The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945–1959 by Stephen Brockmann, and: Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR ed. by Karen Leeder (review)

The field of GDR studies continues to produce many insightful studies. In particular, the last decade or so saw the publication of works that took a more objective approach toward the topic and incorporated the GDR into the larger historical framework of the twentieth century. Thus, GDR studies is finally moving away from biased and politicizing assessments, with which it always had and still has to struggle, and maybe naturally so. One may speculate that it will need another generation of scholars, a generation that is not compromised by actually having experienced the GDR (I am adapting a generational concept here from Brockmann, 262–263), in order to achieve full objectivity.

Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945–1959 explores the political and cultural landscape of the early postwar years in East Germany. It sets out to fight “assumptions that still underlie too many examinations of Cold War culture” (5), and does not assess the cultural developments and literary works as “the diametrical opposite of developments in the west” (341). The book has three main parts defined by pivoting historical events: the founding of the GDR in 1949, the workers’ strike on June 17, 1953, and the uprising in Hungary and arrest of East German intellectuals in 1956. For each of these periods, Brockmann traces the interrelations between the Soviet administration, the East German government, and the intellectuals and Kulturschaffenden, and recounts the public literary and aesthetic debates. Brockmann links them with analyses of literary works by seminal figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers, but also “second-rate writers” (8), such as Willi Bredel or Otto Gotsche—a group of authors who, as the author points out, equally define and shape the literary history of any nation (8, 341). Instead of denying them their “intrinsic historical or aesthetic value,” the author wants to look at them “for their own sake” (2).

The first part of the book lays out how literature and culture in the Soviet occupation zone started out with the period of democratic renewal and reeducation. Classical works by Goethe, Schiller, and others were promoted and printed in the immediate postwar years. This was supported by the German cultural officials and by the Soviet military administration, and led to very early fierce discussions about aesthetic formalism. The paradox lay in the administration’s preference and support for a bourgeois, traditional culture over a modern, progressive, proletarian culture. One of many enlightening examples that Brockmann adduces is Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, which premiered in January 1949 in Berlin. It aroused discussions among literary critics about its perceived negativity, the question of if people are able to learn from history, and the not very hero-like heroine. Instead of the desired reinforcement of a positive hero and encouragement, Brecht showed instead “fatalism and resignation” (93), as one critic claimed. Others defended Brecht’s play and theory of epic theater, and connected them to Schiller’s and Goethe’s works (93).

Brockmann emphasizes how cultural discussions until the 1950s were also driven by the motivation to eventually return to a (culturally) unified Germany. This was, for example, actualized in Johannes R. Becher’s Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (founded in 1945), or in the lines “Germany, united fatherland” of the GDR’s national anthem “Auferstanden aus Ruinen,” (113), also written by Becher in 1949.

Discussing Anna Seghers’s novella Der Mann und sein Name (1952) and her novel Die Toten bleiben jung (1949) as points in case, Brockmann illuminates in the second part the problem of depicting the National Socialist past in GDR literature. Seghers’s novella, for example, is a work in...