Introduction

Afew Months Before The Opening Of The National Site of Warning and Commemoration at Buchenwald in 1958, a novel appeared in East Germany that in many ways corresponded, in its overall aesthetic, shape, and message, to Cremer's memorial on the Ettersberg. This was Bruno Apitz's Naked among Wolves (Nackt unter Wölfen). Just as Cremer linked the motif of a young boy with self-liberation, so Apitz integrated the narrative of a child's rescue into a wider self-liberation narrative. The albeit peripheral tension implied in Cremer's sculpture between dynamism and doubt, conclusively resolved in favor of the former, is a tension that also characterizes Apitz's novel. The conflict between prisoners and the SS implicit in Cremer's memorial is an explicit and fundamental theme of Naked among Wolves. And Apitz's novel heroicizes an international antifascist resistance collective under German leadership in very much the same way as Cremer's sculpture. It should also be pointed out that Apitz's novel encountered as many difficulties and went through as many stages of development as Cremer's group of figures. For here too there were those who found Apitz's view of camp life not positive enough, in terms of either his view of relations between prisoners, or his depiction of the role of the International Camp Committee (ILK). In retrospect, these objections seem founded in an oversensitivity. But they are important nevertheless.

In this chapter I will examine the genesis of Naked among Wolves. I will argue that, in many ways, Bruno Apitz was almost predestined to be the author of the most famous communist novel about Buchenwald. After an overview of his life before, during, and after Nazism, I will explore how he came to write his novel. Its underlying concept and the decision to write it when he did are an expression of the politicization of Buchenwald in the mid-1950s, and at the same time a response to the criticism of Buchenwald's communist prisoners outlined in the previous chapter.