Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit oder Die Grenzen des Sagbaren. Briefe, Tagebücher und fiktionale Texte von DDR-Autoren um 1970
The Presence of the Past or The Limits of What Can be Told. Letters, Diaries and Fictional Texts by GDR-Authors around 1970.

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the way in which certain topoi, particularly those suggesting analogies between specific phenomena in the GDR and the NS-era, were dealt with in literary texts written in the GDR between 1968 and 1970. This historical period is marked by two events that were designed to fundamentally shatter the loyalty felt for the communist leadership of the GDR by a generation of authors born around 1930 and at first impressed by the GDR antifascist founding myth due to their former affiliation with the Hitler Youth or the German Reichswehr. These events were the invasion of the ČSSR in 1968 by troops of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, reminding many authors of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops in 1938; and the GDR 7th Congress of German authors in 1969 with its attacks on Reiner Kunze and Christa Wolf. Particular attention is paid to possible self-censorship, i.e. differences in the covering of specific subjects depending on the authors’ intention as to whether the respective text should be immediately published or not. With the Children’s Eyes. At the end of the 1960s, many GDR authors representing the postwar generation mentioned above had already become parents. It was their children who were supposed to grow up in a better world, a society that would be the other to Auschwitz. It is the eyes of the authors’ own children through which everyday life in the GDR is examined. Here it is particularly the discovery of similarities between educational methods and public rituals in the GDR and the NS-era, that even in the private discourse of diaries and letters, initially not designed for publication, can be denominated only against internal resistance. Reflections on the consequences that might be drawn from these observations succumb to taboos, imposed by the author himself. That the acting out of brutal violence can be understood as psychic preformation for the functioning in a fascist or comparable system can be found in published texts too, for instance in the novella Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968) by Christa Wolf, where the first person narrator understands violence against animals as a recurrent theme, leading from the behavior of the fascist tenant in the village of the protagonist’s childhood to her pupils in the GDR during the early 1960s. But in the published text the protagonist Christa T. takes a surprising turn, arguing that her pupils are indeed still prone to violence, but that the political order prevailing in the GDR would prevent them from living out those dispositions.

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