GDR literature – Is GDR literature a closed collecting area?

A state that, like the GDR, lasted for 40 years until it was absorbed into the West German Federal Republic, tempts philatelists, contemporary historians and literary historians to treat it as a separate collecting area. But is that correct? What could be the benefits of such an approach?

Wolfgang Emmerich, born in Chemnitz in 1941, moved to the West at the age of 17, is now professor emeritus of literary history and cultural studies at the University of Bremen, and is considered a specialist in the literature of the GDR. He knows that his “collection area” was already fraying at the edges during the four decades of the East German state’s existence. He notices something like a continuity of writing among many authors even after the end of the GDR, in which they sometimes found it difficult – some more, others less – to publish their texts.

Emmerich strives to find an answer to the question: “What remains?” He makes a selection that is influenced by his own biography. He sees the early literature of the GDR as one that was indebted to its “founding myth.” Antifascism and socialism as guiding principles, guiding concepts and guidelines of propaganda. The writers of the first decade of the GDR willingly and convincingly subordinated their works to the basic political and social consensus. Why not – after the crimes and devastation of the Nazis in Europe! But Emmerich states that this did not result in any literature that could connect with the world literature that exists in the West. Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, Faulkner, Camus and Nabokov were not appropriate in the early GDR, he claims across the board. Unlike in the West, the “Holocaust” was avoided as a literary subject in the GDR, with the exception of Jurek Becker’s “Jacob the Liar.” Error, even though the word “Holocaust” was not used. According to literary works in the GDR, only communists and labor leaders were tortured and murdered in the concentration camps. Not true either. It should also be remembered that this group of Nazi victims was taboo in the West for a long time.

Emmerich derives his findings about early GDR literature from theoretical foundations laid by Michel Foucault and Karl Mannheim. They are classified under the term “Chronotopos,” which is translated in the title and developed by the Russian-Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, i.e. the cumulative interaction of place and time. All of this is written eruditely. But what remains now? In the second part of the book, the author dissects Stefan Heym’s novel “The King David Report” under the title “Why the Old Testament of all things?” Here he identifies a correspondence between biblical and real socialist reality. Similar to Heiner Müller’s ancient pieces: the Greek myths as an “Esperanto” of universal comprehensibility. One essay is dedicated to “Uwe Johnson contra Hermann Kant”, two analyzes are dedicated to Günter de Bruyn’s “love novels” and Volker Braun’s “Hinze-Kunze novel”. Finally, in a criticism of the correspondence between Sarah Kirsch and Christa Wolf, Emmerich also talks about GDR poetry, to which he at least attaches more lasting value. He identifies Christa Wolf’s remaining dream of a non-oppressive socialism as the longue durée of the founding myth, but expresses greater sympathy for Sarah Kirsch’s consistent farewell to this.

Wolfgang Emmerich: In a different time and place. Literature of the GDR. Wallstein, 291 p., hardcover, €28.

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