anna Funder s memorable label for a country remembered through its repressive security network. This dichotomy goes to the heart of the debate, for the two visions of the GDR do not exist in isolation, 1.

David Bathrick was one of the first to identify the profound, if conflicted, critical investment in the project of GDR socialism that remained even after the state itself had disappeared. Thus, despite their basically critical view of repressive Stalinist state socialism, many critical leftists and here we must speak of East and West German intellectuals never overcame a strangely libidinal attachment to the GDR as a potential purveyor of a post-capitalist alternative, as a preservation reserve for the idea of a noncapitalist utopia.

They were at once sponsored by the utopian dream that inspired it, but also marked by the crippling reality of what it became. What is more, it is undoubtedly the case that for many years critical judgements in East and West were skewed more to political or moral considerations than aesthetic ones. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the so called German literary debate of see the chapter by Carol Anne Costabile-Heming in this volume , it revealed the extent to which GDR literature had been stymied by its need to act as an alternative to the public political realm.

But it is also important to remember that this is not simply an academic debate. It is linked with the way a whole nation remembers and comes to terms with its own past. It is not easy to weigh the value of the culture of an unjust state Unrechtsstaat that was indissolubly indexed to a future that did not arrive.

Equally, the question as to whether the German Democratic Republic was an unjust state is a question for historians. For the individual there was the everyday [den Alltag], that little eternity. There has also been a. But the fixation on a plethora of memory icons simultaneously raises two further aspects that go to the heart of how we remember: These in turn feed into the broader memory contests of recent years. Stephen Brockmann, among others, has pointed out how distant to a contemporary reader the GDR and its culture can seem, that is, as if one is looking at it through the wrong end of telescope.

The two visions of the GDR suggest an ambivalent even spectral apprehension. It was, after all, a state founded on the spectre of communism; in its ideal form it existed as a spectre informing an inadequate reality; and it now haunts contemporary capitalism as unrealized aspiration, trauma or travesty. Brockmann puts it thus: The existence of the GDR is of no doubt to the many victims of its repressive reality.

But it is a provocative formulation. In the same piece of , Garton Ash also warned that East Germany might disappear: The history of East Germany increasingly looks like one of those neglected country roads that used once to be a main highway, but is now a slightly. More particularly, it seems like an extended episode in the epoch that the historian Tony Judt has described with the single word Postwar.

Tackling the great paradox of late capitalism s cultural amnesia, on the one hand, and the ubiquitous memory boom, on the other, Andreas Huyssen, both in Twilight Memories and Present Pasts , highlights the vital role of memory: Memory and musealization are together are called upon to provide a bulwark against obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the speed of change and the ever shrinking horizons of time and space. The culture of the other Germany, that is, the German Democratic Republic or East Germany, has long held a peculiar fascination for those interested in Germany today.

It is not simply that many authors considered to be of world stature emerged from, or are identified with, it: Certainly a number of works that would stand in any pantheon of twentieth-century literature owe their genesis to the particular struggle between Geist and Macht spirit and power that characterized cultural production there.

However, the GDR also fascinates because it offers a case study in the way literature, film and culture responded to the challenges of an authoritarian regime, so often staking out the territories beyond what was permitted and, to borrow a phrase from Wolf, stretching the boundaries of the sayable. This does not mean, though, that all GDR literature is only of historical value, trading on what might be called its dissident bonus. Nor does it necessarily mean that all of it stands up to scrutiny today, freed from its particular context. Rather, under the pressure of censorship, writers and film-makers developed innovative strategies that negotiated between complicity, dissidence and autonomy.

Works of prose, poetry, drama and film of extraordinary intensity and invention were created that bear repeated scrutiny for what they can tell us about the processes of literature itself. It is significant, for example, that an alternative vision for a future German culture emerged out of the ruins of the Second World War; that some of the finest women s writing of the s owed its existence to the cultural climate of East Germany; that socialist writers were in the vanguard of the subjective turn and the development of a sophisticated and selfreflexive body of autobiography; that, in that most polluted of European.

The contemporary literature and film, which engages with the existence of that state, and the disappointed hopes which sustained it, plays a central role in the extraordinarily rich output of the Berlin Republic today. And it is striking that many of the most important German cultural exports of recent years have been films documenting the socialist state or the processes of coming to terms with its loss: Wolfgang Becker s Goodbye, Lenin! Astonishingly no single volume has been published in English that attempts to come to terms with the GDR as a cultural phenomenon.

Today, some twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that absence is even more striking. The aim of this volume is, then, both to grasp the history and context of GDR literature and film as a particular historical entity but also to trace its repercussions in the period since its demise. The perspective gained from a contemporary vantage point allows research to take account of the important revisions and reflections on that legacy since , but also to explore phenomena like Ostalgie, the retro-chic rebranding that has allowed GDR design items to become icons of high fashion; the emergence of Berlin as the cultural capital of Europe; and the fascination with the German Stasi, or secret police.

It allows an insight into the various approaches which researchers have taken to this most contested legacy, from a generational schema to postcolonial models or the increasingly important paradigms of memory: But in addition the volume sets out to present a chronological overview of the development of the GDR: Within that broader arc, individual chapters home in on key debates the so-called formalism debate of the early years or the post-wende German literary debate or historical flashpoints the Aufbau years, the liberalizations of the Honecker era, the expatriation of Wolf.

Finally, key contextual information is offered in chapters on autobiography, gender, satire, cultural opposition, the underground and the Stasi, together, attempting to carve out what is the distinctive contribution of GDR authors and film-makers to the larger sense of German literature today. The volume is rounded off by a view from twenty-five years after the fall of the socialist state that examines the afterlife of the GDR in the Berlin Republic. Cumulatively, it is hoped, that these chapters allow a new reading of the cultural legacy of the GDR, but also of the way it is has been read in the past and the way it is remembered today.

Ralf Kukula Balance film GmbH, Stories from behind the Berlin Wall London: Poetry from the Bad Side. Suhrkamp, , p. Tales from a Lost Country, trans. Penguin, , p. Routledge, and Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, inpublic Culture, Stanford University Press, The three-letter abbreviation was almost taboo.

This fact alone gives an indication of the strict demands governing this remarkable state that existed for some forty years. The GDR authorities sought to persuade people that the future belonged to their state alone, the only state on German soil which was based on true democratic and republican foundations, and that as such it would be a model for all Germans; West Germany, moreover, or the Bundesrepublik Deutschland Federal Republic, FRG as it was derogatively called, would follow suit sooner or later.

History turned out otherwise; the GDR submitted, peacefully and without coercion, to the Grundgesetz Basic Law , which had been the Federal Republic s constitution since something that was unprecedented in world history. More than twenty-five years have passed since that day. The GDR and the everyday life lived there is now as far in the past as the National Socialist regime was in or the end of the First World War was at the beginning of the Second World War in However, the distance to the epochal year of feels decidedly shorter: In fact, all the events that we have come to call the Wende happened more than twenty-five years ago and have already become history.

Despite any feeling of closeness, 1 the GDR is now clearly recognizable as the crystallization of political and sociocultural developments, which from start to finish were governed by the global constellation that emerged out of the Cold War and competition between political systems. Translated by Nick Hodgin 8. It is much more readily apparent today. One way of approaching this question, and it is the one I shall adopt here, is to employ Mikhail Bakhtin s key literary theoretical concept, the chronotope, as a tool for broader cultural analysis. For Bakhtin the notion of the chronotope, which he set out as early as , is a significant category in the analysis of narrative prose.

Broadly speaking, it is the epoch-specific time-space structure of human world perception. Second, I wish to apply this expanded concept of the chronotope to the specific political and social structure which lasted more than forty years and which we call the GDR, and to consider this closely intertwined realm of time-space and its specific organizational structures as a basic premise of the GDR and also of GDR literature.

This way of approaching the GDR chimes with the insights suggested by what has become known as the spatial turn in culture more generally. The GDR was a coherent territory for over forty years, though it had an island at its centre West Berlin which naturally functioned as a constant disruption within the chronotope GDR. The GDR was ethnically homogenous, being a Germanic-North German settlement area that was temporarily and partially settled by Slavs a tiny Slavic minority continued to live there. This marks a regional, though not ethnic, distinction that could be acrimonious, though it was never critical during the GDR.

The GDR was religiously homogenous. In , 90 per cent of the population was Lutheran Protestant. Catholics unquestionably constituted the diaspora. The consequence was what Max Weber called a. Despite some changes in policy and some attempts at reform and restoration, the GDR had the same political administration and the same socialist state-organized economy for over forty years. The structure was hierarchical and subject to manifold control.

Autonomous action in any area of society s value system that is the hallmark of a genuinely modern society, according to Weber was the exception rather than the rule in the GDR. Moreover, things were identical in the cultural sphere. To borrow terms from sociology, the GDR was a land of blocked, braked, partial or halfway modernization The GDR s sociocultural and political traditions were not homogenous, but they nevertheless made a deep impression on the state. These regions including Berlin , which had once been red, became brown during the Nazi period and then red again after Last but not least, the GDR literary system was based on a statesponsored notion of all-encompassing homogeneity.

This was already evident in the legal and economic structures. There were no private publishers, and book publishing, both wholesale and retail, was controlled by the state. In particular, the SED s cultural and political education programmes, and the closely allied doctrine of socialist realism, were intended to ensure homogeneity in literature, which was certainly the case for the first twenty years in the GDR.

So, to summarize the GDR s characteristics: Of course these fundamental characteristics are only sketched out here. Nevertheless they all point towards a single conclusion: A further factor was the faltering increase in population size and its eventual shrinkage. The population shrank decisively until as a result of Republikflucht flight from the Republic , which was largely the flight of the educated elite a fact that in turn resulted in the further homogenization.

From to the GDR population lived within sealed borders. In addition to the basic tendency towards homogenization of ethnicity, religion, political and economic structures and political traditions, there was a gradual assimilation of the diverse social groups which even transcended generations.

Furthermore, there were few foreigners in the GDR. Those that did live there Red Army soldiers, for example or who were invited there students, political asylum seekers from South Africa or Chile and later guest workers mainly from Vietnam and Mozambique were generally kept apart from the East German population. Miscegenation was not encouraged and was for the most part uncommon. One conclusion we can draw from these facts is that just as the term GDR is a useful analytical category in historiographical terms, so is the term GDR literature in literary historiography.

It is most easily comparable with terms that define a particular period, such as the literature of the Weimar Republic, National Socialist literature and the literature of the Federal Republic. These connect a body of literature with a specific historically or politically defined period of time in this case the forty years of the GDR, from to , but simultaneously also refer to a specific geographical territory of the nation-state, as is the case with similar concepts such as Austrian or Swiss literature.

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All of these terms have a chronotopic aspect, in the sense that I have already outlined, since they draw together historical periods and their political systems with territories and their traditions. Such concepts do not, however, have any bearing on the aesthetic styles associated with such periods, and the same is true of such accounts of GDR literature.

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The recurring controversies about the concept of a body of GDR literature which are as old as the GDR itself also demonstrate that, beyond the objective approach of the chronotope, any definition is determined by the particular standpoint of the observer and represents a theoretical construct. Since the beginning of the s there has been a conflict between the concept of two or more German literatures, which includes GDR literature and the notion of a single, unified German literature that transcends states and the boundaries of political systems.

Such polarization was, and continues to be, rooted in two different understandings of the relationship between art and society: It was political interests that initially determined which position was taken. In the s, both conservative West German literary criticism and official GDR cultural policy claimed that there was only one German literature.

The former automatically assumed socialist literature to be inferior and excluded it from their very traditional canon. Despite the existence of two states, SED. After the Berlin Wall was built in , however, official GDR literary criticism routinely spoke of the development of an independent socialist national literature, the founding principle of which was the revolutionary shift from capitalism to socialism and the establishment of a socialist society. Its style of writing was realistic, a method of representation that facilitated and demanded revolutionary change.

Other aesthetic approaches were not countenanced. The GDR s socialist realist literature was aggressively positioned against the literature of the Federal Republic, which was seen as riven by class contradictions. Above all, he emphasized the enormous divergences in authors biographies: The inner unity of this [GDR] literature, of today s Writers Union and its objectives, would be impossible to imagine without the homogeneity of the political and literary biographies of those concerned.

But the period from the s onwards also saw a noticeable and increasing thematic and aesthetic rapprochement between West and East German literature, marked by a Zivilisationskritik, or critique of existing. This transcended ideological systems, and made of the GDR an accessible other 12 for those in the west. What is more it undoubtedly went some way to relativizing any actual cultural discontinuity. All sense of clarity in the literary landscape was lost after Wolf Biermann s expatriation in , following which more than a hundred writers, including some of the most prominent, left the GDR.

By , Fritz J. Raddatz was already talking of the second German exile literature, 13 and later, in , even more confusingly, of a third German literature a term he used to describe the supposedly homogenous group of migrant authors whose work was realistic and socially critical. In, for example, Ursula Heukenkamp argued for the distinctive character of GDR literature, maintaining: The particular relationship with the state, entered into by the majority of authors with a mixture of reluctance, anguish and solidarity is indeed one of the singular features which developed in the GDR [ If it did, the same would also be true, for example, of the three literatures between and There is, then, an irrefutable contradiction: On the other hand, this homogenous chronotope of GDR socialism produced or provoked clearly defined political and aesthetic positions, which over time drifted apart and were located somewhere between the opposing poles of affirmation and subversion, although their reference point that is, the GDR always remained apparent.

The antifascist foundation myth and the workerly society A number of important structural differences between the Federal Republic and the GDR have been established, but there are several more that need to be considered. It is widely accepted that unlike any reasonably serious historiography the narratives that make up a foundation myth do not deal with the events themselves, but rather with their significance for the course of history.

These became the literal foundation myths in October These myths were, quite simply, antifascism and socialism. Indeed, this founding myth constituted itself only by insisting that the people had never really been Nazis at all. The mythical distortion of history even went so far as to suggest that any remaining Nazis were in the Federal Republic, while the whole GDR population were now Sieger der Geschichte history s victors. Stephan Hermlin suggested in that this formula immediately spread like ripples in still water, into which one has thrown a stone, with each GDR citizen now personally able to feel him or herself to be the victor of history.

Flattering and exonerating the people in this way made it easier to govern. In the long term it is more difficult to govern a. This formula also endowed the GDR with a certain authority. On the other hand, it also effected a comprehensive cleansing of the GDR population s collective memory, unburdening many people of feelings of guilt and was for that reason a myth that was willingly adopted. Closely entwined with this first foundation myth is the second myth, namely socialism. The SED characterized the capitalist west as the refuge of exploitation, repression, imperialist war-mongering and the new fascists.

The Aufbau or building of a socialist and later communist society, following an interim stage of antifascist democratic new order, wouldbe the only acceptable historical and ideological answer to the recently defeated National Socialism and subsequent capitalism. The watchwords Antifascism, Democratic New Order and Socialist Aufbau became intrinsic to the GDR s essential, quasi-mythical interpretive framework and pattern of ideological self-justification.

Like antifascism, socialism was accepted without reservation by young people because it presented the absolute opposite of fascism and implied a new beginning. National Socialism, which communists had a tendency to personalize by calling it Hitler-Fascism, was the ultimate evil. Antifascism, and socialism along with it, thus came to represent the ultimate in humanity and goodness per se and, what is more, introduced a new doctrine of salvation, following the collapse of the National Socialist agenda. However, at the same time, the twofold founding myth of the GDR, with its associated moral weight, proved to be a loyalty trap.

Notwithstanding any criticisms or grievances one might wish to level against those in power, it was almost unimaginable to distance oneself from the union of antifascists i. On 28 November , only weeks after the opening of the Wall, activists called for the GDR to continue and to develop a socialist alternative to the Federal Republic because, as they suggested, we. When, not long after, high-ranking SED functionaries like Egon Krenz and Hans Modrow added their voices to the appeal, the loyalty trap snapped shut for one last painful time.

This memory differed significantly from that in the west with regard to central aspects of the Nazi dictatorship. While the concentration camp at Auschwitz as a main site of the Holocaust had since the mids become for the west a historical sign Geschichtszeichen in the Kantian sense, a signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticon, 25 the SED successfully set about instilling the concentration camp at Buchenwald in the minds of numerous generations of GDR citizens as the symbolic site of a supposedly successful proletarian communist resistance.

It was at Buchenwald that many German and foreign communists in particular were interred. The Holocaust was not denied in the GDR but it was marginalized by a wholly different view of fascism. It had only a peripheral role in public discourse and in cultural memory as was evident, not least, in literature. The development and propagandistic nurturing of what Wolfgang Engler has rightly termed the workerly society 27 is a further characteristic of the GDR chronotope.

The GDR was from start to finish a society with a pronounced focus on work. For all the political slogans to the contrary, the working class was never the ruling class; but work was nevertheless always highly valued and, what is more, across all GDR milieus. In a survey in only Butit was not ideology alone. Over the forty years of the GDR s existencea pattern emerged in which the myth of the working class [converged] with the dominant proletarian and petty bourgeois materialist culture of everyday life to become what Engler calls the workerly society.

This resulted in a corresponding habitus in Pierre Bourdieu s terms, those pre-existing social pressures and norms that we have unconsciously internalized and translated almost automatically into forms of behaviour and action , which became deeply ingrained in all sectors and classes in the GDR and was characteristic for the forty years of its existence. Between and , the number of those in work in East Germany fell by 48 per cent that is, almost half of the workforce lost their jobs today the number is still high.

They experienced the devaluation of their professional skills, and to cite Pierre Bourdieu, their cultural and symbolic capital, but they also lost their social capital since the East Germans social networks were far more connected with the workplace than they were in the old Federal Republic.

This continuity existed not only at the level of the state but constituted a particular way of life and everyday environment for GDR citizens and, last but not least, a deeply rooted memory culture. The mutual interpenetration of spatial and temporal determinants relating to everyday life and culture in the GDR is thus both enduring and far-reaching. And it is this collection of homogenizing characteristics that constitutes the striking distinctiveness of GDR literature as a body over and above the many underlying differences.

All memory, as Maurice Halbwachs has noted, belongs to a place, and together the various places amount to something like a topography of memory. This is why Halbwachs says that the place a group occupies is not like a blackboard, where one may write and erase figures at will. Therefore every phase of the group can be translated into spatial terms, and its residence is but the juncture of all these terms. Certainly in the first twenty years, the world of work, especially the industrial sectors, are frequent and typical settings and sites of memory in GDR literature: With regard to the first category the world of work there are examples that could not be found anywhere but in the GDR: Certain historical sites were also prominent settings: The internal chronotopes of GDR literature undoubtedly became more differentiated in the final two decades of the state s existence.

The GDR as a site of repression, for example, in the NVA GDR army , spying and censorship were increasingly thematized in the period leading up to the state s collapse. Different though they are, and along with many others, they can be identified with the West German chronotope. Changes in the timeline: The SED s cultural political education programme and the dogma of socialist realism provided the guidelines. The SED imagined its writers as educators of the people and sought to remove them once and for all from the garret, the much maligned ivory tower.

Provided authors accepted and performed this role, they could enjoy intensive, wide-ranging support in the form of financial grants, generous royalties, invitations to read from their. If they did not keep to the prescribed ideological guidelines, an elaborate series of censorship strategies were quickly implemented, which could result in legal sanctions and even expatriation.

The Quest for Christa T. It was not until the Tenth Writers Congress in that the author Christoph Hein was brave enough to criticize censorship as out-of-date, useless, paradoxical, inhumane, hostile to the people, illegal and culpable. This idealistic slogan was representative of his aim to achieve the complete democratization and socialization of literature at all levels authorship, material production, distribution and public reception of literature. Time and again, various forms of censorship and other measures to keep writers in check choked the exalted intentions of this projected GDR literary society.

At the same time, the constant threat of state intervention in writers lives resulted in another distinctive characteristic of GDR literature: The claim that GDR literature during the forty years of its existence can be considered a distinctive body of work does not of course preclude major. Indeed, the internal historiography of this long period is unquestionably necessary and has hitherto been only carried out at a rather rudimentary level. The starting point is critical aspects of Realpolitik in East Germany and the Eastern bloc, more generally, and their implications for the cultural sector, in particular.

Caesuras such as these do not automatically apply to literary production in any direct way, however. Equally important are those larger and more diffuse social and cultural shifts e. The importance of these and other shifts can be seen quite clearly in the succession of literary generations that shaped the cultural landscape of the GDR, whether they promoted a conservative or progressive agenda. In what follows the systemic approach to GDR literature adopted up until now is therefore supplemented by a differentiated historical approach, based on the different experiences and changes in view of four generations of authors.

This is based on two hypotheses: The first hypothesis is that the four different generations of authors are each shaped by what the sociologist Karl Mannheim, in his seminal essay The Problem of Generations of , termed a natural view of the world. It is, according to Mannheim, early impressions and the experiences of youth that are critical in shaping individuals to the extent that they also pre-form all subsequent experiences and how they are processed even if in the form of negation. For Mannheim, it is of considerable importance for the formation and relevance of every single experience, whether it is undergone by an individual as a decisive childhood experience, or later in life, superimposed upon other basic and early impressions.

Early impressions tend to coalesce into a natural view of the world. As a result all later experiences then tend to receive their meaning from the original set, whether they appear as that set s verification and fulfilment or as its negation and antithesis. Experiences are not accumulated in the course of a lifetime through a process of summation or agglomeration, but are dialectically articulated in the way described.

Second, writers are usually the ones who react like seismographs to changes in their community. In the first twenty years after , the. As a result, the literature produced after increasingly set itself up in opposition to the hegemonic political discourse and simultaneously favoured a programme of aesthetic modernization of what had been an overwhelmingly aesthetically conservative literature. Let us now consider the individual stages of GDR literature in the context of different generations. The basic charter for GDR literature, even before the state s foundation, was its antifascist consensus.

The members of this generation born in the s now replaced a belief based on a total worldview with a new totalizing belief in Marxism. Their voluntary commitment to really existing socialism, which increasingly became a shackle, lasted until the end of the GDR and in some cases beyond. Certainly, it is the case that the majority of writers in the s, and even into the early s, not only tolerated but approved of the Party s aesthetic guidance, the dominance of socialist production as a literary theme and the political use of their literary work especially for increasing productivity.

The factory novels and Brigade brigade plays, antiwar books and the poetry of Aufbau generally affirmed the political master discourse, and contributed to the prevailing monosemic discourse. There are exceptions which prove the rule, however: According to this directive, authors were, on the one hand, expected to go into factories and to report on the brigades daily lives, which Wolf did, for example, in Der geteilte Himmel Divided Heaven, , and, on the other hand, manual workers were expected to take up the pen.

The second Bitterfeld Conference in turned out to be a poorly disguised burial of this idealistic concept, which was always bound to fail. Ironically, the early s benefited from the building of the Wall and the subsequent incarceration of the people within the GDR state, and were shaped by the optimistic literature of arrival or Ankunftsliteratur which featured socialist versions of the bourgeois Bildungs- or Entwicklungsroman the novel of education or selfdevelopment. From today s perspective the radical shift that took place in GDR literature in the second half of the s looks to be at odds with the political changes between and , especially the Eighth Party Conference that resulted in the transition from Ulbricht to Honecker and some liberalization of cultural policy.

The classical heritage the literature of Goethe and Schiller as well as bourgeois realism, from Gottfried Keller to Thomas Mann , together with the associated traditional realist writing style, was no longer such a dominant role model. Writers made use of unconventional, eccentric or dislocated narrative perspectives, which reached the standards set by modernism decades earlier self-reflexivity, discontinuity and lack of plot. Narrative genres such as the fantastical narrative, or use of grotesque or dystopian tropes, which until the mids would have been considered examples of a decadent heritage, were now evident in works such as Ulrich Plenzdorf s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.

At the same time, a new everyday realism developed, which established a substitute public sphere and broke social and political taboos such as the largely suppressed legacy of the Third Reich and the experience of the Holocaust: For Christa Wolf, the mega machine of destructive irrationality that is our world today had its origins in the circumstances surrounding the figure of Cassandra and gave rise to a masculine, bellicose and purpose-orientated form of civilization which still exists today. New theatre also rejected the classical legacy, with its fable based on a rational idea, in favour of a fragmentation of events that went far beyond Brecht s concept of epic theatre.

Perhaps it was the young poets of the late s and s, especially the so-called Volker Braun generation, who were most aware of literature s potential as subversive counter-discourse, in which they could practise diverse ways of speaking heteroglossia, dialogism and intertextuality and thus undermine the monosemy-affirming language environment. Conviction gave way to something that came close to despair and which increasingly led to a sense of hopelessness. Writers continued to identify with their role as active educators and social pedagogues, sometimes even beyond The other thing that persisted was the remarkable fact that the dissent and opposition of the authors mentioned so far found expression almost exclusively from a position of Marxism or socialism.

David Bathrick has explored why critical dissent in the political and literary field of the GDR unlike in the other Eastern bloc countries, especially Poland and the Soviet Union was a genuinely Marxist one. After twelve years of Nazi rule, and the experience of Holocaust, critics of the system in the GDR could neither draw on an uncompromised national heritage nor were the religious traditions of the country suitable for establishing a counter position, as in Poland, for example.

On the other hand, Marx s work, especially his early work, like the Paris Manuscripts, offered philosophical maxims from which a true socialism, socialism with a human face, could be construed. In Bathrick s words, Like Luther, their [the authors ] original intent was very much a move toward reformation and revision and not a total abandonment of doctrinal adherence or even a break with the institutional church.

And again like Luther, the political consequences of such heresy led them far afield of their imagined political goals. In this sense the protestant habitus or self-styling of authors within the Marxist fold e. The Wende of presented a number of such reform socialist authors with a peculiar paradox. With the collapse of the GDR they lost their symbolic capital and privileged position as mouthpieces for the dissemination of true socialism and a kind. When they fell from their pedestals and were heaped with public scorn and mockery during the German literary debate of , they definitively lost the representative status they had clung on to for so long.

One should not, however, forget that there was a quite different category of real martyrs created in the GDR: Few fates are more telling with regard to the effects of the socialist illusion on the life and work of GDR authors than that of Christa Wolf. In the early post-war years this habitus became synonymous with the teleology of Marxism. But gradually, with increasing disillusionment over the decades, not only did this become questionable as an ideological credo but the deeply rooted habitus itself also crumbled at least in part. The author remains tied to a specific discourse genetically linked with Marxism but not really actually Marxist and to central concepts like alienation or utopia, as demonstrated by the final entries in her diary publication Ein Tag im Jahr One Day a Year of Although rare in the years leading up to her death in , all the authors media pronouncements and appearances, or to put it another way, her acts of self-stylization, bear the characteristic traces of this disposition, which developed over decades.

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In the s, a fourth generation of writers who had been born in the s and s began to write and finally abandoned this demanding role. The lasting impact of these authors Wolfgang Hilbig counts as an important forerunner is that they broke free from the self-imposed fealty to the GDR system, something that older writers were never quite able to do. Of course, the scene was infiltrated by informers working for the Ministry of State Security or Stasi Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski , which undermined their credibility considerably.

From chronotope to third space. East Germany and its literature after The Wende of seemed, on the face of it at least, to spell the end of GDR literature. The GDR s model of a Literaturgesellschaft collapsed very quickly and almost completely, and was replaced by Western institutions and structures with the literary market at their centre. Within a very short time in the s other spaces appeared instead of the generally closed time-space that had characterized the GDR.

These new spaces require some brief explanation. The 9th of November marked the beginning of the end of the GDR s spatial and temporal borders; by October , when the two German states were unified, these borders had ceased to exist entirely. The new West-plus-East Germany that came into being the title of Christian Kracht s novel Faserland is appropriate here 50 resembles a virtual third space in the sense described by Edward W.

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