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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies
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Writing in Red - The East German Writers Union and the Role of Literary Intellectuals (Hardcover)
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Writing in Red - The East German Writers Union and the Role of Literary Intellectuals (Hardcover)
Series: German History in Context
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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This book explores how the East German Writers Union became a site
for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with
consequences well beyond the literary community. In the German
Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing
and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED
party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote
and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and
antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its
members' professional interests and enable them to act as public
intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many
writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which
brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the
union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR
society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union
leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually
acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many
authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting theirunion
membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully
worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down
limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the
1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers
and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the
expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the
East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of
History at the University of Central Missouri.
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