The German Genius

in schools, censorship was imposed and relaxed, imposed and relaxed, limiting subject matter and creating eventually an implicit alliance of readers and writers who learned to create and assimilate a series of codes, allegories, and subtexts that, up to a point, the authorities would accept. As a result the GDR became known as “ Leserland ,” the Land of Readers. 16 There was an initial optimism, with authors such as Anna Seghers presenting the brand-new socialist state as a viable alternative to the Third Reich, even daring to compare it with Goethe’s and Schiller’s Weimar. 17 This didn’t last. From the late 1950s on, in such works as Bruno Apitz’s best seller about Buchenwald, Nackt unter Wölfen ( Naked amidst Wolves ; 1958), Hermann Kant’s Die Aula ( The Lecture Hall ; 1965), Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. ( The New Sufferings of Young W .; 1972), and in several titles by Christa Wolf, in particular Kassandra (1983), writers considered what was being lost, aesthetically, because so much of the communist state was centralized. Here, as later, artistic license was allowed where direct criticism was not. 18
    It was to be expected that women writers would shine in East Germany because it was (officially, at any rate) committed to the equality of the sexes, backed up by laws governing such things as maternity leave and day care. But that overlooks the fact that East Germany occupied much of the territory of what had been Prussia, where most men were conservative traditionalists. This made conflict over sex roles more in-grained there than anywhere else. And it was these factors, or some of them, which conspired to produce Christa Wolf, a writer who, perhaps, could not have existed anywhere else. Her Nachdenken über Christa T. ( Reflections on Christa T .; 1968), is the pivotal work, a spare narrative in which the eponymous Christa T. goes in pursuit of a form of Bildung, a fuller realization of her self than is allowed by the drab confines of the communist world she inhabits, and where the terminal illness of her close friend became a metaphor for the GDR. 19 Most controversial of all was Was bleibt ( What Remains ), a book that Wolf wrote in 1979, but that was not released until 1990. It gives a semifictional account of her surveillance by the Stasi and her adjustment to that life. However, because the text was only released after the Wende (the “turn” or reunification of Germany), Wolf was attacked for not being brave enough to “go public” from within the GDR. 20
    A number of books, as Martin Swales has pointed out, specifically addressed the psychological and cultural differences between East and West Germany; among them are Uwe Johnson’s Zwei Ansichten ( Two Views ; 1965), Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspringer ( The Wall Jumper ; 1982), and Thorsten Becker’s Die Bürgschaft ( The Pledge ; 1985). 21 Johnson, who settled in England, showed in his books how there can be no simple, single truth about character, an argument (or message) with more resonance in Germany than elsewhere.
    One of the biggest cultural differences between East and West, as will already be clear, was freedom of expression, a matter on which the GDR shot itself in the foot in 1976 when it stripped Wolf Biermann of his citizenship, “because he told too many uncomfortable truths.” Biermann told these truths in poems and songs, and he and the other Liedermacher , or Song Makers, were an important dimension in politicizing young people on both sides of the Wall in the late 1970s and 1980s. Biermann’s expulsion provoked a wave of immigration of literary figures to the West and was followed by the passing of the “Lex Heym,” a law criminalizing any material that “might” damage the state—this was after Stefan Heym had released his novel Collin in the West in 1979, in which he attacked the corruption of Stalinism in the 1950s. 22 Others kept up the pressure. In books such as Peter Handke’s Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung ( The Hour of True Feeling ; 1975), Christoph Meckel’s Suchbild: Über meinen Vater ( Picture Puzzle: About My Father ; 1980), and Volker Braun’s Hinze-Kunze-Roman ( Every Tom, Dick, and Harry Novel ; 1985), the dominant theme was the links between political restrictions and a deadened psychology.
    That makes it seem as though criticism of East Germany from within was—if not widespread—at least active. This did not stop Günter Kunert from arguing that the GDR