EAST GERMAN WRITERS: WALKING A TIGHTROPE
Eckstein, George
Not much East German writing has reached this country in the 30 years of that state's existence. The publication in 1977 of a slim volume of sensitive observations by the hitherto unknown...
...By choice in the case of the older postwar returnees, such writers as Brecht, Johannes Becher, Anna Seghers, Ludwig Renn, Stefan Heym, Stefan Hermlin (to name only the Communists among them...
...Barbara and The Seventh Cross) in the fiction she wrote after her return from Mexico...
...Many poets are also translators...
...An outsider of a different kind is Edgar Wibeau, the young hero of Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young W.), published in the East in 1973...
...none to the general public...
...Most important of all, the search for her friend's essence forces the author/chronicler to reexamine herself and her own place in her society...
...but he shows, too, the subtle ways in which individuals resist—from the teenage girl sporting an American hippie "PEACE & LOVE" canvas bag to the bunches of flowers with which German co-workers pay silent homage to a Czech colleague at the very time when East German troops help quell the Prague Spring...
...by having known little else in the case of the generation born after the '20s—such writers as Volker Braun, Rudolf Fries, Sarah and Rainer Kirsch, Gunter Kunert, Reiner Kunze, Christa Wolf...
...Not even the new race/ whose upheaving path you have joined with resolve...
...They strain against a leadership that wants to ban anything "negative" from its literature...
...But there will be few if any arrests...
...Deep in the hearth Burns the bygone fight...
...They and the protagonists of their stories—as in Volker Braun's "Unfinished Story"—want to love and admire their Communist parents and the all-important Party secretary, pioneers of the New Era...
...Finally, in May 1969, the grand total of 800 copies was printed and distributed to selected critics, bureaucrats, and libraries...
...Ludwig Renn, the aristocrat whose famous book on World War I started him on the road to Communism, ended his days with pathetic children's stories about Papa Lenin...
...He has read Salinger, speaks in a fresh idiom, kicks against the Reiner Kunze Comments: "Why did I not offer the manuscript [of The Wonderful Years] to a publishing house in East Germany...
...Yet they rebel, not so much against the policeman as against the schoolmaster who tries to guide their every step with "friendly" coaxing and threatening pointed finger...
...or an attempt to imitate Brecht...
...q 231...
...AS IN OTHER East European countries, some of the better writing is done in poetry...
...but since the early '60s he has not been allowed to perform, publish or record in the East...
...Unlike his friend Biermann who shares the regime's basic politics but rebels against its restrictions, Kunze cannot reconcile himself with the basic inhumanity of a system that arrogates to itself the right to shape all persons into a common mold...
...In a country with one of the highest suicide rates in Europe...
...The book, and a play based on it, found a tremendous response among the young, workers and students alike...
...Public readings are popular...
...Where are we now that most of us have abandoned one another...
...Several leading playwrights draw openly on the classics...
...Twice during the years to come he was fined for unauthorized publication in West Germany...
...Among those who protested were most of the authors here mentioned, including Sarah Kirsch, CP member and president of the writers' association, who promptly was deposed from office, expelled from the Party, and, a few months later, exiled...
...The bureaucrats were forced to temper their criticism with caution...
...In her essays—mainly on language and writing—she pays obeisance to the politics of the state...
...In West Germany, where it had been licensed to a leading publishing house, Christa T. became an instant bestseller...
...An effort to give legitimacy to the new culture...
...Army during the war, had to have his latest book, the King David Report, a chronicle of 229 Stalinism in biblical clothing, published in West Germany and the U.S...
...undoubtedly finding its way to the East, despite or because of a concerted campaign denouncing it as negative, individualistic, asocial...
...But where will we be if we abandon one another...
...At any rate, the results are decidedly mixed...
...Kunze's first book in East Germany, back in 1961, consisted of translations from the Czech...
...For a while, he went back to factory work...
...Furthermore . . . because, before publication of my book Letter with Blue Seal, I had been promised it would be followed by publication of Wolf Biermann's work...
...She simply refuses to abdicate the role of the creative author as mediator between reality and reader...
...Reiner Kunze, the miner's son, is a poet who has done fine translations of the work of his Czech poet-friends, some of which are included in The Wonderful Years...
...Periods of firm politico-cultural "direction" have been interspersed with periods of relaxation—but the regime is always there as schoolmaster, alternately patient and stern, holding out the public rewards of literary prizes and the private ones of jobs in publishing or the theater...
...Some passages appeared in literary periodicals in both East and West Germany prior to publication, which was announced for fall 1968 in the East...
...Not a few of them are children of the working class and grateful to a regime that was the first to give them a chance at education...
...Those who remained in the East accepted the official basis of their society more or less wholeheartedly...
...She actively tried to influence literary policies, notably during the attempts, after the XXth Congress, toward a "more open" realism...
...But as writers they cannot close their eyes to the remaining conflicts and contradictions...
...In between he works in a construction brigade, befriends a young teacher in a shy relationship, collides with union bureaucrats, is protected by an old Communist worker of pre-Hitler vintage...
...But Wolf is not a rebel at all...
...His has become "A Time of Solitude": But the door remains shut...
...It presents a good occasion for a brief look at that country's literature...
...He runs away from his apprentice job and his provincial hometown to live illegally in East Berlin in an abandoned ramshackle shed...
...Many of East Germany's more original writers have gone through long periods of silence, of cramping accommodations to official "suggestions," of detours onto the safer ground of lyric poetry or translation...
...All the remaining copies were ordered shredded the following year...
...It is night...
...The slim story, including its fatal end, is jotted down by the hero in the first person—fast, vibrant, nonchalant, colorful...
...In Christa Wolf there are hints of Kleist, another classic writer...
...THE YOUNGER generation has accepted, by and large with idealism, the official claims of its society, where the common good is supposed to have replaced private gain as motivation...
...He paints, makes music, reads, communicates by tape with the only friend back home who knows his whereabouts...
...The irreverent political songs of Wolf Biermann, a sincere if unorthodox Communist, were huge successes...
...Is the nonconforming individualist also the better socialist and having a good time?—impossible...
...In her new novel, the narrator tries to reconstruct, from past encounters, letters, and diaries, the experiences that have shaped the "life toward death" of her friend, dead of leukemia at 35—in reality a kind of suicide of a young woman, gentle, sensitive, inward-looking, and thus in conflict "with the new world of the factpeople, the hop-hop people without imagination...
...A new period of intolerance seems to have begun...
...Among the older figures Becher, who like Brecht had made his start in post-World War I Expressionism, had been groomed during his Moscow exile for the role as culture commissar...
...Brecht, thanks to his international fame, enjoyed a certain freedom for his Berlin Ensemble Theater, paid for by occasional cynical bows to Caesar...
...some will keep their work in the drawer for a better day...
...I listen...
...Some writers will be forced into exile...
...The book itself had a curious history...
...Anna Seghers, too, showed little of her former strength (The Revolt of the Fishermen of St...
...The publication in 1977 of a slim volume of sensitive observations by the hitherto unknown Reiner Kunze, The Wonderful Years (New York: George Braziller), was an important event, and not only because of the book's unusual qualities (about which more later...
...For some of the best writing from beyond the Elbe River could not be published there, but reached the world through West German publishers, sometimes with, sometimes without permission of the East German authorities who pocket the greater part of the authors' royalties...
...things like Existenzangst or suicide must not exist...
...He is one of the new breed of messy-haired, blue-jeaned, jazzloving young workers...
...Attempting to rush his contraption to completion before the Union, the bulldozers, and his mother close in on him, he kills himself accidentally with high-voltage current...
...Yet Kunze loves his country: "Trapped in this land/which I'd choose again and again...
...He expressed his situation in his usual lapidary way: "I am K. /and live/ here/ The poet/ has moved / Address/ unknown...
...From a letter of September 29,1976, published in the magazine Europaische Ideen in its special edition "On Reiner Kunze...
...But these are not the conditions under which a literature can grow with more than intermittent flashes of promise...
...Literature from—not of or in—East Germany, this is the first thing to be said...
...In the spare prose of The Wonderful Years, well-rendered in Johann Neugroschel's translation, he evokes the web in which the regime is trying to catch its children, the length to which it goes in enforcing conformity...
...This command goes against basic human values, and is here mentioned as representative of others...
...Mainly for two reasons: one because the highest authorities repeatedly demanded I should refrain from any comment on the situation of my Czechoslovak colleagues...
...As Wolf was to say later: "Suddenly I was facing myself— and that I had not foreseen...
...some will be bought off with prizes and honors...
...They did not always find the conservative and commercialized climate in West Germany ideal for their work...
...It fulfills the request of the literary bureaucrats—to treat the new problems of "building socialism" now that its rule has become secure—but it does so with a vengeance...
...Hermlin himself is full of doubt and resignation: "What if no one listens...
...The first, Nachdenken Uber Christa T., by Christa Wolf, was published in this country in 1971 under the title The Quest for Christa T. The author, born in 1919, had already made a name for herself by being the first to openly treat Germany's division in Der Geteilte Himmel (The Divided Sky), published in 1963...
...Two very different but controversial novels of the last decade should illustrate the character of this East German writing...
...Title and subject matter of Plenzdorf's book refer to a German classic, Goethe's youthful novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of which Plenzdorfs hero finds a ragged copy in his shed...
...A critical review and a censorious comment were published in early 1969 in the two official East German literary magazines—but still no book...
...230 constraints closing in all around him—an authoritarian Party-boss mother, school, trade union, Party youth organization...
...Again and again he reverts to the theme of creative growth vs...
...Among the early exiles, aside from such pre-Hitler Marxists as the publicist Alfred Kantorowicz, the literary historian Hans Mayer, and the philosopher Ernst Bloch, there were such well-known novelists as Uwe Johnson and Gerhard Zwerenz...
...bureaucratic straightjacket, as in "Diary page 74," published in 1975 in the West German periodical Akzente: But I do not wish to join the chorus (Rather sprout ever new limbs to foil the axe Rather spread out again and again the divining rods of the roots...
...Most have gone to West Germany with its ready public in the mother tongue, although, with the passing decades, there have come subtle changes in the languages of the two Germanies...
...Hermlin, a sensitive poet, introduced many of his younger colleagues in public readings, including Rolf Biermann, the enfant terrible of political verse...
...For example, when Volker Braun, in his Hinze and Kunze, transposes Goethe's Faust into the milieu of an East German industrial combine, with the CP Secretary / Mephisto guiding an eager foreman/ Faust toward ever-greater projects while his engineer/ Gretchen, in a hard choice between career or child, opts for abortion...
...he wrote little in the few years remaining to him after his return to Berlin in 1948...
...He putters around with old parts, trying to construct an improved valve for spraying paint...
...Many authors have nevertheless gone into exile—a voluntary or, more and more lately, forced exile...
...You know that I do not agree with Biermann's concepts of the future of mankind...
...Heym and Hermlin, both from the Jewish upper-middle-class, never managed to conform...
...Now he has been forced into exile, not many weeks after Wolf Biermann, and despite the tremendous protest that the latter's expulsion in December 1976 had provoked among East German writers and artists...
...To this day this promise has not been kept...
...Heym, who had served in the U.S...
...The street is bare...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
