“GDR Literature Isn’t Dead”

Enlarge image

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

With the fall of the wall in 1989, a specific East German literary tradition, partly controlled by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), also collapsed. How should GDR literature be evaluated today? An interview with the East German literature expert, Holger Helbig.

When one thinks of GDR literature, one thinks of books that were published in East Germany, but also of those that were written there yet weren’t allowed to be published, that is, of both books that were loyal to the state and those that criticized the regime. Was there such a thing as a “literature of the GDR” at all?

Yes. There was an understanding of literature that differed fundamentally from that of West Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Literature in the GDR was a kind of substitute public realm: it was always read with a view to the concrete, everyday reality. The reader had the feeling that he was reading things which were intentionally concealed in the news. Correspondingly, the state kept a closer eye on what was going on in literature and responded with censure and expulsion – or with literary prizes.

Critical writing also worked as a vent of course. When Heiner Müller once again said something critical about the GDR, all young intellectuals felt themselves understood for two weeks and didn’t give a thought to resistance. This was deliberately used by the state.

Enlarge image

Twenty-one authors, including Volker Braun, Hermann Kant, and Stephan Hermlin, took part in a reading under the Motto “Authors for Peace” in East Berlin in 1982.

(© picture-alliance/ dpa)

Could you give an example?

In 1975, Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte (i.e., Uncompleted Story) was published in the GDR. The novel tells of a young couple separated by the machinations of the secret police because the boy has applied for an emigration permit. The publication was clearly a political decision – with the catch that it appeared in the literary journal Sinn und Form, which in spite of its considerable reputation had only a small circulation. Thus the SED regime could invoke the publication as an argument for the existence of freedom of speech in the country, without risking mass dissemination. By the way, in 1988 the Unvollendete Geschichte was finally published in book form – a sign of the easing up of GDR cultural politics.

Has GDR literature that was loyal to the party and the state been rightly forgotten?

Rightly forgotten is certainly the second-rate line-toeing literature. But people are still undoubtedly aware of the aesthetically more ambitious authors. Recently, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recommended the works of Peter Hacks, a declared Walter Ulbricht fan, for whom West Germany, in spite of all his criticism of ‘real socialism,’ was never an alternative to the GDR. And then there are those line-toeing authors who are still writing. They sell their books today exclusively in the eastern states.

So the less critical GDR literature has survived the GDR in the East?

Yes, Hermann Kant is an impressive example of this. But certainly many other authors from back then have another significance in the East and are perceived differently there from in West Germany.

Has GDR literature influenced literature after the reunification in 1989?

Enlarge image

Author Uwe Tellkamp won the German Book Prize, a top annual award for German-language novels, for his novel "The Tower" last year.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

It has, if only because many Eastern authors, who are today perceived as representative of Germany as a whole, developed their favorite themes and received their literary stamp in the GDR. I’m thinking, for example, of the poetological self-image of such successful authors as Angela Krauß or Ingo Schulze. Even Uwe Tellkamp’s Wende novel, Der Turm (i.e., The Tower, 2008), treats the intellectual traditions of the GDR. And then there are still those authors who were born in the GDR such as Kerstin Hensel and Ines Geipel who today teach German dramatic verse at the Ernst Busch College of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, using the examples they grew up with. In this way, too, GDR literature continues to influence the next generation of writers.

In the 1990s there was an (unsuccessful) attempt to bring out a book series of GDR classics. If you had the choice, which books would absolutely be among the “classics”?

I think it would be good if Franz Fühmann’s early volume Kameraden (i.e., Comrades, 1955) were to survive: it is an attempt to treat the experience of war in literary form and to pose the question of guilt. I’d wish the same for Stefan Hermlin’s early collection of stories Die erste Reihe (i.e., The First Rank, 1951), containing literary portraits of resistance fighters. These books are aesthetically good, with a didactic, perhaps even an ideological, goal, but one that doesn’t get in the way of the text’s validity. But I have little hope that they’ll soon belong to the canon.

I’m more optimistic about Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leidendes jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young W.), even if it’s quite baffling what West German readers could have found so interesting about it. Then the children’s books of Peter Hacks, one or another of the novels of Christoph Hein and Christa Wolf, a few pieces by Heiner Müller, and of course the poetry: Johannes Bobrowski, Wulf Kirsten, Thomas Brasch, Sarah Kirsch, Elke Erb and Richard Leising. There I could also think of a great many other names.

Do you have a favorite book that was written – and published – in the GDR?

That would be a slender volume of poems by Inge Müller, Heiner Müller’s first wife: Wenn ich schon sterben muss (i.e., If I must die, 1985), first published twenty years after her death. They are magnificent, very moving poems.

Holger Helbig studied literature at the Universities of Jena and Erlangen. He is an adjunct lecturer for Recent German Literature at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 2005, the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded him a Heisenberg grant for, among other things, a project on GDR literature. Helbig is the founder of the journals Uwe Johnson-Jahrbuch and Uwe Johnson-Studien. In 2007 he published a book entitled Weiterschreiben. Zur DDR Literatur nach dem Ende der DDR (i.e., Writing On: On GDR Literature After the End of the GDR).


Thomas Köster conducted the interview. He is one of the two heads of Südpol-Redaktionsbüro Köster & Vierecke. In addition, he is a Cologne-based culture and science journalist and a consultant for reference works.

Translation: Jonathan Uhlaner

Copyright: Goethe-Institut