GDR History – The Art of Listening

He has been interviewing celebrities for decades, and his conversations in front of an audience attract hundreds to cinemas and cultural halls. The people on the podium usually have very eventful biographies, which did not only break in 1989/90. Fractions are what make life interesting. The need for harmony necessarily excludes this after conflicts, but if life only flowed harmoniously, it would be boring and bland.

So Paul Werner Wagner interviews people who by no means had a boring life. And he does it so skillfully that they even talk freely about the defeats – conflicts tend not to only end in triumphs. Because: Questioning is an art that Wagner masters masterfully. This art also includes listening, patience, and giving the other person space. And the ability to withdraw as a questioner. Wagner accepts the distribution of roles: he is a service provider, the other person should shine.

That’s not fair: Wagner, born in 1948, has an astonishing CV himself that you wouldn’t expect from a cultural and literary scholar. He comes from a family of craftsmen in Wolfen; his father’s medium-sized construction company employed around 60 bricklayers and carpenters in the 1950s. But before the family could go west – the house had already been sold – the wall was built. The craft production cooperative (PGH), which his father wanted to escape from, now made him its chairman. After graduating from high school in 1967, son Paul wanted to cross the Hungarian-Austrian border alone. He was sent to prison for a year and a half and then put on probation for seven years at the production facility in Wolfen. Afterwards studying at the Humboldt University…

Little of this finds its way into his profound conversations; he knows his task and fits into it. When this changes, he noticeably revives. When he presented the book that is to be praised here at the end of the year in the fully occupied prayer room of the former Jewish orphanage in Berlin-Pankow, Hans-Eckardt Wenzel asked him questions. The songwriter-philosopher knew all the conversations collected in the book “on art and cultural policy in the GDR” very well and also the author: Wenzel had ultimately contributed a substantial foreword.

This anthology contains conversations with Hans Bentzien, Benno Besson, Jürgen Böttcher, Wieland Förster, Frank Hörnigk, Gustav Just, Manfred Karte, Wolfgang Leonhard, Peter Ruben, Kurt Sanderling, Kurt Schwaen, Hermann Weber and Gerhard Wolf. Most of them are no longer alive. But it is not this fact that makes these dialogues, which took place between 1999 and 2011, contemporary historical evidence. They are culturally and historically important documents because of their perspective. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of the extensive experiences that the respondents had in different places and in different historical phases over the past century. And: They are unusual statements and confident assessments about the GDR. “The search for the errors in the GDR political game is not derived from the end, as is usual in day-to-day propaganda business,” said Wenzel in his foreword, “but from its beginning, i.e. from its meaning in history, not from the absurd theater of its end. «

In the spring of 2004, Wagner interviewed the Dresden-born sculptor Wieland Förster in the Brecht House in Berlin. Förster was arrested by the occupying forces in 1946 at the age of 15 and put in prison for 40 months because he had been denounced for allegedly possessing weapons. Doctors gave the lung patient another quarter of a year after his discharge – Förster will be 95 in a few weeks.

He later found himself caught up in the grind of GDR cultural policy and then into the Academy of Arts. The first meeting with its president Konrad Wolf (“whom I later became very fond of”) took place in 1973. They talked for “five wonderful hours” in Förster’s studio. »I told him about my life and he told me about his life; He told me why he cried at Stalin’s death, and I said why I didn’t cry, and so it went back and forth.”

The last conversation in the book took place a quarter of a century ago. In February 1999, Wagner interviewed the philosopher Peter Ruben, who died in October 2024, the first and last freely elected director of the Central Institute for Philosophy under the umbrella of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. When people talk about “Germany” then and now, they usually only mean West Germany, he complained. Of course, the GDR was also part of German history.

Rubens was convinced that its founding was a response to the mistakes of the past and an attempt to correct them. Addressing the errors of the present, Ruben said in response to Wagner’s question: “Today there is something like anti-communism without communists, a strange phenomenon, a phenomenon of mental stupidity and madness. Why do you beat something that no longer exists?” And he called for conversations about the past and present. Without conversations there is no knowledge. Because “knowledge presupposes an objective analysis, which does not exist.”

It’s not just the conversation with Peter Ruben that proves Heiner Müller right: Our future comes from the dead. Your knowledge guides us.

Paul Werner Wagner: From dawn to evening light. What remains to be considered – Thirteen conversations on art and cultural policy in the GDR. Verlag am Park in Edition Ost, 370 pages, br., 20 €.