Essays

Socialism goes, and Johnny Walker comes.
Volker Braun

The GDR was the land that stood in quotation marks in the BILD newspaper. A land in quotes that is now incomprehensible and suspect for many. One should not speak of the "ash heap of history" when looking back, since the respect and consideration for the people who have endured the political system of bondage and were suppressed by it, forbid this.

Poems were staples. They were not always good or even well done. But they enjoyed a keen interest. The latest books of poems by Volker Braun or Sarah Kirsch were available only under the counter. Poems were needed because in them you could read between the lines, as to how indeed, the present of this small land was designed. In addition to the party-poets, there were critics who argued with censorship in mind and in the authorities.

The poem by Peter Hacks (1928 - 2003) "My village" reads:

My village, that is DDR,
everyone knows everyone else here.
If you whisper in Rostock, Sire,
Hears Leipzig what you declare.


Poems have a half-life, but little survives. Some of what was written in this period and tied between two book covers has turned to dust. On the other hand, some of it remains intact and illuminates even decades later: The incredible poetry of Inge Müller - or the verses of Thomas and Peter Brasch from the 1970s / 80s - early poems by Sarah Kirsch and Helga M. Novak and those from the Saxonian school of poetry with their outstanding representatives, Karl Mickel and Volker Braun - the dark drunken verses of Wolfgang Hilbig, Poems by Uwe Greßmann and various books of poetry by Heiner Müller, the great dramatist. Books that are a must-read: "Slow crunching Morning" by Volker Braun. "Every satellite has an anti-satellite" by Sascha Anderson. "Chestnut alley" by Elke Erb. "Heutmorgestern" by Stefan Döring and "Thirteen-dance" by Bert Papenfuß. These and other books of poetry which - despite their obvious critical attitude - for the most part could appear in the GDR from the early 1980s demonstrated the changing demands of the literature in terms of linguistic criticism. The important anthology: "A Molotov cocktail on alien bedside - poetry of the seventies / eighties by poets in the East" (1991) - edited by Peter Geist contains a comprehensive collection of poems.

Despite all the scepticism in the political system, the monopolized and marginalized, there was the pleasure of the text from the outset; emphasis, image and word play, as well as, irony and wit. Thus wrote the brilliant "occasional poet", Richard Leising (1934 -1997), in the 1960s:

To a proper workers' state
Belongs an appropriate potato salad

Two decades later, Stefan Döring (* 1954) writes:

join in - with power

everybody has the freedom the cowardice
to look at frail and powerful contemptuously
at the affected figures of the never-never land
lucky dice throwers of the board game
who are spoilt and not logged off
inadmissible private beings
to shoot whom one
should be free and prepared to zero in
because one who joins in has power

From the late 1970s a perspective- and paradigm shift began to take effect: The new voices that based their aesthetics on the preceding avant-gardes (Dada to Surrealism, the Wiener Gruppe and Beat Poetry) modelled for themselves and found their own ways to make their voices heard - by means of private apartment readings and concerts. Independent magazines and fanzines that did not wish to belong to the official literature. The result was a "literary Underground" which teamed up together with other arts and wrote -in some cases even rebelled- against a politically, intellectually, and morally worn society. Afterwards, one spoke deprecatingly about the "Prenzlauer Berg scene" - young poets and poetesses of "Cafe Kyril" in Lychener Street in East Berlin and the adjacent Galrev publisher. A scene, that wanted to bring about changes in art and society, but failed in the end, not only because it spied on itself but also because it was disavowed.

Flanzendörfer, Johannes Jansen and Matthias "Baader" Holst, Eberhard Häfner and Ulrich Zieger were the secret stars of the late East German lyrics. Shortly before East Germany began dying in the autumn of 1989 and was little later incorporated into another great Germany there appeared Durs Grünbein’s "Mornings in the Grayzone" as the last important work that marked the end of "real socialism".

"But what remains, is founded by the poets "- This verse by Hölderlin might be understood in terms of the poetry that was written in the GDR from 1949 to 1990; nothing remains of what that stands proud from that time, because it was followed by other cultural references rather than those of the false practicing socialism. The sources for what remains are, beyond dogma and ideology - rather in free play, in the reflexive traversal and in the poetics of the question - a resistance and truthfulness, which constitutes the essence of the poem. For the real "classics" of that time were writers who came from another historical space, like the prematurely deceased "Sarmatian poet", Johannes Bobrowski – the ones who were driven out of the country, like the nature magician, Peter Huchel, or the ones who somehow bore it in a kind of "inner emigration", like the Hermetic Erich Arendt. They were not actually GDR- poets but displaced and recluse.

A farewell to both sides of GDR literature, the affirmative-state-supporting and the non-conformist, can be found in Eberhard Häfner’s (* 1941) 1991 poem "Between Prefix & Suffix the literary Spunk".

still early for the thread, spun from harm, used again, till the thick end, by hook or by crook, with or without we regard ourselves afterwards as fortunate, a piece of history written and shattered again

History moved on and so did the poem.