Echoes of Surrealism

Challenging Socialist Realism in East German Literature, 1945–1990

Gerrit-Jan Berendse

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800730694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Deutsche Literaturkritik

Chapter 1

THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN POST-WAR GERMANY

The end of twelve years of Nazi dictatorship posed a variety of difficult questions concerning Germany’s future and, not least, its cultural future. It is evident that the shock and trauma of 1945 constituted an identity crisis, which Germans and their new governmental structures were compelled to experience and attempt to resolve before moving on. In the final volume of his trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany, Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans emphasizes that despite the need of many Germans for normalization and continuity after the catastrophic schism in the twentieth century, following Hitler’s suicide and the subsequent unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945, a fresh start was out of the question. In the long shadow of the Third Reich, a ‘Zero Hour’ was simply impossible to achieve, because too many aspects of the previous barbarism were rooted in German history. Equally difficult was the task of ensuring that the atrocities of the war were not revived in the new post-1945 era. Particularly in the Western Occupied Zones, large sections of German education, jurisdiction and the economy continued to be administered and delivered by former Nazis. Evans even claims that in West Germany, re-employment had a hidden agenda. He argues that in spite of attempts at denazification it was not possible to ‘ban all 6.5 million members of the party from employment in positions of responsibility’. He continues:

The need for the expertise of judges, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, bankers and many others was too great. … The professions closed ranks and deflected criticism of their behaviour in the Third Reich, and a veil of silence descended over complicity, not to be lifted until after the leading participants retired, towards the end of the century.¹

It was not only through the Nuremberg and the later Auschwitz trials, and the achievements of Israel’s Mossad and other secret services, that former Nazis were held accountable for their brutalities. In the FRG and West Berlin, the fanaticism of the so-called ‘Achtundsechziger’ (Nineteen-Sixty-Eighters) also played an important role in unmasking former Nazis and revealing the contaminated history of the old Germany on which the new was being built. In the GDR, ‘1968’ was of a different quality altogether, as we will see in Chapter 3.

Circumventing the official lines of communication was illegal, and since many previous members of the NSDAP became important participants in establishing the SBZ and the GDR, the past of many of its citizens was simply ignored. The SED’s most effective measure was convincing old Nazis of the benefits of the new ideology and putting it into practice. In Germany, ‘Zero Hour’ was either delayed or did not happen at all. Instead, it was bound to become a myth.

Difficulties with reconstruction and rebuilding were not limited to the West or to the areas just mentioned. This denial of the concept of Zero Hour prevented a fresh start in 1945. This was also true for West German culture, according to Friedhelm Kröll in the Hanser Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Hanser Social History of German Literature), an authoritative volume on the social history of German-language literary fiction. Kröll describes ‘1945’ as a missed opportunity for the FRG. Writers emerging from ‘Inner Emigration’ either continued as if nothing had happened; or literary traditions from other Western cultures became fashionable and were recycled. For a long time, no real change occurred in the teaching of contemporary culture and politics in schools and universities.² Despite the Communists’ strong belief in their foundation myth of anti-Fascism and ‘construction’³ (as evidenced in their national anthem), continuation had become common practice in the East under Walter Ulbricht (as in the West under Konrad Adenauer – albeit under different circumstances and with contrasting motives).

The main reason for this cautious manoeuvring was that both camps feared experimentation. The deepest pitfalls for cultural politics were found in the shattered cultural landscape the Third Reich had left behind: how to deal with what the Nazis had categorized as Entartete Kunst or degenerate art, predominately associated with the exhibition of 19 July 1937 in Munich, which had been followed by similar events in other German and Austrian cities?⁴ The adjective ‘degenerate’ was also used to denounce fictional literature that did not support the so-called National Socialist revolution and the new Volksgesinnung (national ethos) in the 1930s and 1940s. It stems from the noun ‘degeneracy’, used in the fields of biology and medicine, for example, to identify structurally dissimilar components that can perform similar functions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the medical term indicated the condition of those people who had departed from the ‘normal’ because of ‘shattered nerves’, ‘inherited abnormalities’ or ‘behavioural or sexual excess’. It was seen as the beginning of a process that would ultimately lead to annihilation. The physician Max Nordau popularized the term in his book Entartung (Degeneration) in 1892, where, as a non-artist, he applied it to late nineteenth-century art.⁵ Nordau’s definition was later adopted by the Nazis.

As Stephanie Barron points out, the works displayed in the exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ ‘were assembled for the purpose of clarifying for the German public, by defamation and derision, exactly what type of modern art was unacceptable to the Reich and was thus “un-German”’.⁶ Forbidden fruits, however, are always the most beguiling, as was the case with Germans in the Third Reich: Peter Guenter, an American arts student who visited both the Entartete Kunst exhibition and the counter-exhibition Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in Munich in July 1937, reported that the pro-Nazi Kunstausstellung was seen by only 420,000 people, while two million visitors were interested in the avant-garde exhibition, the largest show of this kind in the twentieth century.⁷ The design of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition was simultaneously original and morbid in its employment of techniques of juxtaposition that had been introduced by the architect and racial theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who worked for the new government.⁸ He had characterized modern art as ‘unhealthy’ by setting examples of modern art alongside photographs of deformed and diseased people. By doing so, he implied that they were models for the appearances seen in modern art, in the paintings of Otto Dix, for example, and in the sculptures of Ernst Barlach.

Four years before this public expression of the regime’s denunciation of avant-garde visual culture, 10 May 1933 became infamous as the day of the burning of the books. Jewish and ‘deviant writings’ were not the only works thrown into the flames. Also burned were works of those associated with Modernism, from internationally renowned writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin to German avant-gardist poets like Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp and Paula Ludwig. This literature was classified as decadent, subversive and harmful to the nation. On 9 November in that same year, Nazi censorship in cultural matters was established after the cultural landscape had previously undergone a totalitarian Gleichschaltung (phasing) that was intended to result in a Gleichklang (unison) that respected the people’s will for the radical changes.⁹

In this first chapter, we will assess the problematic history of the sustainability of a literary scene in the GDR that was either associated with or founded on the historical avant-garde. The question for the German cultural functionaries in the Eastern as well as Western zones was how to deal with the fate of the avant-garde, formerly classified as deviant, and censored, burned and publicly denounced in Nazi Germany. As emphasized in the Introduction – and in spite of Enzensberger’s and Bürger’s reservations, and their concerns about the lack of political impact on current affairs of today’s avant-garde – my hypothesis is that the post-war avant-garde had a utopian basis on which it was able to fight a new, yet radically different kind of authoritarianism, especially on the East side of the border or Wall.¹⁰ Released from the terror of oppressive Nazi cultural politics, the avant-garde faced a future with new challenges. The question was, for better or for worse?

As stated in the Introduction, this investigation focuses mainly on textual documents published between 1945 and 1990 with reference to the visual and other creative arts. After marking a definite split between German culture in the East and the West, we will examine the role of Georg Lukács in post-war Central and Eastern Europe. Then, the recycling of the Expressionism/Realism debate of the mid-1930s, which reappeared twenty years later in the GDR in the form of the Formalism Campaigns, will be evaluated.

Markers of Division

If one is asked to select a particular year that accurately reflects the division between the cultural politics of East and West Germany, several options present themselves. As a matter of fact, plenty of markers in the nations’ curricula vitae offer themselves for determining the particulars of the specific cultural-political mechanisms. Not only do they imply the difference between the ideologies in East and West Germany, but they also emphasize aesthetic differences within the GDR itself.

One such key year is 1955. This marker appears to be one of the decisive peaks of the tensions between East and West in both political and cultural matters, and one which prompted a clear division on a bilateral level. The conflict between two antagonistic and competing aesthetics became obvious in Germany. In that year, when it came to their military alliances, both German nations chose to follow separate roads. At the same time, Cold War rhetoric fanned the flames of ideological conflict on each side. While the GDR was enmeshed in the Formalism Campaigns that would eventually lead to the supremacy of Socialist Realism, the FRG displayed its exuberant cultural liberalism to the wider world. In each case art and literature became propaganda vehicles intended to display and reinforce the two respective ideologies.

In its documenta exhibitions the Federal Republic promoted the renaissance, after an absence of twelve years, of the avant-garde. The first documenta opened on 15 July 1955 in the West German city of Kassel (near the border with the GDR) and was the first exhibition of post-war Modernism. It made it publicly known that the FRG dared to reconnect with a Modernist legacy that had been suppressed in Nazi Germany. The event attracted 13,000 visitors and exhibited a total of 670 works by 142 artists, mostly from West Germany, France and Italy.¹¹ But while the classical main currents of the avant-garde – Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism and Cubism – were represented, it was noticeable that explicitly political and subversive movements like Dada (and its artists John Heartfield and George Grosz) were missing. The Surrealist movement was represented, although artists who had been politically outspoken or those who had affiliations with Central and Eastern Europe, for example with the Nadrealism movement in Czechoslovakia, were not. The Surrealists on show were Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Pablo Picasso – each of them an artist with an established international reputation. The major absentee in the 1955 show, however, was the initiator of and ‘engine’ behind Surrealism, André Breton. The documenta might have been the realization of a vision of the curator, Arnold Bode, to revive the ruined former cultural centre of Kassel and to resuscitate a long-supressed Modernist and avant-garde art. At the same time, its location, in the rebuilt Museum Fridericianum, broadcast a message over the Inner German border: the oldest museum on the European continent (built in the spirit of the Enlightenment in 1779) was linked to Modernism. The exhibition revealed that German cultural heritage should not reject the avant-garde, but that the latter should instead become a constituent part of it. Only in 1977, a year after the internationally condemned expulsion of poet and singer Wolf Biermann, were GDR artists from, among others, the so-called Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School) – with the ‘big four’, Hans Mayer-Foreyt, Bernhard Heisig, Werner Tübke and Wolfgang Mattheuer, as its most well-known representatives – selected to participate in the documenta 6, under the banner ‘Weite und Vielfalt der schöpferischen Möglichkeiten des sozialistischen Realismus’ (Width and Diversity of Socialist Realism’s Creative Potentials). In the GDR, these artists – or anybody else for that matter – would have been associated with something like the artistic avant-garde. In SED-speak, the term ‘avant-garde’ was not restricted to art, but instead characterized the status of the official labour unions, consolidated in the Freie Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (Free German Union, FDGB). It was intended to be the Transmissionsriemen (transmission belt) between the Party and the workers, and to enhance efficiency in the Socialist industrial world.¹²

It is undeniable that the documenta was a response to events on the other side of the border. In 1955, cultural politics in the GDR were at the peak of the Formalism Campaigns. The GDR prided itself as the champion of socialist aesthetics. Not only was there a major exhibition of Soviet art in the Academy of Arts in Berlin (organized by the East German Ministry of Culture), but the two-part movie Ernst Thälmann also made a pertinent statement. The first part, Sohn seiner Klasse (Son of his Class), premiered on 9 March 1954; the sequel Führer seiner Klasse (Leader of his Class) on 7 October 1955. The film, bas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations, Definitions and Translations
• Introduction. The Surreal without Surrealism
• Chapter 1. The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Post-war Germany
• Chapter 2. Return of the Avant-Garde? Brecht & Co. in the GDR
• Chapter 3. ‘1968’ in the GDR: Franz Kafka and the Prague Spring
• Chapter 4. Flirting with the Enemy: The Absurd and Grotesque in 1960s Poetry
• Chapter 5. The GDR’s Surrealist Nerve Centre: Adolf Endler’s Strange Nebbich World
• Chapter 6. Wolfgang Hilbig’s Landscapes ‘Where the Minotaurs Graze’
• Chapter 7. ‘Flip-out-Elke’: Elke Erb’s Surrealistic Poetry
• Chapter 8. Gabriele Stötzer under Surveillance: Feminism and the Avant-Garde
• Chapter 9. East German Advocates of Surrealism
• Conclusion. ‘Max Ernst Was Here!’
• Bibliography
• Index