Abstract

Drastic changes in the former GDR necessitate reevaluation of the unique appeal of GDR women's writing, especially women born between 1930 and 1950, whose primary experiences were the contradictions created by the massive shift in their existence from housewife/mother to paid worker with equal rights. Their writings fulfilled GDR literature's much-discussed "compensatory function" in a double sense: by articulating taboos affecting the society as a whole, and by critical reflection on women's situation in socialism. The Utopian solutions outlined by GDR women writers, grounded in and at the same time critical of socialist theory, had and still have persuasive power, because they are not the fantasies of "cockeyed optimists," but bear a "realistic" relationship to reality. (JC)

pdf