This study aims to shed light on the relationship of writers with power in East Germany by setting their work in the context of Soviet and SED German policy after 1945. Peter Davies provides an analysis of the politics of German division as it affected visions of German national identity within the East German artistic community, and shows how this can give us a profound insight into contentious questions of artistic ‘dissidence’ and ‘conformity’. The second part of the study develops these ideas through a series of case studies of important individuals such as Johannes R. Becher, Peter Huchel, Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, analysing the complexities of their relationship with the power structures and ideology of the East German state in the institutional context of the Deutsche Akademie der Künste. The study concludes with an account of the consequences of the June 1953 uprising for these artists' view of their role in the GDR.
This book, originally published in paperback in 2000 under the ISBN 978-1-902653-21-1, was made Open Access in 2025 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-vi, 1-278
Divided Loyalties: East German Writers and the Politics of German Division 1945–1953 Peter Davies Complete volume as single PDF
The Deutsche Akademie der Künste, founded on 12 March 1950, seemed bound up with contradictions from the very beginning. Many of its members believed passionately in the possibility of using the Academy to promote the unity of German culture. These hopes came into conflict with the aggressive intentions of Party cadres, whose campaign to extend their influence in the Academy has been well documented. The dilemma in which committed artists found themselves is clear: the government, which they needed to fulfil their hopes of a unified German culture with an honest approach to the legacy of Nazism, seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.
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10-37
Chapter Two: Soviet German Policy and the Struggle for Stalin's Succession Peter Davies doi:10.59860/td.c6a8bb5
Soviet policy towards the GDR was always a function of the latter's ambiguous position within the complex interplay of forces in Europe. The problem which faced the Soviet leadership was that attempts to use the GDR as a tool in European policy cut both ways. The role of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat as ultra-loyal industrial powerhouse and Eastern Bloc flagship clashed with the periodic necessity for a more open approach to West Germany. In other words, the demands of Blockpolitik and the temptations of Westpolitik pulled in fundamentally incompatible directions.
The notes taken by Wilhelm Pieck during consultations with Stalin and senior Soviet officials in the USSR and SBZ/GDR lay unseen for many years. The appearance in 1994 of a complete edition shed fresh light on the ongoing controversy over Stalin's intentions for Germany. Essentially, it provided a new impetus to attempts to apply a serious critique to what had, in the West, become the orthodox view of German division, a critique which had previously lacked the necessary hard evidence.
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103-28
Chapter Four: 'Das wort wird zur vokabel': The Question of Intellectual Responsibility Peter Davies doi:10.59860/td.c7baaff
As we have seen, much, if not most, of the historical writing about the founding of the GDR has been preoccupied with a complex of themes arising from the question of whether there was a 'missed opportunity' for reunification at various times up to mid-1953. Although the polarisation which characterised this debate is beginning to break down, the obvious emotional appeal of the subject continues to influence attempts to find new approaches. However, as an analysis of the ideological, discursive and broader political context of German division shows, interpretations which rely on divining the supposed intentions of the various individuals (principally, in this case, Stalin, Ulbricht, Tyul'panov and Becher) cannot do justice to the functioning of power under the particular conditions of Soviet occupation.
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129-67
Chapter Five: The Deutsche Akademie der Künste and the End of German Unity Peter Davies doi:10.59860/td.c8c9f46
This chapter will set the context of cultural policy in the Soviet Zone and GDR in the period up to the founding of the Deutsche Akademie der Künste on 24 March 1950. Instead of providing a step-by-step, chronological account, which has been the approach of many works produced since 1989, this study will proceed from a somewhat different angle, namely via an analysis of the origins of the Academy within the developing ideological system of the Soviet Zone, with particular reference to the key role played by Johannes R. Becher. The purpose of this analysis is to locate Becher and the Academy within this ideological system, in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of the issues of complicity and resistance set out in the previous chapter.
Case Study no. 1: Sinn und Form and the Treachery of Language. Case Study no. 2: Brecht and Das Verhör des Lukullus: A study in Realpolitik? Case Study no. 3: 'Ich mein das Ganze: Deutschland!' Hanns Eisler's Faustus and the Problem of National Identity.
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246-54
Chapter Seven: 'Und da hatten wir Andere Sorgen': Free Speech, Discipline and Repression in the Academy in the Wake of 17 June 1953 Peter Davies doi:10.59860/td.c15ed6c
The development of cultural policy in the Soviet Zone/GDR cannot be properly understood in isolation from a broader context of political and ideological conflicts and processes. These processes manifested themselves in terms of a complex of power relations within which the members of the East German intellectual and artistic elite struggled to construct independent spaces for the production of meaning. The domination of individuals in an ideological system such as Marxism-Leninism should not be regarded as the purely passive reception and internalisation of ideological categories and symbolic forms, particularly not in the case of intellectuals, upon whom the system relied for legitimacy and self-perpetuation, but as an active process of self-understanding in which the Marxist intellectual creates an individual accommodation with the system. Each individual experiences this process as an act of free will.
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Bibliography entry:
Davies, Peter, Divided Loyalties: East German Writers and the Politics of German Division 1945-1953, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 49 (MHRA, 2000)
First footnote reference:35 Peter Davies, Divided Loyalties: East German Writers and the Politics of German Division 1945-1953, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 49 (MHRA, 2000), p. 21.
This title was first published by Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic Studies but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.
