The Pedagogical Reception of Naked among Wolves

Until The Collapse of the GDR in 1990, Naked among Wolves (Nackt unter Wölfen) remained a canonical text in East Germany, not least for schoolchildren of the ninth grade (in the 1960s) and then the tenth grade (in the 1970s). Indeed as of the 1970s, in GDR classrooms it probably became the most important literary statement on antifascism. It certainly became more important than Seghers's The Seventh Cross (Das siebte Kreuz, 1946), and was rivaled perhaps only by Dieter Noll's The Adventures of Werner Holt (Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt, 1960). Often, Otto Gotsche's “Buchenwald Song” (“Das Buchenwaldlied”) was taught alongside it, a short story celebrating Robert Siewert's rescue at Buchenwald of the Austrian-Jewish composer Hermann Leopoldi. GDR children were also introduced to Robert Siewert through Gisela Karau's children's book The Good Star of Janusz K. (Der gute Stern des Janusz K., 1963), which describes his rescue of children at Buchenwald.

Indeed it would not be exaggerated to claim that Naked among Wolves was regarded in the GDR as the pinnacle of German literature — at least when viewed in terms of the emphasis on revolutionary socialism that shaped the GDR's understanding of literary traditions. As might be expected, GDR schoolchildren were treated to a strongly selective and tendentious reading of the German literary legacy. Thus Goethe's poem Prometheus was presented to them as an expression of the “strength of the rising bourgeoisie,” whose historical role was ultimately, of course, to give way to socialism, while his drama Egmont was interpreted as illustrating the link between “the struggle of the people against social repression” and “the struggle for the liberation of the nation.” Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell was also read as a “drama of national liberation” with protosocialist tendencies.In the course of their school education, pupils were also introduced to the revolutionary tradition in German literature of the nineteenth century (the poet Heinrich Heine — despite his criticism of communism — as well as Georg Büchner and Georg Weerth featured here), post-1848 “bourgeois realism,” the anti-imperialist dimension to twentieth-century bourgeois realism (Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, and Kurt Tucholsky), and pre-GDR antifascist socialist literature (Erich Weinert, Friedrich Wolf, Bertolt Brecht, and Johannes R. Becher).