Literary intellectuals and the dissolution of the state
Subtitle: professionalism and conformity in the GDR
By: edited by Robert von Hallberg ; translated by Kenneth J. Northcott.
Contributors: Northcott, Kenneth J.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 366
Subjects: Authors, German -- Germany (East) -- Interviews.; Authors, German -- 20th century -- Interviews.; Intellectuals -- Germany (East) -- Interviews.; Literature and society -- Germany (East); Authors, German -- Germany (East) -- Political and social views.; Germany -- History -- Unification, 1990.
Description: For two generations, writers in the German Democratic Republic enjoyed a massive audience in their own country, a readership dependent on their works for a measure of utopian solace amid the grimness of life under Communism. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these writers were abandoned by their readers and stripped of the professional structures that had supported them.

Their literary culture destroyed, they were rebuked for compliant service to the discredited state; and some were reviled for collaborating with the East German secret police, the Stasi.

What drove leading thinkers, including those of the avant-garde who publicly embraced intellectual freedom, to serve as government informants? Why were they content to work within a repressive system rather than challenging it outright? This collection of interviews with more than two dozen writers and literary scholars, including several Stasi informants, provides a gripping, often dismaying picture of the motivations, compromises, and illusions of East German intellectual life.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 329-356) and index.