Apokalypse: Wann ist denn nun Weltuntergang? (GEO eBook Single) (German Edition)

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The bubble keeps the temperature on the moon at an acceptable level for life. Also he is taken aback by the metallic aspect and taste of the salad leaves. He discovers also that Rhea moon is inhabited by fantastic birds and animals stepping on each other in their rush to grab food. The pilot accompanies her to the time flying machine and plays for her a DVD. At this moment the story introduces a highly sensitive deviation of the plot towards it final conclusion.

The princess plants the first seed of her desire to travel to Earth with the pilot and learn to compose Mozartian music. Everything is set for the pilot and the princess to instantly fly to Earth. The reception of both of them on Earth is overwhelming, on the launching pad as well as the conservatory of music. He's only one man, how is he supposed to save an entire nation? Her parents abandoned them because she became blind for no reason. But how can she explain the stranger who made her different when he doesn't exist.

When she gets in accident the boy saves her only the boy is the stranger who made her blind can she forgive him or will she hate him. Als ihre blinde Nichte Rhea dann noch bei ihr auftaucht, beginnt das Chaos erst recht. Aber sie rauft sich zusammen,so gut es eben geht. Die Borg erscheinen auf dem Planeten, und gerade als Chen akzeptiert, dass sie assimiliert werden wird, wird der Lieutenant zweitausend Lichtjahre weit weg transportiert.

Im Herzen des Clusters befindet sich nun ein Borgschiff. Abgeschnitten vom Rest des Borg-Kollektivs, darf die Einstein sich nicht wieder mit ihm vereinigen. Writers continued to identify with their role as active educators and social pedagogues, sometimes even beyond The other thing that persisted was the remarkable fact that the dissent and opposition of the authors mentioned so far found expression almost exclusively from a position of Marxism or socialism.

David Bathrick has explored why critical dissent in the political and literary field of the GDR unlike in the other Eastern bloc countries, especially Poland and the Soviet Union was a genuinely Marxist one. After twelve years of Nazi rule, and the experience of Holocaust, critics of the system in the GDR could neither draw on an uncompromised national heritage nor were the religious traditions of the country suitable for establishing a counter position, as in Poland, for example. On the other hand, Marx s work, especially his early work, like the Paris Manuscripts, offered philosophical maxims from which a true socialism, socialism with a human face, could be construed.

In Bathrick s words, Like Luther, their [the authors ] original intent was very much a move toward reformation and revision and not a total abandonment of doctrinal adherence or even a break with the institutional church. And again like Luther, the political consequences of such heresy led them far afield of their imagined political goals. In this sense the protestant habitus or self-styling of authors within the Marxist fold e. The Wende of presented a number of such reform socialist authors with a peculiar paradox.

With the collapse of the GDR they lost their symbolic capital and privileged position as mouthpieces for the dissemination of true socialism and a kind. When they fell from their pedestals and were heaped with public scorn and mockery during the German literary debate of , they definitively lost the representative status they had clung on to for so long. One should not, however, forget that there was a quite different category of real martyrs created in the GDR: Few fates are more telling with regard to the effects of the socialist illusion on the life and work of GDR authors than that of Christa Wolf.

In the early post-war years this habitus became synonymous with the teleology of Marxism. But gradually, with increasing disillusionment over the decades, not only did this become questionable as an ideological credo but the deeply rooted habitus itself also crumbled at least in part. The author remains tied to a specific discourse genetically linked with Marxism but not really actually Marxist and to central concepts like alienation or utopia, as demonstrated by the final entries in her diary publication Ein Tag im Jahr One Day a Year of Although rare in the years leading up to her death in , all the authors media pronouncements and appearances, or to put it another way, her acts of self-stylization, bear the characteristic traces of this disposition, which developed over decades.

In the s, a fourth generation of writers who had been born in the s and s began to write and finally abandoned this demanding role. The lasting impact of these authors Wolfgang Hilbig counts as an important forerunner is that they broke free from the self-imposed fealty to the GDR system, something that older writers were never quite able to do.

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Of course, the scene was infiltrated by informers working for the Ministry of State Security or Stasi Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski , which undermined their credibility considerably. From chronotope to third space. East Germany and its literature after The Wende of seemed, on the face of it at least, to spell the end of GDR literature. The GDR s model of a Literaturgesellschaft collapsed very quickly and almost completely, and was replaced by Western institutions and structures with the literary market at their centre. Within a very short time in the s other spaces appeared instead of the generally closed time-space that had characterized the GDR.

These new spaces require some brief explanation. The 9th of November marked the beginning of the end of the GDR s spatial and temporal borders; by October , when the two German states were unified, these borders had ceased to exist entirely. The new West-plus-East Germany that came into being the title of Christian Kracht s novel Faserland is appropriate here 50 resembles a virtual third space in the sense described by Edward W.

Soja 51 and Homi K. Bhabha, 52 in which different ideologies, mentalities, forms of habitus, writerly self-understanding and approaches to writing come together, as well as more fundamental differences such as ethnicity, religion and language. As Arjun Appadurai has said, groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous. In an age characterized by immigration and globalization, what once constituted GDR literature is being constantly reintegrated into the field of German literature, which itself has been homogenized by economic factors and the media as well as in people s minds.

Moreover, the distinctive quality of such literature is increasingly dissipating as a result of a daily. Authors from the former GDR are now only a small, albeit important, group among many. The older East German authors in particular had to recalibrate their identities as authors; others sealed themselves off within their old identities as was the case with Hermann Kant and Peter Hacks, for example.

In a period that has seen the German nation become more transcultural, the West German memory space and the cultural memory that had developed there, and which previously seemed so fixed, have now also changed. The conflict between the two German post-war cultures and literatures that dominated the early s, and to which we can apply Aleida Assmann s threefold notion of legitimization, delegitimization and distinction, 54 still continues but is certainly less intense or existentially loaded than it was fifteen or twentyfive years ago.

For the older GDR authors those over sixty , it is still a matter of distinction: Younger authors, on the other hand, have long since developed hybrid identities as writers. This was only to be expected since the majority of them have by now spent long periods in the west, whether in France, Italy or New York. These younger authors, whether from East or West Germany, are not at all disturbed by the growing number of authors of other ethnicities and religions or even from other parts of the world who write and publish in German with, in some cases, exceptional results.

Nor are they or their readers concerned by the number of translated texts from all over the world, novels especially, which have intruded into and broadened the German literary sphere. The notion of a national literature is increasingly questionable. Salman Rushdie s phrase, We all are translated men is apposite. The German family novel, which will soon span four generations, will need to be written anew.

GDR literature will also be increasingly considered in European and Western contexts, and its aesthetic standards will come to be discussed in the context of international trends such as modernism and postmodernism. One consequence of this will be that GDR literature s failings will become more apparent e. Roman in 23 Paarungen Munich: Bertelsmann, , though it has little to do with the issues addressed in this chapter.

Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics , in Michael Holquist ed. Four Essays Austin, London: University of Texas Press, , pp Ibid. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften Bielefeld: Hanser, , pp. Volk und Wissen, , pp Ibid. Raddatz, Eine dritte deutsche Literatur.

Stichworte zu Texten der Gegenwart. Zur deutschen Literatur, 3 Reinbek: Vereinnahmung und Ausgrenzung in der ostdeutschen Wiedergutmachung Berlin: Metropol, , p Wo sind wir zuhause? Zur Psycho- Analyse deutscher Wenden Berlin: Aufbau, , pp See also the. Zweiter Abschnitt [], in Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. Kunde von einem verlorenen Land Berlin: Aufbau, , p.

Westdeutscher Verlag, , pp ; p The term habitus is fundamental to most of Bourdieu s work. See especially Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Wallstein , p. Uwe Johnson in a discussion about Two German Literatures? Transaction, , p For a fuller account of the Bitterfelder Weg see the chapter by Stephen Brockmann in this volume.

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope , trans. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Japhcott Stanford University Press, Compare Gerrit-Jan Berendse s chapter in this volume. Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland Munich: Christian Kracht, Faserland Cologne: The title plays on the English word fatherland, but spoken with a German accent with the sound s instead of th and calls to mind the association with a frayed zerfasert from fasern German fatherland. Bhabha, The Location of Culture London: Routledge, among other works by the same author.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Fink, , p. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism London: Literarische Genealogien und internationaler Kontext Munich: Hermlin, a German Jewish and also from to American author, was adept both in German and English: See Peter Hutchinson s introduction Stefan Heym. On 30 April the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, not far from where Red Army soldiers were fighting against German troops for control of the capital, and a week later German officials signed an unconditional surrender, first in Reims, France, on April 7 in the presence of American officers, and the next day, at Soviet insistence, in Berlin-Karlshorst in the presence of Soviet officers.

Most of the territory that was later to become the GDR was occupied by Soviet troops; however, American troops had reached the Elbe River to the northeast of Leipzig, at Torgau, and therefore a significant chunk of future East German territory that included the cities of Leipzig, Erfurt and Eisenach was initially occupied by Americans.

The entire city of Berlin, in contrast, was occupied by Soviet troops. A few months later, in July of , as decided at the Yalta conference in January of where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had agreed to divide Germany and its capital Berlin into clearly demarcated zones of occupation American troops withdrew to the borders of the future FRG, making room for Soviet occupiers; and in return Soviet troops withdrew from the western sectors of Berlin, making way for American, British and French troops there.

At the end of the Second World War Germany lost large chunks of its previous territory in the east, including the provinces of East Prussia, Silesia and eastern Pommerania, and almost all of the ethnic Germans living in those territories well over ten million fled westward, into what was left of Germany, both the future GDR and the future FRG. When the war ended, Allied authorities declared the German state to be non-existent and proclaimed that all political power lay in their hands alone.

The end of the Second World War in Germany thus differed significantly from that of the First World War, in which German troops had still occupied large swathes In contrast, at the end of the Second World War Germany was occupied by foreign powers, it contained large numbers of German and non-german refugees and any central government controlled by Germans had ceased to exist.

Moreover, most of the country s major cities, including Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich, Leipzig and Dresden, had been badly damaged by massive bombing raids in which tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. When he returned to Berlin on 2 May after spending the years of the Hitler dictatorship in Moscow, the German communist Wolfgang Leonhard found, as he later recalled, a picture of hell flaming ruins and starving people shambling about in tattered clothing.

It could be seen that the red ones had been recently converted from swastika flags. From his exile in California, Thomas Mann, Germany s most famous living writer, proclaimed on the BBC on 8 May that our shame lies open to the eyes of the world, and that everything German, everyone who speaks German, writes German, has lived in German, is affected by this shameful revelation.

As overblown as this rhetoric may sound today, Mann was not exaggerating. Although he was referring primarily to the death camps, the shame of which Mann spoke included all the crimes of the Nazi regime, with which even German anti-nazis were associated. Humanity shudders in horror at Germany! Of course we who would not have been victors if Hitler had won, are defeated along with him.

It was clear at the end of the war that a high level of cultural development did not necessarily. The fact that the same nation had produced both Beethoven and the Nazi death camps, both the Goethe of Weimar and the Buchenwald concentration camp only a few miles away from Weimar, was widely noted. The exiled Germanist Richard Alewyn proclaimed in , the th anniversary year of Goethe s birth, Between us and Weimar lies Buchenwald.

A German patriot might try in various ways to dissociate himself from Germany, Alewyn argued, but what will not work [ There are only Goethe and Hitler, humanity and bestiality. Germany s division into two countries and involvement in the Cold War that followed the Second World War was to acquire a sense of inevitability in later years, but at the beginning of May nothing seemed inevitable but German defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union, the United States and their Allies.

While the division of Germany into military zones of occupation had been decided on at Yalta in January of , there had been no decision to create two separate German states, and many Germans hoped that the four zones of occupation American, British, Soviet and French would eventually become part of a unified German state as indeed they ultimately did in , far later than most had imagined at the end of the Second World War.

When, at the German writers conference that was held in Berlin in October of , during a period of increasing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the assembled authors approved a resolution proclaiming the irrevocable unity of the fatherland and declaring literature itself to be a band of unity above and beyond all zonal boundaries and political positions, they were expressing the heartfelt wishes of many patriots, not just literary intellectuals. This meant that in both the east and the west, German politicians approach to the formation of a new German state was dependent on their beliefs about the reasons for Nazism s triumph or, alternatively, that German politicians adjusted their beliefs about the reason for Nazism s triumph to the nature of the state in which they lived or hoped to live.

In the west, Nazism was seen above all as a turning away from Christianity, and therefore one of the major responses to Nazism was the creation of the Christian Democratic Union CDU as a. For communists and socialists, however, the Nazi regime had above all been a capitalist regime, in accordance with the so-called Dimitrov thesis named after Georgi Mikhailov Dimitrov, the major twentieth-century leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the General Secretary of the Communist International Comintern from to which defined the Nazi dictatorship as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capitalism.

It was precisely this that Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the so-called Gruppe Ulbricht Ulbricht Group , undertook to do when he and nine other exiled members of the German Communist Party KPD , including the future renegade Wolfgang Leonhard, Karl Maron the father of the East German writer Monika Maron and Fritz Erpenbeck the father of the German scientist and writer John Erpenbeck and grandfather of the writer Jenny Erpenbeck flew from their exile in Moscow back to Germany on 30 April , which was, coincidentally, also the day of Hitler s suicide. It was Ulbricht s task to organize the restructuring of the KPD which of course had been illegal under the Nazi dictatorship in the defeated country and to work towards what was termed an antifascist-democratic transformation of Germany.

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As Leonhard later recalled, All we knew was that, according to our directives, we had a political mission to carry out, the target of which was Fascism and its remnants, and the purpose of which was the transformation of Germany into a democracy. As Ulbricht put it many years later, he and his fellow communists believed that their primary goal ought to be the creation of antifascistdemocratic administrative units and cooperation in the removal of the remnants of fascism and in overcoming the distress of the population. I believed that after the destruction of Hitler s army the Soviet Union would selflessly help the German antifascists and democrats to build up a new, democratic Germany.

Becher, who like so many. Becher immediately went about setting up an antifascist cultural organization called the Cultural Federation for the Democratic Renewal of Germany Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands , which was officially recognized in all of Berlin s sectors by mid-july. The Kulturbund was to play a major role in the GDR s cultural life for the next four decades; and Becher himself was one of the dominant figures in East German cultural development for over a decade, becoming the nation s first Minister of Culture in Also playing a key role in cultural development at this time was the communist functionary Anton Ackermann, who, in an official manifesto of June , proclaimedthekpdtobethe protector of the vital interests of the German nation and emphasized the party s interest in working not just with socialists and communists but with all forces opposed to Nazism, with the ultimate political goal being the establishment of parliamentary democracy, not a communist dictatorship.

Both of these Soviet military men brought with them an appreciation for the accomplishments of German culture coupled with the determination to transform Germany into a country that would no longer pose a threat to Soviet security. As Tulpanov later recalled, Our goal was to preserve all the treasures of German culture, especially what the fascists had appropriated and besmirched. We could not give up everything that the fascists had claimed for themselves. We had to purify it. Ultimately the German Democratic Republic, which was founded in October of , over four years after the end of the war, became a socialist dictatorship governed almost exclusively by one party although other parties did exist ; but it is.

After all, it is not clear whether the mere fact of the existence of a socialist Germany was really that important to Soviet leaders more important, for instance, than reparations payments from the far wealthier western part of the country, which was where Germany s major industrial region, the Ruhr, was located. The Soviet zone, in contrast, was far less heavily industrialized.

At any rate, as the hot Second World War between Germany and the Allies was rapidly supplanted by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Stalin s intentions with respect to Germany were never seriously put to the test by western powers, and by the end of the division of Germany became increasingly inevitable.

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German communists determination to transform Germany into a peaceful, unthreatening country, and their desire to work with other antifascists, predated the end of the Second World War. Already in the mids, not long after Hitler s accession to power in January of ,the communists had worked towards what they called a Popular Front Volksfront , which was intended to involve all antifascists from the relatively conservative but democratic bourgeoisie to the communists left-wing rivals, the Social Democrats in the common struggle against Nazism.

In order to make this effort convincing, communists needed to downplay their long-range goal for a dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of the KPD and instead stress the common element that connected them to bourgeois and Social Democratic antifascists: Since, until Hitler s accession to power, the KPD had been involved in an extremely bitter internecine feud with the SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany , even calling the Social Democrats social fascists, it is clear that the communists proclamation of a Volksfront in the mids was to a large extent a tactical move intended to preserve and expand communist influence in a period of great danger, when both the KPD and the SPD were banned in Germany, along with any other non-nazi political party.

However, even though much of the Volksfront rhetoric was tactical, it had a powerful impact in the s and s, and many Germans communists as well as non-communists took it seriously. The first major goal of the KPD in the Soviet zone, after the refounding of the party, was unification of the KPD with the SPD, a goal that was achieved in the Soviet zone but not in the western zones in April of , with the cooperation of the SPD leader Otto Grotewohl and with the exertion of considerable pressure on any members of the SPD who opposed the conjoining of the two parties.

The unification of the two. Walter Ulbricht and other communists trumpeted this unification as one of the signal achievements of German history more generally, since in their view it meant the unification of a working class whose bitter division, they believed, had helped make Hitler s triumphs possible; they hoped that the fusion of the two parties would make it possible to create a more progressive Germany and prevent a return to Nazism. As Walter Ulbricht was to put it later, the unification of the SPD and the KPD to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany became the turning point in Germany s history, making it possible to prevent the revival of the rule of monopoly capitalism, of neo-nazism, and of colonialism in one part of Germany and to create a strong bastion of peace in Germany.

It is this Volksfront rhetoric that one hears in many of the proclamations of German communists from the mids, and that led to the establishment of the Democratic Block an umbrella organization for all legal antifascist parties in July of ; five years later the Democratic Block was to become the National Front, which was responsible for carrying out the GDR s elections. The National Front also included the leaders of major antifascist organizations, such as Johannes R. Communist tactics in the immediate post-war period were based on at the very least the appearance of inclusiveness, and this emphasis on inclusiveness was to last until the end of the GDR, even if in practice it was always the SED that pulled the strings.

Also, leading cultural figures like Johannes R. Becher were generally willing to go along with the tactics of the SED even when they disagreed with them because of their support of the SED s proclaimed overall strategy, that is, the creation of a socialist Germany. This was true even of a writer as critical as Brecht, who, although he disagreed, for instance, with the SED s brutal response to the Culture always played an important role in the thinking of communist leaders for a number of reasons.

For tactical political reasons an emphasis on culture was well suited for the creation of broad constituencies that would include not just communists but other Germans as well. Not all Germans were in agreement on the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat, but most Germans could agree on respect and esteem for the accomplishments of German culture, and in the assessment that Germany at the end of the Second World War had reached a historical and cultural nadir.

In many of the proclamations of major communist cultural figures from the mids, one sees virtually no specific mention of communism but instead much broader mentions of the need for a democratic transformation of German culture. In September of , at a meeting of German communist intellectuals in Moscow, Becher gave a speech on the re-education of the German people, proclaiming that this would be both political and cultural: In the political and moral attitude of our people we must now give clear, strong, convincing, shining expression to this rich heritage of humanism, of classicism, to the rich heritage of the workers movement.

Our classicism never corresponded to a classical politics. On the contrary, in our political actions we always acted against our best traditions. We were never able to find a political expression that corresponded to those high cultural achievements. We must now get beyond this unholy contradiction between intellect and power, which has led to the worst catastrophe in our history, and which ultimately even destroyed any free intellectual activity.

We had to purify it quoted above. As Becher argued in , on the occasion of the th anniversary of Goethe s birth, if Goethe had been alive among the German people, then his living strength would have engendered such an overpowering hatred of Nazi barbarism that the movement would have failed at the very beginning. Klemperer wrote in that the solution to Nazism had to be a renewed emphasis on German cultural traditions. The Nazis, Klemperer argued, represented the most extreme opposite of the basic views of the German classical era, and therefore the response to Nazism s devastation of the country had to be Further down the path of culture!

Nevertheless, the relatively uncritical celebration of traditional German culture in the GDR did separate its culture from that of the FRG, where attacks by Alewyn or the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, not to mention the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno, on cultural smugness began to have a major cultural impact by the s.

In contrast, the classical heritage was celebrated and upheld in the GDR; this celebration informed, for instance, the career of the great GDR playwright Peter Hacks and was to find an echo, many years after the GDR s demise, in the complaint by a character in Uwe Tellkamp s novel Der Turm The Tower, that Goethe is the generalissimo of opinions and the prince of feelings; because he is the engraving-king of the quotation-coins. Instead, communist literary intellectuals, for the most part, wanted to use traditional literary and artistic forms in order to support a radically new social and economic structure; this created a tension between political radicalism, on the one hand, and artistic conservatism, on the other, that was difficult for many progressive intellectuals, such as Brecht, to put up with; but put up with it he and many others did.

Movements like Expressionism were politically and aesthetically suspect because they were believed to represent decadence and decline rather than strength and optimism, and any literary intellectuals who questioned the validity of German cultural traditions were likely to come in for stinging criticism. The irony of this, of course, was that artistic and literary experimenters had been subjected to eerily similar criticisms during the so-called Third Reich.

Although similarities between literature and literary criticism in the Third Reich and the GDR should not be exaggerated because there were significant differences, especially the focus in the GDR on realism and on economic and work life, as well as the virtually total absence of real literary or artistic battles within the Third Reich these similarities are nevertheless disturbing.

In the run-up to the celebrations of the th anniversary of Goethe s birth, when Karl Jaspers expressed scepticism about the relevance of Goethe for the post-holocaust world, the Soviet military officer Alexander Dymschitz castigated Jaspers and proclaimed Goethe to be the herald of Germany s nationalunity. Becher, who succeeded in luring Thomas Mann to Weimar for the Goethe celebration that year, also spoke out against the existentialist blather about Goethe s inability to grasp the whole problematic of the human being, arguing that, in contrast to the misery of existentialism, we find in Goethe that fear has been overcome, sothathuman beings can raise themselves in triumph even over death.

Given the relatively conservative cultural predilections of German communist literary intellectuals, as well as communists proclaimed wish to cooperate with all other antifascists, including bourgeois intellectuals, in the rebuilding of Germany, it is no coincidence that one of the first major literary-cultural battles in the young GDR occurred in over a work that was perceived as. Hanns Eisler, a distinguished leftist composer and writer who had spent the years of the Nazi dictatorship in exile in the United States like Eisler s friend and colleague Brecht, with whom Eisler frequently collaborated had published excerpts from the libretto to his planned opera Johann Faustus in the second half of Incontrastto Goethe, who had ended his complex two-part play with the salvation, not the damnation, of Faust, Eisler depicted Faust in a highly negative way: As Eisler interpreted his own drama, He who rejects and betrays his people, the movement of his people and the revolution, by making a pact with the rulers, is the Devil sprize.

For more traditionalist communist intellectuals, Eisler s drama represented an intolerable attack on Germany s proud cultural heritage. Three meetings were held at Berlin s Academy of the Arts in the spring of to discuss Eisler s Johann Faustus, and most of the speakers were fiercely critical of it. Alexander Abusch proclaimed that certain of our artists have not thought deeply enough about the fundamental questions of our patriotic struggle and have thus not developed a genuine relationship with the great inheritance of our national literature, and he called Goethe s Faust a great, positive hero of our classical national drama even though Goethe s Faust had by no means been an unambiguously positive figure.

In Girnus s view, A conception which sees German history as nothing but Misere, and which lacks an appreciation of the creative potential of the people, is false. This false conception necessarily goes hand in hand with a false understanding of questions of realism in artistic form and aesthetics. Such artists devotion to the goal of a socialist Germany is evident in Eisler s letter to the Central Committee: Yet I cannot hope to find the motivation to write music again, which is what keeps me alive, anywhere but in the German Democratic Republic. The primary aesthetic approach championed by communists from the s onward was socialist realism, which was associated in the Soviet Union with Stalin s ideological henchman Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov.

Socialist realism, promulgated in the Soviet Union in , wasalso adopted in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and in the later GDR, and it was championed by most communist writers as well as by party intellectuals like Alexander Abusch, who would succeed Johannes R. Becher as Minister of Culture in Socialist realism was supposed to provide a realistic depiction of human life from a socialist perspective; antirealism and antisocialism were frowned upon. Socialist-realist literature was also supposed to feature a positive hero the kind of hero that Abusch had seen in Goethe sfaust in practice such a figure was often a member of the working class that the reader could identify with and look up to; and, since socialism implied an optimistic philosophy of history, socialist-realist literature was supposed to convey optimism about the future.

In practice there were often conflicts between realism, on the one hand, and optimism, on the other, since the real situation of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was hardly a pleasant one. The emphasis among party intellectuals on socialist realism also led to predictable disagreements not only between socialist and non-socialist writers but also between the party s own ideologues, such as Becher and Abusch, and the GDR s most famous and talented writers and artists people like Brecht and Eisler, who favoured a more modernist approach than most party ideologues were comfortable with, and who tended to be, as demonstrated by Eisler s Johann Faustus, more critical of traditional German culture.

In spite of such disagreements, both Eisler and Brecht supported the socialist German state, and both created art that explicitly supported it. In the s, for instance, when the dictates of socialist realism not to mention the need to rebuild Germany, which found expression in the title of the Kulturbund s journalaufbau literally: Such works, not surprisingly, tended to dispense with psychological complexity even as they celebrated the world of labour; but.

The emphasis on the world of work ultimately led to the Bitterfeld Conference of and the so-called Bitterfelder Weg in the s, in which GDR writers were encouraged to focus on production, while GDR workers were encouraged to write. At its best, socialist realism was able to focus on the world of work and production in ways rarely equalled by the literature of the west. The problem with Becher s words after was that the words Deutschland, einig Vaterland Germany, united fatherland , which had corresponded to communist policy in , no longer corresponded to the SED s approach in the s and s, which emphasized the GDR s self-sufficiency rather than German unity.

Since the GDR was typically one of the most prolific winners of medals at Olympic events, an international audience thus got to witness the spectacle of the best East German athletes standing in silence while Eisler s music. The GDR is probably the only case in world history of a country in which the words to its own official national anthem were in effect banned. Most of the best German writers such as Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, Bertolt Brecht, and the great novelist Anna Seghers had left the country during the Nazi dictatorship.

After the end of the Third Reich, one of the primary questions for German culture was whether these writers would return to their homeland, and if so, to which part of Germany: One of Johannes R. Becher s great accomplishments as leader of the Kulturbund was that he encouraged such people to return. In November of the Kulturbund issued a proclamation to German emigrants, who, it claimed, had preserved Germany s honour, and who, in word and deed have publicly vouched for the fact that the true, free German spirit still lives and breathes and that its victory is certain.

Seghers wrote some of the most moving fictional depictions of German history in the twentieth century, and her novels Das siebte Kreuz The Seventh Cross, and Die Toten bleiben jung The Dead Stay Young, , both about the communist resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, became standard reading in the GDR. After his return to Berlin, Brecht together with his wife Helene Weigel established the Berliner Ensemble from on in Berlin s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, and it was in this and other Berlin theatres that Brecht, after fifteen years of exile from his homeland, was finally able to produce some of the plays that he had written during his years of exile: In the arena of culture, then, it is fair to say that the GDR and not the West German Federal Republic was able to attract the most famous and influential exile writers.

As Brecht wrote in response to the West German writer Wolfgang Weyrauch, who had criticized him for writing lyrics in support of the East German state, I havemyopinionsnot because I am here; rather, I am here because I have my opinions. The novella is about a former SS man who once worked in a Nazi concentration camp, where he almost certainly participated in the oppression of anti-nazi resistance fighters.

Like so many other real and fictional Nazis at the end of the Second World War, this man does not quite know how to respond to the utter defeat of Nazism, a movement that had previously been so triumphant and that had worshipped power and success. The protagonist s world is both literally and figuratively shattered. In order to hide from justice, he takes on a false name: Ultimately the protagonist even becomes a communist and a member of the SED, but over time it becomes increasingly difficult for him to live a double life, especially when the entire meaning of history seems to be opened up to him through his study of Marxism-Leninism.

In other words, increasingly the Nazi protagonist becomes a communist, and this transformation is not just one of convenience but one of deep conviction. In the end the protagonist s deceptionis discovered, and he is stripped of his party membership and must begin all over again, using his real name. This figure is hardly the stereotypical positive hero that critics in both the east and the west tended to expect from socialist realism; rather, he is a deeply problematic, flawed, but, therefore, also realistically portrayed human being. In this novella the real positive hero, the resistance fighter whose name the protagonist has appropriated, is dead and therefore never able to make an appearance.

Seghers s novella depicts an archetypal situation of the immediate post-war period. The GDR was a socialist state founded on the ruins of a Nazi state dedicated to the elimination of what its leaders perceived as Jewish socialism, and many of its citizens had been ardent Nazis prior to the foundation of the GDR. Just as Seghers s protagonist is trying to transform himself from a Nazi into a communist, so too the German Democratic Republic proclaimed a desire to transform a Nazi Germany into a socialist Germany.

That this transformation would be difficult is admitted in the conclusion to the novella: Es wird nicht leicht sein It won t be easy. Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, trans. Regnery, , p. Aufbau and Suhrkamp, , p Here and elsewhere, translations from German-language sources are my own unless otherwise noted. Literatur zwischen Hoffnung und Repression Berlin: Fischer, , pp Johannes R. Aufbau, , pp ; p Johannes R.

Der Befreier, in Karl Robert Mandelkow ed. Beck, , pp ; p Victor Klemperer, Kultur: Neues Leben, , p. Brecht, tellingly, wrote a much less celebratory alternative to this national anthem entitled Kinderhymne Children s Anthem , which emphasized not triumphalism but the ordinariness of German post-war aspirations: Brecht, Children s Anthem trans. Edith Roseveare, in Brecht, Poems , ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim London: Aufbau, , pp ; p. Outlining the Soviet Union s vision of a programme of de-nazification and political re-education in Germany, he left his audience in no doubt of the importance of developing a new generation of filmmakers committed to a democratic antifascist cinema.

Becher, peace was the continuation of the war against fascism by other means, mainly ideological means. The situation for left-leaning German filmmakers at the end of the Second World War was very different to that with which the writers of fiction and poetry were confronted. Whereas the latter could draw on an existing tradition of antifascist literature produced in exile, progressive filmmakers had to look back to the era of Expressionism and to the proletarian cinema of the Weimar Republic for their inspiration.

And while everyone agreed that the model to be avoided was the aesthetic legacy of Ufa Universum Film AG the principal German film company during the Weimar Republic with its infamous factory of dreams, embarking on a new direction was to prove problematic, not least because most of those recruited to the early DEFA production teams had learned their craft at Ufa during the s. Just how difficult breaking with the past could be is exemplified by Kurt Maetzig s Ehe im Schatten Marriage in the Shadows, In it we witness the tragic story of a successful actor named Hans Wieland, whose Jewish wife, the actress Elizabeth Maurer, is banned from appearing on stage by the Nazis.

Having achieved fame for their pre performances of the eighteenth-century dramatist Friedrich Schiller s play Kabale und Liebe Love and Intrigue , the couple find themselves forced to perform their stage roles in real life when, in a melodramatic quasi-schillerian Liebestod at the end of the film, Hans poisons Elizabeth s tea before drinking from the same cup himself. Yet despite being one of the first films to address questions of Jewish victimhood during the Nazi period, its exaggerated pathos obscures, rather than clarifies, the historical reasons for Elizabeth s persecution.

A resounding success with the viewing public across all four sectors of divided Berlin when first released on 3 October , it was, perhaps inevitably, condemned by Brecht as terrible kitsch! Nonetheless, as the popularity of Ehe im Schatten demonstrated, breaking with the past placed demands not only on filmmakers but on audiences too: I adopted this style of cinematography partly out of a sense of uncertainty, Maetzig conceded, [b]ut also from a desire to meet the expectations of my target audience.

Not surprisingly, filmmakers at DEFA soon found that the fuzzy definitions of antifascism with which they had been working hitherto were to be subjected to a much greater degree of ideological control. In contrast to filmmakers of a liberal political persuasion in the west, who portrayed fascism as a form of political totalitarianism that could only be countered through guarantees of individual freedom backed up by the promotion of a system of liberal parliamentary democracy, antifascist filmmakers in the east found themselves increasingly under pressure to follow the so-called Dimitrov doctrine of Named after the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, this theory portrayed fascism as an essentially economic phenomenon, defining it as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.

An early casualty of this shift in cultural policy was Falk Harnack s Das Beil von Wandsbek The Axe of Wandsbek, , a film about a Hamburg butcher recruited by the Nazis to execute four members of the antifascist resistance. Withdrawn by the DEFA studio management, ostensibly because of its failure to condemn the central character outright, Harnack s film served as a warning that such psychologically oriented approaches to the question of Nazi collaboration to say nothing of the questions the film raised about the appointment of former Nazis to positions of political prominence in the GDR would no longer be tolerated.

Drawing on Richard Sasuly s study I. Farben and documents from the Nuremberg trials, Maetzig and his scriptwriters, Friedrich Wolf and Philipp Gecht, set out to expose the company s involvement in supporting Hitler. In keeping with the prevailing Dimitrov doctrine, the film posits a link between monopolistic capitalism and fascism; and as in many DEFA productions of the s, Hitler is portrayed as a weak individual, wholly dependent for his political survival on the grace and favour of the gods of monopoly capitalism.

Yet while few questioned the role played by heavy industry in supporting Hitler during the s, what made Maetzig s film so controversial and led to it being banned in the Federal Republic was its depiction of the agreement struck between the firm I. By exchanging a range of lucrative patents for an assurance that, in the event of an aerial war, the German industrial plant will be spared, each company ensures its continued economic survival in the post-war period.

As the chairman of I. Farben, Mauch, and his American counterpart, Mr Lawson, meet in Switzerland to discuss the division of the post-war world into spheres of influence, the film depicts a world dominated not by politicians, but by global capitalists whose common enemy is the Soviet Union and the international labour movement.

At the time of its release and for long afterwards Maetzig insisted that his film was not a work of propaganda targeted at the Federal Republic, but an accurate account of historical events. As Maetzig acknowledged, it is scarcely possible to do justice to the complex relationship between monopoly capitalism, fascism and military conflict in a film lasting just minutes.

However, his claim that Der Rat. Although the intertitles indicate that the action takes place in the Rhineland industrial zone in , the first clearly recognizable image is a shot of the I. Farben building in Frankfurt am Main. Yet the real enemy in the film is not Hitler and his capitalist backers, but rather the SPD the social fascists Sozialfaschisten whose failure to endorse the radical economic policies of the KPD is instrumental in facilitating Hitler s rise to power.

When Pablo s lover, Magdalena, is killed by a German bomb he is filled with a hatred of everything German; nonetheless, his subsequent encounter with the International Brigades teaches him that not all Germans are fascists. While the didactic thrust of Paryla s rather wooden production was hardly subtle, it did reflect the changing landscape of German-German politics during the Cold War. East German cinema-viewers could hardly have failed to map the contrasting representations of German military action in Paryla s film onto the political developments of and, in particular, the recent integration of the Federal Republic into the NATO alliance.

For, as Stefan Soldovieri has argued, the release in the west of Harald Reinl s Solange du lebst As Long As You Live in an anticommunist film inspired by the climate of McCarthyism in which a young German pilot helps liberate a Spanish village from the oppressive rule of the Republican forces had addressed the need to provide citizens in the Federal Republic with positive images of German suffering and sacrifice in military combat. Even more important for an understanding of the film s presentation of military conflict, however, were developments in the East German Ministry for National Defence and the creation of the National People s Army NVA in Although the NVA remained a voluntary professional army up until , compulsory military service had already been introduced into the FRG in Fearful that rumours of compulsory military service in the GDR would swell the ranks of those already emigrating to the west, the SED also sought to use the Spanish Civil War as a source of inspiring images of military action for East Germans that were untainted by any association with the Second World War, and which could be exploited to bolster feelings of solidarity in the Cold War and ongoing struggle against global fascism.

It shows the German Commander Witting played by the archetypal antifascist actor Erwin Geschonneck entrusting five members of his International Brigade with what they mistakenly believe to be part of a document outlining the fascist forces plan of attack.

When they finally reach the headquarters of their retreating brigade, they discover that contained within the spent cartridge each has been carrying is not the enemy s battle plan, but a message from their dying commander which, when reassembled, reads, Stay together. That way you will survive.

Working for the first time with a so-called optisches Drehbuch a storyboard on which details of the camerawork were meticulously planned Beyer and his team explored new ways in which the drama of Walter Gorrish s screenplay could be conveyed not through dialogue, but through a visual language based on the stylized depiction of the heroic masculine body. This modernist approach to film aesthetics that combined elements of neorealism and quasi-expressionist cinematography was further enhanced through the use of montage, most notably in the Russian Wasja s stream of hallucinatory images as he searches for water.

It is, of course, tempting to see this departure from conventional socialist-realist aesthetics as a rejection on Beyer s part of the grand filmic narratives of DEFA s antifascist cinema. Yet, as Sabine Hake has argued, it is important not to fall into the trap of equating filmic experimentation with expressions of political dissent. Erwin Geschonneck as Heinrich Witting. In part, this change of direction can be explained in terms of the traumatic legacy of the infamous Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December , a process that saw twelve films banned and a number of writers and filmmakers subjected to scathing attacks.

Following the building of the Berlin Wall in and the landmark Kafka conference of in Liblice, a number of filmmakers felt sufficiently confident to explore ways in which the antifascist genre might be reworked aesthetically. Barlach had always been a controversial figure in the GDR, and the first major.

However, Der verlorene Engel had the distinction of being the only film not set in the contemporary GDR to be banned in the wake of the Eleventh Plenum. Anxious that DEFA should not be cut off from developments in new-wave cinema in both Western and Eastern Europe, and keen to build on the modernist agenda he had embraced with his own nouvelle vague-inspired adaptation of Der geteilte Himmel Divided Heaven, , Wolf chose to return once again to what many regarded as the safe haven of the antifascist genre with his next film Ich war neunzehn I Was Nineteen, However, in embedding the narrative of Ich war neunzehn within a modernist aesthetic, Wolf sought to address a new generation of East German cinema audiences who had come to take an increasingly sceptical view of the heroic master narratives of antifascism.

Both thematically and formally, Ich war neunzehn is a film that invites the viewer to reflect on the role played by the media and indeed all forms of representation in constructing history and memory. The crucial role played by the radio in mediating knowledge of the course of the war is emphasized during the discussions that take place between Gregor, Vadim and the Wehrmacht officers in the Spandau citadel: By contrast, a more low-key example of the interplay between memory and representation is to be found when Gregor enters the room of an elderly woman who has committed suicide, and we follow his gaze as his eyes wander over a collection of photographs attempting to piece together the victim s life from the still images of relatives and events from the past.

Filmed in the manner of a documentary using a handheld camera, the seemingly unmediated objective film record is overlain with Gregor s subjective view of this past life. This issue is highlighted when a young German girl comes to seek refuge in the military headquarters, or Kommandatura, in Bernau. Not surprisingly the issue of German women raped by Soviet troops had been a taboo subject in conventional antifascist discourses of the s and s in the GDR. The issue of rape though never explicitly mentioned as such was considerably more prominent in Wolf s original treatment for the film than in its final realization; there we read that the Kommandatura was besieged not by one, but by women seeking shelter.

At the same time, during the violent quarrel that erupts between her and the young female Soviet soldier, the juxtaposition of the German girl s anxiety and protestations of innocence, on the one hand, and the account of the Russian girl s suffering, on the other, focuses the viewer s attention on the underlying and unresolved tensions not only within the bond between the GDR and the Soviet Union, but within the very concept of victimhood itself.

This episode is just one of a number of sequences in which the film highlights the effects of war on children; others include the child-soldier decorated by the SS officer in the Spandau citadel, the young Soviet soldier shot when a group of Germans commandeer a battalion of T34 tanks, and the little girl stranded in the midst of the firefight in the final episode of the film.

In each case, the vulnerability of the children is underscored in Wolf s stylized presentation of the body and in the use of long static shots that open up a discursive space for a process of melancholic reflection. No one embodies this child-like vulnerability more clearly than the film s central protagonist Gregor played by the young student-actor Jaecki Schwarz.

What makes Ich war neunzehn one of the most enduring German war films is precisely its refusal to ignore the complexities of victimhood; and in. Figure 3 Re-imagining the antifascist body. Jaecki Schwarz as Gregor Hecker. Ich war neunzehn I Was Nineteen , dir. Interpreting fascism as an essentially economic phenomenon constituted an almost insuperable obstacle to historiographical explanations of Jewish persecution grounded in racial theory and led to the privileging of communist members of the antifascist resistance rather than Jews as the victims of the Third Reich.

Moreover, all too often such references as there were to the Holocaust in East German political life were exploited not as an opportunity to embark upon a process of introspection within the GDR, but as a means of denigrating the neighbouring Federal Republic.

Despite such limitations, it is important nonetheless to remember that throughout its history DEFA produced a number of films tackling Jewish persecution and, in some cases, the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Although Wolf s German-Soviet background is central to an understanding of so many of his films, it should not be forgotten that his Jewish roots are evident not only in Sterne and Professor Mamlock but also in Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz The Naked Man on the Playing Field, , a film in which the central character, the sculptor Kemmel,. Yet despite the formal inventiveness of Marczinovsky s camerawork and Beyer s genuine attempt to focus the film on the conflict of reason and feeling in the contrasting reactions of the inmates triggered by the child s arrival, the viewer is left with a sense of unease.

For in portraying the members of the antifascist resistance simultaneously as both masters of their own destiny and saviours of the Jewish victim,the film also lays itself open to the charge of instrumentalizing Jewish issues in the service of an altogether different political agenda. Yet what renders Beyer s film so radical is the way in which it refuses to sentimentalize its subject matter; and at the end of the film, it is clear that there is no escape from the destination in which the train containing Jakob and the other deported Jews is heading.

By contrast, Peter Kassovitz s Hollywood remake of , Jakob the Liar, casts the central protagonist played by Robin Williams as an heroic figure of individual resistance and supplies an artificial happy ending in which the Jews incarcerated on the train are rescued by Russian troops.

Often dismissed unfairly as one-dimensional propagandist works, DEFA s antifascist films offer a unique insight into the shifting paradigms of both GDR cultural politics and East German film aesthetics. While early examples of antifascist cinema revealed an often remarkable degree of continuity with the traditions of Ufa, the introduction of new technology and the influence of newwave aesthetics in the work of Beyer and Wolf served to both affirm and call into question existing myths of antifascism in the GDR.

By the late s and early s, however, the antifascist genre appeared to have run its course as filmmakers found themselves increasingly unable to respond to the dilemma touched upon in Konrad Wolf s Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, namely the need to find new aesthetic forms conducive to a more differentiated approach to questions of victimhood and memories of the antifascist past.

However, Weiss s less-than-flattering depiction of the antifascist resistance as a web of paranoia, betrayal and mutual distrust a reading that inevitably invited parallels to be drawn with the Stasi and the surveillance society of the GDR in the final phase of its existence represented both the logical conclusion of the antifascist genre and, at the same time, its demise. Hitzeroth, , pp Johannes R. Becher, Zu unseren Kulturaufgaben, cited in Horst Haase ed. Leben und Werk [Schriftsteller der Gegenwart 1], 2nd edn Berlin: Volk und Wissen, , p Cf.

Henschel, , p Neuer Zug auf alten Gleisen. Documents Oxford University Press, , 3 vols. Sabine Hake, Political affects:

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