4 - ‘GDR literature’ in the Berlin Republic

Summary

‘How can you call this book “GDR Literature” … The GDR no longer exists!’ This was the indignant retort of Thomas Brussig, one of the more successful writers from the former East Germany, to a question about the status of his bestselling novel Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995). For Brussig, clearly, ‘GDR literature’, along with the state itself, had passed into history with unification on 3 October 1990. Yet, if this is truly the case, how are we to understand the title of the volume DDR-Literatur der neunziger Jahre (GDR Literature of the Nineties), published in 2000 in Heinz Ludwig Arnold's Text+Kritik series, or, indeed, of the 1996 edition of Wolfgang Emmerich's seminal Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (A Short Literary History of the GDR), which similarly refers to texts from the 1990s?

In this chapter I examine this tension and explore competing definitions of ‘GDR literature since unification’. I focus on a range of authors, from those who first came to public attention in the GDR itself to those who were not yet adults at the time of the Wende (the fall of the Berlin Wall). I look at how the political and aesthetic stances adopted by established GDR writers continue to impact upon the literature of the Berlin Republic and at a form of post-1990 ‘GDR literature’ with a less ideological, more visceral relationship to the now defunct state.