THE EVENTS OF 1956 REVEALED a deep-seated generation gap that many participants privately acknowledged but that was rarely addressed directly in public forums. The generation gap played an unmistakable role in literature and film, however. DEFA director Gerhard Klein made a series of films about troubled young people in Berlin—Alarm im Zirkus (Circus Alarm, 1954), Eine Berliner Romanze (A Berlin Romance, 1956), and Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser (Berlin—Schönhauser Corner, 1957)— that openly depicted the East German generation gap. Because of their frankness, these films were controversial among party dogmatists, who believed that such portrayals of the generation gap tended to encourage rather than discourage it.

Klein was by no means the only cultural figure to address the problem of the generation gap. Erwin Strittmatter did so as well in Tinko (1954). A generation gap existed in the novel between the eponymous hero, a young boy, and his war-veteran father, who returns home from the war at the beginning of the story—but also between Tinko's socialist father and right-wing grandfather, a small-minded man who is representative of the older, more conservative members of small-town society in postwar Brandenburg. At one point this grandfather even beats his grandson up. Anna Seghers's novella “Der Mann und sein Name” also addressed the generation gap that existed in East Germany between young former Nazis and older antifascists. Seghers's 1959 work Die Entscheidung (The Decision), her first full-length novel about life in the GDR, approached a similar topic through its depiction of the former Nazi Robert Lohse, now a fervent socialist, and the young industrial trainees entrusted to his care. Dieter Noll's two-part novel Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (1960, 1963) narrated the difficult transformation of its young protagonist from a Nazi soldier into an imperfect socialist. The gap between the German generations in Noll's novel is reflected in the split between the young, confused hero Werner Holt and his older, clearer-thinking socialist father, who had opposed the Nazis from the very beginning, and who places his knowledge and skills as a chemist at the disposal of the new socialist order.

The young writer Uwe Johnson (born in 1934), who was still studying German literature in Leipzig when the year 1956 began, depicted the generation gap in his first novel, Ingrid Babendererde: Reifeprüfung 1953 (written in 1953–54), […]