Search

The return of the exiles (1945–1949) East German literature was born out of the grief and desperate hopes of a generation of writers for whom modernism and politics were intertwined. Some of them – Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Friedrich Wolf, Johannes R. Becher – were children of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie who had become internationally renowned during the Weimar Republic. Others – Eduard Claudius, Hans Marchwitza, Willi Bredel, Adam Scharrer – had come from the working class and began writing about production within the worker correspondent movements of the twenties. Still others – the poets Erich Arendt, Stephan Hermlin, Peter Huchel; the novelists Erwin Strittmatter and Stefan Heym; the playwright Alfred Matusche – first established themselves after World War II. They all devoted themselves after Hitler's downfall to the creation of a humanistic, anti-fascist literature which would prevail in the German Democratic Republic for forty years from its official foundation in 1949. History was not to be on their side. Their childhood years had coincided with the height of German military expansionism. With the suffering and chaos caused by World War I, which these writers experienced as young adults, many of them as soldiers, they willingly surrendered their nationalistic inheritance and became cosmopolitans. In the aftermath of the revolutions in Russia, as well as the failed German revolutions in which a number of them participated, they became committed socialists and communists. They identified with the European avant-garde movements of the time and participated in some of the most fascinating artistic and intellectual projects of the 1920s. In 1933 most of these writers were blacklisted by the National Socialists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forty-five years from the collapse of National Socialist Germany in 1945 to the unification of the two German states in 1990 might seem to be an era with a self-evident beginning and end, for how could events of such magnitude and with such profound social and cultural consequences fail to exert epochal influences on literature? This led, after 1945, to the widespread expectation and assertion of a new beginning, a ‘Stunde Null’ or ‘Zero Hour’. Equally, the end of the era was announced as early as 2 October 1990, one day before unification, in the critic Frank Schirrmacher's essay ‘Abschied von der Literatur der Bundesrepublik’ (‘Farewell to the literature of the Federal Republic’) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But the continuities of German literature across the supposed divide of 1945 are as numerous as the discontinuities; and the apparent end of duality in 1990 made manifest continued divergencies, unsurprising after forty years of ideological division and cultural separation. Literature is not immune to social and political processes; but the rethinking provoked by major upheavals in society may take many years to be reflected in the themes and forms of literature. In this sense, the literature ‘of’ the Federal Republic is still to be written. Schirrmacher's purpose was in any case not a balanced retrospective but a new campaign in a controversy which had accompanied West German literature through most of its history as part of the perennial German question of the relationship of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ (‘spirit’ and ‘power’): is literature's importance to be measured by its role as a socially and morally responsible force within a society, whether affirmative or critical of that society? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What marks out the German literature of the period 1100 to 1450 is the emergence and establishment of an autonomous German literary culture in written form, such as had not existed in the previous period. From the late eleventh century onwards it is possible to see a realignment of the relationship between German writings and Latin writings, and between written literature in the vernacular and oral tradition. Let us take just one area as an example. The new German vernacular biblical epic in couplet verse begins in the second half of the eleventh century with the Altdeutsche Genesis (also known as the Vienna Genesis, most likely c. 1060–1100), continues in the twelfth century with the Altdeutsche Exodus (probably c. 1100–30), the biblical poems of Frau Ava (probably d. 1127), the Vorauer Bucher Mosis (The Vorau Books of Moses, probably c. 1130–40), the Anegenge (The beginning, probably 1170–80) and the Kindheit Jesu (The childhood of Christ) by Konrad von FuSesbrunnen (probably c. 1190–1200). These major narrative texts in Middle High German provide a literary context for the Mittelfrankische Reimbibel (The Central Franconian rhymed Bible), an extensive compendium of Old and New Testament matter including stories of the martyrs and early Christian history in German verse (early twelfth-century, only fragments survive); for the Annolied (The song of Anno, c. 1077–81), where for the first time historiographical matters are addressed in German verse; and for the first European vernacular chronicle in verse, the mid-twelfth-century Kaiserchronik (The chronicle of the emperors). We know of no directly comparable traditions of written narrative literature in German before this period - notwithstanding Otfrid and the shorter Old High German poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]