Mit Aussicht

via wikipedia.

In this post we will have a look at the East-German literature between 1950 and 1989. The gap between the nations is still felt today and I will present some authors, who published novels about life in the GDR in the recent years.

After the end of World War II Germany was divided into West- and East-Germany. The separation manifested itself in the building of the Berlin Wall, dividing the city into two parts. This Wall did not only mark a political separation, but also a cultural one. While West-Germany developed a post-modern literature, East-German literature first had to overcome the principles of socialist realism in order to express critical points of view. Censorship was ubiquitous and writers had to find creative ways to publish their books without changes to the original manuscript.

Shortly after the war authors were writing about their war experiences in both states. The horror of battles and the speechlessness in the face of the Konzentrationslager sparked a whole series of novels dealing with the imminent past. But soon the two literatures drifted apart. The "old generation" - those, who survived the war as adults, such as Bertholt Brecht or Anna Seghers - had to make room for a new, a younger generation.
 The aesthetics of socialst realism led to a "narrowing" of themes until Stalin's death in 1953. "Aufbauliteratur" became popular, depicting young people eager to devote their life to building the new socialist world. 20 years later, most of the young authors of the 1950s realised that reality in the GDR could not keep up with the promises that were made. One of these authors is Brigitte Reimann, who started her writing career with a novel Die Geschwister (The Siblings), in which she tells the story of a young woman, whose brother is leaving for the west and her anger at him. Reimann was one of those eager people, but became a disillusioned and depressed woman after the fights in Prag in 1968. Shortly before her death in 1973, she wrote Franziska Linkerhand, which sold out several times. Franziska is a young architect, a woman trying to find her place in a society that is, in the end, still misogynistic. Reimann shows the dark sides of socialist life in the GDR in this book and it's no wonder it's unabridged and unchanged version had been published after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Then, finally, in the late 1970s and 1980s GDR literature liberated itself step by step from the ideology of the Communist party. Some authors published their texts in the other German state and gained a reputation that crossed the border. For example, Christa Wolf is an author well known and highly acclaimed on both sides. Her lectures on poetics in Frankfurt in 1982 inserted new impulses into the feminist reading of Austria's author Ingeborg Bachmann, which were needed then. Side by side with the authors of the second generation (those, who started writing in the 1960s/1970s), a third generation's voice is heard - the avantgarde of the late 1980s. Contrary to common belief, East-Germany had a flourishing punk movement that divested itself from the governmental control and self-published poetry in small numbers. Naturally, they are not well-known and are only of scientific interest today.

After the states had been reunited, the long process of finding a common ground began and is still today in full swing. Prejudice exists on both sides. 20 years after the fall of the real Berlin Wall it is still there in the heads of people. Contemporary German literature has seen a number of novels dealing with life in the two old German states. Here I will shortly present only two of them, which I found to be very good.

Christa Wolf 1989

Christa Wolf - Was bleibt (What remains) 

Although written in 1979, Was bleibt had not been published until 1990. The novella tells about the life of a female author in East-Berlin over the course of one day. She is openly watched by the Stasi and has to fight a growing feeling of paranoia and self-doubt. Wolf is telling us about her own life here. After protesting against the eviction of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1979, the Stasi decided to make itself known. Wolf had been secretly surveiled by the minstry since 1969, but was now watched openly. When published in 1990, the novella was one cause of the so-called "Literaturstreit" in which the author's authenticity was called into question.

Uwe Tellkamp - Der Turm (The Tower)

This generational novel's setting is Dresden in the 1980s. As readers we follow the lifes of the Hoffmann family members. Father Richard is a successful doctor. When approached by the Stasi, he cannot say no: Richard denunciated his former friend to them already and has an affair with his secretary Josta, both of which makes him susceptible to blackmail. His son Christian also wants to study medicine. In order to be allowed to study he needs to be top of his school class. Moreover he must serve in the army for at least three years. In the end he is interned in the military prison.
The third charakter is Meno, the brother of Richard's wife Anne. Meno was not allowed to work as a biologist and thus now is an editor. He is torn between his sympathy with the authors, whose works he corrects, and the demands of the minstry of culture for censorship. When the protests against the systems reach their peak in 1989 the members of the family find themselves on both sides.

When I was in school in the late 1990s until 2004, literature from the former GDR rarely was a part of the curriculum. As I told you in my post yesterday, I had a very good teacher, who encouraged us to read Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Sky). To be honest, a huge amount of the GDR literature is obsolete today due to their socialist themes. For people like me, who were born in the 1980s, life in the GDR is something we cannot grasp, because we cannot remember it. The only novels that are interesting to me are those, which have timeless themes such as the emanzipation of women, coming-of-age-stories or the children's books I grew up with. The other problem is the censorship I mentioned, because when I find an old book, printed before 1990, I can never be sure to read, what the author actually wanted to write.

Have you read a novel by an author from the fomer GDR? Tell me in the comments.