Author – Gisela Elsner: The long -term links radicals

Censorship takes place in the Federal Republic. This censorship is difficult to prove insofar as it does not open, but is hidden (…). This censorship is a voluntary self -censorship of the editors, lecturers, editors or publishing directors. » In 1986 the writer Gisela Elsner replied to a “questionnaire, the literature censorship of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945”.

At that time, Elsner had been a member of the German Communist Party (DKP) and as a writer for nine years. It’s different today. Many know Elsner at most from the film “The untouchable”, in which her son Oskar Röhler denounces her as a drug -dependent salon communist. It is all the more gratifying that the ND science editor Tanja Röckemann in the criminal publisher has released the book “The World, viewed without eyelids”, which does justice to the communist writer Gisela Elsner.

Röckemann’s book also deals with the limits that were set to a communist writer in the FRG of the 1980s.

It is not only a story about Gisela Elsner, but also a piece of West German literary history. “In order to take Gisela Elsner into account as an organized communist and the political nature of her literary work, the present study is constantly constituted along the political landscape of the Federal Republic” (p.9), Röckemann describes her approach in the introduction.

When reading it it becomes clear how much left history has been buried in the past decades. This becomes clear with the entrance quotation. If there is talk of censorship today, of course everyone immediately thinks of the GDR. The fact that there have also been regulations of critical literature in the FRG is dismissed today as an old GDR propaganda. After all, once left intellectuals, the HoH song of the Ach so liberal democracy of the FRG, which has won the fall of the wall throughout Germany. Anyone who still expresses doubts will quickly be put to the edge as an eternal and streak.

It is all the more gratifying that Röckemann announces the discussions again in the book, which in the 1970s have long been led by the massive restriction of democracy in the FRG in the 1970s. In the mid -1980s, however, in the time, in which Elsner wrote about censorship and self -censorship in the FRG, the wind had turned. Many ex-link had already made their peace with the conditions in the FRG or converted into the sectarian left circle.

Elsner also judges this with sharp polemics. In a letter to Chris Hirte, who was responsible for the GDR editions of Eisner’s books as the editor of the publisher of the publisher, she writes in 1986: «The murderous, nihilist anarchy of imperialism, which is increasingly aiming for a third World War, put the non-parliamentary revolutionary, on the crooked petty sons, citizens and intellectual sons as well as the homeless leftists, which so far have been able to contact the trade union movement and the working class in a minimal way and are therefore, including the petty-bourgeois-pacifist peace movement, to be determined for lack of success, the intellectual weaknesses of anarchism. » (P. 18) Apart from their traditional-communist anarchism scolding, the polemical but very accurate description of contemporary left could also come from concrete editor Hermann L. Gremliza after 1989.

However, Elsner had little confidence in the milieu of the West German left. Her assessment of the German Peace Movement of the 1980s was also much more sober and more realistic than the propaganda hymns, which were heard from the DKP and its environment at the time. That is why Elsner also had her problems with the DKP, to which Röckemann dedicates his own chapter. In June 1989, Elsner even left the DKP, but four months later she undo this step. After the fall of the wall, Elsner did not want to make himself in common with those who then returned to the DKP or left -wing politics as a whole. After all, Elsner had not taken a detour through social democracy, as Röckemann emphasizes.

This differed from many short-term links that had started their political socialization with campaign aid for the SPD Chancellor candidate Willy Brandt. The filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta made it clear that such a SPD voting aid does not exclude a radical left-wing phase in the film “Sympathizer-Our German Herbst” made by her son. There reports from Trotta that the RAF prisoner, who had come to death in the Stuttgart-Stammheim high-security prison on October 18, 1977 on October 18, 1977. It is understandable that Elsner didn’t want to have anything to do with this milieu and his opportunism. “It should be emphasized here that Elsner, with its continuous delimitation from the SPD, takes a comparatively particular position in the Federal Republican left of this time,” writes Röckemann.

Because she was not one of those who transfigured her flexibility to political virtue, Elsner soon got difficulties in literary business. Röckemann’s book also deals with the limits that were set to a communist writer in the FRG of the 1980s. The author meticulously deals with the dealings of Rowohlt publishing house with Elsner. At first she was very welcome with her novels such as “Das Touch ban”, “The Punken victory” and “offside” at Rowohlt. Röckemann traces how the conflict between the author and the publisher is worried until it was terminated by the publisher in 1986. When the association of the writers wants to convey in the conflict, this is rejected by the management of the Rowohlt publishing house.

It is “not about the literary quality of Elsner’s work”, but about other things between Elsner and Rowohlt-Verlag, which I do not want to represent “(p.130), Röckemann quotes from a letter from Rowohlt boss Michael Naumann. How strongly the publisher’s announcement Elsner also hit financially shows a letter that she wrote to her friend and comrade Ronald M. Schernikau in October 1986: »I am really nothing. I can hardly go for days because my knees are buttery. «(P. 131)

It is gratifying that Röckemann often points to the precarious financial situation of the author. After the outline of Rowohlt, the GDR licenses were able to compensate for the losses. Elsner belonged to a number of German -speaking authors from the FRG, Switzerland and Austria, whose books were published in the GDR. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she also lost this source of income. The book also makes it clear that the end of the GDR for Elsner was a much more fundamental turning point.

In 1990 Elsner dissolved her apartment in Munich and sets off to Berlin. This is the period that Oskar Röhler is discussed in the film “The untouchable”. It becomes clear that mother and son have little to say. After all, Elsner ends up in the prefabricated building in the east of Berlin. But soon she will go back to Munich. “In the GDR there was a risk that I will be delivered to the madhouse,” she wrote to Schernikau in August 1990. He became an important letter partner for Elsner during this time. Röckemann describes Elsner like Schernikau as the bulky communist. Both were members of the DKP and certainly critics of the official party course. However, neither of them is in common with the efforts to make the party of social democrats.

Schernikau was still naturalized in autumn 1989 and defended communism in his much -noticed speech at the last writer congress in March 1990, but not the politics of the SED. Elsner reversed in autumn 1989 from the DKP. Both survived the GDR only briefly. Schernikau died on October 20, 1991 in Berlin to AIDS, Gisela Elsner committed suicide on May 13, 1992. Schernikau has been rediscovered in the theater and radio in the past 30 years. It would be desirable if Röckemann’s book contributes to the fact that Gisela Elsner’s books are also read more. The criminal publisher has reissued some.

Tanja Röckemann: The world, looks at without eyelids. Gisela Elsner, Communism and 68, Verlag, Brosch., 405 p., 29 €.