Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: In the House of the Hangman
- Chapter One The Dead Mother: Anna Seghers
- Chapter Two Stefan Heym’s Negotiation of Communist-Jewish Identity
- Chapter Three The Dead Wife: Stephan Hermlin
- Chapter Four Expanding East German Holocaust Discourse: Peter Edel and Fred Wander
- Chapter Five The Dead Father: Jurek Becker
- Conclusion: “Let Us Speak German for an Hour.”
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter Three - The Dead Wife: Stephan Hermlin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: In the House of the Hangman
- Chapter One The Dead Mother: Anna Seghers
- Chapter Two Stefan Heym’s Negotiation of Communist-Jewish Identity
- Chapter Three The Dead Wife: Stephan Hermlin
- Chapter Four Expanding East German Holocaust Discourse: Peter Edel and Fred Wander
- Chapter Five The Dead Father: Jurek Becker
- Conclusion: “Let Us Speak German for an Hour.”
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I made some very close friends in the Party, but I met even more people whom I count among my worst enemies. These comrades confronted me with a senseless, irrational hostility from the outset. I often asked myself: What is it about me? What is it that has such unpleasant effects on these people? What could it have been? I have a suspicion, indeed a rather uncanny suspicion … anti-Semitism? Yes. Why? These are things that one does not want to recognize for a long time. You redecorate reality to suit your needs. Many people with origins similar to mine had quite similar experiences. Anna Seghers, for instance.
—Stephan HermlinLooking back on his life in 1992, not long after the collapse of East Germany and five years before his death, the former East German writer Stephan Hermlin compared his experiences to those of Anna Seghers. Born in 1915, Hermlin shared similarities with Seghers, who was fifteen years his senior. Both grew up in affluent Jewish-German households and both joined the Communists while young, thus turning their backs on the class and the religion of their parents. Both resisted the Nazis and entered into difficult exiles. In exile, both experienced terror and traumas that they confront in their literary works—Seghers the death of her Jewish mother, and Hermlin the death of his Jewish wife. Both felt a strong and abiding connection to Germany, its landscapes, its music, and its literature. In part for that reason, both returned from exile, first to the Western Zone of Occupation, then to the fledgling East German state. Both were important writers, though Hermlin's international fame and recognition never approached that of Seghers, and both negotiated the complicated construction of Jewish-German-Communist identity in their works. Despite Stalinism and the resulting East German antisemitism, both writers became important literary arbiters in their chosen country, though both saw their own literary quality suffer under government demands for Socialist Realism. And, as is evident from the epigraph, despite their privileged status and “redecorated reality,” neither writer ever felt entirely at home in post-Holocaust (East) Germany.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In the Shadow of the HolocaustJewish-Communist Writers in East Germany, pp. 88 - 116Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022