12 - Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures

Summary

… Reiß den neben dir

Aus dem tödlichen Schlaf: Es ist nicht Vietnam

Hörst du

Es ist nicht Vietnam!

[… Wrest the one beside you

from deadly sleep: It is not Vietnam

Do you hear

It is not Vietnam!]

—Inge Müller (1925–66), “(VIETNAM)”

In the mid-1960s, the public sphere in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) endorsed a hegemonic interpretation of history that excised World War II trauma from collective consciousness and subsumed both real and allegorical resistance against National Socialism into its national and internationalist socialist imaginary. Yet personal trauma persisted. During allied air strikes, poet Inge Müller spent three days buried under rubble, along with the corpses of her parents and a surviving dog. During her lifetime, only a few of her poems were published; the career of her second husband, Heiner Müller, dominated the relationship. Her suicide in 1966, inconsistent with the image of artists and intellectuals that the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party) projected, diverged from the GDR narrative of personal and political optimism and commitment to the utopian rhetoric of the Aufbau or building of a socialist state on German soil. During the 1960s, any recognition of personal stories of war-time victimhood or postwar trauma remained repressed or languished in an unpublished poetic indictment of socialist reason’s sleep, articulated, yet signified only as bracketed.

The political and social turbulence of the 1960s, while exerting a profound impact on both sides of the Cold War divide, resonated differently in the two Germanys. While radicalism in some Western democracies fomented violence and sometimes spurred social change, geo-political events that galvanized transnational protest movements, such as the Vietnam War, elicited responses on both sides of the Berlin Wall, albeit selectively. In the Eastern European states, interdependent political and aesthetic practices largely suppressed sympathy with the agents of protest and reform in Prague, for example, while instrumentalizing dissent against Western powers, particularly the United States and its First World allies. In the GDR, during the aftermath of the Prague Spring and of the regime change within the SED, any potential for reformist impulse was subjugated to aesthetic orthodoxy: by decree, GDR art should create a “socialist human community” by portraying everyday life with optimism.