Writing in Red: The East German Writers Union and the Role of Literary Intellectuals by Thomas W. Goldstein (review)

In Writing in Red, Thomas W. Goldstein mentions so many little-known writers that an alternative history of East German literature could be written using only his primary research as a starting point. And this is just one achievement of this strong contribution to our understanding of cultural politics in the GDR. Goldstein's main argument is that the East German Writers Union acted as an instrument for the enforcement of cultural policies set by the Central Committee and Politburo and as a professional association that represented its members' interests; the union's debates and actions in the 1970s and 1980s were defined by the conflict between these two aims. Following in the footsteps of Konrad Jarausch and David Bathrick, Goldstein's book is a nuanced addition to scholarship on the role of intellectuals and everyday life in East Germany. It also makes a solid contribution to the social-historical literature on private life and state power that coalesced in the 2000s in the work of David Crew, Katherine Pence, and Paul Betts. It should be added that Goldstein's lucid summaries of these two fields of inquiry in his introduction are a great resource for graduate students and, because of Goldstein's admirably declarative prose, undergraduate students trying to get a basic sense of current research.

Using source material drawn from thirty-seven archives and documented in eighty-six pages of endnotes, Goldstein tells his story in an introduction, eight chapters arranged mostly by chronology, and a helpful conclusion. The introduction establishes the real-world stakes of the study using an anecdote about a GDR author looking back with regret on one of the union's actions. Goldstein then lays out his main claims and explains his theoretical framework: he relies on David Bathrick's notion of the mediating role writers played between state authority and popular sentiment and draws on Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about social identities and institutional norms. Goldstein's use of Bourdieu follows a more than decade-long trend in studies of GDR literature that included contributions in the mid-2000s by leading scholars such as Wolfgang Emmerich. While Bourdieu's notion of the "dual habitus" certainly fits the role of some intellectuals in the GDR, the abstraction of his terminology seems somewhat at odds with Goldstein's rich and subtle account of writers' personal and professional struggles.

Goldstein's first chapter takes a long historical view. He shows how the East German Writers Union represented for some members a culmination of longstanding attempts to create a national professional organization. This, for Goldstein, explains why many GDR writers, however critical, were comfortable being connected to established authority through their union membership. The following chapter is thematic and explains how the union helped solve problems for members by pushing for higher wages and benefits and by helping with visa problems and the like. Chapters 3–8 march chronologically, often with only three or four years covered per chapter, through the union's history from 1971 to 1990. For many scholars, the first highpoint will be in chapter 4, in which the Biermann Affair is discussed in a degree of detail new to the scholarship and using primary sources heretofore untapped; the second highpoint will be in chapter eight, which describes the union's actions during the fall of 1989. Very interesting insights emerge, though, in the more marginal moments of Goldstein's book. Examples include the surprising amount of agreement by 1985 among all generations of writers about environmental issues and the intricate relationship between the Central Committee's promotion of GDR peace movements and the many, often localized, movements among writers.

In his conclusion, Goldstein summarizes the implications of his research. His work on the Writers Union highlights the significance of generational divides among writers, and reveals the union to be an institutional embodiment of Bathrick's conception of...