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  • Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere by Sara Jones
  • Elizabeth Mittman
Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere. By Sara Jones. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Pp. 226. Cloth $147.00. ISBN 978-3110237955

Both before and since the Wende, GDR literary studies have been dominated by readings that rest on assumptions of political clarity, whereby individual actors are identified in terms of their allegiances and judged accordingly. Political and aesthetic judgments converge to a remarkable degree, such that it is generally presumed that the value of literature stands in direct correlation to its distance from the halls of power; the Literaturstreit around Christa Wolf and the scandals around the Prenzlauer Berg poets in the early 1990s turned on precisely this problem. These analyses advance the view that art and politics exist in an oppositional relationship to one another; that art is a privileged site of freedom. The problem with such approaches, which are [End Page 451] grounded in theories of totalitarianism, Sara Jones argues, is their inability to account for voluntary participation in the propagation of the system. Leaning on the substantial contributions of GDR historians—most notably Mary Fulbrook—she counters the moral absolutists with the argument that negotiation and compromise were virtually inescapable dynamics of everyday life in the GDR, and that investigating these dynamics may prove more productive for a deep understanding of that society than a focus on ideological positions and structures of rule. Jones argues that the boundaries between opposition and conformity are fluid, and all GDR writers, regardless of their political inclinations, were confronted with complex moral choices. Complicity in the GDR regime and its institutional structures did not preclude criticism of the regime and its policies; conversely, regime-critical writers were necessarily complicit in those structures they critiqued. More provocatively, she presents compelling evidence that individual writers often cultivated public images of apparent clarity vis-à-vis the State while simultaneously negotiating far more ambiguous relationships behind the scenes.

This investigation presents case studies of three writers with markedly different political profiles, personal biographies, and literary reputations: Hermann Kant, cultural functionary and writer of international reputation; Stefan Heym, known above all for his unique status as “loyal dissident”; and Elfriede Brüning, generally regarded as a minor figure both artistically and politically. The selection of this motley trio, initially puzzling, serves Jones well in the support of her core argument. Focusing on the period of repeated cultural freezes and thaws from the mid-1960s to the Wende, Jones disentangles myriad threads of the written record, tracing each writer’s relationship to various organs of the GDR state. Her study turns neither on political ideology nor on literary value, but on the shared, essentially practical concerns of all GDR writers asserting their own positions as published writers and public figures within a complex literary and political landscape. In order to ferret out these complex interactions, Jones relies on a variety of sources: archival materials, the writers’ own published autobiographies, and, to a far lesser extent, their literary works. Jones thus joins the growing ranks of GDR researchers engaged in archivally driven scholarship; one of the project’s greatest merits is its painstaking perusal of extensive source materials from the archives of the SED, block organizations, and the Stasi. Juxtaposing the evidence of these documents with the authors’ own representations of events and of relationships opens up neither grand revelation nor sordid scandal, but rather a morass of conflicting perspectives that suggest more complex relationships than are generally assumed between writers and the State apparatus.

In a very real sense, the core “texts” of Jones’ analysis are the authors themselves. Memoirs and Stasi reports alike are approached through a unifying theoretical framework inspired by Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s work on the ways in which speech and discourse operate as social and political acts. As the authors navigate the complex terrain of power relations within state socialism, they maximize their utilization of the [End Page 452] symbolic currency of the linguistic market—that is, official discourse—within which they are operating. Reading the various sources against one another, Jones ferrets out ambiguity where writers project...

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