Looking 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.

In this chapter, we examine and compare two autobiographical novels by East German Holocaust survivors, Die Bilder des Zeugen Schattmann (The pictures of witness Schattmann, 1969) by Peter Edel and Der siebente Brunnen (The Seventh Well, 1973) by Fred Wander. Written within just a few years of each other, the two novels, along with Jurek Becker's novel Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1969), demonstrate the range of possibility for attempted depictions of the Holocaust in East Germany. The survivor status of the two authors lent their writing a certain impermeable authenticity and authority, even though both authors characterized their books as novels and Wander in particular emphasized how much fiction his account contains. Both authors publicly proclaimed the East German state as the better Germany; and, despite the sensitive topics involved, that state welcomed their works accordingly, rewarding both authors with important prizes.

The similarities end here, however, and the two novels possess little else in common. Ranging over seven hundred pages and written in a Socialist Realist style, Edel's novel provides a full-throated and combative plaidoyer for the East German state with which he identified so closely. Not surprisingly, the East Germans also made a film version of it as a four-part television documentary. Wander's slim novel, by contrast, features a loose structure and an elusive, poetically tinged parabolic language, and attempts to make film versions of it were blocked by the government. Edel's novel hammers at its political agenda with the grace of a sledgehammer; Wander's book, while political, remains more elusive, subtle, and reserved. Nonetheless, the latter book presented a radical reshaping of Holocaust writing in East Germany. Although it was translated into English, it received little international attention after its initial release, and a West German review was both dismissive and damning. After German reunification, however, and republication by Wallstein in 1995, Wander's novel has seen a steady increase in scholarly attention and respect, often mentioned in the same breath with works by Primo Levi or Ruth Klüger. Edel's novel, on the other hand, has remained in literary obscurity. Nonetheless, as we shall see, even this most orthodox, state-supporting novel finds itself riven by tensions born of history and trauma, and at key moments it swerves from the Party line to which it so conscientiously, even desperately, attempts to adhere.

Jurek Becker (1937–97) was a Holocaust survivor and a committed socialist. Born in Poland, he grew up in East Germany and, although he eventually moved to the West, he remained a citizen of that country until its demise in 1990. Becker set his first and most successful novel, Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1969), in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. Widely praised, translated into twelve languages, and made into two film versions (1974 and 1999), the novel brought Becker international fame and established him nolens volens as a “Jewish” writer. Among his subsequent production were two further novels, both set in East Germany and with pronounced autobiographical features, which dealt with the issue of what it meant to be Jewish in socialism. Becker's biographer Sander Gilman calls this trilogy “unique in postwar German writing” (2003, ix) and the most important depiction of the Jew in postwar Germany. Yet until his death in 1997, Becker had doubts regarding whether he was in fact a German Jew.

In the following I will look briefly at Becker's autobiography and then examine his trilogy as a negotiation of German-Jewish-Communist identity. Although scholars regard Becker as one of the leading German postwar writers, he was not, as we have noted, originally from Germany, nor was German his native language. Becker was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Lodz, Poland in 1937, approximately two years before the beginning of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Poland. In 1940, the Nazis evicted Becker and his family from their comfortable flat and interned them in the inhumane conditions of the Lodz Jewish ghetto constructed by the Germans. The Germans deported Becker's father, Max, to Auschwitz, purportedly for possessing an illegal radio. The Nazis later deported Becker, his mother Anette, and his sister to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück, which was north of Berlin. The Red Army liberated the camp in 1945, but not before Becker's sister and mother had died. Becker believed that his mother had died of starvation because she gave him her rations.

Becker's father Max survived Auschwitz, and through a US aid organization he located his eight-year-old son in Berlin after the war.

Why would Jews return to Germany after World War II and the Holocaust? Why did a good number of prominent Jewish artists, intellectuals, and politicians choose East Germany? Among the writers in that group, what were the constraints of censorship and self-censorship? How did they feel about their fellow non-Jewish Germans? How are feelings of trauma and loss reflected in their works? And how, after the Holocaust, did they respond to Soviet-inspired antisemitism?

By examining the life and work of six East German writers, this study has attempted to address these questions. With the exception of Jurek Becker, who was, in the words of the East German poet Uwe Kolbe, “born into” socialism, these writers—Anna Seghers, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Fred Wander, and Peter Edel—all chose East Germany, and they did so for remarkably similar reasons. Some of those reasons were psychological and cultural. Against Nazi ideology, they wanted to assert that they were Germans too, and moreover the representatives of the “good Germany,” the repositories of that Germany symbolized by Weimar and not Buchenwald. For them, the East German self-representation as the guardian of the German classical tradition and the culmination of progressive German history proved tremendously attractive.

Of course, their politics guided their choices as well and were generally the decisive factor. As Communists or Communist sympathizers, the heirs of a movement crushed almost completely and rather easily by the Nazis, these writers experienced the unexpected good fortune of being handed a revolution by the Soviet victors. After the war, five of our authors, all of whom had spent the war in exile or the camps or both, lived for some time in the West before choosing to move to the East. Their experiences with an incomplete Western de-Nazification, and the concomitant transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to enemy, certainly contributed to their decisions, as did a belief in the Comintern dogma that late capitalism in crisis produced fascism. Given that ideological framework, the capitalist West could hardly constitute an alternative, and the East appeared comparatively attractive and inviting, despite Stalinism. It is not clear how much these authors knew, or wanted to know, about the horrors of Stalinism, the betrayals and treachery involved in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, or the fate of German leftists who sought safe haven in the Soviet Union after fleeing Hitler.

Christa Wolf (1929–2011), one of the most talented and profound writers from the former East Germany, learned much from Anna Seghers, who functioned as her mentor. In one of Wolf's many musings about Seghers one finds the epigram above; it outlines the multiple “contradictory, seemingly mutually exclusive identities” of Seghers, how those identities rendered her vulnerable and opened her to deathly danger. It is not, to be sure, immediately apparent how all these identities should exclude each other; for example, it is hard to see why one could not be simultaneously a Jew, a woman, and a mother. Of interest to us, however, are Wolf's first three apparently mutually exclusive categories, that of German, Jew, and Communist, as well as the fashion in which those identities brought Seghers into peril, and not only from the Nazis.

Like many Jewish Communists of her generation, Seghers did not emphasize her Jewishness in her writing or her public pronouncements; if anything—and again, she is hardly alone in this respect—the opposite holds true. Yet her practiced repression breaks down in the mid-1940s, when a series of events—notably, the murder of her mother by the Nazis and her own near-death experience in exile—combined to break the contours of her carefully constructed personality. Her writing from that time—“Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen” (“The Excursion of the Dead Girls”), “Post ins Gelobte Land” (“Post to the Promised Land”), “Das Ende” (“The End”), and “Passagiere der Luftbrücke” (Passengers of the Berlin airlift)—strikes an uncharacteristic but intensely personal note and it struggles with raw emotion. Marie Haller-Nevermann asserts of “Post ins Gelobte Land,” for example, that Seghers's use of the word pogrom alone seems to have unleashed an eruption that exposed a longburied theme (1997, 105).

Although the impact of antisemitism on the negotiation of Communist-Jewish identity plays an important role in Stefan Heym's life and work, scholars have paid it surprisingly little attention. In Marxist fashion, Heym himself tended to view antisemitism as a “secondary,” class-related phenomenon: the ruling classes utilize Jews as scapegoats to divert the attention of the masses from their true oppressors. Like racism or misogyny, antisemitism (along with societally constructed forms of Jewish “difference”) should disappear in the classless society. As Heym acknowledged in a speech delivered in 1982, “I admit it was one of my great hopes that with the arrival of socialism, antisemitism would disappear and the new, classless society would do away with any kind of discrimination whatsoever; no longer would one differentiate between Jew and non-Jew… .” In other words, Red assimilation would eliminate not only antisemitism but Jews as well. Much of Heym's writing adheres to this framework, as I outline in the following chapter. But some of the more explosive moments in his oeuvre occur when other, competing claims emerge, challenging and disrupting the neatly comforting pattern Heym struggles to establish.

Stefan Heym was born as Helmut Flieg in Chemnitz, Germany in 1913. Doubly endangered as a leftist and a Jew, Flieg fled Germany in 1933 for Czechoslovakia, where he assumed the pen name Stefan Heym. He was fortunate to receive a scholarship from a Jewish organization to emigrate to the United States and attend the University of Chicago, where he obtained a master's degree with a thesis on the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine. Unbeknown to Heym, he had left his Czech lover pregnant; the child would be murdered at Auschwitz. In the United States, Heym made increasingly urgent efforts to help his family leave Germany. He ultimately was able to obtain visas for his brother and his mother. His father, whom the Nazis had briefly taken hostage as they searched for Heym, committed suicide while Heym was in the United States.

Writing in the New York Times from the last days of East Germany in 1989, after the fall of the Wall and shortly before that country would disappear into West Germany, David Binder noted:

Binder's catalog of names mentions some of the more prominent and powerful German-Jewish Communists, and we could expand the list greatly, especially if we were to include the numerous German-Jewish artists and writers who relocated to East Germany after the Second World War. Of particular interest here is Binder's inclusion of Hilde Benjamin. Infamous for her Stalinism, her management of show trials, her draconian sentencing, including her use of the death penalty, she received such nicknames as “Red Hilde,” “Bloody Hilde,” and even the “Red Freisler,” after the notorious Nazi judge. In short, she seemed to embody the postwar avenging Jew, mercilessly condemning ex-Nazis or anyone who deviated from the East German antifascist Communist Party line. In a remarkable antisemitic slander, the prolific best-selling author Charles Whiting describes Benjamin reading the Talmud to classical music and candlelight after meting out death sentences (1972, 133–34).

Hilde Benjamin was not Jewish, however. Her parents were Lutherans; she considered herself an atheist. She did marry into a prominent German-Jewish family: her husband, Georg Benjamin, was a Communist persecuted by the Nazis, who eventually murdered him in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Her brother-in-law was the famous philosopher Walter Benjamin who took his own life after having been pursued by the Nazis. To be fair, David Binder's mistake is not uncommon, perhaps because Benjamin's actions appeared to be a logical consequence of Jewish wartime suffering. Yet, as the Jewish-German writer Jurek Becker once remarked, acts of revenge from Jewish survivors living in postwar Germany in fact remained surprisingly rare (Hage 1987, 338).

Parts of this study draw on my previously published material, which I have expanded, revised, and updated. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to utilize that material:

In order to try to reach students and scholars of Holocaust studies, Judaic studies, comparative literature, and history, as well as those in German literature and German studies, I have translated quotations from German into English or used English translations when readily accessible. The original German is available in the footnotes. Titles of published translations are included in parentheses and capitalized headline-style, while unpublished translations are capitalized sentence-style.

I thank my colleagues and graduate students in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama, as well as former Dean of Arts and Sciences, Robert Olin, for their support over the years. Jim Walker of Camden House has been, as always, a patient and supportive editor. The two anonymous readers made numerous detailed and welcome suggestions for improvement that I have attempted to integrate as well as possible.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my friends for their endless help: Stephen Brett, Nancy Carson and Michael Conaway, Melissa Kent and Paul Toppins, Paige and Mark McCormick, Jon and Lane McLelland, Catherine Roach and Ted Trost. I am especially grateful to my wife Tanusha. This book is dedicated to my family: Christopher, Eva, Katharina, and Tanusha.