Literature of the GDR

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Pól Ó Dochartaigh (University of Ulster at Coleraine)

Ed. by Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.1: German-language Writing and Culture: Germany, 500-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Domains

Literature Topic

Dates

Date of occurrence 1945-1990

Places

Germany (Location)

1. Anti-fascism (1945-49)

In contrast to West Germany, where 1945 was generally regarded as a “zero hour”, a phrase that was intended to define a new beginning after the horrors of Nazism but could also be seen as implying that what happened before 1945 was best forgotten, the authorities in the Soviet Zone of Germany and later the GDR clearly defined culture as both springing from a largely Communist “antifascist” tradition and at the same time being a lineal descendant of the liberal humanist cultural inheritance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This led to a combination of older bourgeois literary and contemporary Marxist (including Soviet) influence on early GDR culture.

The humanist view of …

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3988 words

Citation: Ó Dochartaigh, Pól. "Literature of the GDR". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 July 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1478, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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Literature of the GDR

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