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From Socialist Realism to a New Individualism: Some Trends in Recent East German Literature

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From Socialist Realism to a New Individualism: Some Trends in Recent East German Literature WILMA IGGERS (Buffalo, U.S.A.) From Socialist Realism to a New Individualism: Some Trends in Recent East German Literature I A comprehensive survey of recent literature in the DDR is not possible within the scope of this paper. I will however attempt to trace the transformation of literature, particularly narrative prose, from the obligatory socialist realism of only a decade ago to the more open, introspective, critical works of recent years. The literature of the DDR has become much more complex; it has in some cases dealt with themes and styles as individualistic as one can find anywhere. This article is necessarily very selective; authors of the early postwar years are discussed only insofar as they provide a background or perspective for later works. Johannes Bobrowski was a noncomformist in the fifties; yet I see no direct develop- ment from him to the present. Hermann Kant's Das Impressum (Neuwied: Luchter- hand, 1972), for example, is not discussed because it marks little development from its antecedent, Die Aula (Miinchen: Riitten & Loening, 1966). The factors which contribute most to literature in the DDR are the principles and tendencies formulated by Altkommunisten such as Anna Seghers, J. R. Becher, and Arnold Zweig, under the influence of Soviet cultural politics. In 1949, the government issued a set of guidelines for cultural development and for the improvement of the working and living conditions of the intelligentsia. Simultane- ously, it established national prizes in literature and the arts. At the same time, the German Academy of the Arts and the German Writers' Association were estab- lished. The most influential organization has been the Institute for Literature. The Socialist Unity Party daily, Neues Deutschland, and Sonntag, the cultural weekly, , have been the vehicles for party cultural directives between congresses. The most important resolution was the one adopted at the 1959 conference in Bitterfeld which came to be known as "der Bitterfelder Weg": It expected writers to work in factories and on construction sites in order to be able to write more realistically and meticulously about the jobs and lives of the workers. This rejection of intellectual exclusiveness achieved for the most part a middle- brow aesthetic level. Love themes were rare; instead, a "wertbetonte Unterhaltungs- literatur" developed which concerned itself with such conflicts as a technical catas- trophe to which people reacted correctly; dissatisfaction caused by bad function- aries who were replaced by good ones who set things right; and enemies from the West who wanted to harm the socialist society and were always defeated. In keep- ing with the dictates of the Party, the world of labor and technology, in which there was no room for psychological elements, and almost none for erotic ones, was idealized. After Russian models of old, war and peace were favorite themes. The positive hero was created; he was sometimes tempted by reactionary influences, but with the help of the Party he inevitably saw the light in the end. 70 As with many other aspects of life and art in East Germany, so the East German novel followed, particularly until the last few years, traditional patterns to a much greater extent than its counterpart in the West. The chief change in the generational novel was from showing a gradual decline, as in Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan (Hamburg: Classen, 1958), to depicting a rise, as typified in Arnold Zweig's Grischa novels (e.g., Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1928]). In the educational novel the shift was from the aesthetic-and-moral sphere to the social sphere, as in Die A benteuer des Werner Holt by Dieter Noll (Bremen: Schunemann, 1966). Overall, there has also been a shift in emphasis within the novel. While the writers of the traditional novel were primarily interested in a development of a person, a family, a community, etcetera, in the DDR counterpart the emphasis is on the conclusion, on an achievement in a new society with a new outlook. East German literature up to the present can be viewed as a sequence of three generations, consisting first of those who received their most decisive impressions, and for the most part committed themselves to communism, before the Second World War. Among them, Bert Brecht, Louis Furnberg, F. C. Weiskopf, Erich Wein- ert, Willi Bredel, Arnold Zweig, and J. R. Becher are now dead; only Anna Seghers is still alive. The second group reached maturity about the time of World War II, and began writing when Germany was divided into an eastern and a western part. Stephan Hermlin, Bodo Uhse, Johannes Bobrowski, Franz Fuhmann, Peter Huchel, and Erwin Strittmatter belong to this group. An additional distinction could be made between those who spent the war years in exile and those who fought in Hitler's army. Of the third generation, which was largely formed by the new reality of the DDR, the most interesting exponents are Heiner Mfller, Gunter Kunert, Volker Braun, Sarah Kirsch, Christa Wolf,' and Giinter de Bruyn. In addition, there is a number of especially individualistic writers who moved to East Germany from the West, as for example Peter Hacks, Stefan Heym, and Wolf Biermann. Although such an attempt to divide a literary development into chronological segments is likely to obscure generational overlaps and the development of indi- vidual writers and thus result in oversimplification, some points of comparison may be helpful. While the main themes of the earliest group of writers in the DDR were national socialism, war, the new social awareness in the workers' movement, and the writers' own memoirs, the newer literature is more concerned with conflicts within the new society and efforts to solve them than with the hostile nonsocialist societies of the past and present. Reflecting a greater permissiveness in govern- mental directives, the newer literature is more individualistic: it not only varies more in language and style, but also in methods of dealing with problems of individual identity and of relationships between individuals. Literature is no longer monopolized by works illustrating how social problems can be resolved. Even Anna Seghers, whose novels for many years were filled with masses of people at work who only differed from each other by virtue of being .
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