For a comparison between the GDR official account of the amalgamation of the two parties and a critical West German one, see Sozialismus in der DDR: Dokumente und Materialien, ed. RainerRilling (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1979), i, 106ff.
2.
Cf. LucioColletti, Marxism and Hegel (London: Verso, 1979), 57-59. In recent years GDR scholars have once more recognized the stature of Lukács as a critic and philosopher of literature. His political and cultural fortunes are documented in a fair, accurate and on the whole sympathetic volume of essays, Dialog und Kontroverse mit Georg Lukács: Der Methodenstreit deutscher sozialistischer Schriftsteller, ed. Werner Mittenzwei (Leipzig: Reclam, 1975).
3.
Remarks made in the course of a speech during a formal consultation between the GDR Council of Ministers and the Academy of the Arts on 30 March 1962, as a result of which a new, more militant statute for the Academy was drafted. Proceedings reported in a supplement to Sinn und Form, 2/1962. (Translations from German sources are mine.)
4.
Sinn und Form, ibid.
5.
Weimarer Beiträge, 5/1972, 31, for criticism of the “Bitterfeld way” for its exclusive emphasis on ‘high art', its patronising attitude to the working class and its lack of international perspective. Cf. also Literatur der DDR (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1976), 229-30. This volume, sponsored by the Institute for Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the SED, is the first authorized account of the history of GDR literature. The authors describe the attempt to base a new socialist national literature on the writing of workers themselves as “a false orientation”.
6.
From Ulbricht's speeches to the Seventh Congress, quoted by SchoberR. in “Was vermag Literatur?”, Sinn und Form, 3/1970, 783, and to the Central Committee Plenum, December1969, quoted in Weimarer Beiträge, 3/1970, 37.
7.
The peace treaty was followed by the Four-Power Agreement on Berlin in June1972.
8.
These moves, while they were regarded with suspicion by the sed, led to important diplomatic advantages for the GDR in 1973, through the implementation of the Basic Treaty between the two Germanies and the admission of both countries to the United Nations. The GDR's demand for recognition by the Federal Republic as a foreign country was dropped, to be revived again only in October1980 during the tensions that followed the Polish crisis.
9.
Cultural solidarity was positively emphasized during this period by the publication in December1970 of a special issue of the Soviet periodical Voprossy Literatury devoted to GDR literature.
10.
World Marxist Review, 12/1970, 25, speeches by Butenko and Glezerman, both of Moscow. See also the criticisms by Soviet economist Lev Leontyev of The Political Economy of Socialism and its Application in the GDR, a study edited by GüntherMittag, economist and SED Politburo member, World Marxist Review, 7/1970, 20-23.
11.
Explicit sympathy with the Prague Spring was still impermissible eight years later when, after the appearance of his book Die wunderbaren Jahre (1976), the GDR writer Reiner Kunze was expelled from the Writers’ Union because of his expression of shame and disappointment at the behaviour of the country's leadership in 1968.
12.
PrachtE. “Zur Theorie des sozialistischen Realismus”, in WeimarerBeiträge, 6/1970, 46. Cf. also A. Abusch, in Sinn und Form, 2/1970, 263, and Soviet aesthetician M. Chraptschenko, Sinn und Form, 5/1970, 1165.
13.
Weimarer Beiträge, 10/1970, 112.
14.
“Marxist spotlight on the Frankfurt school”, in World Marxist Review, 8/1970, 45-116; also Dieter Ulle, review of Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie, in Weimarer Beiträge, 6/1972, 133-54.
15.
See articles by Lucien Sève, Central Committee member of the French Communist Party, in World Marxist Review, 5/1971 and 6/1971; also Weimarer Beiträge, 6/1972, 170. But cf. also the scholarly and reasonable discussion by Robert Weimann (for whom see below): “French Structuralism and Literary History: Some Critiques and Reconsiderations”, in New Literary History, 3/1973, 437-69.
16.
Abusch, op. cit., 267.
17.
See the extensive discussions that followed the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, World Marxist Review, 6/1966 and 9/1966; also the reports of a seminar on “The Historical Significance of the Great October Socialist Revolution” held in Prague in June 1967, World Marxist Review, 89, 11/1967. The latter journal, published from Prague in several languages under the title Problems of Peace and Socialism, had sponsored the seminar.
18.
Cf. Vaughan JamesC., Soviet Socialist Realism (London: Macmillan, 1973), 1-14, for a discussion of these terms in the Soviet context. The relevant Lenin texts are reprinted in James's appendices.
19.
In Weimarer Beiträge for April 1971, an issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the SED, Horst Haase defined the new situation for socialist writers: “The emergence of non-antagonistic contradictions side by side with antagonistic ones, their juxtaposition in the transitional period, the ultimate predominance of non-antagonistic contradictions after the victory of socialist relations of production in the GDR and their complex relationship with antagonistic contradictions brought about by external causes, especially through the existence of the imperialist West German state - these constellations have influenced the realistic treatment of conflicts in literature in ways not previously encountered” (p. 16).
20.
In 1979 the poet Günter Kunert provoked Party condemnation for articles asserting that ecological problems were equally serious under socialism as in capitalist countries.
21.
Chraptschenko, op. cit., 11541172.
22.
Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1962), vol. xiv.
23.
For example Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: NLB1971), 49 and passim.
24.
Zur Theorie des sozialistischen Realismus (Berlin: Dietz, 1974), 375ff.
25.
Neue deutsche Literatur, 10/1972, 166.
26.
From a speech to the Central Committee Plenum, July1972, quoted in Weimarer Beiträge, 9/1972, 7.
27.
Neue deutsche Literatur, 10/1972, 162163.
28.
Zur Theorie des sozialistischen Realismus, 581.
29.
“Zu Genesis und Struktur realistischer Weltaneignung”, Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik, xi, no. 2 (1979), 12-41, pp. 14-15.
