Enemies of the people: Censoring books in East Germany

Writer Matthias Biskupek took part in demonstrations in East Germany as the Berlin Wall came down. He looks back at the attempts to censor books and theatre

LET’S FIRST CALL to mind that radical change that took place 25 years ago in the heart of Germany. At that time, it was a firmly divided organ – on one side Berlin, the capital of East Germany; on the other, West Berlin, the three free sectors.

In summer 1989, the East German state, the German Democratic Republic, was already starting to teeter: its leader had taken refuge in his illness, while his subjects, who were eager to be mature citizens, left via Hungary or the Western embassies – or shouted: “We’re staying here!” These public voices were not in the majority, even if there were 70,000 of them in Leipzig on 9 October. There was, however, an overwhelming majority of up to 90 per cent who simply wanted to stay in the country they had always lived in.

During that October, the cry was: “We are the people!” It was a riposte to the strictly regulated official newspapers’ description of the demonstrators as “enemies of the people”. This was long before we started hearing Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s slogan “We are one people!” – and it came from citizens who had previously been very well behaved and were often loyal to the state.

It was no coincidence that the largest demonstration in Berlin’s history, held on Alexanderplatz on 4 November, was organised by artists: actors, songwriters, authors and painters. One of their principal demands was: “Abolish censorship!” – although there had already been an official decree to this effect for the book trade. More of that later.

When, five days after this demonstration, the wall didn’t fall, but was rendered ridiculous in true bureaucratic German style, with every identification card presented there being waved through, there was nothing left for authors to do but what they had been doing all along: write down their stories, ideas, desires and impressions.

People who had only ever written to oppose the authorities’ power began to wonder what they could now be asked to do. But very quickly a new power emerged – accommodating and centuries-old – the power of a free market for publishing.

In East Germany itself, “censorship” had always been a word shrouded in mystery, a word that at one time would always crop up in the discussion following a public reading. People would ask the author, in loud voices, whether the book had been censored. There was a hunger for truth – and people believed they found it in authors. They were seen as prophets who could answer the basic question: “How should you live in a state that is not very pleasant?”

Perhaps authors represented their own experiences in a different, more balanced and forceful way than the usual fare served up by the newspapers. Or so a lot of people believed. The possibility of discovering true life while living under a false ideology was the reason the latest books flew off the shelves, and why people kept going to readings. Publicity was generated in interminable all-night conversations in the fug of Prenzlauer Berg kitchen-diners in Berlin. For many people, books and the wisdom they proclaimed were bread-and-butter necessities. And since the cost of bread, butter and everything else was so low, even somebody who was just starting out, and had no real contacts in the East German government, could make a living as a freelance artist. But were you a true poet if your work was published officially, and was therefore permitted? This kind of thinking still overshadows every word published in the former East Germany.

Let’s explore this by looking at a book in detail. Siegfried Lokatis, a professor of book studies in Leipzig, has often demonstrated that he doesn’t evaluate books from a present-day perspective. He simply asks: “What was it like back then?”, “What was written?”, “What was published?”, “Who did what, and when?”. He put together the 350-page paperback Vom Autor zur Zensurakte – Abenteuer im Leseland DDR (From Author to Censor’s File – Adventures in the Land of Books) with Theresia Rost and Grit Steuer. There are thick black lines on the cover, as well as the words “confidential” and “report”. This is the average person’s idea of censorship: it’s mainly a case of putting black lines through things; a quaint, almost romantic notion.

The papers collected in this book – mostly by students of publishing history, who often have no first-hand experience of East Germany – chart the history of censorship measures in various decades since 1950. But it is important to remember that when talking about censorship in East Germany, you must always ask: “When?” Things were different just after the war from how they were in the 1980s. And there were periods of thaw and frost.

Book censorship was officially abolished on 1 January 1989, at a time when most people still thought of East Germany as ironclad and everlasting. The fact that it was not so immutable – there was “no alternative”, in modern parlance – had something to do with the books that were published. Long before German reunification, the writer Christoph Hein described the country’s downfall several times over. Anyone wanting to read about it will find what they are looking for in East German books.

It was Hein who, at an East German writers’ congress in 1987 stated publicly: “Censorship is antiquated, useless, paradoxical, hostile to humans and peoples, unlawful and punishable.” This sentence was also officially published – though with the tiniest print run.

There are other tales to be told about how censorship was enforced outside the world of books. Cabaret programmes that had previously been sanctioned, but which a single citizen suddenly found provocative and “reported”, would suddenly have to be performed before a selected audience, preferably in the morning, at an unusual hour for cabaret. If the reaction was a stony silence, the authorities could then tell the performers: “Your programme doesn’t work! The people are not amused! Wouldn’t you prefer to cancel it voluntarily?” Of course, you always followed this paternal advice.

Above: Author Christoph Hein gives a speech during a rally at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, 4 November 1989

Credit: ADN Hubert Link/DPA/Press Association Images

But were you a true poet if your work was published officially?

In 1983, I experienced one of these reactions to a programme for which I was responsible, in the Fettnäppchen cabaret in Gera. There was an unwritten rule for East German cabaret programmes that between the skits that addressed “mistakes, weaknesses and shortcomings” – an ironic term for all those little niggles, like gaps in the supply chain or poor transport links – there had to be at least one “West number” that pilloried the inhumanity of capitalism, agitprop style. There is something similiar to the “West number” from Author to Censor’s File: a piece about the blocking of Luchterhand’s proposed edition of Anna Seghers’s 1936 novel The Seventh Cross. The blockers were cold warriors from the West.

The know-all attitude of the East German evaluators, who were supposed to be literature experts, still fills their former victims with rage

Above: Protesters around Alexanderplatz in Berlin, November 1989. The banners read: “once a liar, always a liar ...” and “democracy”

Credit: dpa picture alliance/Alamy

However, the know-all attitude of the East German evaluators, who were supposed to be independent literature experts, still fills their former victims with rage. One fundamental evil of the East German state was that it handed down judgments on what was good and right, from the battlements of a “vanguard of the proletariat”. They dictated when the people should read Franz Kafka, and when Norwegian poems were opportune. This did more to damage citizens’ trust in the state than any “evil Bonn ultra” – an ironic term for Western cold warriors.

But when we read books about censorship in East Germany, we are also prompted to think about current practices. In the 1995 book Fragebogen: Zensur (Questionnaire: Censorship), edited by US academic Richard Zipser, the East German author John Erpenbeck complains that “no form of censorship is so devastating, so damaging to personalities and to literature as a whole, as the brute censorship of the market”.

Cautiously, we may object that censorship has actually been an extra-economic practice since the time of the sainted Prince Metternich. Today’s practices of refusing to publish or pay attention, of denial and exclusion, can be overcome a little more easily (with the help of the internet, for example) than censorship during the epoch of the printed book, a medium that began to lose its dominance around the same time as the fall of East Germany.

Censorship and editing – and the latter also includes the rejection of texts for reasons of quality and taste – are two very different things, as can be illustrated using a short sentence from Lokatis’s anthology. When a 25-year-old author writes about a “notorious petition against the exile of the critical songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976”, you might suggest to him that it is possibly the exile, and not the petition, that is notorious. But the Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel certainly wouldn’t have stopped the young author using this expression.

So was it possible to publish one’s opinion anywhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Was that time a good time for unpublished manuscripts? “No”, many authors would say today, because then those pitiless market rules took over, taking away the market for some writers. And not just upstanding (mendacious) party authors, either.

But I had no problem being published from north to south, east to west, and for the first time was also able to try out my abilities as a polemical journalist. Was I an exception? After 1990, clichéd categories developed that still exist today: here the Germans, there the East Germans; here East German authors, there German authors.

Even so, after 1989 many East Germans began to feel a certain sense of superiority, in contrast to the widespread media image of them as moaning Ossis (Easties), the losers of German reunification.

Seasoned East Germans take their superior viewpoint – if they have one – from a sense of having survived: they have already witnessed the collapse of a state. They know the catastrophe that others live in fear of is already behind them. They know that when a miracle happens and something long-established comes crashing down, it’s not all bad. In the 1970s and 1980s, East Germans experienced the sensation that now grips the masses of unified Germany: the state is finished. But for individuals with a private income, things are mighty fine. (“Mighty fine, Egon!” was the victory cry of the East’s cult film gangsters, the Olsen Gang, when they got one over on the lazy state of Denmark.)

Then as now: the holes are patched over, and the people placated with speeches. Humour and self-deprecation help, and a degree of pragmatism is the most helpful thing of all: you just have to muddle through, or durchwurschteln, as they say in Saxony. Many people, including all kinds of writers, were not especially courageous through the hard times of East German censorship. But they always muddled through.