Literature of East Germany

East German literature is the literature produced in East Germany from the time of the Soviet occupation in 1945 until the end of the communist government in 1990. The literature of this period was heavily influenced by the concepts of socialist realism and controlled by the communist government. As a result, the literature of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was for decades dismissed as nothing more than "Boy meet Tractor literature", but its study is now considered a legitimate field. Because of its language, the literature is more accessible to western scholars and is considered to be one of the most reliable, if not the most reliable, sources about East Germany.

The criticism of Georg Lukács greatly impacted the literature of the GDR. His theories served as a middle ground between the necessary creative independence of the author and the theory of socialist realism as it was functioning at that time in the Soviet Union, paving the way for an East German literature that was to be more independent and original than what was to be found in the soviet bloc. Central to Luckacs' theories was the importance of the quest for individual identity, which he felt was not portrayed by socialist realism. He rejected the work of many authors, including Willi Bredel, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Ernst Ottwalt for reasons pertaining to the development of characters. He was against the notion that a character can develop fully with only one major change in their lives without relation to the entire experience of the individual, usually the conversion to socialism in the socialist realist novels, which is what he, as a socialist, was most concerned with. Lukács took Goethe's work Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre as the model that authors should attempt to emulate.

The literature of this period was largely anti-fascist. This literature was written by those exiles who had managed to escape Nazi Germany and then had to be naturalized after the war had ended. The typical biography for an exile author of this time included an active interest in the defense of the Weimar Republic and democratic power against state authority, followed by exile during the time of National Socialism and then return to the Soviet Occupation Zone to support through their literature the development of an antifascist-democratic reform.

...
Wikipedia