Katja Hoyer: recommendation

Transcript context

…What was the best literary creation from East Germany? I wouldn’t necessarily point to one single thing. I was quite struck when I was researching this that artists did take a fair amount of freedom from the state back and basically did write literature. Even those that seemed quite close to the state, [produced work] that was quite critical. If you take Christa Wolf, for example, who wrote a famous book called Divided Heaven, which was also translated and also a huge bestseller in West Germany, that’s highly critical of the Berlin Wall, of the way that lives were quite often ruined or split by this, yet it became a bestseller in the GDR as well. I would say, overall, the corpus of literature is well worth looking at because people lived in a dictatorship in a different world and tried to find ways of expressing that, even though the censorship was in place. I would say rather than reading one specific work, to try and read maybe four or five different things and get a cross-section of what was going on at the time. Christa Wolf, being one of them, although she’s a difficult read as well, it’s not something to easily get through. Brigitte Reimann is a very good read, I find. Her books, again, they are openly critical of the state, but at the same time, she was also somebody who did well for herself in the GDR. That nuance, again, is coming through quite well there. Uwe Johnson is good. Speculations About Jakob.…

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