FOLLOWING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, communist authorities in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and subsequently in East Germany constructed a symbolic politics of paternity. In order to fill the ideological and emotional vacuum left by the collapse of fascism and the rupture of the often unacknowledged libidinal attachment to Hitler, the communists encouraged identification with the “antifascist father,” with Stalin as patriarch. In the cultural realm, as Julia Hell has shown in her Post-Fascist Fantasies, a number of foundational novels, structured around generations and centering on the figure of the father, narrated the pre-history of East Germany. Although little read today, such novels as Die Toten bleiben jung (1949; The Dead Stay Young, 1950), written by Anna Seghers, Hans Marchwitza's Die Heimkehr der Kumiaks (1952; The Homecoming of the Kumiak Family), Otto Gotsche's Die Fahne von Kriwoj Rog (1959; The Flag from Kriwoj Rog), or Die Söhne (1949; The Sons) by Willi Bredel proved fundamental in constructing an East German master narrative.

The generation of Seghers (born 1900), Marchwitza (born 1890), Gotsche (born 1904), and Bredel (born 1901), shared several common biographical and literary traits. They were mature, politically committed adults when Hitler assumed power, and they spent the Second World War resisting the Nazis, either in exile or in the communist underground. They viewed the establishment of East Germany as a welcome, teleological triumph, one that crowned a long history of struggle and sacrifice. They structured their novels as family sagas and narrated the pre-history of East Germany by focusing on a single working-class family. The novels emphasize the role of the father, who often has numerous metonymical displacements, and the genealogy of fathers and sons. There is little room for women; the novels unfold within a traditional universe that equates “bad” women with sexuality and fascism, contrasting them with idealized socialist mother figures.