WHEN ANNA SEGHERS returned to Germany in 1947 and settled in the Soviet zone of occupation, the literary world was already eagerly anticipating her arrival. Seghers's great anti-Nazi novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross), which had appeared in Mexico in 1943 and in the United States a year later, was considered so important for postwar German literature that the country's leading cultural-political weekly, Sonntag, had begun publishing it in serialized form in its first issue, on July 7, 1946. The novel dominated subsequent issues of the newspaper for most of the rest of the year, finally reaching its conclusion—the famous words “All of us felt how ruthlessly and fearfully outward powers could strike to the very core of man, but at the same time we felt that at the very core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable”—on December 15.

Partly as a result of the fame of this novel, Seghers was hailed as a genius when she arrived in Germany less than a year later. In the pages of Die Weltbühne, a key literary-cultural biweekly that had been intentionally (re)created to remind its readers of the Weimar-era journal of the same title, the former anti-Nazi resistance fighter and writer Jan Petersen, a long-time comrade of Seghers, called her the “shaper of our era” and proclaimed that the role of a writer with such creative power would be crucial for serving the cause of “truth and bringing it closer to people.” Seghers's work, he believed, could, “for hundreds of thousands … for millions of readers, make the confusions of our chaotic era clearly visible, thus transforming the seemingly insoluble into a profound, path-breaking understanding, which” would be “the only basis for conscious and intentional action.” The editors of Die Weltbühne greeted Seghers's arrival in Germany enthusiastically and declared Petersen's article to be not only the first overview of the writer's work ever published but a necessary response to the problem that, at this point, few members of the German reading public had access to Seghers's writing of the previous twelve years, since books by Seghers had been banned during the Nazi period.

What Is “East German Literature,”and Who Are “East German Authors”?

THE TITLE CONTAINS A KEY TERM that may need clarification: “East German literature.” This was already a relatively problematic term prior to 1989, since it was so difficult to define. Did “East German literature,” for instance, include the literature of former GDR citizens who went to the west, such as Uwe Johnson, Günter Kunert, Sarah Kirsch, or Wolf Biermann? And even when it was written by citizens of the GDR who remained in the GDR, to what extent could one speak of “East German literature” as something separated from that larger sphere of literary activity known as “German literature?” These were not easy questions to answer even before 1989. Now, almost three decades later, they have become doubly complicated, since the GDR no longer exists as a state. A writer like Thomas Brussig (born in 1965), who has had a major impact on the literary picture of East Germany since reunification, does not even want to be called an East German writer. He would like to think of himself primarily as a German writer.

No doubt for Brussig part of the reluctance to be seen as an “East German” writer comes from resistance to the GDR literary establishment's attempt to create a canon of “DDR-Literatur,” as exemplified most prominently in the eleventh volume of the history of German literature put out by the Marxist think tank Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED (Institute for Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the SED) in 1976. In that volume Horst Haase designated GDR literature as “sozialistische Nationalliteratur der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” arguing that this literature was “fest gegründet auf das Leben und Wirken der werktätigen Menschen in der sozialistischen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und auf die Existenz des internationalen Sozialismus/Kommunismus” and that it existed in energetic opposition to the purported imperialism of the Federal Republic of Germany and other capitalist states (Haase et al. 1976, 21, 28). Writers like Christa Wolf, whom Brussig sees as having supported the East German state in a conformist way, may have found entry into this volume as part of the East German canon, but Brussig would hardly like to see himself in such company.

THIS BOOK EXPLORES THE EMERGENCE of East German literature from 1945–59. The focus on the 1940s and 1950s is relatively unusual, since most studies of East German literature, particularly in the English-speaking world, have addressed primarily later periods, from 1961 onward. That emphasis is understandable, since scholarship on East German literature outside of Germany did not really begin until the 1970s. It was only logical for the scholars who initiated that exploration to focus primarily on more contemporary works—especially since those works also seemed to meet Western standards of literary merit better than some of the more obviously socialist, politicized literature of the 1940s and 1950s.

When scholarship on East German literature began, therefore, many scholars, even in Germany itself, tended to emphasize literary discontinuities between the first decades of GDR literature and later decades. The emphasis on such discontinuities was, as Julia Hell has pointed out, one of the “critical orthodoxies” concerning East German literature in the 1970s and 1980s, and it continues to influence literary criticism to this day. The unconventional, innovative work of authors such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Irmtraud Morgner, and Volker Braun in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was seen above all as a critical response to, and break with, the more obviously partisan—and frequently socialist—literature of the 1950s. It was easier to make a claim for the aesthetic value of—to take one prominent example—Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), which deals in a complex way with a young woman's coming-of-age in the Nazi period, than for Eduard Claudius's socialist realist novel Menschen an unserer Seite (People on Our Side, 1951), a book that addresses the work lives of laborers in a Berlin factory. Wolf's novel satisfied Western literary and aesthetic criteria for modernist literature more easily. Similar comparative statements could be made for other pairs of authors as well.

There is much to be said for the narrative of discontinuity between the literature of the 1940s and 1950s and subsequent literature. Writers such as Wolf, Müller, Morgner, and Braun were indeed in many ways responding to the work their predecessors had created, and they also intentionally produced literature that differed from it. There are, however, two fundamental problems with a focus on discontinuity.

NINETEEN FIFTY-SIX WAS one of the most difficult and contradictory years in the history of international Communism. It began in a promising way, with Nikita Khrushchev's so-called “secret speech” at the twentieth congress of the CPSU, in which the leader of the USSR did the previously unthinkable: he denounced Stalin and his crimes. Khrushchev's speech sent shock waves through the socialist world, including the GDR, and it led democratic reformers to believe that they now had an ally at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. This belief was not completely naive. Khrushchev was indeed a reformer. He criticized East German leader Walter Ulbricht's dogmatic approach in the presence of other high-level Communists and urged the SED leadership to give up its “rigid approach” and finally address “the problems facing the SED and the GDR,” as one of the Soviet leader's East German interlocutors later remembered. But the year that had begun with such promise ended eight months later with the Hungarian revolution and a Soviet intervention in Hungary that crushed hopes for democratic reform. The year 1956 in the socialist world could reasonably be described, in the words of Charles Dickens, as “the best of times” but also “the worst of times,” “the season of Light” and “the season of Darkness,” “the spring of hope” and “the winter of despair.”

Gustav Just was one of the GDR's key democratic reformers in 1956. He had previously worked for the SED Central Committee in the realm of culture and was now serving as the associate editor of Sonntag. Because of his work at Sonntag, Just was in a position to exert considerable influence on other East German intellectuals. After Khrushchev's speech he decided to make use of that influence. He and his fellow reformers believed that the events in the Soviet Union had changed everything. The way was now clear, they argued, for democratic reforms throughout the socialist world, especially in the GDR. In the 1930s Stalin had persecuted anyone who showed signs of independence. Khrushchev now seemed to be welcoming reformers like Just—perhaps because he was a reformer himself. “We believed that after the twentieth Party Congress it was simply impossible that Stalinist trials … could still take place.

THIS BOOK ENDS MORE OR LESS where a standard history of East German literature might begin: with the year 1959, when German writers met in the industrial city of Bitterfeld to embark on the so-called “Bitterfelder Weg.” The Bitterfelder Weg would bring writers into factories and encourage factory workers to write (“Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!”—“Reach for your pen, brother!”). The idea behind the Bitterfelder Weg was to portray the actual lived reality of social and economic life in the German Democratic Republic, a task that many young authors, including Franz Fühmann, Christa Wolf, and Brigitte Reimann embraced with enthusiasm. In particular Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963) and Reimann's Ankunft im Alltag (Arrival in the Everyday, 1961) seemed to herald the appearance of a new generation of writers and a new approach to literature itself.

As I hope to have shown in the previous chapters, however, the supposedly new path embarked upon by East German literature in 1959 was in fact an old one. The SED had been urging writers to take this path for at least a decade before the first conference in Bitterfeld. After all, there had been a major debate about contemporary literature and the need for portrayals of the East German present as early as 1949, in the wake of the publication of Otto Gotsche's Tiefe Furchen. As Gustav Leuteritz had complained on that occasion, “Viewed objectively, [we] have not paid our debt of new creation to the German present” and “We are marching in place, we are not marching forward.” In subsequent years, party leaders repeatedly complained about East German literature's supposed failure to keep up with the times. In the so-called Nachterstedter Brief (Nachter stedt Letter) of January 1955, a group of workers at a brown coal factory northwest of Halle had, with prodding from the SED, addressed a letter to East German writers urging: “We would like more books about the magnificent construction taking place in all areas of our German Democratic Republic, about the labor and life of working people.” At the 1956 congress of the East German Writers Union, Walter Ulbricht once again urged writers: “Sing about the people who are working for a luminous future.” He also charged writers with failing to keep up with the pace of social change in the GDR.

ANNA SEGHERS's NOVEL Die Toten bleiben jung was published toward the end of 1949. It was quickly greeted by critics as a masterpiece of modern German literature and a foundational literary work for the young GDR. Seghers had worked on the novel in Mexico from 1944 to 1947, and when she returned to Germany in the spring of 1947 she brought the manuscript with her. Die Toten bleiben jung constituted an attempt to tell, by means of fiction, the story of Germany's social and political development from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

Like Das siebte Kreuz almost a decade earlier, Die Toten bleiben jung featured a multiplicity of characters from various social classes, each with distinct personalities and attitudes. Seghers portrayed Communists and Social Democrats, Nazis and Rhineland industrialists, members of the working class, the aristocracy, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie. She populated the novel with young and old people, men and women, the physically disabled and the healthy, Jews and non-Jews, Germans and non-Germans—all of the many groups that played a role in the development of German society during the first half of the twentieth century. There were so many characters in the novel that the author included a dramatis personae at the beginning of the book as an aid for readers.

Whereas Das siebte Kreuz had told one overarching story—that of Georg Heisler's successful escape from the fictional Westhofen concentration camp—and thus featured, in spite of its multiplicity of characters, a chief protagonist and unity of action, Die Toten bleiben jung had no obvious main character or unity of action. The plot of Das siebte Kreuz had unfolded over the course of one week, with each of its seven chapters representing a day; Die Toten bleiben jung, by contrast, spanned a period of twenty-five years, and each of its eighteen chapters necessarily covered a considerably longer period than the entirety of Das siebte Kreuz.

Socialist Pessimism

Die Toten bleiben jung also differed from Das siebte Kreuz in another significant respect: it was even more negative than its predecessor. The anti-Nazi intellectual Greta Kuckhoff had complained in 1946 that reading Das siebte Kreuz had left her “completely exhausted,” and she had even charged that the novel pushed its readers toward “a feeling of hopelessness.” Kuckhoff remained in the minority with her criticisms, however.

THE EAST GERMAN PROTESTS OF 17 JUNE 1953 went down in history as the first major postwar uprising against an East bloc government. On 17 June, for the first time since the end of the war East Germans went out onto the street and protested independently. Their actions amounted to a general strike throughout much of the country. To a large extent the protests came from ordinary workers, the very proletariat whose interests the government claimed to represent. They therefore highlighted the chasm between rhetoric and reality—between the real-life working class and the officials who purportedly represented it.

The gap between the SED and ordinary workers soon found expression in a scolding article that Kuba, the first secretary of the East German Writers Union, published in the SED newspaper, Neues Deutschland, three days after the uprising. Kuba, who was a former construction worker himself, chastised the proletariat for rising up against “their” government. He described the protesters in generally positive terms: “sunburned faces under white linen caps, muscular arms and necks, nicely marbled.” And he declared to them, “you looked good.” The healthy appearance of the protesting workers in East Berlin proved, Kuba asserted, that the proletariat was thriving: “You have been eating well in our republic, one could see it.” The obvious implication was that East German workers were guilty of ingratitude toward the state that had done so much for them.

Following the general line of the SED and the East German government— a line also followed by Soviet authorities, who ultimately put down the uprising—Kuba blamed the protests on outside capitalist and fascist agitators who—or so he claimed—had misled all-too-credulous workers. “What,” he pointedly asked, “was an American automobile doing at a demonstration of Berlin construction workers?” Kuba charged that East Berlin's workers had foolishly put their faith in Western Pied Pipers.

THE DEBATE ABOUT BRECHT's Mutter Courage in 1949 and Seghers's Die Toten bleiben jung in 1950 made it plain that the heroes of literary works were a key concern for East German critics and politicians. After all, the problem that some critics identified in Mutter Courage was that Anna Fierling, the protagonist of Brecht's play, was not really a hero at all. While Seghers's novel did feature a few positive heroes, critics such as Alexander Abusch complained that these figures tended to be less interesting than their negative counterparts and therefore failed to dominate the narratives of which they were a part.

By the end of 1952 Heinrich Goeres, writing in Sonntag, proclaimed that the relative lack of positive heroes in contemporary East German literature was one of the major problems facing the cultural sphere. In order to solve this problem, Goeres advised East German writers to follow the model of Soviet literature. Like many other literary intellectuals and SED leaders, Goeres believed that it was particularly important for his colleagues to focus their attention on heroes of the present: men and women dedicated to the construction of socialism in the postwar world.

Goeres's demand for positive heroes dovetailed with a similar call made by an editorial in the SED daily Neues Deutschland on 9 November 1952. The unsigned editorial castigated East German writers for lagging behind the objective development of their country and charged that their tardiness was the result of ideological unclarity. Neues Deutschland insisted that the struggle between socialism and capitalism, between east and west, and between progress and reaction was worthy of depiction in dramas and novels. Nevertheless, East German writers had as yet produced relatively few literary works that reflected the revolutionary changes occurring in the country. “Is not all of this a genuine national epic in the truest sense of the word? Why is it that our writers are not throwing themselves into … this reality artistically with the same passion and the same optimism as our working people and our party …?” The placement of this editorial in the first column of page 1 of the SED “organ” gave these demands particular prominence.

NOT ALL SOUTH GERMANS IN BERLIN during the postwar years were as enthusiastic in their patriotism as Johannes R. Becher. The Augsburger Bertolt Brecht, who arrived in the ruined German capital more than three years after Becher, in late October 1948, recorded feelings that were considerably more ambivalent, but also more acute about the sometimes bizarre humor to be found in the desperate situation of postwar Germans. Brecht called Berlin “an etching by Churchill based on an idea by Hitler” or, alternatively, “the heap of rubble near Potsdam.” On his first morning in the city, the returning émigré made a point of visiting the ruins of Hitler's chancellery in order to savor the extent of the Nazi dictator's defeat: “Early at 6:30 a.m. I walk down the ruined Wilhelmstrasse to the Reich Chancellery. In order, so to speak, to smoke my cigar there. A few workers and rubble women. The ruins make less of an impression on me than the thought of what people must have experienced during the destruction of the city.”

Brecht was sensitive to the stories he heard about the Battle of Berlin, which had taken place in April and May of 1945. In his diaries he expressed both sympathy for and impatience with the city's ordinary inhabitants. On the one hand, he wrote: “Even now, after three years … panic still resonates among the workers, caused by the plundering and rapes that followed the conquering of Berlin.” After the Red Army had taken Berlin, Brecht wrote, drunken hordes of Soviet soldiers “swarmed through … the buildings, grabbed the women, shot men and women who resisted, committed rape in front of the eyes of children, stood in lines in front of buildings, and so on.” Brecht's colleague Heinz Kuckhahn—who had worked with the playwright during the Weimar Republic and was about to collaborate with him again on the Berlin premiere of the antiwar masterpiece Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children)—told the writer that he had seen “a seventy-year-old woman, shot dead after being raped.” The Soviet cultural officer Alexander Dimshitz, who officially welcomed Brecht to Berlin on 23 October, attempted to explain the ferocity of Soviet soldiers during and after the Battle of Berlin by pointing out to Brecht how difficult it had been, in 1941–42, […]