Weltliteratur in der DDR. Debatten—Rezeption—Kulturpolitik Herausgegeben von Peter Goßens, Monika Schmitz-Emans, and: Weltliteratur aus der DDR. Relektüren Herausgegeben von Peter Goßens, Monika Schmitz-Emans (review)

Over the course of the last decade and a half, the term Weltliteratur has received increasing attention. In his largely positive review of Peter Goßens’s 2011 study Weltliteratur: Modelle transnationaler Wahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert (see Monatshefte 105.4, Winter 2013, 721–724), B. Venkat Mani notes the contemporary “revitalization of discussions on world literature” and argues that increasing economic and political globalization, along with other factors, “have led to the reestablishment of world literature as a major field of study in academia” (721). Mani’s own study Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (2016) is now itself part of the “revitalization” that he had already observed a number of years earlier. These two new volumes edited by Goßens and Monika Schmitz-Emans are also a part of the same process.

Of course, as Goßens himself notes in his own major contribution to the first volume, entitled “‘Erbkriege um Traumbesitz’: Voraussetzungen des Begriffes ‘Weltliteratur’ in der DDR,” the term Weltliteratur can have at least two rather different meanings. The most common general usage of the term simply means “great literature,” “world-class literature,” or “canonical literature.” This is the sense that underwrites the second volume, in which sixty-eight works of East German literature—loosely defined, since some of them, including Anna Seghers’s Das siebte Kreuz (1942), were actually published before the creation of the GDR, while another, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm (2008), was written and published a number of years after the GDR’s end—are briefly summarized and interpreted by contemporary German young people: students at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where Goßens and Schmitz-Emans both teach. Most of these students were born, as Goßens notes, shortly before or after the collapse of the GDR. For them, therefore, the GDR is not a personal experience or memory but rather a concept mediated by historical, literary, and other social processes of memorialization. The primary question that he posed to the students, Goßens recounts, is: “Ist das jeweilige Werk immer noch, unabhängig von seiner literarischen Provenienz, als interessanter, spannender literarischer Text zu lesen oder ist mit dem Verschwinden des politischen Systems auch seine Existenzberechtigung verschwunden?” (13) The answer to this question is that in spite of the disappearance of the East German state, GDR literature is nevertheless “als interessanter, spannender literarischer Text zu lesen [ . . . ].” In this sense the second volume argues for the canonical status of much of GDR literature and criticizes the attack on that literature after 1989 and what Goßens views as its calamitous disappearance in the aftermath of German reunification. As he puts it: “Wohl selten ist die kulturelle Gesamtproduktion eines ganzen Landes in einer solchen Geschwindigkeit der Vergessenheit anheimgestellt worden, wie die Erzeugnisse aus 40 Jahren DDR” (11). It is hard to argue with this verdict.

The first and much weightier volume is primarily devoted to a different meaning of the term Weltliteratur. In this second meaning, Weltliteratur refers not so much to canonicity or perceived value as to internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Weltliteratur, in this sense, goes beyond the purely national and becomes part of an international dialogue. It takes up aspects of foreign cultures within it, and in turn foreign cultures take it up into themselves. This was the sense intended by Goethe in a famous comment to Eckermann in January 1827: “Aber freilich, wenn wir Deutschen nicht aus dem engen Kreise unserer eigenen Umgebung hinausblicken, so kommen wir gar zu leicht in diesen pedantischen Dünkel. Ich sehe mich daher gerne bei fremden Nationen um und rate jedem, es auch seinerseits zu tun. Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Weltliteratur...