Christa Wolf’s “Lesen und Schreiben”¹ was one of the most influential essays published in the lifetime of the German Democratic Republic. Setting out an unexpectedly radical program for restoring credibility to East German literature as a vehicle for the authentic representation of the experience of its authors, it exposed the limitations of the official cultural doctrine of socialist realism and helped to initiate an internal debate that gradually undermined its authority. It was to change the nature of the creative prose writing produced by East German authors, not just in the remaining two decades of the GDR’s lifetime but (for...

When Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand first appeared in print in the GDR in 1974 as an uncompleted posthumous novel,¹ at the height of the “no taboos” cultural liberalization that Erich Honecker initiated after taking office as SED leader, it provoked extraordinary interest throughout the German-speaking world. For readers who had noted the move toward a more subjective and politically critical perspective between her two short novels Ankunft im Alltag (1961) and Die Geschwister (1963), it finally fulfilled the expectation, fueled since the publication of initial extracts from it in 1964–65,² that she was capable of producing a significant full-length...

Like Brigitte Reimann, Franz Fühmann died within the lifetime of the GDR, in his case in July 1984 at the age of 62. In terms of their current literary reputations, however, they appear to have little in common. There is no single work of Fühmann’s to place alongside Franziska Linkerhand as evidence of his continuing importance, and no postunification resurgence of interest to compare with the Reimann renaissance since the middle 1990s, stimulated by the new insights into her life provided by her posthumously released diaries and correspondence as well as by the publication of the uncensored text of her...

Stefan Heym provides our first case study of an author who appeared to have little time for autobiography before the watershed of 1979, when he was the most prominent of the authors expelled from the GDR Writers’ Union following the infamous tribunal in East Berlin’s Rotes Rathaus. He then spent most of the 1980s working on the longest of the works discussed in this volume, Nachruf (1988). Along with his near-contemporary Stephan Hermlin, who was also Jewish, born in the Saxon industrial town of Chemnitz, and among the youngest of the literary exiles from Hitler’s Germany, Heym is often viewed...

Since the collapse of the GDR, Günter de Bruyn’s literary standing has grown in a way that sets him apart from the other East German authors of his generation.¹ The dramatic change in his fortunes in unified Germany is attributable to various factors. Primarily, of course, it reflects the strong impact that his two-volume autobiography, Zwischenbilanz (1992) and Vierzig Jahre (1996), has made both in the cultural media and among the general readership, a rare case of critical praise being accompanied by widespread public interest. De Bruyn has also enjoyed a moral bonus resulting from the open and self-critical manner...

Christa Wolf is of particular importance to this study both as the author who, in her essay “Lesen und Schreiben,” most effectively articulated her generation’s aspiration toward “subjective authenticity” and as the most consistent exponent of this aesthetic in the sequence of her first-person prose works that begins with Nachdenken über Christa T. in 1969. More than any other of the five authors examined in detail here, Wolf has also remained in the spotlight of critical analysis since the late 1960s, attracting controversy in the GDR and establishing an international reputation with Christa T. and Kindheitsmuster (1976), working through a...