Self-Legitimation or Self-Critique? The Kafka Debates in East German Cultural Politics.

In the literary debates of the first two decades of the German Democratic Republic, the work of Franz Kafka generally served as a foil for how not to write socialist literature. Assessments of Kafka's work and legacy either opposed the modernist Kafka against socialist realist principles or fashioned the Prague author into a perceptive critic of bourgeois, capitalist society who, nevertheless, stopped short of grasping the underlying causes of the circumstances he critiqued and whose insights into the alienation of his times remained irrelevant for the socialist present. This article complicates this early reception of Kafka in the GDR by focusing on contributions of the East German delegation to the 1963 international Kafka conference in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, which invited Marxists from both East and West to discuss Kafka's potential relevance for socialist societies, resulting in an unprecedented political critique of alienation under really existing socialism from many invitees. While the East German delegation largely refrained from such conclusions, critic Ernst Schumacher's speech departs from the consensus of his East German peers: coining the notion of 'double estrangement' (doppelte Verfremdung) to describe the interpretive uncertainty of Kafka's writing as well as its emancipatory, imaginative dimensions, Schumacher eventually extols its utopian potential to allow it to reflect the new social reality of the GDR's future as negotiated by the GDR's community of readers and writers (Literaturgesellschaft). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]