7 - “Der Fall Loest”: A Case Study of Crime Stories and the Public Sphere in the GDR

Summary

The time is 1957; the city is leipzig, German Democratic Republic (GDR). A successful author has been arrested for an alleged attempt to overthrow the government. In the fashion of a show trial, the writer is tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Prohibited from writing anything during his imprisonment, the author longs for the day of his release when he can begin writing again. But the authorities have other things in mind. Worried that the writer’s loyal readers would become suspicious because of his seven-year absence, the authorities encourage the writer to adopt a pseudonym upon his release in 1964. To conceal his identity even further, the authorities permit him only to write crime fiction in the years immediately following his incarceration. Though these opening lines read like the description on a crime novel’s dust jacket, it is the real life story of the GDR writer Erich Loest (1926–2013), and his fall from grace with the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the GDR.

Crime fiction was a popular genre in the GDR, produced in large print runs. Because of their widespread availability, these texts reached substantially wider audiences than did the works of such famous GDR authors as Christa Wolf, Christoph Hein, or Volker Braun, whose oftencontroversial texts were available in more limited quantities. In this chapter, I undertake a case study of Erich Loest’s crime novels. For my analysis of the publication histories of these works, I examine SED Party documents, secret police (Staatsicherheit or Stasi) files, and Loest’s own autobiographical texts. These official documents establish that the SED, the Stasi, and editors at GDR publishing houses made a concerted effort to keep Loest and his critiques of the GDR out of the public sphere. Remarkably, however, Loest was able to access the public sphere through the genre of crime fiction. Nonetheless, even crime fiction was subject to the same types of censorship and manipulation at the hands of the SED. In this chapter I explore the publication practices within the GDR, focusing specifically on the ways that even nonmainstream fiction like crime fiction was viewed just as suspiciously as other forms of literature.