Helen Bridge, Womens Writing and Historiography in the GDR

OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGESAND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS

Editorial Committee

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CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD

Womens Writing and Historiography

in the GDR

HELEN BRIDGE

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3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 2 6

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all those who have given me help and encourage-ment during my work on this book, which is a revised version of a doc-toral thesis submitted to the University of Oxford in 1999. I am partic-ularly indebted to my supervisor Karen Leeder, for providing invalu-able feedback, inspiration, and support over four years. Thanks arealso due to colleagues and friends who took an interest in my work andoffered advice and encouragement: Ray Ockenden, Elizabeth Boa,Katrin Kohl, Tom Kuhn, Helen Watanabe-OKelly, Peter Grieder,and Simon Ward. For financial support while writing the thesis I amgrateful to Wolfson College, Oxford; grants from the Gerrans Fundand the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the British Academyenabled me to make several visits to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv inMarbach and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Over the past two yearsmy colleagues at Exeter have been very supportive; I am especiallygrateful to Chloe Paver and Dave Horrocks, who read drafts of mywork and provided very helpful constructive criticism.

An earlier version of my analysis of Irmtraud Morgners Amanda inChapter 3 appeared as an article in German Life and Letters in 1998. I am grateful to Blackwell Publishers for permission to reproduce this material.

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CONTENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION 1

Writing the Literary History of the GDR after 1989 1Literature and Historiography in the GDR:

The Divergence of Theory and Practice 10Theoretical Approaches to the Relationship between

Literary and Historical Discourses 19Feminism in the GDR 26Approaches to Narrative Prose by GDR Women 30

1. DAS VERGANGENE IST NICHT TOT: NEW APPROACHES TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM IN LITERATURE OF THE 1970S 34

Historical and Literary Treatments of National Socialism Prior to the 1970s 34

Shifting Perspectives on the National Socialist Past in 1970s Literature and Historiography 40

Der gewhnliche Faschismus: Helga SchtzsJette / Julia Novels 45

Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind?: Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster and its Reception in the GDR 57

Developments in Historians and Writers Approaches to National Socialism after Kindheitsmuster 75

2. IHRE GESCHICHTE WRE NOCH ZU SCHREIBEN: BIOGRAPHICAL FICTIONS ABOUT WOMEN 90

Womens Lives as a Challenge to Orthodox Historical Narratives 90

Academic Work on Womens History in the GDR and Feminist Debates in the West 92

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Writing a Womans Life 100Christa Wolf 108Sigrid Damm and Renate Feyl 124Brigitte Struzyk 154

3. DIE WELT DER UNENDLICHEN MGLICHKEITEN NEBEN DIESER EINEN REALITT: FANTASTIC APPROACHES TO HISTORY IN LITERATURE OF THE 1970S AND 1980S 167

Literary Treatments of Myth in the GDR 167Fantastic Approaches to History: Morgners Trobadora

Beatriz and Knigsdorfs Respektloser Umgang 173Myth as History and History as Myth: Wolf s Kassandra

and Morgners Amanda 188

CONCLUSION 224

Womens Writing and Historiography in the GDR 224German Reunification and the Transformation of

the Literary Field 232

253

275

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in references throughout the book:

ABNG Amsterdamer Beitrge zur neueren GermanistikCG Colloquia GermanicaDD Diskussion DeutschDS Deutsche StudienFMLS Forum for Modern Language StudiesGLL German Life and LettersGM German MonitorGSR German Studies ReviewGR Germanic ReviewLGS London German StudiesMDU Monatshefte fr den deutschen UnterrichtNDH Neue deutsche HefteNDL Neue deutsche LiteraturSF Sinn und FormWB Weimarer BeitrgeWIGY Women in German YearbookZG Zeitschrift fr Germanistik

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INTRODUCTION

The collapse of the GDR has given rise to extensive reflection, amongstliterary scholars as well as historians and journalists, on the question ofhow now to approach the history of the GDR and its literature. Threeareas of the discussion are of particular relevance for the present study.Firstly, attention has been focused on the questions of what consti-tutes GDR literature, whether the term corresponds to a definable literary entity, and what value such a category might have for literaryhistoriography. Whereas terms like English literature or Germanliterature might be defined (although not unproblematically) eitheraccording to the use of a common language or in relation to an idea ofnation based on cultural, if not always political, identity, GDR litera-ture is a category defined by a political entity with clear historical and geographical boundaries. These state boundaries had a specialrelevance for literature because of the unusual ideological constraintswhich governed cultural production, circulation, and reception withinthem. However, they proved permeable to literature in a number ofways, raising questions about how to delimit GDR literature. Shouldthe category include a text like Anna Segherss Das siebte Kreuz, whichplayed a prominent and influential role in the literary life of the earlyGDR, yet was first published seven years before its foundation? Aretexts of the 1990s which deal with the experience of life in the GDR andare read primarily by citizens of the new Bundeslnder still in some senseGDR literature? Did the many writers who left the GDR in the late1970s and 1980s continue to produce GDR literature although theylived and wrote in the West? Debates about the various possiblemeanings of the term are nothing new, but in recent years criticalreflection on its validity has been prompted by a widespread recogni-tion of the primarily political motivations which determined its usagesin East and West respectively up to 1989. Critics including Ursula

See Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, rev. edn. (Leipzig:Kiepenheuer, 1996), 212; Marc Silberman, Whose Story Is This? Rewriting the LiteraryHistory of the GDR, in Contentious Memories: Looking Back at the GDR, ed. Jost Hermand andMarc Silberman (New York: Lang, 1998), 2557 (32).

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Heukenkamp and Rainer Rosenberg have argued that it is futile tocontinue to work with a category which was created to fulfil a politicalfunction in each of the post-war German states:

Zwanzig Jahre lang hat das Paradigma von der Existenz der zwei deutschenLiteraturen in den beiden deutschen Staaten gegolten. Nun hat es ausgedient.Unter den Bedingungen der Zweistaatlichkeit erwies es sich als ntzlich,ermglichte es doch bersichtliche Einteilungen und war zudem auf jewechselnde Art auch politisch vernnftig.

Jede geschichtliche Gestalt erscheint, wenn sie vergangen ist, in einemanderen Licht. So wird auch aus dem Untergang der DDR eine neue Sichtauf die DDR-Literatur gewonnen werden. Als eine eigenstndige deutsch-sprachige Literatur neben der westdeutschen oder sterreichischen wird mandas, was in den Grenzen dieses Staates geschrieben wurde, in Zukunft wohlkaum noch verhandeln.

While in future it will undeniably be necessary to rethink the relation-ship between literature written in the GDR and that of other German-speaking states, a thorough understanding of the position, functions,and achievements of literature within its immediate social and politicalcontext is necessary before any meaningful comparisons can be drawnbetween literatures written under markedly dierent conditions. It ismy aim to enhance such an understanding; I therefore retain a belief inthe validity and value of the term GDR literature. Because my focusis on the functions literature can take on in a totalitarian state as one ina nexus of strictly controlled discourses, I shall work with a narrowdefinition of GDR literature, focusing primarily on texts which wereboth written and published under the constraints of the GDR system.

A second area of discussion since 1989 has centred on the relation-ship between politics and aesthetics, and the need for a critical reassess-ment of the way GDR literature related to the political and culturalpolitical history of the state. The criticisms which Bernhard Greinermade in 1983 of western GDR literary studies in general have foundwidespread acceptance amongst scholars since the fall of the BerlinWall. Greiner attacked the excessive politicization of GDR literatureand the adoption of an unnecessarily narrow range of approaches.

2

Ursula Heukenkamp, Eine Geschichte oder viele Geschichten der deutschen Literaturseit 1945? Grnde und Gegengrnde, ZG, 5 (1995), 1, 2237 (22).

Rainer Rosenberg, Was war DDR-Literatur? Die Diskussion um den Gegenstand inder Literaturwissenschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ZG, 5 (1995), 1, 921 (19).

Bernhard Greiner, DDR-Literatur als Problem der Literaturwissenschaft, Jahrbuch zurLiteratur in der DDR, 3 (1983), 23354.


Extending Greiners critique in the 1996 edition of his Kleine Literatur-geschichte der DDR, Wolfgang Emmerich, the principal authority onGDR literary history, argues that:

Interesse an der DDR-Literatur war hufig weit mehr aus dem Interesse amExperiment Sozialismus als an der Literatur an sich geboren. Natrlich war diesesInteresse allemal legitim und bleibt es auch. Folgenschwer war die Verwechslungder beiden Interessen, oder doch zumindest ihre permanente Vermischung.Literarische Texte wurden so nur selten als Texte untersucht und weit hufiger als Widerspiegelung gesellschaftlich-politischer Verhltnisseoderumgekehrt (was methodologisch wenig ndert): als Protest gegen sie.

New simplifications of the relationship between aesthetics andideology have gained currency since 1989. As Thomas C. Fox haspointed out, the new paradigm proposed by Ulrich Greiner and otherparticipants in the Literaturstreit is as inadequate for understandingthe relationship between GDR authors and the state as the paradigmit was supposed to replace. A one-sided view of the author as a heroicvoice of opposition has been countered with an equally one-sidedcondemnation of GDR literature as Gesinnungssthetik subordinat-ing aesthetic values to social, political, and moral concerns, and as theproduct of a co-dependency between author and state.

While studies prior to 1989 all too often read GDR literature as a direct consequence of cultural policy and so neglected the aestheticqualities of literary texts, the complex relationship between literatureand its GDR context remains an important subject for analysis.Questions of aesthetics are, in the GDR as in other societies and historical periods, inextricably bound up with ideological positions.Recognizing that literary texts use aesthetic means to constructimaginative worlds and versions of reality, rather than fulfilling astraightforward documentary function, does not mean that the politi-cal implications of dierent aesthetic choices have to be neglected. In the case of the GDR, where cultural policy overtly politicizedaesthetics, any account of literature based solely on aesthetic criteriawould be, in Emmerichs words, historisch verfehlt. Examining howparticular aesthetic qualities of literature enabled it to articulate newideological positions, the present study aims to shed light on the

3

Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 1718. Thomas C. Fox, Germanistik and GDR Studies: (Re)Reading a Censored Literature,

MDU 85 (1993), 3, 28494 (284). See also Ulrich Greiner, Die deutsche Gesinnungssthetik:Noch einmal: Christa Wolf und der deutsche Literaturstreit. Ein Zwischenbilanz, in Es gehtnicht um Christa Wolf : Der Literaturstreit im vereinigten Deutschland, ed. Thomas Anz, rev. edn.(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), 20816. Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 19.


complex relationships between literature and other discourses in theGDR, including ocial cultural policy, while avoiding overly simplemodels which seek causes in the history of policy and eects in literarytexts.

The third subject of debate in GDR studies since 1989, of particularinterest here, is one which is symptomatic of recent western thinkingabout history more broadly, and concerns the validity of historical nar-ratives. At the centre of the debate is a tension between the value, evennecessity, of narrative as a means of structuring historical accounts andoering explanations for historical events, and an awareness of theuntenability of the grand narratives which characterized traditionalhistoriography. This tension is manifest in Emmerichs Kleine Literatur-geschichte der DDR, as well as in many recent contributions to debatesabout the future of GDR studies.

Emmerich criticizes the use of teleological models to describe liter-ary historical developments, particularly amongst GDR scholars, intheir use of metaphors such as Abschied, Ankunft, and Anwesend-sein. He expresses his intention, der Vielheit und Uneindeutigkeit der(literar-)historischen Prozesse Rechnung zu tragen, and draws on themodel of literary history established by Uwe Japp, in order to empha-size the inconsistencies and ruptures which characterize literarydevelopments. These ideas, already evident in Emmerichs workprior to the GDRs demise, are outlined more fully in an essay of 1988:

Literatur entfaltet sich weder linear noch stetig, noch auf irgendein Telos hin. Es gibt nicht eine literarische Entwicklung, sondern ein System wider-spruchsvoller, interferierender Bewegungen. Verschiedene sthetischeStrategien und Praxen existieren nebeneinander, konkurrieren miteinander.

While thus recognizing the inadequacy of a single historical narra-tive to do justice to the complexities of literary history, Emmerichinsists that in order to write meaningful literary histories it is necessaryto relate developments to an overarching macrothesis:

Nun ist es beim Geschft einer ja auch erzhlenden Literaturgeschichts-schreibung beinahe unmglich, ganz ohne einen roten Faden oder dochwenigstens eine berschaubare, stets reduktive Zahl von wenigen krftigeren

4

Cf. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to thePostmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 616.

Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 204. Wolfgang Emmerich, Gleichzeitigkeit: Vormoderne, Moderne und Postmoderne in

der Literatur der DDR, in Die andere deutsche Literatur: Aufstze zur Literatur aus der DDR(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 12950 (130).


Leit-Fden auszukommen. Keine Literaturgeschichte lt sich ohne eine,wie auch immer implizit bleibende, Makrothese ber den Verlauf literar-historischer Prozesse ( J. Fohrmann), ohne eine idealtypische Konstruktion(S. Scherer) schreiben.

The macrothesis of the Kleine Literaturgeschichte is, da ein erheblicherTeil der Literatur aus der DDR im Lauf von vier Jahrzehnten eineEmanzipationsbewegung vollzieht. Emmerich defines this processprimarily in aesthetic terms, as a shift from didacticism towardsHaltungen des erkennenden Experimentierens, zum sthetischenText als Dierenz zur Wirklichkeit, nicht als deren planes Abbild, buthis choice of metaphor (Emanzipation) reveals the inseparability ofaesthetics and politics. While the central hypothesis of his work isessentially unchanged from the 1988 edition, the new edition aims ateine dierenzierte und insgesamt skeptischere Darstellung gerade desUnstimmigen an diesem Proze.

Discussions about the project of writing GDR literary history andsuggestions of new contexts in which to understand GDR literaturehave been particularly prominent in US Germanists responses to theevents of 1989. There, what Patricia Herminghouse has called ahealthy skepticism about all attempts to produce literary history hasresulted, for many, in a broad shift of agenda. Like Emmerich, manyUS scholars have questioned the approaches to GDR literature whichdominated studies produced in the West before 1989. There has beena widespread call for self-reflection on the part of (American) critics,and for a critical re-examination of the ways GDR literature has beenappropriated by US German Studies. Herminghouse describes thetask facing those who work on the GDR as,

more than a mere remapping of the parameters which had contained thestudy of GDR literature within the American academic landscape: confront-ing the need to reexamine the political and professional interests circumscrib-ing its domain also entails acknowledging factors which shaped our ownengagement with this particular strain of writing in the German language.

Such methodological meta-reflection is unquestionably necessary,but at times it threatens to eclipse literature as the object of study, and

5

Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 21. Ibid. Patricia Herminghouse, New Contexts for GDR Literature: An American

Perspective, in Cultural Transformations in the New Germany: American and German Perspectives, ed.Friederike Eigler and Peter C. Pfeier (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 93101 (98).

Ibid. 93.


to function as a pretext for not formulating any new hypotheses aboutthe GDR. While some US critics, such as Thomas Fox, insist that aswe historicize GDR literature, it will be essential to continue recon-structing the horizon of former readers, others have proposed newstarting-points for approaching GDR literature which often neglectthe historical context of the GDR, in order to relate literary texts tocontexts regarded as more relevant to American readers. MarcSilbermans article Whose Story is This? Rewriting the LiteraryHistory of the GDR exemplifies this trend in US criticism. TreatingGDR literature as an especially salient object for illustrating how weconstruct tradition and how we endorse values that define continuity,Silberman does not oer his own grand narrative of GDR litera-turethough he does suggest starting-points for onebut examinesinstead the obstacles, typologies, and strategies pertinent to such anundertaking. This involves a theoretical discussion which shares thetension central to Emmerichs introduction. Silberman, too, questionsthe linear construction of literary history and criticizes the rigidlyteleological organizing schemes which have, in his view, tended tocharacterize GDR literary history. On the other hand, like Emmerich,he accepts the necessity of abstract, retrospective concepts as a meansof ordering and analysing material:

Needless to say, the problematization of literary history does not obviate theneed to pursue synthesizing retrospectives. Without the selectivity of a liter-ary canon the evaluation of genres, authors, and individual works can notproceed, and without historicizing periods and phases comparisons becomeall but impossible. The point is to define our expectations and limitationswhen contemplating the past [ . . . ]

This sounds remarkably close to Emmerichs position, as outlined inhis introduction, yet Silbermans discussion of the 1996 Kleine Literatur-geschichte is a polemical attempt to discredit it by revealing inconsisten-cies in Emmerichs methodology. He accuses him, for example, of basing his work on the same teleology of increasing autonomy andsubjectivity that characterized his previous work:

From this perspective the forty-year history of GDR literature traces aprogressive evolution from a pre-modern, closed society under the extra-literary control of dogmatic censorship that produced works of socialistrealism to modern forms of resistance and systemic critique that culminated inexperimental and avantgarde aesthetics.

6

Fox, 286. Silberman, 28. Ibid. 302. Ibid. 46.


It is true that Emmerichs preference for avantgarde experimentalismdetermines his construction of GDR literary history. However, thenew cultural paradigm which Silberman proposes as an alternativeframework within which to read post-1945 German literature, namelythe global economy of advanced capitalism, in which autonomoushistory disappears, traditional regimes of political power no longerfunction, and national boundaries become superfluous, could arguablybe seen as equally teleological:

The similarities between modern forms of culture and organizationcapitalism, socialism, fascismemerge now in high relief. [ . . . ] There werefundamental dierences in how these socio-political systems squanderedhuman and natural resources or in how they controlled access to power, butthey also constitute the shared past out of which the new globalization of artand culture has been emerging.

A new grand narrative which flattens out the dierences betweencapitalism, socialism, and fascism, and claims the meaninglessness ofhistory, political power, and national boundaries, can scarcely hope to do justice to GDR literature as a historically specific phenomenon,constrained by very real boundaries, both geographical and political.

A central premiss of my analysis is that Emmerichs macrothesis thatGDR literature gradually emancipated itself from the ideologicalconstraints imposed on it remains a valid and helpful framework whichdoes justice to the special features of this literature within its historicalcontext. While accepting this broad historical narrative, however, Ishall draw out the complexities and inconsistencies which Emmerichhighlights in his introduction, but tends to suppress in his later discus-sion of literary texts. The present study focuses on one strand of theliterary history of the last two decades of the GDRs existence, that is,the development of critical approaches to history in narrative fiction bywomen. While women were not the only authors to expand the bound-aries of historical debate in the GDR, this study will show how theincreasing centrality of gender to their critiques means that they madea special and significant contribution to GDR public discourses. Whentexts by a variety of authors are juxtaposed, the idea that a singlechronological narrative is adequate for describing developments in literature appears problematic. The authors to be discussed were bornbetween the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, a time-span within whicheven generations born only ten or fifteen years apart could be separ-

7

Ibid. 478.


ated by considerably dierent experiences of the GDR. As soon as anyliterary history takes account of the careers of more than one author, aplurality of developments is inevitable. This plurality took a specialform in the GDR, where the privileges granted to prominent and inter-nationally successful authorspermission to travel to the West andconsequently access to western discourses, for examplewere with-held from less established writers. Furthermore, as David Bathrick hasargued, an lite group of well-known authors occupied a position ofpolitical power as institutions within the GDR public sphere:

Dabei erwies sich, da eben diese zentrale Position des Kultursektors erfolg-reichen und etablierten Autoren nicht nur eine gewisse Macht, sondern aucheine politische Autonomie verlieh, die in den anderen gesellschaftlichenBereichen dieser entlichkeit ohne Beispiel ist. Das gilt besonders frAutoren von Weltrang wie etwa Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Mller, Christa Wolf,Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin und Volker Braun. Sie alle wurden auf dieseWeise gewissermaen zu Institutionen, die direkt oder indirekt fr dieArtikulation von gesellschaftlichen Interessen, aber auch fr Formen derDissidenz oder Opposition sorgten.

As Julia Hell has pointed out, Emmerichs model of GDR literaryhistory is implicitly centred on the career of Christa Wolf. He doesnot problematize the relationship between the texts of those authorswho might be regarded as social institutions in Bathricks analysis, andthose by writers who did not have this status. Instead, he attempts to fitthe latter into a pattern established by more prominent writers. Thereare good reasons why accounts of GDR literature have tended to focuson Wolf. Besides the quality of her writing (an argument which couldbe made for other writers who never gained a status comparable withhers), her works participate in a number of discourses which were ofpolitical and intellectual interest to many in East and West especiallyfrom the late 1960s onwards: utopian socialism, feminism, environ-mentalism, and the peace movement. Wolf belonged to a group ofwriters who produced what many, in East and West, saw as the mostinteresting and representative GDR texts of the 1970s and 1980s.Neither dogmatically armative of the SED state nor radically dis-

8

David Bathrick, Kultur und entlichkeit in der DDR, in Literatur der DDR in densiebziger Jahren, ed. P. U. Hohendahl and P. Herminghouse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1983), 5381 (64).

Julia Hell, Critical Orthodoxies, Old and New, or The Fantasy of a Pure Voice:Christa Wolf , in Contentious Memories: Looking Back at the GDR, ed. Hermand and Silberman,65101 (66).


sident, Wolf, Braun, Mller, and others shared the ideals of socialismand advocated reforms of the state system from within. The fact thatWolf has been made more central to GDR literary histories than anyother author in this category has two probable reasons. Firstly, hertexts were frequently the earliest prominent and highly successfulattempts in GDR prose literature to explore new topics and literarytechniques which subsequently became popular with other authors,although in drama Mller played a similar role. Secondly, her careerspans the last three decades of the GDR, and manifests an unusuallyclear progression in ideas and literary technique.Her shift from histori-cal optimism and socialist realist dogmatism to positions of increasingsubjectivity, feminism, pessimism, and criticism of the course historyhas taken, lends itself as a narrative framework for understandingbroader developments in GDR literature.

Since 1989 there have been calls for greater attention to be paid toGDR women writers who have hitherto been excluded from a canoncentring on Wolf and Irmtraud Morgner. Recent research projectshave focused on women of a younger generation who never identifiedwith the socialist state and who, often unable to publish their works inthe GDR, did not participate in public discourse in the way that theolder women did. Because the present study is concerned with theways in which literature can reconfigure the boundaries imposed onpublic discourses in a totalitarian state, it will deal primarily with thatstrand of GDR literature which aimed at reforming socialism fromwithin. It aims to strike a balance between acknowledging the import-ance of the literary career of Wolf, as one of the most prominent andinfluential writers of the GDR, and suggesting that the literary historyof the GDR is not a single story determined by the work of one author.Whereas Wolf and Morgner have often been grouped together ascanonical authors of the same generation with broadly similarconcerns, this study will draw out dierences between their aestheticsand ideas, as well as showing how their works relate to those of lessestablished writers.

9

See, for example, Karen Jankowsky, Canons Crumble Just Like Walls: Discovering theWorks of GDR Women Writers, in Cultural Transformations in the New Germany, ed. Eigler andPfeier, 10216.

For example, Birgit Dahlke, Papierboot: Autorinnen aus der DDRinoziell publiziert(Wrzburg: Knigshausen and Neumann, 1997). A canonical writer is compared with amarginalized one in Beth V. Linklater, Und immer zgelloser wird die Lust: Constructions ofSexuality in East German Literatures. With Special Reference to Irmtraud Morgner and Gabriele Sttzer-Kachold (Berne: Lang, 1998).


:

In his Kleine Literaturgeschichte, Emmerich uses the term geschichts-philosophischer Paradigmenwechsel to describe a set of fundamentalshifts which transformed GDR literature during the 1970s and 1980s:Das vom Marxismus in seiner orthodoxen Version vermittelte Fort-schrittsdenken wird von den kritischen Knstlern verworfen, derGlaube an ein gesetzmig gesichertes Ankommen im Sozialismusund endlich Kommunismus geht verloren. A prominent and sub-stantial sector of GDR literature moved beyond its ocially prescribedrole as a voice for the state ideology, to become instead a forum for the articulation of plural, critical, and subversive viewpoints. The rela-tionship between literature and history was, as Emmerichs formula-tion suggests, central to this shift. The SED understood literature as ameans of influencing the course of history: by reflecting the progress ofsocialist society in accordance with Marxs model of history, literaryworks were to instil a socialist historical consciousness in readers and soinspire them to work actively towards bringing about communism.However, as many GDR writers began to reject this optimistic under-standing of history as progress towards a teleological goal, their worksincreasingly transformed the way history was understood and writtenabout in the GDR, as well as calling for transformations of historicalreality in ways quite dierent from those envisaged by the SED.Literature assumed a special and important role as a medium in whichmore critical approaches to history, taboo in other kinds of GDRpublic discourse, could be explored.

The cultural and political developments of the 1970s resulted in aparadoxical situation for literature. Although Honecker seemed topromise greater ideological and aesthetic freedom for writers in 1971,the limitations of this liberalization quickly became apparent, as criti-cal works by writers including Braun, Heym, and Mller continued to be suppressed. After Wolf Biermanns expatriation in 1976, statecontrol of literature intensified, with the consequence that writers power to voice criticisms in the public sphere was diminished, yet their attitude to the state was more critical than ever before. For a subsectorof society, literature continued to oer a space in which increasinglycritical positions were articulated. This study takes as its starting-pointthe increasing tendency, from the 1970s onwards, for literature by

10

Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 273.


many of the major writers in the GDR to challenge the ocial Partyline and broaden the parameters of historical debate. By analysing theshifts in literature alongside developments in academic work on historyand in literary criticism, it asks why literature in particular has thepotential to subvert the requirements imposed on it in a totalitarianstate where all public discourses are subject to strict ideological regula-tion and censorship. It begins by outlining a model of the relationshipsbetween GDR literature, academic discourses on history and on litera-ture, and a prescriptive ocial discourse which outlined roles for eachof these.

The SED authorized a model of history based on Marxs writings.However, as is generally the case when considering ocial GDR policy, it is essential to recognize the discrepancy between the Partysclaims concerning the theory on which the regime was ostensiblybased, and the actual appropriation of this theory in practice. Theempirical quality of Marxs ideas about history and his emphasis on theprogression towards a communist future, to be achieved by politicalactivity, were played down. Instead, the SED instrumentalized anddogmatized this model of history as an understanding of the past withthe primary aim of legitimizing the GDR and discrediting the capital-ist West. In order to achieve this, the dialectical concept of progresscentral to Marxs thought was reduced to a polarized view of the pastin terms of progressive and reactionary elements, introduced by theSED as the ocial interpretation of the past in 1951. By positioning itsown regime at a stage in Marxs model of societys development afterthe proletarian revolution, the SED changed the emphasis of thismodel from a progression towards a future goal, to the justification andpreservation of present conditions. This represents a significant diver-gence from the ideas of Marx and Engels, for in Die deutsche Ideo-logie they assert that communism is to be understood not as a staticideal condition to be attained, but as a dynamic process of continuingprogress: Der Kommunismus ist fr uns nicht ein Zustand, der her-gestellt werden soll, ein Ideal, wonach die Wirklichkeit sich zu richtenhaben [wird]. Wir nennen Kommunismus die wirkliche Bewegung,welche den jetzigen Zustand aufhebt. The West German historian

11

Alexander Fischer and Gnther Heydemann, Weg und Wandel der Geschichts-wissenschaft und des Geschichtsverstndnisses in der SBZ/DDR seit 1945, in Geschichtswis-senschaft in der DDR, 2 vols., ed. Fischer and Heydemann (Berlin (FRG): Duncker andHumblot, 1988), i. Historische Entwicklung, Theoriediskussion und Geschichtsdidaktik, 330 (9).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Ausgewhlte Werke, 6 vols.(Berlin: Dietz, 19702), i (1970), 20177 (226).


Hermann Weber has shown how the SED instrumentalized Marxsmodel of history in order to legitimize its own policies. GDR historians,he asserts, were obligedin practice, if not in the ocial rhetorictotreat history as rckprojizierte Gegenwart, that is, die aktuelle Politikin die Vergangenheit zu transformieren. Certain elements in Marxswritings made his theory of history particularly susceptible to this kindof appropriation. In particular, his claim to a scientifically objectivetheory of history, his emphasis on the need to make the study of historypolitically productive for the present, and his understanding of historyas a course of progress determined by laws, were adopted in a dogmat-ically binding form in the GDR and used as a basis for an approach tohistory which served primarily to legitimize the regime and its policiesin the present.

The ocial functions of both professional history and literature inthe GDR were determined by this understanding of history. Althoughthe precise nature of the limitations and prescriptions imposed on the activities of historians and writers varied during the course of the GDRs development, the ultimate functions attributed to themremained constant. Historians had the task of illustrating and re-inforcing the theoretical, ostensibly Marxist model of history proposedby the SED, by demonstrating how individual periods, figures, andevents fitted into it. Literature, meanwhile, was given an overtlyhistorical and didactic role as a tool of socialist enlightenment.Fictional works were to influence the course of history by enablingreaders to recognize and fulfil their roles in history. Literature wasassigned a function comparable to that of history, in interpretinghistorical events according to a schema regarded as the only objectiveand true way of understanding the course of history. While professionalhistory was to lend academic authority to this ocial model of history,literature was to make it comprehensible to the public, particularly inits implications for the present.

12

Hermann Weber, Weie Flecken und die DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft, inZwischen Parteilichkeit und Professionalitt: Bilanz der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR, ed. Konrad H.Jarausch (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1991), 13953 (140).

Fischer and Heydemann, Weg und Wandel, 67. See also Peter Lbbe, Zur Funktionder Geschichtswissenschaft im staatlich etablierten Sozialismus, DS 25 (1987), 292300 (292,297).

Walter Schmidt, Geschichtsbewutsein und sozialistische Persnlichkeit bei derGestaltung der entwickelten sozialistischen Gesellschaft, in Geschichtsbewutsein und sozialisti-sche Gesellschaft: Beitrge zur Rolle der Geschichtswissenschaft, des Geschichtsunterrichts und derGeschichtspropaganda bei der Entwicklung des sozialistischen Geschichtsbewutseins, ed. Helmut Meierand Walter Schmidt (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), 841 (9).


In the earliest years of the GDR, literature was regarded as an essen-tial medium for antifascist re-education. It was given a central role in state planning, as an eective means of achieving and cementingsocial change. Walter Ulbricht announced in 1951, Die Kunst hat imFnfjahrplan eine hohe Aufgabe. Sie kann Groes leisten, um dieMenschen zu echtem Patriotismus, zum Geiste des Friedens, derDemokratie und des Fortschritts zu erziehen. In an attempt to attainsocialism without the class struggles and socio-economic revolutionsfrom below which were central to Marxs model of history, the SEDplaced enormous faith in the humanist literary heritage as a substitutemeans of achieving historical progress quickly. Cultural policy aimedto introduce the masses to German Classical art and literature, whilewriters were to help create a sozialistische Nationalkultur based on the development of alles Groe, Humanistische, Fortschrittliche,das die Kultur unseres Volkes in der Vergangenheit hervorgebrachthat, as well as den kulturellen Traditionen des mehr als hundert-jhrigen revolutionren Kampfes der deutschen Arbeiterklasse.As Emmerich has commented, such policies were founded on naveassumptions about how a historical Erbe could be made productivefor the present: Geistig-literarische Produktionen der Vergangenheitwurden als Gter oder Schtze wahrgenommen, die man sichaneignen, von denen man Besitz ergreifen msse.

During the later decades of the GDRs history, both historiographyand literature were able to negotiate a broadening of the boundarieswithin which they worked, loosening the restrictions imposed on themand eecting reformulations of the ocial state discourse which theywere obliged to support. Significant changes in historiography wereinitiated by a reconsideration of the relationship between the SED andhistorians in the late 1960s. Party control of the activities of historianshad been particularly strict during the politically tense 1950s: at thefortieth anniversary of the 1918 revolution, academics were repri-manded for their wrong interpretations of this event. By the late1960s, nearly all professional historians were members of the Party, so

13

Aufgaben der Kunst, in Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, ed.Elimar Schubbe (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972), 21315 (213).

Wolfram Schlenker, Das Kulturelle Erbe in der DDR: Gesellschaftliche Entwicklung undKulturpolitik 19451965 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), 67.

Die sozialistische Nationalkultur als die Erfllung der humanistischen Kultur desdeutschen Volkes, in Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, ed. Schubbe,7812 (781).

Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte, 84. Fischer and Heydemann, Weg und Wandel, 10.


this degree of policing was no longer felt to be necessary, althoughresearch remained subject to five-year planning. At the SeventhParty Congress of the SED in 1967, greater significance was accordedto academic disciplines. Consequently, historical studies were able todevelop away from their former purely ideological function, towards agreater emphasis on academic research. With the foundation of theRat fr Geschichtswissenschaften in 1968, a new, dialogic form ofcommunication between the Party and historians was introduced.This was accompanied by demands for a broader theory and method-ology of history.

These changed conditions of historical research, together with theabandonment of hope for a reunification of Germany into a single,socialist state, led to changes in the ocial interpretation of the past inthe 1970s. The emphasis shifted from Germanys national past toparallels in the historical development of the GDR and other socialiststates, while the dierences between the Federal Republic and theGDR were now highlighted to a greater degree. Proletarian inter-nationalism and socialist patriotism were now regarded as comple-mentary and wholly compatible, so the focus on the GDRs place in aworld revolutionary process was accompanied by the new view thatthe GDR was heir to the entire German past. A new, more integralapproach to German history began, in the late 1970s, to replace theprevious highly selective treatment. Ingrid Mittenzweis essay of 1978,Die zwei Gesichter Preuens is representative of, and played animportant part in, this change. Mittenzwei challenges the simplisticpolarity between progressive and reactionary elements in historywhich had previously dominated the ocial approach to the past,arguing instead for a more dierentiated assessment of key historicalepisodes. She criticizes the tendency to focus on certain aspects ofhistory and ignore others, and asserts that the whole of history must be addressed, including elements which are problematic for the GDR, such as Prussias authoritarian past: Preuen ist Teil unsererGeschichte, nicht nur Weimar. Ein Volk kann sich seine Traditionennicht aussuchen; es mu sich ihnen stellen, und es sollte dies auf unter-schiedliche Weise tun.

The ideas raised by Mittenzweis essay formed the basis of a discus-

14

Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (London: Polity, 1999), 131. Fischer and Heydemann, Weg und Wandel, 1518. Ingrid Mittenzwei, Die zwei Gesichter Preuens, Forum, 32 (1978), 19, 89; repr. in Erbe

und Tradition: Die Diskussion der Historiker, ed. Helmut Meier and Walter Schmidt (Cologne:Pahl-Rugenstein, 1989), 728 (72).


sion of heritage and tradition amongst GDR historians, beginning inthe late 1970s. The term Erbe was broadened to refer to the entirelegacy of history in its complexity and its contradictions, whileTradition was used to denote those elements of the Erbe whichcould be evaluated positively from the perspective of the GDR andwere therefore considered to have a function in solving historicalproblems faced in the present. The schematic division of the Germannational past into progressive elements which could serve as afoundation for the GDR, and reactionary elements allegedly leadingto the Federal Republic, was thus replaced by a more dierentiatedexamination of the GDRs relation to the whole of German history.Although this new approach meant that a broader range of historicalepisodes and figures were considered worthy of academic attention, afundamental continuity in the role and the methodology of GDRhistorical studies is apparent. Helmut Meier and Walter Schmidtoutline the new tasks facing historians:

Unser Traditionsverstndnis hebt daher stets zwei Aspekte des Verhltnissesder sozialistischen DDR zur deutschen Geschichte in ihrer Gesamtheit her-vor: erstens die Fortsetzung und Vollendung der progressiven, humanistischenund revolutionren Traditionen des Volkes und zweitens den entschiedenen,endgltigen Bruch mit der deutschen Reaktion.

A polarized conception of a positive and a negative line of historicaldevelopment is maintained here, although both of these are nowrelated solely to the GDR, rather than to the opposition between Eastand West Germany. Similarly, the function of historiography in legit-imizing the GDR as the lawful end-product of a positive tradition ofrevolutionary progress remained essentially unchallenged. Any signifi-cant dissent from this ocial model could, even in the 1980s, only bevoiced privately, and did not find expression in published academicwork.

As in all academic disciplines in the GDR, there were niches whereindividual scholars could pursue research in a relatively undogmaticway. Academics employed by the Akademie der Wissenschaften had

15

Ulrich Neuhuer-Wespy, Erbe und Tradition in der DDR: Zum gewandeltenGeschichtsbild der SED, in Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR, ed. Fischer and Heydemann, i.12953.

Helmut Meier and Walter Schmidt, Zum marxistisch-leninistischen Traditionsver-stndnis in der DDR, in Erbe und Tradition: Die Diskussion der Historiker, ed. Meier and Schmidt,2757 (31).

Marxist Historiography in Transformation: East German Social History in the 1980s, ed. Georg G.Iggers, trans. Bruce Little (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991), 8.


greater freedom than those working at universities, because they werenot required to teach. In the words of Rainer Eckert, who worked atthe Institut fr deutsche Geschichte at the Akademie, es ging [ . . . ]nicht um den Nachwuchs, der einseitig ideologisch geprgt werdensollte. Since these historians were required to produce researchwhich would gain the GDR international prestige, they also had accessto western publications, and were able to meet western academics atinternational conferences. However, most historians at the Akademiewere members of the SED and so were subject to Party disciplinarymeasures if their work did not support the accepted interpretation ofhistory suciently. These ranged from a reprimand to a ban on publi-cations, removal from an academic position, or even a prison sentence.Studies of ancient and medieval history were freer from ideologicalcontrol than those of more modern (and politically relevant) periods.At the Zentralinstitut fr Alte Geschichte und Archologie of theAkademie, for example, only 10 per cent of the employees belonged tothe SED.

As Mary Fulbrook has suggested, in the later years of the GDRmany historians moved away from committed dogmatic positions:Many East German historians adopted the sandwich principle: arich and nutritious empirical filling could be safely topped and tailedby a little dry bread of Marxist-Leninist theory in the introductory andconcluding sections. By the late 1980s, GDR historians such asJrgen Kuczynski, Hartmut Zwahr, Jan Peters, and Sigrid Jacobeithad also produced some varied and undogmatic work on topics insocial history and Alltagsgeschichte. However, such work was regardedas a serious threat to mainstream political history, and gained whatfreedom it had from its marginalization. As Harald Dehne has com-

16

Ohne Vergangenheitsbewltigung gibt es keinen demokratischen Neubeginn:Gesprch mit Dr Rainer Eckert, Historiker, 1972 von der Humboldt-Universitt relegiertwegen Teilnahme an einer staatsfeindlichen Gruppierung, in Hure oder Muse? Klio in der DDR:Dokumente und Materialien des Unabhngigen Historiker-Verbandes, ed. Rainer Eckert, Ilko-SaschaKowalczuk, and Isolde Stark (Berlin: Gesellschaft fr sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung undPublizistik, 1994), 11519 (119).

Ibid. See also Therese Hrnigk, Contours of a New Academic Landscape: ResearchInstitutes and the University System in the New German States, in Cultural Transformations inthe New Germany, ed. Eigler and Pfeier, 1729 (176).

Isolde Stark, Warum ein Unabhngiger Historiker-Verband?, in Hure oder Muse?, ed.Eckert, Kowalczuk, and Stark, 1120 (12).

Fulbrook, German National Identity, 132. A seminal work was Jrgen Kuczynski, Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes, 5 vols.

(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 19802). Other examples of such work are collected in MarxistHistoriography in Transformation, ed. Iggers.


mented in an illuminating 1992 postscript to an essay written for publi-cation in the West in 1989, as long as everyday-historical questionsremained shunted o onto the sidetrack of marginal disciplines, theycontinued to be tolerated as an object of interest pursued by what weredeemed to be harmless exotics. Nevertheless, as Dehne makesclear in his comments on his own essay, work on these topics was some-times severely compromised by political expediency.

It was only in the final years of the GDR that any significant cracksbegan to show in the seemingly monolithic block of historical studies.When, in 1988, Gorbachev extended glasnost to include the blank spotsof history and the October issue of the Soviet journal Sputnik, devotedto the taboo-breaking topic Stalin and the War, was banned in theGDR, some young historians protested, and were consequently disci-plined. This diversity of opinion, however, only entered the historicalprofession when the GDR was on the point of collapse, and even thenremained a marginal phenomenon. On the whole, GDR historianscontinued to produce work which served to legitimize the state untilthe very end of the states existence.

While historians reformulated their task in order to broaden theareas of study considered legitimate, but did not challenge the funda-mental role and structure of their discipline as established in the earlydecades of the GDR, literature transformed historical debate in moreradical ways from the late 1960s onwards. Until this time most litera-ture, like historiography, had fulfilled the function assigned to it by theSED. Conforming to the socialist realist doctrine, GDR literature ofthe 1950s and early 1960s generally reflected the ocial conception ofhistory and encouraged readers to play their part in helping to estab-lish the socialist state. During the 1960s, however, a fundamental shiftoccurred in the world view of some of the most prominent writers inthe GDR. From the mid-1960s onwards literary texts began to appearwhich questioned the prescribed aesthetic models which had hithertobeen willingly adopted, and instead expressed growing scepticism

17

Harald Dehne, Have We Come Any Closer to Alltag? Everyday Reality and WorkersLives as an Object of Historical Research in the German Democratic Republic, in TheHistory of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Ldtke, trans.William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11648 (141).

Rainer Eckert, Zwischen den Scherben einer zerbrochenen Welt: Honung auf einenNeubeginn. Die Probleme der Historiker in den Neuen Bundeslndern, in Hure oder Muse?,ed. Eckert, Kowalczuk, and Stark, 1338 (135).

Patricia Herminghouse, Confronting the Blank Spots of History: GDR Culture andthe Legacy of Stalinism, GSR 14 (1991), 2, 34565 (347); Marxist Historiography in Transforma-tion, ed. Iggers, 5.


concerning the inflexible Weltanschauung of the SED. In texts such asChrista Wolfs Juninachmittag (1965) and Nachdenken ber Christa T.(1968) and Fritz Rudolf Friess Der Weg nach Oobliadooh (published in theFederal Republic, 1966) the schematic and closed narrative forms ofsocialist realism are rejected in favour of modernist modes of narrationwhich give voice to a loss of faith in the possibility of comprehendingreality as a totality and reflecting this totality objectively in literature.This direction became more marked and more widespread after theEighth Party Congress of the SED in 1971. Honeckers announcementthat there were no taboos for art providing it proceeded from socialistprinciples created an atmospherealbeit shortlivedof new hopesfor a liberalization of cultural policy. Texts written in the 1960s but atthat time regarded as too subversive for publication were now able toappear.

The first two chapters of this book analyse this divergence in therespective developments of literature and historiography from the1970s onwards. The first chapter discusses the treatment of the Nation-al Socialist past, showing how literature was able to challenge the foun-dation narrative of antifascism by introducing new perspectives basedon specifically female experiences of fascism. The second chaptershows how feminist approaches to womens place in history wereexplored by GDR literary writers, but remained taboo for historians.In each case, I ask what it was that enabled literature to broaden theboundaries of historical debate, and whether developments in theliterary sphere had any impact on academic discourses dealing withthe same topics. The third chapter examines a group of texts whichadopt a rather dierent approach to history, employing fantasy andmyth.

The relationship between the three chapters is not always one ofchronological continuity, although a variety of literary developmentsover the course of the 1970s and 1980s will emerge. Rather, eachchapter is concerned with history on a dierent level. In the first,authors reclaim a personal and collective past which represented anenormous psychological and moral burden, and which had beendenied by the SED. The second chapter is also concerned with therecovery of histories excluded from the ocial state notion of itsheritage, but in this case the focus is on womens experience as areservoir of ideals which should be made productive for the present.

18

Wolfgang Emmerich, Der verlorene Faden: Probleme des Erzhlens in den siebzigerJahren, in Die andere deutsche Literatur, 4678 (5060).


This project is continued by some of the texts in Chapter 3, but hereseveral new elements are introduced. Writers explore new ways ofmaking history productive by incorporating fantasy into their works,while explorations of womens experience excluded from conventionalnotions of history are complemented by panoramic reinterpretationsof the whole of western history.

Two broad problemsor groups of problemsmust be addressed inthe attempt to create a model of the way literature and historiographyfunctioned in the GDR. Firstly, a theory of GDR culture must be ableto account for the ways in which political developments, ocial statediscourse, literature, and academic writing interacted to producechanges in the cultural and intellectual spheres over the course ofGDR history. Secondly, the diering developments of literary and historical discourses in the GDR raise important questions more gen-erally about the relationship between literature and historiography.How was literature able to voice fundamental critiques of the orthodox discourse, while historiography achieved only more limited reformu-lations of the ocially sanctioned approach to history? An obvious factor is the dierent extents to which literature and historiographywere institutionalized in the GDR. Whereas historians had to workwithin an institution, whether the Akademie der Wissenschaften, auniversity, or another institute of higher education, writers did notnecessarily need to belong to the Schriftstellerverband in order toproduce literature. However, most mainstream writers did belong tothe Schriftstellerverband and were bound by its statute to a role of sub-ordination to state cultural policy. Furthermore, all published litera-ture was subject to institutional control in so far as it was dependent onthe Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel, which functioned as acensoring body with the power to decide whether or not a book couldbe submitted for publication. In view of these means of institutionalcontrol and the harsh disciplinary measures to which writers could besubjected for any action perceived as against the interests of the state,the dierent institutional positions of historians and writers cannotfully account for the diering developments of the two discourses.

19

Cf. David Bathrick, The End of the Wall Before the End of the Wall, GSR 14 (1991), 2,297311 (304).


This section will consider a variety of western theoretical discussions ofliterature and history which are fruitful for understanding how GDRdiscourses in particular functioned.

The historyof GDRliterature has been understoodby Emmerich,among othersin terms of a progression away from the ocially sanctioned master discourse in order to become an eective criticalcounter-discourse. It might seem tempting to contrast literature, as acounter-discourse, with historiography, which remained within theboundaries of the master discourse, butas David Bathrick has shownin his discussion of GDR literaturethere are problems with a binarymodel such as this:The facile juxtaposition of master discourse (Leitdiskurs, monosemia, orencrastic language) to counterdiscourse (countertext, polysemia, etc.) suggestsa discreteness of separation that denies the truly contextual and historicalnature of the problem we are addressing. The struggle to rewrite andreinscribe the master plot is precisely a process by which one as writer istextually engaged in stretching or realigning cultural political mappings. Forexample, Christa Wolf continually invokes and at the same time violates a setof formal and ideological codes and in so doing renders those very boundarieshistorically transfigured. Is she inside or out? On one side or the other?

Similar problems arise when this binary opposition is applied to GDRhistoriography. Although historians did not publicly subvert or chal-lenge the ocial discourse on history to the same extent as writers of literature, a similar process of broadening the debate and redefining itsterms from within the confines imposed on it transformed academicwork on history during the 1970s. Taking Bathricks comments as astarting-point, this study will work with a model which sees the variouskinds of GDR public discourse (literature, historiography, literary crit-icism, etc.) as a series of interrelated spaces, each centred on ocialstate policy and operating within boundaries imposed by this ocialdiscourse. However, both literature and academic writings were ableto reconfigure these discursive spaces and to rewrite the master plotto use Bathricks terminologywhich formed their centre. By exam-ining specific examples of this process, I aim to establish why literaturewas able to accomplish more momentous transformations of discursivespace than academic work, and how far the reconfiguration of one discourse could trigger changes in others.

20

Emmerich, Status melancholicus: Zur Transformation der Utopie in vier Jahr-zehnten, in Die andere deutsche Literatur, 17589 (180).

David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln, Neb., andLondon: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 19.


Pierre Bourdieus theory of cultural productionalthough writtenprimarily with France in mind and so in its detail often not appropriatefor describing GDR practiceprovides some broad notions which arehelpful for conceptualizing the GDR cultural and intellectual spheres.His concept of the cultural field with its own specific economy based ona particular set of beliefs concerning what constitutes a cultural workand its aesthetic or social value oers a valuable way of approachingGDR culture. The fields of literature and literary criticism are,according to Bourdieu, sites where the authority to determine the legit-imate definition of the literary work is at stake. In order to understandthe significance of a particular literary work, it must be analysed inrelation to the structure of the field at the time when it was produced.These ideas seem particularly appropriate with reference to GDR literature, where the ocial regulation of culture meant that contestsover the definition and role of literature were able to shape the field of cultural production in unusually overt ways. Dissent from theaccepted value system could, for example, result in censorship andeven imprisonment for the artist. An understanding of the rules of thisparticular field is unquestionably necessary for recognizing thesignificance of individual works produced within it.

Bourdieus model of how the structure of a field changes over time isalso particularly apt for the GDR. A fields structure is determined bythe relational system of positions occupied by agents within the field.This system is dynamic: whenever a new position asserts itself, forexample as a result of political change, this determines a displacementof the whole structure and leads to changes in the position-takings ofthe occupants of other positions. This model is very fruitful forunderstanding how the interrelated fields of literature, literary criti-cism, and historiography developed over time in the GDR, despite theattempt to regulate their roles from above. The first chapter of thisstudy, for example, shows how the publication of Christa Wolf sKindheitsmuster, by creating a new position within the field, altered thestructure of the field as a whole and made it possible for other authorsand literary critics to take up new positions. As Randal Johnson com-ments, for Bourdieu the central dialectic of change in the cultural fieldis a broad conflict between orthodoxy and heresy. If orthodoxy is understood as adherence to the ocial state discourse and heresy

21

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and trans.Randal Johnson (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity, 1993), 9.

Ibid. 58. Ibid. 17.


as dissidence, then this struggle is clearly central to the broadening of discursive boundaries in the GDR.

Bourdieus model of the cultural field oers a productive way ofapproaching the dynamics of change in GDR literature and historiog-raphy. However, the central question of why these two discoursesdiverged so significantly in their developments remains unanswered.The project of comparing historiography and prose fiction presup-poses a certain degree of common ground between the two. In recentdecades, critical theory has highlighted the permeable nature of theboundary between written history and prose fiction. Each uses lan-guage, and in most instances narrative, to create a discourse whichcombines a referential relationship to reality with elements of fiction-ality. The textual nature of historiography has been emphasized.Keith Jenkins, for example, argues that a fundamental disjunctionmust be acknowledged between the past as a reality, which is inacces-sible, and the discursive traces of this reality which provide the only criterion for assessing the truth of any particular historical discourse.Hayden White has suggested that historiography employs literaryrhetoric and plot structures to give meaning to the events of the past,which do not oer themselves as stories:Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure,can be shown to have had a plot all along, they give to reality the odor of theideal. [ . . . ] The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I sug-gest, for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed asto their significance as elements of a moral drama.

While a total erasure of the boundary between literature and histori-ographyof which White has frequently been accusedis clearlyabsurd, acknowledging the fictional elements in historical narratives isparticularly helpful for approaching GDR historiography. Whitesanalysis, based on nineteenth-century political historiography, doesnot do justice to many developments in twentieth-century approachesto history, but is extremely apt in the case of an ideologically controlledhistorical profession where historians work was required to conformto a prescribed master narrative of history. White argues that histori-

22

Keith Jenkins, On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London andNew York: Routledge, 1995), 18.

Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; repr. 1990), 4.

Ibid. 21. See, for example, Paul Michael Ltzeler, Klio oder Kalliope? Literatur und Geschichte:

Sondierung, Analyse, Interpretation (Berlin: Schmidt, 1997), 1213.


ans have failed to acknowledge the constructed nature of historicalstories, presenting them instead as empirically found. He distinguishesbetween a historical discourse that narrates and a discourse that nar-rativizes: while the former openly adopts a perspective that looks outon the world and reports it, the latter feigns to make the world speakitself and speak itself as a story, thus concealing the act of constructioninvolved in the presentation of the past. With its claims to scientificobjectivity and empirical verifiability, GDR historiography is a primeexample of the latter.

While the mixture of fact and fictionor real events and imaginarycontextscontained in both literature and historiography provides abasis for a comparison, a number of important dierences between thetwo discourses might help to account for their diering developmentsin the GDR. Whites reduction of historiography to an ultimatelyfictional discourse is a helpful way of approaching the process by whichGDR historians accommodated historical figures and events within anauthoritative grand narrative of history. However, this equation of historiography with fiction risks obscuring the fact that the twodiscourses are traditionally expected to fulfil very dierent functionswith regard to notions of reality and truth. As Karin J. MacHardyconcludes in a paper on The Boundaries of History and Literature, historiography is subject to criteria of verifiability which do not applyto literary writing:

The most important of these dierences is that historians do not have thefreedom to invent occurrences or persons of the past, nor can they narratetheir inner dialogues. [ . . . ] Unlike fiction writers, historians have to verifytheir stories with evidence from other texts, such as archival sources and otherhistorical studies. Nevertheless, this verification of consistency does not in itselfobjectify historians work as it is thereby not contradicted by reality itself butby other texts. It must be stressed that fiction writing cannot be contradictedin this manner.

If plot structures which are ultimately imaginary are employed byhistorians, then this occurs with the aim of finding as truthful a way aspossible of making sense of real events in the past. Prose fiction can

23

White, 2. This idea can be traced back to Barthess work in the 1960s. See RolandBarthes, Historical Discourse, trans. Peter Wexler, in Structuralism: A Reader, ed. MichaelLane (London: Cape, 1966), 14555 (153).

See Jenkins, 19. Karin J. MacHardy, The Boundaries of History and Literature, in Fact and Fiction:

German History and Literature 18481924, ed. Gisela Brude-Firnau and Karin J. MacHardy(Tbingen: Francke, 1990), 1125 (25).


focus on imaginary events as well as real ones, and is free to combinethe two in ways historiography is not. Literature deals with possibili-ties, rather than the actual events of history. This dierence has impor-tant consequences for any attempt to control the notions of truthembodied in literature and historiography respectively. Literature isnot subject to the requirement to depict a single, consistent world,which R. G. Collingwood defines as a condition for history and LionelGossman regards rather as a regulative constraint in the conventionsof historical discourse: that all history must be consistent with itself,since there is only one historical world, whereas fictional universes,being autonomous, need not agree, and cannot clash. Literaturethus allows a plurality of fictional worlds and narratives because it isregarded as an ultimately imaginative discourse, while historiography,understood as the representation of a reality conceived to be mono-lithic, is confined to a single world and, in a totalitarian state such as theGDR, to a single overarching narrative.

Since literature is an imaginary narrativization of both real andimaginary events, any relation it might bear to the past is not one ofstraightforward correspondence. Both this more opaque relationshipto reality and the inevitable plurality of fictional worlds and plots fromone text to another make it more dicult to control literatures con-formity to a single definitive narrative than is the case with history.Literature also has a far greater potential for ambiguity and pluralitywithin an individual text than historiography. A literary text may pre-sent contradictory meanings or a subversive subtext far more easilythan a historical account, which is required to be internally consistent,and where the convention of a more transparent identity of narratorand author corresponds to a reading practice based on the straight-forward equation of statements on the page with authorial opinion. A polyphony of voices and the possibilities of irony are among the features which make authorial views much harder to locate in a novel.

In attempting to impose similar constraints on literature and histo-riography, the SED also overlooked fundamental dierences in theirtraditions as institutions. Whereas history is generally practised withinstate institutions and so has often had the task of writing the ocialstory of the past, from the perspective of a particular state, literature

24

R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 246. Cited in LionelGossman, History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification, in The Writing of History:Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 339 (30).


has a long tradition of commenting critically on society from an outsideperspective. The subjective experience of the writer, conventionallysuppressed in historical accounts, is traditionally the basis and subjectof a large proportion of world literature. Bathrick has argued that inthe GDR literature was more able than any other discourse, einenauthentischen Kontakt zwischen der entlichen und der privatenSphre zu vermitteln. Elizabeth Mittman has described the con-sequences of the tension between a tradition of literary autonomy andthe SEDs attempts at institutionalizing and controlling literature inthe following terms:

As a site for the production and communication of subjectivity, for the expres-sion of the non-collective, in and through the voice of the writer, literatureproduced under the structural conditions of state socialism bears witness to apersistence of dissonances between two antagonistic discursive realmstheocial discourse of the state and a plethora of other, private voices thatwould, through their public articulation, contest the dominant discourse.

Finally, the dierent developments of literature and historiographyin the GDR may be related to a more widespread divergence of thetwo discourses from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularlywith regard to the question of how language and narrative relate toreality. Dominick LaCapra sees the tremendous explosion of explora-tory approaches to narrative in the novel since Flaubert as a phenom-enon from which modern historiography could fruitfully learn.While literature began to question the transparency of language as amedium for reflecting reality and to challenge the closed narrativesand omniscient narrators of realism, such reflective and self-criticalimpulses remained absent from mainstream western historiography:

Narrative in history tends, with some exceptions, to remain set in itsnineteenth-century ways. [ . . . ] There is relatively little self-consciousnessabout the problem of voice or point of view; the narrator tends to be omni-scient and to rely on the convention of unity not only of narrative voice butbetween narrative and authorial voice; and the story is typically organized inaccordance with a chronologically arranged, beginning-middle-end struc-ture.

25

Bathrick, Kultur und entlichkeit, 65. Elizabeth Mittman, Locating a Public Sphere: Some Reflections on Writers and

entlichkeit in the GDR, in WIGY 10, ed. Jeanette Clausen and Sara Friedrichsmeyer(Lincoln, Neb., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1937 (23).

Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UniversityPress, 1985; repr. 1996), 123. Ibid. 122.


Despite its attempt to impose on literature narrative conventions ofthis kind, in the form of socialist realism, the SED was not able in thelong term to prevent writers from taking up modernist literary tradi-tions which challenge monolithic and unified narratives, and under-mine faith in the directly mimetic capacity of language. Most of thetexts to be discussed in the present study incorporate a degree of nar-rative self-reflection, in order to highlight the limitations of languageand literary form as means of representing a past reality. They thusimplicitly, and at times explicitly, challenge the premisses of the ocialversion of history. Historiography, meanwhile, had no such traditionof self-reflection or scepticism about language and narrative. GDR historians writing was generally characterized not only by the kind oflanguage traditional in academic work; a language which, despite itsrootedness in a particular time and place, is confident that it has accessto an objective truth, and which denies its origin in a thinking andorganizing subject, and values reason to the neglect of imagination.Historians also adopted the rigid terminology of ocial SED dis-course, a language which made imaginative input and rigorous intel-lectual enquiry dicult by providing a fixed set of concepts embodyinga preconceived truth which all work had to support. As Georg Iggershas argued, MarxistLeninist ideology led to the ritualization oflanguage in the form of a terminological code that prevented intellec-tually honest communication.

The SEDs attempt to appropriate literature as a form of ideologicalsupport to disseminate the authorized version of history to the publicundoubtedly helped to create a literature which was highly consciousof its role as a commentator on history. However, the various factors Ihave outlinedliteratures opaque relationship to reality, its potentialfor plurality and ambiguity, its capacity for self-reflection, its traditionof critical commentary on society, and its roots in subjective, individ-ual experiencehelp to explain why literature was able to developaway from supporting state-sponsored historiography, to become analternative discourse on history.

Feminism represents one of the most significant and fundamentalchallenges to the orthodox model of history voiced by GDR literature

26

Marxist Historiography in Transformation, ed. Iggers, 7.


of the 1970s and 1980s. It can be seen as an area of intersection betweentwo dierent kinds of discourse which questioned this orthodox model:those created by political movements, such as environmentalism andthe peace movement, and more theoretical bodies of thought, forexample, the postmodern scepticism about history which has per-vaded the work of many western intellectuals in recent decades. Notonly is feminism both a political practice and a body of theories, but,in a variety of forms, it also overlaps with, draws from, and feeds intoall of these other discourses.

Gender relations in the GDR were characterized by the discrepancybetween ocial proclamations and experienced reality which generallystructured all areas of public and private life. The SED based its poli-cies concerning women and gender equality on the writings of Marx,Engels, Bebel, and Zetkin, all of whom saw womens oppression underpatriarchy as a problem subordinate to the oppression of the workingclasses under capitalism. Sonja Hilzinger identifies three fundamentalideas common to these socialist thinkers: da sie im Privateigentumdie Ursache der Versklavung der Arbeiter wie der Frauen sehen, dasie die Frauen-Emanzipationsbewegung der Arbeiterbewegung unter-ordnen und da sie in der Einfhrung sozialistischer Produktions-verhltnisse das Ende beider Ausbeutungsverhltnisse sehen.

The assumption that womens oppression was rooted in capitalismmeant that the establishment of a socialist state was regarded as a foun-dation on which gender equality would automatically develop. Legis-lation, motivated at least in part by economic necessity in the post-waryears, aimed at enabling women to combine motherhood with a career.Equality was defined in terms of womens participation in paid employ-ment. Women were thus encouraged to play the same role as men inthe public sphere, though in practice they generally occupied less presti-gious and lower paid positions. Sociological research has shown that,in the private sphere, conventional gender roles continued to prevail, afinding which is frequently reflected in literature by women.

One important consequence of the ocial claim to have achieved

27

Cf. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Cambridge, Mass., andOxford: Blackwell, 1987; repr. 1994), 16.

Sonja Hilzinger, Als ganzer Mensch zu leben . . .: Emanzipatorische Tendenzen in der neuerenFrauen-Literatur der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 1011.

See, for example, Morgners Trobadora Beatriz. For more detailed accounts of the legalprovisions for GDR women and sociological evidence, see Hilzinger, Als ganzer Mensch zuleben . . ., 1028; Mechthild M. Matheja-Theaker, Alternative Emanzipationsvorstellungen in derDDR-Frauenliteratur (19711989): Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur Situation der Frau (Stuttgart: Heinz,1996), 1519.


gender equality was the taboo status accorded to the notion of feminism. There could be no autonomous, public womens movementin the GDR, since this would have challenged the idea that genderinequality was a consequence of class inequality, and had thereforebeen eradicated under real existierender Sozialismus. There was thusno public forum for the discussion of womens needs, problems, andcontinuing subordination to men, particularly in the private domain.Feminism was regarded as the product of western capitalist relations,and therefore dismissed as irrelevant to the GDR. A narrow under-standing of feminism as an expression of womens antagonism towardsmen was widespread. Eva Kaufmann has shown how, in der DDR jedeselbstndige Regung und Bewegung von Frauen als Emanzentumverpnt und politisch denunziert wurde. Small academic discussiongroups were formed during the 1980s to explore feminist approachesto research, for example by the Berlin cultural scientist Irene Dlling.However, such groups were few in number and marginal, occupying asemi-ocial space within institutions. They were also perceived as athreat: in 1986, a research group on womens issues in German litera-ture at the Akademie der Wissenschaften was dissolved, because itsmembers were thought to have strayed too far from the Party line.Even writers like Wolf and Morgner were eager to distance themselvesfrom feminism as it was widely understood. In an interview of 1976with Ursula Krechel, Morgner persistently rejects the label DDR-Feministin, arguing that der Feminismus ist eine Reaktion auf einefrauenfeindliche Umgebung. Mein Staat ist frauenfreundlich, anddefining herself as eine Kommunistin, die die speziellen Forderungender Frauen auerordentlich bewegen. Similarly, in her essay Be-rhrung, written as a preface for Maxie Wanders Guten Morgen, duSchne, Wolf stresses the distinction between Wanders work and be-stimmte Frauengruppen in kapitalistischen Lndern, denen man ihrenoft fanatischen Mnnerha vorwirft. However, Wolf goes on to

28

Eva Kaufmann, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Wolf und andere: Feminismus in derDDR-Literatur, in Literatur in der DDR: Rckblicke, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and FraukeMeyer-Gosau (Munich: text + kritik, 1991), 10916 (113).

Gabriele Jhnert, Das Zentrum fr interdisziplinre Frauenforschung (ZiF) an derHumboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, ZG, 9 (1999), 1, 11822 (118).

Hrnigk, Contours of a New Academic Landscape, 176. Die tglichen Zerstckelungen: Gesprch mit Ursula Krechel, in Irmtraud Morgner:

Texte, Daten, Bilder, ed.MarlisGerhardt (Frankfurt amMain:Luchterhand, 1990), 2433 (245). Christa Wolf, Berhrung: Maxie Wander, in Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und

Aufstze, Reden und Gesprche 19591985, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1987; repr.1990), i. 196209 (205).


blame social conditionsthe lack of a strong workers movementforthis variety of feminism, and to conclude that GDR women might beable to learn something from the solidarity, initiative, imagination,and plurality which she perceives in western womens movements.

The reluctance of these writers publicly to identify themselves withfeminism may have been partly motivated by pragmatic political con-siderations, and represented in any case a rejection of a popular andideologically motivated image of Feminismus which corresponded onlyto a small strand in the heterogeneous and constantly developing bodyof ideas produced by feminists internationally since the early 1970s.While it is clearly not unproblematic to apply the term feminist toworks by writers who expressly distanced themselves from this label, I shall use the term in a broad sense, as a useful shorthand to describepositions which criticize gender relations under patriarchy.

Feminism, in all its manifestations, presented a number of chal-lenges to ocial SED discourse. By highlighting womens continuingoppression in the present and calling for political action to overcomepatriarchy, it questioned the legitimacy of the GDR as a state wheregender equality had been realized. By encouraging critical reflectionon the meanings of terms like gender equality and womens needs, itquestioned the goals the GDR had set itself, determined as they wereby an assimilation of women to male norms, rather than a questioningof those norms. Feminist critiques of patriarchy and its manifestationin the traditional nuclear family revealed the inadequacy of the SEDspolicy of integrating women into existing patriarchal structures. Mostgenerally, by promoting gender as an independent category of analy-sis, feminism challenged the strict subordination of gender to class inGDR discourse.

Because of the importance of feminism as a challenge to the Partyline, examining the degree to which feminist ideas became absorbedinto dierent kinds of discourse in the GDR is an eective way ofassessing the dierent rules which governed literature and academicwriting, and the varying extents to which each was able to subvertocial ideology. The dierent feminist approaches adopted by thevarious texts discussed here may correspond to dierent stages andperspectives in the debates which have taken place in western femi-nism since the 1970s. However, it is not the aim of this study to estab-lish a teleology based on the history of western feminist theory, nor toassess literary texts according to criteria provided by a particular set offeminist ideas. Instead, the emphasis is on the variety of ways in which

29


women writers broadened the boundaries of GDR public discourse byfocusing on gender.

The literary texts which form the focus of the chapters to follow havehitherto been examined in the contexts of three dierent kinds of critical study. Firstly, attention has been focused on womens writing in the GDR, sometimes within broader surveys of GDR literature.Secondly, in the case of the more prominent writers, that is, Wolf andto a lesser extent Morgner, a number of author-based studies haveappeared. Thirdly, texts have been grouped by topic, often togetherwith literature by men and/or literature from the other German-speaking states, and analysed accordingly. Studies have thus focusedon literary representations of the National Socialist past, biographicalfiction, or writers employment of mythical themes and forms. Thisstudy is the first to combine the examination of these dierent topics, in order to show the variety and the developments in the ways GDRwomens writing transformed approaches to history in the 1970s and1980s.

Two critical approaches dominate this body of secondary literature.Firstly, literature by GDR women has repeatedly been read as astraightforward reflection of, or comment on, the social conditionsgoverning womens lives under real existierender Sozialismus. Aninsistence on the social basis and intent of this literature characterizesthe work of critics within the GDR. In assessing how the termsFrauenliteratur and weibliches Schreiben might be helpful forapproaching writing in the GDR, for example, Ilse Nagelschmidtdefines them in exclusively sociological terms:

Im Proze der sozialistischen Revolution, in dessen Verlauf die nochbestehenden nichtantagonistischen sozialen Widersprche zwischen denKlassen und Schichten abgebaut werden, verstehen wir die sozialistischeFrauenliteratur als eine besondere Mglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der knst-lerischen Artikulation, auf bestehende Probleme aufmerksam zu machen,wirkliche Verhltnisse und Verfahrensweisen analytisch darzustellen, um soden dierenzierten Annherungsvorgang der Geschlechter zu forcieren.

30

Ilse Nagelschmidt, Sozialistische Frauenliteratur: berlegungen zu einem Phnomender DDR-Literatur in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren, WB 35 (1989), 3, 45071 (459).


In the West, too, sociological approachesalbeit with a dierentaccentdominated criticism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Thesociological bias which Emmerich perceives in research on GDRliterature in general was, and remains, particularly prominent in workon womens writing. Emmerichs own treatment of texts by women inthe 1996 edition of the Kleine Literaturgeschichte persists in regarding thenotion of womens writing as a sociologically determined phenome-non concerned solely with analysing the society in which it was written.Although texts by women, especially Wolf and Morgner, are central toEmmerichs narrative of literary history at a number of points, onlyonce in the section on the literature of

Helen Bridge, Womens Writing and Historiography in the GDR

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