"Sinn und Form": The Anatomy of a Literary Journal 9783110217865, 9783110217858

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Establishing the Legend: The Accumulation of Symbolic Capital (1948-1955)
Chapter 2. Dynamic Mediation: The Literary Field and the Field oE Power
Chapter 3. Institutional Investment: Capital Exchanges in The Academy oE Arts
Chapter 4. Double Agent? The Editor-in-Chief as Symbolic Banker
Chapter 5. Contributors: The Social Capital oE the Sinn und Form Salon
Chapter 6. The Compositional Premium: The Journal as Fractal Text
Chapter 7. The Circle of Belief: Readership and Reception
Backmatter

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Stephen Parker, Matthew Philpotts Sinn und Form

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies Edited by

Scott Denham · Irene Kacandes Jonathan Petropoulos Volume 6

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Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Stephen Parker, Matthew Philpotts

Sinn und Form The Anatomy of a Literary Journal

≥

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-3-11-021785-8 ISSN 1861-8030 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Laufen Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Foreword This study of the acclaimed German, and formerly East German, literary and cultural journal Sinn und Form has been long in the making. Its origins lie in an essay written for a collaborative volume on German literature and the Cold War, which was produced by a group of UK and German researchers in the period just before and ,ust after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 1 The events of 1989-90 profoundly altered the terms of reference for research into Sinn und Form, which could suddenly benefit from unrestricted access to the archives of the journal's 'parent' institution, the East Berlin Academy oE Arts, and of the Central Party Archive of the Socialist Dnity Party of Germany (SED). .l\ full-Iength history of Sinn und Form, a leading forum for intellectuallife in German socialism, rapidly became an irresistible prospect. Yet the scale of material that became available in East Berlin archives was immense. In the event, archival work was undertaken over a ten-year period in a succession oE visits to Berlin. The most important of those visits took place in 1993-94, following the award to Stephen Parker of a fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. After initial work in the Teilbestand Sinn und Form and the administrative archives of the East Berlin Academy, the Humboldt award permitted undisturbed concentration on the mass of archival material available in the freshly united Berlin Academy of Arts, the Central Party Archive and other institutions, among them the Gauck Behörde with its holdings from the Stasi archives. This material was accumulated within a very substantial chronological manuscript, charting the published face of the journal and the institutional story behind it. The demands of another research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2000, together with commitments in university management before and after the merger in 2004 of the Victoria University of Manchester and the Dniversity of Manchester Institute oE Science and Technology, put the original Sinn und Form project into abeyance. By the time it was revived in 2004-05, it had become a collaborative enterprise with Matthew Philpotts, whose theoretical interests in the function and typology of literary journals brought a fresh impetus and helped to initiate a wholesale re-conceptualisation of the project. This second phase proceeded initially on the basis of a re-ordering of manuscript material within a framework designed to lay bear the 'anatomy of a

Stephen Parker, 'Peter Huche1 and Sinn und F'orm: The (;erman Academy of Arts and the Issue of Gennan Cultural Unity', in Stephen Parker, Colin Riordan and Rhys Williams (eds), German Wtiters and tbe Cold War J945-6 J (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 132-58.

VI

Foreword

literary journal'. To that end, the British Academy kindly provided funds to support important work undertaken by PhiIippa Ginns in 2005-06. Discussion also began in that year of the applicability for the analysis of a literary and cultural journal of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture. The consideration of Bourdieu's work proved a decisive stimulus for the completion of our study in its fmal form in the course of 2007-08, led by Matthew Philpotts during aperiod of research leave supported by the AHRC. Without the generous and sustained support of the external funding bodies mentioned above, this ambitious project would never have come to fruition. The University of Manchester, too, supported both authors through research leave, funded aseries of research trips and also contributed to research assistance in the latter stages. Profound personal and professional thanks are due to the Humboldt Foundation and to Eberhard Lämmert and Justus Fetscher, who were so supportive in 1993-94 when Stephen Parker was attached to the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Free University, Berlin, and also to the many individuals who gave their time generously for such productive discussion during those visits to Berlin. Foremost among them are the long-standing editors of Sinn und Form, Heide Lipecky and Sebastian Kleinschmidt. Finally, thanks need also to be expressed to the staff of the various archives for their unstinting support over such a long period and to the very many colleagues, students, friends and family members whose engagement with, and support for, the project has been vital to its realisation. Stephen Parker Matthew Philpotts

Manchester, May 2009

Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Establishing the Legend: The Accumulation oE Symbolic Capital (1948-1955) The Literary Field and the Field ofPower Institutional Infrastmcture: Adoption by the Academy of Arts Editorship: The Making of a Myth Contributors: Accumulating Capital in the West Composition: The Thick Litera!)T Journal Readership and Reception: Trojan Horse or Bridge across the Divide?

1

11 13 20 29 36 45 54

Chapter 2 Dynamic Mediation: The Literary Field and the Field oE Power

63

A New Beginning? Re-establishing an All-German Identity The Force of Heteronomy: The Cultural Journal as Party Joumal. No Taboos? Expanding the Space ofPossibles

64 78 94

Chapter 3 Institutional Investment: Capital Exchanges in the Academy oE Arts Investing through the .A.cademy In the Institutional Triangle

Chapter 4 Double Agent? The Editor-in-ChieE as Symbolic Banker The Habitus of the Editor-in-Chief Selection for the Succession Editorial Practice: Strategy, Struggle and the Formula for Success

116 118 141

167 169 177 190

VIII

Contents

Chapter 5 Contributors: The Social Capital of the Sinn und Form Salon Ieons New Talent 'Problematie' Writers The Nueleus: Regular Contributors

Chapter 6 The Compositional Premium: The Joumal as Fractal Text Huehel: Poetie Forms Girnus: Serial Forms Schu1z: Breadth of Form Kleinschmidt: Forms of Self-Similarity

Chapter 7 The Circle of Belief: Readership and Reception The View from the West Reading in a Socialist Public Sphere: The Plenzdorf Debate Conquering the Feuilleton Field 1990-1993

219 221 236 246 264

279 282 291 306 312

325 328 343 356

Sources

377

Index

385

Introduction Under its first editor-in-chief Peter Huchel (1948-1962), Sinn und F017l1 enjoyed a legendary status across the German-German divide of the Cold War, as a publication of outstanding international quality. The journal stood for a progressive humanism in the established manner of an elite literary review, blending tradition and innovation into a publishing programme which aspired to breadth, representativity, and quality. In this respect its name was in itself a programmatic assertion of faith in the enduring literary values which the journal represented, an abiding belief in 'meaning and form'. As Germany sought to recover from the barbarism of National Socialism, such an ethos was both attractive and necessary. Its most prestigious author was Bertolt Brecht, and it could count among its early luminaries Thomas Mann, Pablo Neroda, Ernst Bloch, Romain Rolland, Alfred Döblin, and Georg Lukacs. Even if that quality was not always maintained through the established phase of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the journal's privileged status as a showcase publication gave its editors a latitude undreamt of elsewhere in a public sphere tightly policed by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its 'Sword and Shield', the Stasi. The result was aseries of landmark publications under Wilhelm Girnus (1964-1981), among them Ulrich Plenzdorfs Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (2/1972) and Volker Braun's Unvollendete Gesr:hit'hte (5/1975). The risk-taking excellence of this legendary review lent it a unique presence in East Berlin cultural life. It is no coincidence that a ron of the journal's distinctive coloured spines feature on a bookshelf in the background shot of an East Berlin apartment in Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! (2003). The abiding strength of the journal's reputation was strikingly re-affirmed in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s under Sebastian Kleinschmidt's influence, first as a member of the editorial team, then as deputy editor-in-chief and ftnally as editor-in-chief from 1991 to the present. That good name enabled the journal, uniquely amongst East Berlin institutions, to negotiate German unification with its leadership and reputation intact. Sinn und F017l1 has always attracted much interest in the feuilleton press, particularly the Huchel years. Collections of journalistic and academic essays dealing with his editorship, as weIl as his achievements as a poet, were assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 1 Huchel's tenure attracted more substantial

Otto Best (ed.), Hommage/ür Pe/er Hutbel (Munieh: Piper, 1968) and Hans Mayer (ed.), Ober Pe/er HUtfJeI (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973).

2

Introduction

academic attention in the 1980s, which also saw the publication in East and West Germany of a re-print of the journal's first ten years. 2 Following Bernhard Schiele's PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, which deals with the joumal's reception under Huchel, Uwe Schoor's doctorate, begun at the Humboldt University in the final years of the GDR, lends particular weight to the civilizing mission of Huchel's editorship after National Socialism. 3 Schoor's study remains the most extensive treatment of the journal's published face and of its founding ethos, but it does not extend appreciably beyond Huchel's tenure, nor was its author in a position to integrate fully the wealth of archival material which would soon emerge. More recently, some of that material has been presented by Matthias Braun in his study of Sinn und Form across the full period of the GDR, with its particular emphasis on the perspective of state security. However, as Braun himself concludes, 'the Stasi never really got hold of Sinn und Form', and Braun's work provides only the most perfunctory analysis of Sinn und Form as a literary and cultural journa1.4 The result is essentially a documentation which fails to move our understanding of the joumal beyond the primary sources which are presented at length. A comprehensive, book-Iength history of Sinn und Form exploring its capacity to establish and maintain its highly influential status in the German intellectual field remains long overdue. The present study is founded on a recognition of that omission in the existing scholarship and, with it, of the necessity to combine the complementary perspectives offered by the journal's published face and by archival material that teIls the story of editorial policy underpinning it. Until 1989, much of this material remained inaccessible within the secretive and taboo-Iaden world of East Berlin, fertile ground for the proliferation of myths and legends. When unrestricted access was granted to East Berlin archives, compiled so assiduously in 'Prussian' socialism, remarkably extensive holdings became available: principally the archives located in the Berlin Academy of Arts and the archives of the SED; to a lesser extent the archives of the Ministry of Culture and the Stasi. This voluminous material offers a compelling insight into a triangle of fraught institutional relations in East Berlin between Sinn und Form, the Academy and senior figures in the SED's cultural apparatus. The journal's public face masked a complex dynamic that, by virtue of the anomalous position occupied by Sinn und Form in the GDR literary system, ranged from a productive but precarious balancing of interests to downright dysfunctionality. It was always a principal site for the affirmation and 2 3

4

Elmar Faber and Franz Reno (eds), Sinn und Form: Dic cr.rtcn ~hn Jahre (Berlin; Nördlingen: Rütten & Loening; Greno, 1988). Bemhard Schiele, Re:rfptionJ- und WirkungJgeJt:hicbte der Litcratuf'~eitJt1Jrift 'Sinn und Form' unter der Redaktion [Ion Peter Hut:hel (1949-1962) (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988), pp. 353-57. Uwe Schoor, DaJ geheime ]oumal der Nation: Die ZeitJt1Jrijt 'Sinn und Form', Chefredakteur Petcr HUt1JeI 1949-1962 (Berlin: Lang, 1992). Matthias Braun, Die Literatu't!itHhrijt 'Sinn und Form:' Ein ungeliebtc.r AUJbiingcJcbild der SEDKulturpolitik (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2004), p. 154.

Introduction

3

contestation of the SED's cuItural orthodoxy, and the editor-in-chief was drawn unremittingly into this struggle. Yet the capacity of Sinn und Form to operate within networks of the internationalliterary field and to flourish after the collapse of the GDR - in both cases beyond the constraints of the SED system - invites further methodological reflection on its function as a literary institution in its own right. Above all, Sinn und Form invites analysis alongside other literary journals as discrete entities with a specific function as agents in the public sphere. That is to say, journals demand to be viewed not so much as neutral vessels for the publication of pieces by various authors, but rather as institutions in cultural life possessing shared generic properties, distinct from books on the one hand and newspapers on the other. Such a perspective promises to break new ground in research into journals which, in the German context, has hitherto been characterised by primarily bibliographical and reference works. AIthough excellent in themselves, their contribution is overwhelmingly empirical, rather than theoretical and methodological. 5 As a resuIt, there exists no explicidy comparative and typological framework for the study of literary and cultural journals and very litde literature analysing their function as agents which shape the wider literary and cultural field. Where this function of agency is acknowledged in the German context, it is associated only with short-lived, ethin' avant-gardist journals such as those of Expressionism. Dietzel and Hügel, for example, stress the contribution made by journals to literary innovation from the late nineteenth century onwards: 'As such, journals do not just reflect the literary avant-garde, often enough they drive it forward.'6 Long-standing, high-prestige, 'thick' journals such as Sinn und Form have tended to be neglected from this perspective, a notable omission given the importance of a journal such as Die neue Rundst-hau in mediating literary modernism. 7 Indeed, it is symptomatic that one scholar still feit able even recendy to describe the study of journals 'as perhaps the last great terra inr--ognita of literary studies'.8 In this way, this book constitutes not only an opportunity to write the history of a single, albeit highly influential, journal, but also to lay the foundations for a newand systematic approach to Zeitschriftenforst"hung, that is, research into journals as agents in literary and cultural history. The resuIt is a typological approach which seeks to identify the generic, 'anatomical' dimensions of the journal as a 5

6 7 8

See, for example, the multi-volume Marbach repertory of German literary journals published by Saur, inc1uding for the post-1945 period, Bernhard Fischer and Thomas Dietzel (eds), DeutJehe Iiterarüehe ZeitJchrijten 1945-1970: Ein Repertorium, 4 vols (Munich: Saur, 1992). Thomas Dietzel and Hans-Dtto Hügel (eds), Deu/Jehe IiterariJehe ZeitJehr[jien 1880-1945: Ein Repertorium, 5 vols (Munich: Saur, 1988), p. 8. See Helmut Schanze, 'So Fischer: Verlagsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte', Die neue RundJehau, 97.4 (1986), 187-202. See Erdmut Jost, 'Ästhetizismus im luftleeren Raum', IASL-online, 5 July 2006 , p. 1, last accessed 5 May 2009.

4

Introduction

cultural institution and to explore the contribution made by each of these dimensions to the functioning of that institution. U sing this approach, we have identified seven principal analytical categories with generic applicability to any journal which, in turn, inform the structure of our study, each yielding its own chapter: (i) the founding conception or core ethos of the journal; (ü) the culturalhistorical context in which the journal is assembled, published and read; (iü) the specific institutional infrastructure which supports the journal, be that a political or cultural organisation, a publishing house, or a loose literary circle; (iv) the pivotal strategie and managerial role played by editors, both as cultural figureheads (Herausgeber) and as hands-on editorial staff (Redaktion); (v) the journal's network of contributors, both regular and irregular, national and international, contemporary and from the tradition; (vi) the journal's distinctive textual and compositional dimension as a composite and serialliterary work; and fmally (viü) the readership and reception of the journal. Yet an appropriately searching examination of Sinn und Form on the basis of these common typological features requires a more sophisticated theoretical underpinning than a rather loosely conceived cultural politics and an essentially descriptive inventory of anatomieal dimensions. In particular, our central aim is to offer an explanatory analysis of the notable success and longevity of the journal, of its capacity to accumulate and preserve significant sums of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would term 'symbolic capital'. Indeed, among his considerable writings on art and culture Bourdieu provides an illuminating discussion of Andre Gide's achievement as editor of Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, another long-standing review journal which, in Bourdieu's terms, occupied 'a dominant place in the intellectual field'.9 Bourdieu compares the strategies which bring together authors and texts into a literary journal to the 'social strategies [...] governing the constitution of a salon or a movement' and suggests that the editor of the journal can be seen as 'symbolic banker' with the combined capital of his authors at his disposal. Situated within the broader context of Bourdieu's sociology of culture, this brief analysis hints at a theoretical approach able to do justice to the situation and function of a journal like Sinn und Form in the intellectual and literary fields. lO In its thorough-going treatment of the production, dissemination and consumption of works of art, Bourdieu's framework situates cultural objects firmly within the struggle between agents in the field, not only primary cultural producers, but also agents of transmission and reception, such as editors, critics, publishers, and literary agents. Above all, Bourdieu invites us to reflect on the mechanisms by which value is assigned to cultural objects and on

9 10

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rufes qf Art: Tbe Genesir and J'trudure qf the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 273. See principally the essays collected in Bourdieu's Tbe RufeJ rf Art and Tbe Field q/ Cultural Produdion: E.fJqy.r on Art and Literature, ed. by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).

Introduction

5

the processes which sustain elite literary production. For a journal such as Sinn und Form, such questions are of fundamental importance.

Understood in Bourdieu's terms, the intellectual and literary field becomes a dynamic site of struggle in which agents compete to secure and exchange capital in its various forms. tl In tum, joumals become vital institutions in the field, sites in which intellectuals adopt positions in that field and through which they exercise agency in their transactions of capital. That capital may be (economic', (political', or (cultural' depending on the field in which it originates and is recognised. For writers, literary capital becomes the vital currency, defmed and dispensed according to principles internal to the literary field itself, but literary producers also participate in the struggles of the economic and political fields, in which economic and political capital is bestowed. At the same time, this capital may exist in material and embodied forms or, crucially, it may be (misrecognised' in a symbolic form. While cultural capital in the shape (of cultural knowledge, competences or dispositions' is essential in equipping agents to participate in the intellectual field, it is the (symbolic capital' of (accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or honour' which is the most sought-after currency of the intellectual and literary world. 12 Each issue of Sinn und Form is, then, a new intervention - in Bourdieu's terms a 'position-taking' - in a field which is structured by two fundamental sets of oppositions. First, the journal situates itself between the 'autonomous' and 'heteronomous' poles of the field; that is, between positions where the internal values of the literary field itself hold sway and positions where the external values of politics and the economy predominate. Second, it occupies a location in the field between 'established' and 'heretical' positions, the former occupied by consecrated agents rich in symbolic capital, the latter by newcomers anxious to usurp those established positions. But more than this, the accumulation of these successive position-takings and of the capital held by individual agents associated with the enterprise is invested in the name of the journal, which functions as an agent in its own right, able to participate in transactions of capital and occupying its own readily recognisable position in the field. Moreover, as Bourdieu suggests of Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, the journal possesses as an agent in the field a 'common habitus' which acts as a unifying principle for its cultural practice. 13 Defmed as a set of 'durable, transposable dispositions', as 'structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures', habitus is a central, if not always transparent, notion in Bourdieu's framework. As Randal Johnson puts it: 11

12

13

For a systematic exposition of the different forms of capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Forms of Capital', in J ohn Richardson (ed.), Handbook rfTbeory and Resean:bfor tbe J odology q/Education (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241-58. Randal Johnson, 'Editor's Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture', in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Produdion: EJJqys on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 1-25 (p. 7). Bourdieu, The Rules ofArt, p. 273.

6

Introduction

The habitus is sometimes described as a 'feel for the game', a 'practical sense' that inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to rules. Rather, it is a set of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions. The habitus is the result of a long process of inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes a second sense or a second nature. 14

Once established, the habitus of the journal exerts a considerable influence across all its anatomical dimensions, as individual practice in those dimensions is adjusted towards the deftning ethos of the journal's own tradition. Bourdieu's articulation of a theoretical framework around the terms 'field', 'habitus' and 'capital', in its cultural, political and economic forms of exchange, supplies a critical vocabulary at once precise and yet flexible enough for our purposes. Indeed, in its capacity 'to overcome the impasse between internalist and externalist modes of reading',15 there is a particular promise in Bourdieu's theory for its application to German literary journals, the study of which has been hampered by an often intractable tension between the predominantly internal approaches of Germanistik and the external approaches of Publi:;jstik. More specifically, while it might seem richly ironic that the language of capital exchange should be applied to an institution long part of a socialist cultural system that regarded such notions as anachronistic, that language facilitates the understanding of a journal whose position was intrinsically anomalous. On the one hand, its horne was that extremely restrictive political system of the one-party state; on the other, its success could only be measured within the flow of symbolic capital determined by notions of international excellence. As David McDonald has put it, reflecting on the value of Bourdieu's model for his own study of the literary field in late Victorian Britain: Its power resides, I would argue, in its ability to articulate the mediating ground between textuality and social history, symbolic value and material production. It offers critics and book historians alike a sophisticated theory of context which obliges us to see writing and reading as thoroughly social practices. At the same time, Bourdieu's insistence on the relative autonomy of the field ensures that we do not collapse the text back into its context through a false reductionism, whether sociological or economic. 16

Crucially, we also understand that international literary field to enjoy the relative autonomy theorised by Bourdieu and highlighted above by !vfcDonald. Of course, Sinn und Form could not escape all the restrictions imposed by the SED. Indeed, all the while that it strove to accumulate symbolic capital, it could never escape the requirement to justify its existence to the custodians of political capital in the institutional context of East Berlin. Yet, for all the dominance of the political and 14 15 16

Johnson, p. 5. David McDonald, Britisb Literary Cu/ture and Pub/iJbing Pradice 1880-191+ (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), p. 172. McDonald, p. 20.

Introduction

7

economic field in the GDR, Sinn und Form's anomalous position, engaged with the internationalliterary field, justifies reference to such a relative autonomy. Analysed from Bourdieu's perspective, that internationalliterary field retains the logic of an economic world inverted, in which artistic distinction is marked not by economic profit but by the symbolic capital derived from recognition by cognoscenti, typically producers themselves within 'the field of restricted production'.17 Here, the disavowal of commercial success is viewed as a precondition for purely literary recognition. The former discredits the latter, and this applies also to political success which necessarily compromises pure literary endeavour. Salient from this perspective in the GDR is not so much the opposition between the literary 'purists' and 'profiteers' developed by McDonald, the former orientated towards specific literary capital and the latter towards economic capital, as that between 'purists' and 'propagandists'. Crucially, these position-takings involve the exchange of two forms of capital, the literary and the political, which are essentially incompatible with one another. i\s much as the SED sought to subordinate literary capital to political capital and, in effect, remove this incompatibility, purely literary capital in its symbolic form remained an international currency. To extend the analogy, literary capital validated in the GDR was a worthless currency if it was not recognised and could not be exchanged in the hard currency of the international field. This was the risk run by GDR intellectuals who moved too close to the source of SED power. Caught between these two sources of legitimacy and seeking to balance cultural and political capital, Sinn und Form exemplifies the distinctive predicament of all manifestations of internationally credible cultural activity in the GDR. Drawing upon the tradition of thick review journals like Nouvelle Revue Franfaise and Die neue Rundschau, Sinn und Form was founded quite explicidy within the same sub-field of restricted production by figures - Johannes R. Becher, Paul Wiegier and Huchel - whose literary values were rooted in that tradition. These principal agents, the two Herausgeber and the first Chefredakteur, shared a common habitus, in which the consecration bestowed by symbolic capital was the overriding concern. That would prove to be an unrelenting source of tension with the forces of heteronomy but an essential component in the creation of the Sinn und Form legend. The force of that legend meant that subsequent editors-in-chief were required to embody a set of dispositions within the habitus of the office, which were favourable to the relative autonomy of the internationalliterary field, in particular a fundamental empathy with the aesthetic concerns oE purist producers. We choose to describe these dispositions as those oE the Poet, exemplified by Huchel. Yet that consecration achieved by Huchel could only be achieved over the longer term through the mastery oE a range of other, contradictory dispositions, which we choose to call those of the Professional,

17

See Bourdieu, The Field 0/ Cultural Produl'tion, pp. 115-20.

8

Introduction

illustrated most readily by Wilhelm Gimus (1964-1981). The Professional dispositions of the journal's editor-in-chief all concern the mastery of institutional relations with political and economic capital controlled by the SED and its propagandists. Indeed, for Bourdieu mediating agents akin to editors in the wider world of the arts, among them dealers and gallery directors, typically possess such dual dispositions as 'double personages'.18 They must command the confidence of the producers of symbolic and cultural capital as weIl as that of the custodians of political and economic capital. The long-term success of Sinn und Form depended on the editor's capacity as a Professional to negotiate a path through the complex, triangular relationship with the Academy leadership and the SED's cultural hierarchy, both of which expected their interests to be represented in their journal. That precarious relationship imposed huge pressures on the journal and its editor-in-chief, repeatedly threatening to compromise the delicate balance between Poet and Professional. Each editor-in-chief came to recognise that the continuing success of Sinn und Form depended on that balance remaining more favourable to symbolic capital. In this sense, it is highly appropriate that our exploration of the role of the editor-in-chief as the 'symbolic banker' for the journal should occupy the central, pivotal position amongst the seven chapters of our book. 19 That is not to say that our study intends to foreground unduly the individuals who occupied this role, though their respective achievements and weaknesses will be acknowledged. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate in the analysis of the seven anatomical categories the operation of essentially the same fundamental contradictions between the literary field and the field of power, autonomy and heteronomy, symbolic and political capital, Poet and Professional - that the editor-in-chief embodies. Infused with the critical vocabulary that we have derived from Bourdieu and re-shaped to illuminate our own specific object of analysis, the seven anatomical categories outlined above are transformed into explanatory categories for the success and longevity of the journal. Throughout, we seek to synthesise a reading of the published face of the journal with the remarkable archival material which details the processes behind that public face. To this end, we offer not an absolutely comprehensive chronological account of the history of Sinn und Form, but an explanatory analysis structured around key episodes in the story of the journal over the last sixty years. In chapter one, the founding ethos of the journal is analysed in terms of the crucial, initial phase in the life-cycle of any successful cultural product, what Bourdieu terms the 'phase of the initial accumulation of symbolic capital'.20 In the case of Sinn und Form, such was its capacity to gather symbolic capital for itself in 18 19 20

Bourdieu, Thc Rufes ofArt, p. 216. For a discussion of mediating agents as 'symbolic bankers' in the field, see Bourdieu, Thc Ficld of Cultural Pmduction, p. 77. Bourdieu, Thc Rufes ofArt, p. 255.

Introduction

9

its highly unstable early years that this founding ethos can be seen to have spawned a 'legend' which retained an abiding force throughout the journal's history. In chapter two, we consider not simply the cultural and political context of the journal, but rather seek to reconstruct its 'predicament' in the field of power during Cold War and after German re-unification, and in the shifting dynamics of overlapping literary fields, both international and national, allGerman and specifically GDR. Our focus in chapter three shifts to the 'institutional investments' made in Sinn und Form through the Berlin Academy of Arts and the conversions of capital - material and symbolic, political and literary - which have ensued from those investments. Mediating between these external dimensions and those dimensions more closely associated with the text itself, our fourth chapter examining the 'dual habitus' of the editor-in-chief leads on in chapter five to an analysis of the 'salon' of contributors to Sinn und Form, that exclusive club populated by those who have published regularly in the journal and the shared social capital at the disposal of the journal. In chapter six, our attention turns to what we have termed the 'compositional premium' attached to the distinctive textual properties of the thick journal, the added symbolic value which derives from the complex encoding of the journal as aserial and composite text and which invites a process of aesthetic de-coding by suitably qualified readers. Finally, in chapter seven we approach the readership of the journal as the vital component which closes the 'circle of belief' in the cultural field, establishing and sustaining the symbolic capital of the joumal as a charismatic expression of the disinterestedness so prized in the inverted market of symbolic goodS. 21 Although, as we shall see, there were fallow periods and two severe political ruptures in the joumal's history, 1962 and 1989, the success of Sinn und Form, sustained over sixty years, is a remarkable story. Moreover, its history to date contradicts Bourdieu's view of the inevitable erosion of symbolic capital, once accumulated, through its exploitation by political and economic capital. 22 For Bourdieu, the life-cycle of any cultural product is circumscribed within an everevolving market characterised by generational change and the cumulative ruptures in the modem cultural field driven by risk-taking innovators. Nearly twenty years after the 'Wende', to use the most common coinage for the process of German re-unification, Sinn und Form continues to occupy its position in the field of restricted literary production, suggesting that its longevity can no longer be accounted for solely by that aspect of its legend which emphasises its negotiation of the restrictive circumstances in the GDR during the Cold War. As a thick review journal Sinn und Form has hitherto succeeded in integrating serial ruptures in the field of culture within its vision of a progressive humanism, even though the continuing validity of that vision itself has not gone uncontested. The journal's longevity has depended upon its capacity to act as a mediating agent 21 22

See Bourdieu, The Field qfCultural Produdion, pp. 77-78. See Bourdieu, The RuleJ ofArt, pp. 254-55.

10

Introduction

within the cultural field itself and between the cultural field and the field of power. In particular, the thick review journal has performed the dual role of presenting established literary excellence and new talent, affirming its standing by sharing symbolic capital with iconic names and accumulating new reserves of symbolic capital by showcasing that new talent. In doing so, it has constantly mediated the founding ethos fundamental to its legend, maintaining its reputation through the blend of tradition and innovation. The investigation of the journal's anatomy therefore takes on added significance. As we have seen, our work has led us to regard the project as both a history of Sinn und Form and as a wider contribution to research into literary and cultural journals, employing a typology that can be applied comparatively. Shifting the terms of enquiry onto the anatomy of the literary journal itself as the object of analysis and exploring its functional role in the cultural field offers the opportunity both to understand the capacity of Sinn und Form to maintain its standing over sixty years and to initiate a systematic approach to Zeits{;hnflenforschung, informed by the perspectives and insights of German literary studies. Through this latter dimension, we hope that this book will open up a host of new avenues for comparative research. A systematic reconstruction of the periodical field in the GDR, for example, would illuminate the inter-relationships between Sinn und Form and other publications occupying comparable and contrasting positions, such as Aufbau, Neue deutsche Literatur or the alternative magazines of the later 1980s. 23 Alternatively, an immensely fruitful comparison could be drawn between Sinn und Form and other thick, high-prestige journals published within the socialist literary field and destined for international consumption. Of these, No'!)' Mir and its legendary editor Alexander Tvardovsky are the most obvious comparators for Sinn und Form, but further insight could be provided by analyses of such journals as TwrJrczost: (poland), Host do Domu (Czechoslovakia) and even Les Lettres Franfaises. Similarly, the editors of those journals - figures such as Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz,Jan Skacel, Louis Aragon and Pierre Daix - would provide further fascinating evidence of the dual editorial habitus, caught between autonomy and heteronomy. Finally, our study of the vital mediating function of the thick review journal invites a re-appraisal of twentieth-century literary and cultural history which positions at its centre these unique spaces of intellectual and cultural exchange. Indeed, refracted through the multitextual and transnational prism of such journals as Die neue Rundschau, Nouvelle Revue Franfaise, or Revista de O{xidente, a very different literary history might emerge from that which has thus far privileged the author, the nation and the book.

23

For a collection of papers dealing with individual journals and magazines in the CiDR, see Simone Barck, Martina Langermann and Siegfried Lokatis (eds), Zwirchen 'MoJaik' und ~inheil~' ZeilJchriften in der DDR (Berlin: Links, 1999).

Chapter 1 Establishing the Legend: The Accumulation of Symbolic Capital (1948-1955) Sinn und Form is read here in the West, and let me add that I hear uniformly good things about the journal. A number of my colleagues describe it as the only German literary journal worthy of the name. In any case, my friend Hans Erich Nossack was so taken by the last issue that he has resolved to send his own work to you from time to time. 1

We begin our analysis of the origins of the Sinn und Form 'legend' not in the last months of 1948, the time of the journal's foundation and the completion of the opening issue, but in February 1955 when Hans Henny J ahnn provided this favourable assessment of the journal's resonance in the West. The issue of Sinn und Form which had so impressed Jahnn's friend Nossack was the double issue (56/1954) that had appeared at the end of the previous year and that had opened with a lengthy excerpt from Alfred Döblin's Hamlet. Together with Döblin's fmal and, at that time, still unpublished novel, the issue contained prose by his contemporaries from the Weimar Republic, Ludwig Renn, Herbert Ihering, and Leonhard Frank, as well as an extract from Jahnn's own soon to be published drama, Thomas Chatterton. Lyric poetry was contributed by, among others, Eberhard Meckel, Werner Warsinsky, Wolfgang Bächler and Hugo Huppert, and accompanied by Johannes R. Becher's reflections on the genre in an extract from the second part of his Poetische Konfession. An international dimension was lent by the acclaimed early twentieth-century Finnish poet, Eino Leino, and by the Indian intellectual Pupul J ayakar, and the issue was completed by an impressive range of literary-critical essays from such notables as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, from the Germanists Reinhard Buchwald and Joachim Müller, and from the foremost GDR intellectuals Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer. Writers under discussion in those essays ranged from Goethe and Stifter to Chekhov and Flaubert. As the reviewer for the Deutsche Volkszeitung put it: 'Surely such first-class, representative

Hans Henny]ahnn's letter to Peter Huchel of 22 February 1955 is in Bernd Goldmann (ed.), HanJ Henny Jahnn, Peler HUfhel· Ein Bri~/ived}JelI951-1959 (Mainz: f-Iase & Koehler, 1974) p. 72.

12

Establishing the Legend

names of internationalliterary renown have seldom been united in a single issue of a joumal.'2 It was precisely this issue of the joumal which its own editor-in-chief picked out as the strongest that he had put together during his editorship. Huchel claimed in a letter to the publishers that he had 'not yet in six years produced such an imposing issue',3 and he found support for his view from a range of correspondents, both in the East and the West. Bloch, for example, in a letter to Huchel of 11 January 1955, contrasted the composition of the double issue very favourably with what he perceived to be the drab cultural formulae of the GDR: 'There has scarcely ever been a composition like this; and that amidst this sterility, amidst the repugnant jargon that surrounds us almost everywhere. Let me shake your hand.'4 Wolfgang Koeppen, one of those West German writers to whom the journal was sent on a regular basis, wrote to Huchel congratulating him on the issue and identifying it as without doubt 'one of the best German journals'. 5 J ahnn himself described the double issue as 'especially rich'. At a time when the vast majority of West German intellectuals were deeply suspicious of the GDR, Sinn und Form was increasingly coming to be identified with the literary values of its editor and his vision of Cold War diplomacy, rather than with its fmancial and political sponsors in the GDR. Crucially, the growing symbolic capital enjoyed by the journal was invested in a currency recognised on both sides of the GermanGerman border. Viewed in the context of the early history of Sinn und Form, the success of 56/1954 symbolises a key juncture in the development of the journal and its legend. Having survived a turbulent and crisis-ridden first five years, the journal and its name had come to designate more than simply a materialliterary object. No longer a neutral vessel which derived its own value purely from the value associated with its contributors and their contributions, by 1954 Sinn und Form possessed its own substantial sum of symbolic capital which it could dispense and exchange in the cultural and political fields. As such, 1954 represents the culmination of the first, founding phase of the journal, what we term, following Pierre Bourdieu, the phase of the initial accumulation of symbolic capital. 6 And in this chapter our aim is to map the processes by which the journal was able to accumu-

2

3

4 5 6

'Sinn und Form: Ein Beispiel kultureller Einheit', Deul.fche T/o1kJzeitung, 5 February 1955. The review is reproduced in full in Bemhard Schiele, RezeptionJ- und WirkungJgeJcbicbte der L.iteraturzeit.rchrifl ~finn und Form' unter der Redaktion l'on Peter I-lUt:bel (19+9-1962) (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988), pp. 353-57 (here p. 353). Huche1's letter to Rütten und Loening of 11 Gctober 1954 is cited by Uwe Schoor, DaJ geheime Journal der Nation: Die Zeit.rchrfft 'Sinn und Form', Chtjredakteur: Peter HucbeI19+9-62 (Berlin: Lang, 1992), p. 174. See Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 174. Koeppen's letter of 28 December 1954 is cited by Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 174. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rufes if Art: The GenesiJ and Stme/ure if the Literary Field, trans by Susan Emanue1 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 255.

Intraductian

13

late and secure this symbolic capital amidst the political and cultural-political turbulence of its founding years. Throughout, the double issue of 1954 will be used as a point of reference from which to consider the key anatomical features of Sinn und Form as a cultural institution and the means by which they contributed to its accumulation of capital in the first six years of its existence. Offering an analysis which focuses both on the joumal's textual dimension and on the vast hinterland of agents and institutions which exert an influence on it, we shall consider in subsequent sections: the institutional basis of Sinn und Form and, above all, its location in the cultural-political struggles played out in the German Academy of Arts; the disposition and aptitudes of Peter Huchel as editor-in-chief and the securing of his role through the crisis of 1953; the extensive volume of capital donated to the enterprise by the journal's contributors; the textual and compositional dimension of Sinn und Form as a characteristically thick cultural journal; and, f111ally, the consecrating force of its readership and reception in both East and West. First of all, though, we seek to reconstruct the predicament of Sinn und Form in relation to the literary field and the field of power in the years leading from its foundation to 1954. Only in that context can the construction of the legend be appropriately understood.

The Literary Field and the Field of Power Autonomous values: literary journals between tradition and innovation In SINN UND FORM we are presenting a literary journal, the publication of which can only be justified if - far removed from any aestheticism - it serves the spirit of language and poetry. For only by meeting this condition can it become one of the essential and representative literary publications that appear as periodicals in Germany. First and foremost, the se1ection of contributions will proceed according to the principles that ought always to have applied to such a review: to grant a hearing to all those voices that, through artistic means, shape the word in the cause of human and social progress, in the interests of humanism and of intellectual profundity or that, through critical means and with meticulous knowledge, evaluate literary publications from the intellectual realm, both in Germany and abroad. 7

Still in 1954, six years after its foundation, Sinn und Form bore the hallmarks of its foundation amidst the rubble of the war's end. The journal was shaped by the ideals and core values set out in the publicity material which announced its publication in late 1948. Those core values can only be understood in the context of the flood of new journal publications which appeared in Germany immediately after 1945 and the powerful sense of agency feIt by writers and intellectuals in the 7

Publicity flier far Sinn und Form, 1948, SAdA, Jahannes R. Becher Archive, 10614.

14

Establishing the Legend

period of political transition under the Occupation. Military defeat, political and infrastructural collapse, social and material devastation, and not least an overwhelming sense of moral bankruptcy cleared the way for a fundamental reevaluation of cultural values amidst the now familiar rhetoric of tabula rasa and the Zero Hour. In the sense that there were few established positions in the literary field - consecration under National Socialism having been discredited and previously consecrated figures needing to re-position themselves after exile - the opportunity existed for new entrants to the field to establish their positions and contribute towards a new set of dominant values in the literary field. As Alfred Andersch put it in his 1948 essay Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung. 'The collapse of the old world has, above all among the young generation, generated the feeling of a complete absence of presuppositions, the anticipation of an original new becoming, for which there exist no precedents.'8 But not all agents in the literary field shared this impetus towards a radical new beginning. For many, literary tradition and continuity offered a reassuring point of anchorage amidst the uncertainties of the ruins, and it was in this spirit that in 1947, for example, Hans Paeschke had marked the first issue of his newly founded Merkur by signalling explicitly his orientation towards Lessing and to Wieland's Teutscher Merkur. In Paeschke's words: 'We must move beyond the compulsion to explain and justify ourselves, again and again, afresh before the world.'9 As such, the literary field at this point was characterised by a particularly intense and explicit struggle between the poles of innovation and traditionalism..A.nd this struggle was often contested directly in relation to notions of heteronomy and autonomy, so that positiontakings hinged on the perceived necessity, or otherwise, of social and political engagement in the wake of National Socialism. If the forces of literary innovation seemed to gain initial prominence in their call for a renewed political engagement articulated in a decidedly matter-of-fact tone, a pervasive suspicion of ideology soon reaffirmed the value of the more traditional, inwardly oriented poetry.lO It is as an intervention in this literary field, structured by the kind of alternatives represented by Paeschke's 'esteem for the world-renowned greats of our past' and Andersch's 'complete absence of presuppositions', that the foundation of Sinn und Form needs to be understood. In this sense, the declared intention of the journal to serve 'the spirit of language and poetry' and to represent the 'the principles that ought always to have applied to such a review' makes its position plain. While extra-literary concerns are invoked through the notions of progress and humanism and while the statement is careful to position the journal away

8 9 10

Alfred Anderseh, DeutJche Literatur in der EntJcheidung: Ein Beitrag zur Ana!yJe der literari.rchen Situation (Karlsruhe: Volk und Welt, 1948), pp. 24-25. Hans Paeschke, 'Verantwortung des Geistes', Merkur, 1 (1947),100-10 (p. 1(9). The first issue opened programmatically with Lessing's 'Über eine Aufgabe im TeulJcben Merkurl. See Stephen Parker et al, Tbe Modern Re.rtoralion: Re-thinking German literaf)' hi.rlof)' 1930-1960 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), especially pp. 126-85.

The Literary Field and the Field of Power

15

from pure aestheticism, explicit reference to socialism made in an earlier draft has been pointedly dropped from the published material. ll As such, the journal was not to be bound by the political dogma wruch was already encroaching on cultural life in East Berlin. Rather, within the parameters of a broadly based progressive anti-fascism, the statement clearly aligns the journal with predominantly autonomous literary values, a point reinforced by Werner Wilk's recollections of editorial policy at the journal's foundation: It was to be the great, representative German journal, the mission of whieh was to traee and doeument the eurrents of German and internationalliterature with poems, novellas, extraets from novels, and essays. It was to eontain no polemies, no manifestoes (exeept for artistie values) and no reviews. [...] It was to be - as people later put it - 'all-German', keep itself out of the diseussions and demands of everyday polities and publish eontributions by writers from all the German zones of oeeupation, in so far as they met the artistie standards of the journal and did not have a dubious past,12

Literary quality was set out as the sole criterion of selection. Otherwise, with the exception of overt involvement with German fascism, the journal steadfastly rejected any role for heteronomous concerns in the selection of contributors and contributions. On trus basis, the journal was to be all-German, international and, above aIl, 'representative'. This twin commitment to quality and to international representativity emerges too from a letter from Huchel to Henri Bergmiller, outlining the new project and inviting rum to contribute as a translator: 'We are talking about a literary journal that is intended to promote foreign literature, that is to say, writing of value. Anything that belongs to less serious literature or the feuilleton is out of the question.'13 Or, as the publicity material for the journal put it: 'Pioneering work is to be done, too, in the mediation of all foreign literature that can have a vital impact - irrespective of the language in wruch it is written.'14 In the explicit rejection of the more accessible or commercialliterature of the feuilleton, Sinn und Form was clearly positioning itself as an unashamedly elite literary journal in the field of restricted literary production, where production is aimed predominantly at other producers. Aimed at an intellectual audience, the journal sought charismatic consecration and specific symbolic profits in the form of literary prestige, rather than the commercial consecration and profits of the market. In trus context, the repeated emphasis on all-German and international literature can be read as a disavowal of the capital accrued from specific, local sources of legitimacy - political as weIl as economic - in favour of common principles of consecration with validity across the literary field, not only within the Soviet Zone and the early GDR, but also across the politically divided German

11 12 13 14

See Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 28. Wemer Wilk, 'Peter Huche1', Neue deutsche Hqie, 9 (1962), 81-96 (p. 89). Huche1's letter to Bergmiller of 14 June 1948 is in SAdA, Teilbestand Sinn und Form, 57. The publicity document is in SAdA,Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10614.

16

Establishing the Legend

cultural space. This is made most explicit in the publicity material for the journal's launch with the reference to the timeless values of the literary review, and it is here that Sinn und Form is positioning itself in a very specific line of continuity in the autonomous values of the literary field. Another piece of correspondence from the foundation of the journal, Heinz-Winfried Sabais's report of a conversation held with Huchel in mid-1948, reinforces the point: 'I believe that this journal will fulftl a great and demanding mission, and in saying that I am reminded of Stefan George's Blätterfür die Kunst, not in their manner but in their function, and of course without their soullessness and reactionary line. If I understand it correcdy that function was to [...] unite tradition and progress.'lS Of course, Sabais had good reason to be wary of close associations with George and his literary enterprise, and we have already noted the deliberate rejection of a position of aestheticism in the opening publicity material for Sinn und Form. N onetheless, it should also be clear that the journal was being founded with a very conscious eye on its prestigious antecedents and contemporaries in the field of restricted autonomous production, and George's Bliitter für die Kunst provided just one of many such points 0 f reference. Most significant in this context are the two West German journals with similar representative claims, namely Gottfried Bermann-Fischer's Die neue Runds(;hau and Paeschke's Merkur, and the two antecedents alluded to in the full tide of Sinn und Form, Thomas Mann's exile journal Maß und Wert and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Neue deutsche Beiträge. The last of these connections was made explicit by Huchel himself ten years after the foundation of Sinn und Form, when he referred in a letter to cour ambitious, indeed almost arrogant sub-tide, Beiträge zur Literatur, following Hugo von Hofmannsthal'.16 ~1ore clirect is the connection to Mann's Maß und Wert, published in Zurich between 1937 and 1940 with an explicit agenda to contrast the barbarity of National Socialism with the enduring 'measure' and 'value' of the established bourgeois institution of literature. Becher, as the founder and driving force behind Sinn und Form, had initially hoped to adopt the tide of Mann's journal, using it in a note drafting his plans for the journal in early 1948 before making the following request to Mann: In the seareh for a title, it has been suggested that I turn to you and enquire whether you might find it felieitous and desirable to give this new publieation the name of the journal Maß und Wertung [sie] that was onee assoeiated with you. It is seIf-evident that this thought would not have emerged if the new publieation was not feit to be similar in eharaeter to the old one. [...] I-Iowever, what speaks most strongly for this seems to

15

16

Sabais's letter to Becher of 28 June 1948 is in SAdA, Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10172. Becher replied on 21 September 1948, promising to discuss Sabais's offer with Huchel. 'The letter is in SAdA,Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10173. Huche1's letter to Apad Fay of 30 December 1958 is quoted by Schoor, DaJ gebeime .Journal der Nation, p. 31.

The Literary Fie1d and the Fie1d of Power

17

me to be the fact that in Maß und Wertung exactly that is expressed which is needed most urgently in Germany, now as before. 17

While Mann refused Becher's request, the echo of Maß und Wett in the classicistic balance of Sinn und Form is all too apparent. Becher acknowledged to Mann in a subsequent letter that he had 'after all found a tide that [...] in a certain way recalls Maß und Wert. t8 For all the differences in emphases, what runs as a common thread through these journals - and, as we shall see below, one might usefully add Willy Haas's Die literarische Welt to the list - is a shared belief in the capacity of a high-quality literary journal, between ideological extremes and removed from cultural and social ephemera, to make a telling contribution to contemporary society, crucially, on its own terms. Rejecting unequivocally any gratuitous avant-gardist experimentation, but also eschewing a sterile respect for the past, all these journals sought to achieve a more profound and effective topicality through a dynamic and productive synthesis between literary tradition and the present. Sabais's view of the deftning function of the literary journal fmds a striking echo, for example, in Paeschke's reflections in Merkur three years later. For Paeschke the most important task for a German cultural journal was 'to oppose both a romantic restoration and an activism without tradition, to look forwards as weIl as backwards, to think of yesterday and tomorrow'.t9 In this sense, Sinn und Form set out to promote what Gustav Seibt has more recently termed a 'progressive restoration'.20 In the process, it positioned itself in a strong line of literary continuity which, significantly, was in tune with the dominant restorative mood of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Judged by the autonomous principles of legitimacy valid in the field of literary production at the time of its foundation, Sinn und Form put itself in a position from which it could expect to accumulate substantial capital, and not least its share of the capital already possessed by the respected journals which it sought to emulate and with which it sought to associate itself.

17

18 19 20

Becher's letter to Mann of 24 April 1948 is quoted by Schoor, DaJ gebeime journal der Nation, pp. 20-21 and is reproduced in full in Rolf Harder (ed.), Briefe an jobanneJ R BedJer 1910-1958 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1993), pp. 373-75. For discussion of Becher's note drafting his plans for the journal, see Schoor, Dasgeheime journal der Nation, p. 27. Becher's letter to Mann of 11 June 1948 is quoted by Schoor, DaJ gebeime journal der Nation, p. 22. See also Becher, Briefe, p. 380. Hans Paeschke, 'Der Geist des Auslandes im Spiegel seiner Zeitschriften 111', Merkur, 5 (1951), 765-75 (p. 775). Gustav Seibt, 'Das Prinzip Abstand: FünfzigJahre Sinn und Form', Sinn und Form, (51) 1999,20518 (p. 208).

18

Establishing the Legend

Heteronomous values: the literary field and German communism Protected as it may have been from the demands of commercialliterature, the institutional position of Sinn und Form in the GDR in 1954 ensured that it was nevertheless subject to an alternative set of external values, namely the heteronomous demands imposed on the literary field by SED cultural policy. Published under the 'total' claim of the GDR regime, Sinn und Form had to look towards institutional consecration by the agencies of SED cultural policy, particularly the Cultural Department of the SED Central Committee, in order to accrue sufficient political capital to secure its continuing existence, political capital which it exchanged for economic capital in the form of the subsidy which it received from the regime. Significantly, the relationship between the two sets of values in relation to which Sinn und Form had to orient itself - the autonomous values of the literary field and the heteronomous values emanating from the field of political power - was neither stable nor neutral. Fluctuations in cultural policy and in the force and effectiveness with which the SED's total claim was imposed, for exampIe, permitted greater or lesser scope for literary activity aligned with the autonomous principles of the field and granted greater or lesser force to those autonomous principles as a source of legitimation for literary activity. Significantly, at the time of the journal's foundation and in the first years of its publication, a number of factors eombined to ensure that broadly 'autonomous' literary values enjoyed currency across the German cultural space that Sinn und Form sought to occupy. In part, this was a natural consequence of the incomplete nature of the authoritarian or, even, totalitarian nature of rule in the Soviet Zone and in the GDR. Cultural continuities across both the geographical and temporal boundaries of any political regime act as one of the most important restrictions on the exercise of dictatorial power, and the autonomous values of the literary field constitute one signifieant set of such cultural continuities. In the early GDR, this inability to exereise total control over the cultural sphere was exacerbated not only by the neeessarily uneertain nature of eultural policy and its assoeiated institutions during the crystallisation phase of the regime, but also by a set of political and geo-political factors bound up with the fragile power of the SED and its fundamental lack of legitimacy. Most importantly, German political division could not so easily partition the German cultural space, stilliess so when Stalin's poliey on the German Question was oriented not towards revolutionary strategy, but towards securing Soviet interests through negotiation with the western allies and the unification of Germany. For Stalin, if not for the SED hardliners around Walter Ulbricht who were paradoxically charged with implementing Stalin's policy, the 'special German path to Socialism' was explicitly not

The Literary Field and the Field of Power

19

to be that of Sovietisation. 21 Indeed, even beyond Stalin's death in 1953 and up until 1955, priority in Soviet policy was given to unification rather than the separate development of a socialist state. 22 In the cultural sphere, such geopolitical considerations had two key consequences. Firstly, and as we shall see below in our consideration of the post-Nazi cultural institutions wruch supported Sinn und Form, they gave prominence and official political legitimacy to an inclusive all-German cultural policy, progressive and representative rather than partisan and sectarian. As such, the position occupied by Sinn und Form in the literary field at its foundation was liable to accme political capital, as weIl as specific literary capital. Secondly, these political conditions generated the most profound contradictions and tensions within SED cultural policy wruch reproduced the fundamental tension in the political field between the pursuit of the all-German approach and the emerging reality of the separate German socialist state. Conflict and faction were rife in both the cultural and the political fields, both within the SED and between Moscow and East Berlin, as policy lurched between all-German and specifically GDR paths. At its emdest in the literary field, trus was the tension between, on the one hand, the predominantly autonomous principles of the progressive restoration wruch tapped into shared bourgeois cultural values and traditions and, on the other, the heteronomous principles of a much more partisan or propagandist Socialist Realism. The second set of factors wruch protected the autonomous principles to wruch Sinn und Form was oriented relates to the particular development of German Marxist literary aesthetics in the mid-twentieth century: such was the trajectory of the 'official' position from the late Weimar Republic, through exile and into the Soviet Zone, that even the strongly partisan SED position was not entirely incompatible with the position occupied by Sinn und Form in the literary field. As far back as the late 1920s, many of the key figures in GDR literary politics had been engaged in debates concerning the nature of revolutionary Marxist literature and the role of the proletarian left in literary production. 23 Characteristic of these debates was the steadfast rejection by liberal and conservative bourgeois writers of the validity of proletarian-revolutionary writing as a form of genuine literary activity. Invoking the autonomous principles of the literary field, journal editors such as Martin Raschke in Die Kolonne or Willy Haas in Die literaris(;he Welt mbbished the stilted reportage of worker correspondents. Acting as gatekeepers of the literary field, Raschke and Haas could not countenance the substitution of political commitment for literary merit. But it is worth remembering too that

21 22 23

See Peter Davies, Divided Lr(yalties: East German Writers and the PolitiCJ f!/ German DtiJision 19451953 (Leeds: Maney, 2000). See Wilfried Loth, Stalins ungeliebte.r Kind: Warum Mo.rkau die DDR nit:ht wollte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994). See Parker et al, Modern Restoration, pp. 41-60. See also Helga Gallas, Mar~;irtist:he Literaturtheorie: Kontrover..ren im Bundproletarisch-rezJolutioniirer SchriflJteller (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), pp. 46-69.

20

Establishing thc Legend

comparable debates were taking place amongst the writers of the Marxist left themselves, most notably on the pages of Die Linkskuroe (1929-1932), the literary journal of the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. Driven by Becher in his role as the League's President and by Georg Lukacs, the outcome of these debates was a significant victory for the bourgeois tradition. Indeed, it was in these debates that Lukacs gained an influence which would persist in the early GDR, his advocacy of a brand of 19th -century bourgeois realism acquiring a normative status for German communist writers. The sidelining of aradical, proletarian form of Socialist Realism, which was initiated in the years around 1930 and was prolonged by the broad and inclusive agenda of the Popular Front initiative amongst German communist writers in exile, had profound implications for a GDR literary journal which had elite and representative aspirations and which stood closer to Haas and Raschke than to the worker correspondents. In years to come, the dogmatic insistence on the humanist tradition of Weimar Classicism by SED cultural officials, their exclusion of German modernism, and the advocacy of a more proletarian brand of Socialist Realism would all pose serious difficulties for Sinn und Form, but at its foundation there was no necessary contradiction between an elite, essentially bourgeois literary journal and official German Marxist aesthetics. How the journal defended itself against the most severe of those threats so that it was in a position to publish the double issue of 1954 will form the subject-matter of the next seetion, in which we shall concern ourselves with the institutional basis of Sinn und Form which brought it into the sphere of influence of the SED.

Institutional Infrastructure: Adoption by the Academy of Arts .A.s did every issue of Sinn und Form published from the end of 1950, the double issue of 1954 carried a simple notification of its institutional provenance: 'SINN UND FORM/ Published by the German Academy of Arts/ Literature Section.'24 The Academy, formally established on 24 March 1950 as a successor institution to the Prussian Academy of Arts, was one of a number of cultural products of Soviet German policy which were explicitly all-German, rather than socialist, in their founding intentions. And it is to another of these institutions, the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund) and its founding President, again Johannes R. Becher, that the origins of the journal can be traced. Far from the SED-affiliated mass organisation that it would become, the Kulturbund was founded formally on 8 August 1945 as a cross-zone grouping of progressive 24

The full tide of the Academy's Literature Section was the 'Section for Literature and for Language Cultivation' (Sektion Difhtkunst und Sprachpflege). We use the designation 'Literature Section' throughout.

Institutional Infrastructure

21

intellectuals, entirely in keeping with the proclamation by the Communist Party of Germany (hereafter KPD) on 11 June 1945 of the 'establishment of an antifascist, democratic regime, of a parliamentary-democratic republic'. Already at the first meeting of the Presidium of the Kulturbund on 24 August, reference was made to a literary journal recognisable in its broad outlines as the Sinn und Form project. Paul Wiegier, who had been appointed to a senior editorial position at the Aufbau Verlag, the publishing arm of the Kulturbund, and who would act as cofounder of Sinn und Form with Becher, addressed the meeting as folIows: Our publishing programme includes work on journals, or rather a number of journal projeets, and I use this plural advisedly, sinee Aufbau, the monthly for eultural polities, is now to be followed by a literary monthly, whieh is being prepared for Oetober and whieh is to be devoted to literature in the narrower sense, to eriticism, and to philosophy, and whieh has to eonsider in equal measure the plastie arts. 25

Although this timetable proved to be over-optimistic, the essential elements of this 'representative' literary project were developed on and off over the coming months and years. Above all, that project was shaped by Becher, the KPD's leading spokesman on cultural affairs and one of the few German literary figures with the required strategie vision and influence for such an ambitious undertaking. Becher, the Expressionist poet, returned from exile in :Lvloscow convinced of his mission to create the German Kulturnation which Goethe and, more recendy, Thomas Mann had invoked. In May 1947, he wrote to WiegIer of his plan 'to publish together with you a representative literary journal under the tide Die Tradition'.26 Not only the tide, but also the list of proposed contributors shows the direction of Becher's thinking: prominent were the conservative authors of inner emigration, Ernst Wiechert, Hans Carossa, and Ricarda Huch. The choice of WiegIer as co-founder of Sinn und Form - a figure who enjoyed, in Hans Mayer's words, 'a respected, bourgeois literary name'27 - and of Peter Huchel as editor-in-chief are further telling indicators of the journal's proposed orientation. Indeed, the initiallocation of the journal's editorial seat in the British Sector of Berlin in Charlottenburg at Bayemallee 44 is not just attributable to the fact the Huchel already lived there, in the Soviet enclave around Radio Berlin, for whom he worked. Rather, this choice had a strategie significance which Becher explained to the head of Radio Berlin.28 For Becher, Sinn und Form was 'of the greatest importance in cultural-political 25 26

27

28

The minutes of the meeting of 24 August 1945 are in SAPMO, DY 27 Kulturbund, 907/498. Becher's letter to Wiegier of 3 May 1947 is in Becher, I3ri~/e, p. 336. See also Becher's letter of 15 March 1948 to Sergey Tulpanov proposing 'the transformation of thc literary journal Mii,...~ into a representative journal through an appropriate reconstitution of its editorial team with its seat in Berlin'. Becher, Briife, p. 366. Hans Mayer (ed.), Ober Peter Huchel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 174. Wiegier, the author of a distinguished history of German literature, had a long association with the Ullstein Verlag. He died in August 1949, shortly after the journal's foundation. Becher's letter of2 November 1949 is in SAdA, Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10188.

22

Establishing thc Legend

terms', and, as he continued, 'the editorial offices are in West Berlin for carefully considered reasons'. Quite simply, Sinn und Form was aimed at West Berlin, West Germany and the western world, and its institutional set-up supported that orientation. Amidst this careful strategie planning, the more practical institutional and financial arrangements for the journal were undertaken with somewhat less forethought. The first editorial meeting was held at the Kulturbund on 25 May 1948, where Becher, Wiegier and Huchel were joined by the printer Eduard Stichnote and by the publisher Ulrich Riemerschmidt of Rütten und Loening and the Potsdamer Verlagsgesellschaft. 29 A contract dated 15 October 1948 was made between the publisher and Becher as President of the I..illiteratur 1933-1950, IV: E>..ilpresse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), pp. 505-06 and pp. 532-39. Huchel wrote this in a letter to Rolf Italiaander of 5 November 1956, which is in I-Iuchel, Briife, pp. 246-47.

Editorship

33

recognised by scholars as a characteristic feature of the years around 1930. 68 Symptomatic in this respect is Huchel's association in those years with the Kolonne Circle of young nature poets and their literary journal of the same name, whose most notable contributors included Martin Raschke, Günter Eich, and Elisabeth Langgässer. It was to Huchel that the Kolonne poetry prize was awarded in 1932, recognition of the commonalities between his brand of inspired nature poetry and the journal's own polemical attempts to re-assert the value of the genius poet against the journalistic and politicised writing of Neue Sachlichkeit. The social question and overt party-political allegiances had no role to play in this re-assertion of literary autonomy, and it is no little irony that Haas's editorship of Die literarische Welt was characterised by frequent and often vitriolic exchanges with the Marxist Left and, most prominently, with Johannes R. Becher. Indeed, Huchel himself made clear in an autobiographical essay in 1931 his distance from contemporaries who aligned themselves with the KPD.69 By the time Huchel came to the attention of Becher in 1948, having been captured by the Soviet army in 1945 and recruited by Soviet cultural officers to work at Radio Berlin, the intervening years had helped to establish sufficient common ground for a viable working relationship. While Becher had completed his transition to an aesthetically conservative position in the 1930s and 1940s, the compromises and complexities of earning a living as a writer in Nazi Germany had brought a new social engagement to Huchel's literary standpoint. At a rhetoricallevel, this sentiment would manifest itself in a moral rejection of the kind of inwardness which he himself had practised between 1933 and 1945 and which he, and Kolonne poets such as Eich and Langgässer, now condemned as an abdication of responsibility.7° In his literary practice, this engagement would yield his enthusiastic poetic homage to the Land Reform, 'Das Gesetz', a short-lived reconciliation of his nature idiom with a socialist and realist concern for the peasantry.7 1 More enduring, and more in keeping with his established poetic habitus, was the following programmatic statement which synthesised a broad concern for humane values with the kind of aesthetic discourse which he had embodied, both publicly and in his authorial self-image, since 1930: 'Today, as a fresh dissemination of humanist thinking again begins to develop alongside a fresh cultivation of artistic taste, we

68

69 70 71

See Parker et al, The Modern Restoration, pp. 66-70 and pp. 337-41. See also See Frank Trommler, 'Emigration und Nachkriegsliteratur: Zum Problem der geschichtlichen Kontinuität', in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (eds), E>"Ajf und innere Emigration: Third Wist:Onsin Workshop (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1972), pp. 173-97; Hans Dieter Schäfer, 'Zur Periodisierung der deutschen Literatur seit 1930', in Nicolas Born and Jürgen Manthey (eds), Uteraturmaga~n 7: Nat:hkriegsliteratur (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977), pp. 95-115; and Anton Kaes, Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zurdeutst:hen Literatur 1918-1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983). Peter Huche1, 'Europa neunzehnhunderttraurig', in Huchel, GeJammelte Werke, 11, p. 218. See, for example, Huchel's speech at the Tag du./reien But:heJ, 10 May 1947, in Huche1, GeJammelte Werke, 11, pp. 261-65. Huchel, GeJammelte Werke, I, p. 283.

34

Establishing the Legend

once more face the same challenge that critics adumbrated a decade and a half ago.'72 The line of continuity to his mentor Haas and, in turn, to Haas's intellectual inspiration, Hofmannsthai, is clear enough. It was precisely the literary credibility which could be gamered in the West by a predominantly autonomous poet - and Huchel saw his mission in these terms - that Haas's protege brought to Becher's representative, all-German project. These credentials marked him out as someone who could fulft! the particular demands of the editorial role as they were described in his contract, namely to secure for the journal 'a high scholarly and literary quality' and to conceive it as 'the leading organ in the field of literary criticism'J3 Andersch could scarcely have picked out with greater accuracy Huchel's qualifications for the post when he described him as 'actually not a Marxist at all but a "bourgeois" poet of high standing, whose intentions most likely bear comparison with those that predominated among the so-called "Inner Emigres" under National Socialism'.74 Gr, as Huchel himself acknowledged, somewhat more prosaically, 'the Soviet cultural officers emphasised the importance of having a man in charge who was not in the Party'.75 If this relative autonomy was Huchel's greatest asset at the time of the journal's foundation, when the deliberate avoidance of all markers of a sectarian socialist agenda matched Soviet policy for Germany, it became his greatest source of vulnerability when GDR cultural policy started to be shaped more closely by the SED propagandists from 1951 onwards. Abusch's outrage expressed in the Academy Plenary on 26 June 1953 that the editorial office was situated 'somewhere in a village far beyond Potsdam' expressed the frustrations of the SED faction at the physical and institutional distance which Huchel had succeeded in putting between himself and the Academy.7 6 That physical distance was seen as an expression of aesthetic and political distance. Certainly, Huchel's choice of Wilhelmshorst near Potsdam as the editorial seat from 1950, after the move from Charlottenburg, need not be seen as part of a deliberate distancing strategy on his part. Suitable accornrnodation in East Berlin near the Acaderny was difficult to find, and it could be claimed that proximity to the publishing house in Potsdarn was equally desirable. All the same, the fact that his family horne doubled as the editorial seat and that his wife worked with him on the editorial team reinforced the sense that Huchel was investing his post with a personal charisma. Indeed, it is significant that even in September 1953, after the pressure on Huchel had been eased and his position secured, the i\cademy commission for Sinn und Form instituted a formal advisory board for the journal comprising two representatives from

72 73 74 75 76

Huchel, Gesammelte Werke, 11, p. 256. Huchel, Gesammelte Werke, 11, p. 326. Alfred Anderseh, 'Marxisten in der Igelstellung', Frankfurter Hefte, 6 (1951), 208-10 (p. 208). Huchel, Gesammelte Werke, 11, p. 374. The rninutes of the Plenary session of 26 June 1953 are in SAdA, ZAA, 118.

Editorsrup

35

the Literature Section and one each from the .A.cademy's other sections.77 This, together with the allocation of a room in the main Academy building for regular consultations with the editorial staff, constituted a clear attempt to de-personalise the editorship of the journal and to bridge the distance which Huchel had established between the editorial seat and the Academy. Likewise, Zweig pursued the idea of a second editor into 1954, approaching Louis Fürnberg directly: We need you, dear Louis, in Berlin, more specifically, in the Academy of Arts, with Huchel as the principal editor of Sinn und Form. That cannot be done from Weimar; our bi-monthly journal is already suffering because Huchel is in Wilhelmshorst, and likewise his editorial team, and that he only comes to Berlin twice a week. 78

Nothing came of Zweig's initiative, but it was clearly not just hard-line SED politicians, wanting to instrumentalise the journal, who feit that Sinn und Form was hampered by Huchel's personal style of editorship. But, here again, the institutional inertia of the Academy only served to reinforce Huchel's independent position. The advisory board proved to be no more robust than had been the Sinn und Form commission in shaping the editorial direction of the journal, the latter tellingly set up at Huchel's own request in February 1951 as a means of freeing his editorial work from the cumbersome committee structure of the Academy. In the wake of the conflicts of 1953 and in the absence of Abusch and Becher, the Academy lacked the will and means to impose itself, and Huchel was left to go his own way over the next two or three years, his authority and autonomy stronger than ever. Indeed, it was a sign of the symbolic capital he now commanded that he was able to reject the Academy's salary offers of 1,200 and then 1,500 marks, eventually agreeing in early 1954 to 1,750 marks per month and a 250 mark rise for his wife.7 9 It was also in these years that Huchel embarked on his own personal mission of cultural diplomacy between East and West, supported by the Academy and the commission for all-German work in the Writers' Union. Venues in the year of the 1954 double issue, for example, included Düsseldorf, the International PEN Congress in Amsterdam and the meeting of the Hölderlin Society in Bad Homburg. So active had Huchel been in this area, that on 23 February 1955 he commented to Ludvik Kundera that in recent months he had spent more time in the West than at his desk. 80 Orienting himself explicitly towards western sources of culturallegitimation, Huchel became 77 78

79

80

The minutes of the meeting of 29 September 1953 are in SAdA, ZAA, 81. Zweig's letter to Fümberg of May 1954 is in Rosemarie Poschmann and Gerhard Wolf (eds), Der BriejWechsel iJVischen Louis Fümberg und AmoM Zweig: Dokumente einer Freundscbqfl (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1978), pp. 206-08 (here pp. 206-07). Huchel's letter to Engel of 5 January 1954, informing rum of rus discussions with Becher, who had agreed to rus salary wishes is in SAdA, 2M, 81. The initial offers were made through the Presidium on 21 October 1953 and in writing by Engel. See SAdA, ZM, 17 and SAdA, ZM, 81. Kundera kindly supplied Stephen Parker with copies of Huchel's correspondence with rum on a visit in September 1981.

36

Establishing the Legend

the embodiment of the all-German policy which Sinn und Form had been founded to represent. In this way, the events of 1953 emerge as a watershed in the development of Huchel's role as editor and, in turn, in the contribution made by Huchel to the Sinn und Form legend. In particular, it was 1953 that saw a decisive shift in the balance between Huchel and Becher as figureheads of the journal. Looking back, Huchel sought to downplay Becher's role even in the early days of the journal: 'I managed the journal without paying any attention to personal relationships, even if Johannes R. Becher [...] would have liked to have made a Becher journal out of it.'81 In fact, in the years until 1953 Sinn und Form was much more of a 'Becher journal' than Huchel, and many western critics, have been prepared to acknowledge. It was Becher who had the links with many of the major figures who were won for the journal, and it was Becher's patronage which secured the journal's survival in those early years. However, to return to the analogy with Maß und Werl, Becher was no Thomas Mann. Lacking Mann's unimpeachable international literary reputation, Becher surrendered what literary capital he did possess in the West, as he made the transition from poet to SED :J\1inister of Culture. This, as much as anything, created the space which Huchel was able to fill with his own literary reputation, and Huchel's treatment at the hands of the SED in 1953 could only bolster his own reserves of literary capital. In its renunciation of political capital at this time, Sinn und Form became a mysterious, even exotic phenomenon which western observers could not account for beyond Huchel's charisma. In practical terms, the events of June 1953 also opened up room for manoeuvre in the cultural field, above all through an international dimension, which would have been unimaginable in the preceding eighteen months. Just as Brecht used that space to cement his reputation through the Berlin Ensemble and its international tours, so Huchel would work to secure the international prestige of Sinn und Form. Of course, Peter Huchel was no Ferdinand Lion, and what his apprenticeship with Willy Haas had also given him was a subtle appreciation of the mIes of the editorial game. It is to the product of those skills, Sinn und Form as a literary work, that attention will turn in subsequent seetions.

Contributors: Accumulating Capital in the West If Sinn und Form was to a large extent the journal of its founder and of its first editor-in-chief, then it was also, as is any literary journal, 'from the start the work of its authors'ß2 Indeed, the multi-authored nature of the literary journal is one of its deftning characteristics as a text, and each of those authors makes a contribution

81

Huche1, Gesammelte Werke, 11, p. 374.

82

Faber and Greno, p. 78.

Contributors

37

to the sum of symbolic capital at the disposal of the journal and its editor. In the double issue of 1954, for example, that capital is provided by twenty-two different contributors, each occupying their own position in the literary and political fields, each with their own trajectory towards that position. If, as Bourdieu suggests, 'the gathering together of the authors [...] which make up a literary review has as its genuine principle [...] social strategies close to those governing the constitution of a salon or a movement', then we might legitimately ask what the qualifications were for belonging to the Sinn und Form 'salon',83 More specifically, what was the proftle of contributors across the double issue which Huchel clearly saw as the epitome of his editorial work? What was, to use Bourdieu's terminology again, the 'unifying and generative principle' for contributors to Sinn und Form; what was their 'common habitus' or 'ethos'? Here, we are not concerned with the specific cultural value which can be placed on their individual contributions as texts, or at least not yet. Nor are we interested in the real-world biographies of the individuals responsible for producing those contributions. Instead, our concern rests with the symbolic value of each individual contributor as a literary 'name', the value by which capital accrues to the journal. Clearly, the contributors invite categorisation according to a number of parameters: their age and literary reputation, for example, or their social origin and political affiliation. We might usefully distinguish between German and nonGerman contributors, between Eastem Bloc contributors and those from the West. Contemporary writers brought something different from those published posthumously; established names had a function which diverged from unknown newcomers. Some enjoyed personal or institutional relationships with key figures around the journal and figured with regularity; some had no prior connection to the editor or founder and appeared only once. What all these contributors have in common is that, through their publication in Sinn und Form, they participated in an exchange of capital with the journal and entered into a creative and productive relationship with its core idea. Whether their presence reinforced that idea or implied some revision of it, each made a discernible contribution to the legend which we are seeking to reconstruct. In this respect, not all contributors are equal, and what is most striking about the double issue of 1954 is the concentration of such notable literary and intellectual reputations in a single issue. Foremost amongst these is Thomas Mann, undoubtedly the most respected living German writer at the time, and one of the few figures of sufficient stature to be able to transcend the political division between East and West. For Becher, Mann's importance went beyond simply the unmatched respect he commanded as a writer. As a proponent and living embodiment of the German Kulturnation which lay at the heart of Becher's representative all-German vision, Mann's involvement with Sinn und Form took on

83

Bourdieu, Thc RulcJ qfArt, p. 273.

38

Establishing the Legend

iconic significance. Following the unsuccessful request to adopt the title of Maß und Weft, for example, a further letter had gone out from Becher to Mann in December 1948, requesting possible contributions and enclosing the first issue of the journal.84 By mid-1953, Becher's courting of Thomas Mann had taken on the proportions of high-level cultural diplomacy on behalf of the GDR itself, desperate for the legitimacy which Mann's blessing would have provided. Plans were being made by the Aufbau Verlag for a new collected edition of Mann's works to be published to coincide with Mann's 80 th birthday in June 1955, and it was hoped that Mann would accept the award of the GDR National Prize. Through the Academy, Huchel had been asked in July 1953 to draft a statement in support of Mann's National Prize, and two months later he approached Mann directly to request permission to reproduce the speech about Tolstoy which he had delivered at Princeton in 1939.85 The shameless flattery of Huchel's letter is indicative of the efforts which the GDR cultural elite were prepared to make to win over Mann, who had remained conspicuously neutral on the German question. Huchel regaled Mann with anecdotes from his recent trip to the Soviet Union where both intellectuals and workers had apparently enthused about Mann's work. Huchel was prepared to snub his long-time friend Alfred Kantorowicz in deference to offence which might have been caused by the latter's essay on the falling-out between the Mann brother forty years earlier.8 6 While Mann would decline the award of the National Prize, the efforts of Becher and Huchel on behalf of Sinn und Form were more successful. The Chekhov essay which appeared in the double issue of 1954 was the second of three contributions to be published in Mann's lifetime: the speech about Tolstoy had appeared in 5/1953 (5-7), and extracts from his Schiller address would appear shortly before his death (3/1955, 325-44). Mann's apparent obliviousness to Huchel's identity - his diary-entry for 4 Gctober 1953 records 'resumption of the letter to the man from Sinn und Form' suggests that we would be mistaken to attribute this particular coup to the charismatic force of Huchel's editorship.87 Comparable in profile to Thomas Mann amongst the contributors to the double issue, if inevitably lacking the equivalent stature, were two further eIder statesmen of progressive German literature who had taken up residence in the West after their return from exile, namely Alfred Döblin and Leonhard Frank. Indeed, the recruitment of Döblin bears comparison to the active courting of 84 85 86

87

Copies of the journal and a letter also went out to Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger. See Johannes R Becher Archive, 10176-79. The letter from the Academy to Huchel of 21 July 1953 is in SAdA, ZAA, 323. Huchel's letter to Thomas Mann of 20 September 1953 is in Huchel, Briefe, pp. 140-42. Huchel turned down Kantorowicz's essay (Der Zola-Essay als Brennpunkt der weltanschaulichen Beziehungen zwischen Heinrich und Thomas Mann' for fear of upsetting the younger Mann brother. See Huchel's letter to Kantorowicz of 27 November 1953 in Huchel, Brt~fe, pp. 152-54. Thomas Mann, TagebüdJer 1953-1955, ed. by IngeJens (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1995), p. 123.

Contributors

39

Mann. Döblin, too, had received one of the letters requesting contributions sent out with the first issue of the journal in December 1948, and it was Becher again who prompted Huchel to win for Sinn und Form a figure whom he saw as of strategie importance for a project seeking to undertake cultural diplomacy between East and West. In the immediate post-war period, Becher and Döblin had intervened together to ensure that the works of their fellow Expressionist, Gottfried Benn, were banned on account of his support for National Socialism, but, while Benn had begun to make a spectacular comeback in West German literary life, Döblin found himself an increasingly isolated figure in West Germany in the early 1950s. In this sense, there was mutual self-interest, and the promise of a mutual exchange of capital, in Huchel's advances to Döblin, which were manifested in a high-level mission to the latter's horne in the Black Forest, undertaken with Hans Mayer in September 1954. Correspondence followed in the second half of September, again dripping with praise and flattery on Huchel's part, and resulted in Döblin sending Huchel the manuscript of the Hamlet novel and giving permission to publish an extract. In the following years, this relationship would secure publication of the Hamlet novel with Rütten und Loening and would help to foster a renewed interest in Döblin's work, anticipating the subsequent, more widespread Döblin revival.8 s Leonhard Frank's relationship with Becher was a more personal one which stretched as far back as their Munich Bohemian days in the early 1900s. Becher promoted Frank through the Academy. His name was included amongst those West German authors suggested by Becher as contributors at a monthly editorial meeting in December 1950, and he appeared again amongst those recommended for a GDR National Prize in mid-1953 and for whom Huchel was expected to write a supporting statement.89 If Frank lacked the standing of Mann and Döblin, he was nonetheless another writer who had secured consecration in the first two decades of the twentieth century, having been awarded the Fontane Prize in 1914, the year before Döblin, and the Kleist Prize in 1920. For all their differences, these three septuagenarian grandees of German literary life were all figures who could trace their success back before 1918, who brought westem credibility to the joumal, and who were courted by Becher through the Academy. As figures who transcended German division, they embodied the core concept of Sinn und Form. 90 In addition to these three established German authors who were resident in the West, a further ten contributors to the double issue originated in the Federal 88 89 90

For details, see Stephen Parker, Peter Hut:heL' A Literary Lije in Twentieth-Century Germany (Beme: Lang, 1998), pp. 347-52. The minutes of the meeting of 20 December 1950 are in SAdA, ZAA, 315. The letter from the Academy to Huchel of 21 July 1953 is in SAdA, ZAA, 323. Among the contributors to 5-6/1954, one might also inc1ude here the Heidelberg literary historian Reinhard Buchwald. Buchwald started his career as areader under Anton Kippenberg at the Insel Verlag in 1906 and, at the age of 70, enjoyed an established status and generational position in literary scholarship comparable to that of Mann, Döblin and Frank as writers.

40

Establishing the Legend

Republic. As such, more than half of the contributors to this flagship edition of the journal, whose existence was underwritten by the SED, lived and worked in the West. Of these, Hans-Joachim Leidei, Rolf Seeliger, and Konrad Winkler were litde-known poets whose literary status failed to move beyond the obscure. Published alongside them were three further West German poets of slighdy more substantial, if not enduring, renown. Two of these, the forty-four-year-old Werner Warsinsky and the twenty-nine-year-old Wolfgang Bächler, were rising stars of the 1950s. The other, Eberhard Meckel, was a contemporary of Huchel's from the artists' colony in Berlin in the early 1930s and a fellow contributor to Die Kolonne. His poems appeared in Sinn und Form principally as recognition of his help in mediating Huchel's approach to Döblin in September, but it is clear that he shared basic poetological principles with at least some of those who appeared alongside him. Warsinsky had risen to prominence the previous year with his critically acclaimed magical realist novel, Kimmerische Fahrt, for which he was awarded the European Literature Prize in Geneva. Having been championed by Gottfried Benn, himself the intellectual authority of the Kolonne Circle, Warsinsky published in Akzente and Texte und Zeichen in the 1950s but soon fell back into obscurity. Bächler, meanwhile, had been the youngest participant at the founding meeting of the Gruppe 47 and had already been published twice in the journal. Significantly, he offered a deftnition of poetry which shared much with Huchel's vision of a new social responsibility combined with a conventional strictness of form. Together with Georg Schwarz, a Swabian Romantic and Mörike epigone, the presence of these West German nature poets offered a clear insight into the orientation of the journal. Sinn und Form was not just interested in publishing the literary establishment, but also sought to offer a platform for what it perceived to be valuable literature by the less well-known and the entirely unknown. Needless to say, these were not proletarians writing industrial, Socialist Realist reportage. The West German presence in the journal was clearly attributable in part to the cultural diplomacy which Huchel had undertaken in the West in the early 1950s. Georg Schwarz, for example, had been one of the Munich writers whom Huchel had encountered at the Starnberg meeting between East and West German writers in March 1951, while that same meeting had prompted Bächler to write an enthusiastic review of Sinn und Form for the Amsterdam journal Litterair Paspoort. 91 By the mid-1950s Huchel was maintaining correspondence with a range of western writers, including Hans Bender, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Konrad Farner, Ernst Fischer, Peter Hamm, Rudolf Hartung, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Walter Höllerer, Rolf Italiaander, Hans Henny Jahnn, Walter Jens, Hermann Kasack, Alfred KeIletat, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Kreuder, Heinz Ludwig Schneider, 91

The Starnberg meeting had been Becher's initiative through the Literature Section of the Academy. The publisher Willi Weismann acted as host. For Bächler Sinn und Form compared favourably to a Western equivalent like Die neue Rundrebau. The review from I.itterair Pa.rpoort, 47 (May 1951) is reproduced in Schiele, pp. 483-85.

Contributors

41

Günther Weisenborn and Wolfgang Weyrauch. Of these, the relationship with Jahnn, another product of the Starnberg meeting, was one of the strongest and most productive, and it is highly appropriate that J ahnn, too, appeared in the 1954 double issue. This was J ahnn's seventh contribution to the journal in only the sixth year of its existence, and this fruitful collaboration between the journal of the East Berlin Academy of Arts and the President of the Hamburg Academy of Arts demonstrated what was possible in East-West literary relations, particularly with western intellectuals opposed to the Adenauer restoration. The progressive restoration manifest in Sinn und Form acted as a welcome point of contrast. The relationship with Jahnn also demonstrated the trust which Huchel, the bourgeois nature poet, was able to establish and maintain with western contributors..A.t the same time, the Cold War climate placed very real restrictions, both practical and political, on these relationships, so that very few West German writers became regular contributors to the journal. Of those published in the double issue of 1954, for example, six were making their one and only appearance in the journal, and, Jahnn aside, only Bächler had made more than one previous contribution. Indeed, only Jahnn would go on to make more than four contributions. As such, the presence in that issue of such western German contributors as Mann, Döblin, and Frank may have been symbolic, iconic even, for Becher's vision for the journal, but they were not altogether typical of its regular published face. Much more typical of the journal were the five representatives of the GDR cultural elite - Becher, Brecht, Renn, Bloch, and Mayer - who appeared in the double issue and each of whom had contributed an average of at least one piece per year up until the end of 1954. Of these, Brecht and Becher were the most prolific, averaging over two pieces per year, not including the special issues which had been dedicated to them. Next came Bloch and Mayer, the journal's most regular essayists, both of whom were making their tenth contribution since the foundation of the journal. Renn was making a sixth contribution. All of these regular contributors belonged to the GDR cultural establishment: all had, for example, been awarded the GDR National Prize by 1955, and all enjoyed prestigious and privileged institutional positions. Becher and Brecht - together with another contributor to 5-6/1954, the theatre critic Herbert Ihering - were founder members of the Academy, while Renn had been elected at the same time as Huchel in 1952. Through the Academy, Brecht and Renn (along with Ihering) were also members of the journal's editorial board which had been instituted at the beginning of the year. Mayer aside, all belonged to the generation of German Marxist intellectuals who could trace their success back at least as far as the Weimar Republic and who had participated prominently in the vibrant publishing activity and intellectual exchange which characterised the German Marxist Left from the late 1920s and sustained it through exile. Indeed, the generational proximity between Becher, Ihering, Renn and Bloch, all ofwhom were in their mid-tolate sixties by 1954, is striking. With Zweig, Seghers, and Lukacs, who likewise av-

42

Establishing the Legend

eraged more than one contribution per year, these six contributors constituted the core constituency of Sinn und Form in its founding phase. Central to the capacity of the journal to accrue hard cultural currency through its GDR contributors was the credibility that those contributors could call upon in the West. Of course, a privileged position in the cultural hierarchy of the GDR was no guarantee of that kind of credibility, quite the opposite in fact. As we have seen, such credibility depended not least on a perceived distance to the SED regime, on the maintenance of at least relative autonomy on the part of GDR intellectuals. In this respect, the prominence of Becher and Renn was somewhat problematic. By the mid-1950s, Becher's reputation in the West was shot. Even as early as 1951, review copies of the Sinn und Form special issue marking Becher's 60 th birthday had been distributed only in the East. Given Becher's all-German mission for the journal, such adecision was a telling indicator of the kind of scathing response which the special issue could have been expected to provoke in the West. As such, Becher's presence was more likely to detract from the symbolic capital of the journal in the West than to add to it. Seen in this light, Becher's high frequency of contribution is all the more significant for the manner in which it undermines Huchel's later claim that he restricted Becher's contributions through an agreement between the two of them that neither should publish more than the other. Huchel's claim, that he published his own work sparingly so as to limit Becher's publications, is hardly borne out by the evidence: by the end of 1954 Becher had made twice as many contributions as Huchel. The reality of the situation, as revealed in Becher's correspondence, was that Huchel had no choice other than to publish the material which Becher sent to him. So it was, for example, in June 1950, when nine poems and Paul Rilla's essay 'Der Weg Johannes R. Bechers' were dispatched from Becher's office,92 and so it was with the 300 pages of self-indulgence which Becher submitted for his own special issue. At this stage, the exchange of literary capital between Becher and Sinn und Form was clearly no longer to the benefit of the journal, but rather to the contributor, and this was also the case for Renn, the only other SED member to appear in the double issue. As a champion of proletarian literature and a writer of reportage and children's literature, Renn is not a natural contributor to the Sinn und Form legend. What he could provide, as a prisoner under the Nazi regime and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, were his cast-iron anti-fascist credentials and much needed political capital for the journal inside the GDR. Of course, that vital political capital was also what Becher brought to the journal. A much more comfortable fit for the Sinn und Form legend were Bloch and Mayer, whose careers in the GDR, most notably through their dissident trajectories, demonstrate a remarkable parallelism. Both returned from exile in the West, Bloch in New York and Mayer in Paris and Geneva, to be appointed to Chairs in

92

SAdA, Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10193.

Contributors

43

Leipzig in 1948. N either had the direct institutional link to Sinn und Form which other regular GDR contributors enjoyed through the Academy, but both had strong personal relationships with Huchel. In Bloch's case, this relationship went back to Berlin in the early 1930s; in Mayer's case it was built in the social and intellectual exchanges which took place under the auspices of the Kulturbund in its 'clubhouse' on Jägerstraße in the late 1940s. Both also shared an intellectual brilliance and an openness to the West which made them natural contributors to the journal from the very beginning. For all their ideological commitment, both would also become increasingly set against the dogmatic SED orthodoxies which held in their respective fields and would become increasingly marginalised in the GDR for their perceived lack of orthodoxy. In this, of course, they shared more than a passing resemblance to Brecht, another immensely appropriate contributor to the double issue and the only GDR writer who could begin to approach the stature of Thomas Mann. The international prestige he was accruing through the Berlin Ensemble, the authority he exercised in the Academy, and the relative autonomy he maintained in relation to the SED all contributed to the symbolic capital he was able to contribute to Sinn und Form. Unlike Mann, Brecht matched this capital with a frequency of contributions to the journal which made him its most regular contributor. 93 At two crucial junctures, his return from exile in 1949 and his marginalisation in 1952/53, Sinn und Form offered Brecht a valuable and respected publishing oudet in East Berlin, on the latter occasion when others were closed to him. In return, Brecht lent his reputation to the journal and defended its position in the Academy against the SED, most notably after 17 June 1953. As we have seen, Huchel had much to gain much from the association, and the manner in which his own fate would come to mirror that of Bloch and Mayer after 1956 and 1961 begins to suggest that the dissident intellectual habitus of its contributors is a core component in the establishment of the Sinn und Form legend. Such an analysis does not hold up entirely: on the one hand, it imposes a retrospective, western narrative from the 1960s and 1970s onto figures whose reputations looked different in the early 1950s; on the other, it neglects the strongly partisan GDR agenda which Brecht sought to impose on the journal. All the same, the legend of Sinn und Form cannot be understood without reference to the capital accumulated through these core contributors in the founding phase of the journal. Through the publication of leading GDR figures who enjoyed credibility in the West (Brecht, Bloch, Mayer) and through the publication of canonical western writers (Mann, Döblin) and other established names Oahnn), Sinn und Form was making use of the quickest and most direct means by which a literary journal can accrue symbolic capital. By acting as a contributor to the journal, an established 93

See Stephen Parker, 'Brecht and Sinn und Form: The Creation of Cold War Legends', German Life and utters, 60 (2007), 518-33. For a fuller discussion of Brecht's contributions after the founding phase of the journal, see chapter five below.

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Establishing the Legend

name in effect donates a portion of their own existing capital to the enterprise, and the age-proflle of contributors to the 1954 double issue is revealing in this respect: half of the twenty-two contributors were born before 1900 and had established themselves weIl before 1933. It is telling too that the majority of contributors were western in their orientation and that only Becher and Renn were Party loyalists. Beyond official commemorative occasions, there was no place for the likes of Marchwitza, Bredel and Wolf in Huchel's Sinn und Form. In this way, the identity of its contributors offers clear evidence that symbolic capital was defmed for Sinn und Form by the international inteIlectual and literary field, not by the propagandists of East Berlin. At the other end of the scale from the established superstars of the literary field were the largely unknown newcomers, and these too had a presence in the 1954 double issue, albeit a less significant one. Here, the exchange of capital which takes place between contributor and journal is reversed. For the relative unknown, capital flows predominantly out from the journal, as that contributor seeks to borrow from the accumulated capital possessed by the journal and from that ofhis/her fellow contributors. At the same time, none of these exchanges of capital is a straightforward, one-way process. Even the established contributors, with the possible exception ofThomas Mann, stood to gain from their association with Sinn und Form and the symbolic capital it could bring to them in the West. For their own reasons, Becher, Brecht, and Döblin aIl fall into this category. Equally, symbolic capital can accrue to the journal through the publication of lesser known contributors, albeit indirectly. In these cases, the journal is asserting its commitment to the autonomous principles of the literary field where a lack of recognition may, paradoxicaIly, carry with it a certain prestige, the prestige of the undiscovered talent whose value has only been recognised by the literary cognoscenti. The same principle can also be seen at work in the publication of esoteric foreign contributors, in this case Eino Leino and Pupul Jayakar. For any literary journal, this is an investment of capital which may yield longer-term dividends in the event of an unknown contributor subsequently achieving recognition and thereby bringing the retrospective kudos of discovery to the journal. Of course, this investment in the 1954 double issue of Sinn und Form was very pointedly not being made in emerging GDR writers. The journal's centre of gravity was clearly located in the West. To put things simply, the typical contributor to the 1954 double issue was an established German writer in his (not her) sixties, either a western exile or a nonconformist, non-SED figure from the GDR. In terms of the key structuring principles of the literary field, contributors were clustered towards the orthodox and autonomous poles of the field. If, as Bourdieu suggests, a journal's table of contents represents 'an exhibition of the symbolic capital available to the enterprise' ,94

94

Bourdieu, The RH/es ofArt, p. 273.

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45

then, as an institution in the German intellectual field of the early 1950s, Sinn und Form was clearly extremely richly endowed.

Composition: The Thick Literary Journal The first compositional element encountered by areader picking up the 1954 double issue would have been the distinctive design and layout of the joumal, which emerged in the summer of 1948 from lengthy discussions between Huchel, Riemerschmidt, Stichnote and the Suhrkamp editor Hermann Kasack, and which has remained essentially unaltered to the present day. The high production values which had gone into the octavo format, soft-cover volume would have been obvious enough: the unadorned cover design carried simply the title of the joumal, in capitals at the top of the page, and the year and issue number at the bottom; the plain, off-white page was interrupted only by the coloured paper band bearing the names of contributors in capitals and the titles of contributions in italics. As a marker both of continuity throughout the lifespan of Sinn und Form and of the particular literary aspirations of the journal, that outward design is difficult to match. Indeed, associations with distinguished predecessors and contemporaries abound. In typographical conventions and in the use of the seriffed Bodoni Antiqua typeface, for example, Sinn und Form recalled directly Die neue Rundschau. 95 This was a comparison drawn by, among many others, Alfred Andersch who noted in his 1951 review that the 'classical nobility' of Stichnote's typography attained 'a pinnacle of static classicism', and that 'in similar fashion to Anna Simons in her day in Corond. 96 The internailayout of the journal also invites comparison to Maß und Wert, both in specific elements, such as the two-columned layout of its review section, and in its general austerity, without typographical variation or illustration to break up the density of the text. In this respect, Schoor is surely correct to identify in Sinn und Form a recognisable constellation of design characteristics which define 'a "refmed" review journal'.97 Indeed, Hans Mayer's suggestion that Becher, in setting down the foundations of his journal, may have been recalling not only Corona but also Inse/schiff, the journal of the Insel Verlag in which both he and Huchel had been published, indicates a very deliberate attempt to emulate the presentation of the traditional, high-quality review journal.98 Of course, such similarities extend beyond surface questions of typeface and layout and are embedded instead in the function and aspirations of the journal. Published bi-monthly and consisting of a relatively small number of lengthy contributions, both Maß und Wett and Sinn und Form were not structured so as to be 95 96 97 98

See Schoor, DaJgeheime Journal der Nil/ion, p. 26 and p. 214, note 70. Andersch, 'Marxisten in der Igelstellung', p. 208. Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 213, note 57. Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 213, note 57.

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Establishing the Legend

responsive to topical events in the manner of Die literarische Welt with its weekly, newspaper-style format, its short multi-columned articles, illustrations, and largeformat headlines. Where Haas's journal sought to capture the vibrancy of Berlin literary life in the 1920s through a heightened sense of immediacy and topicality, Maß und Wen and Sinn und Form eschewed editorial and formatting gimmicry in order to emphasise the weight and sobriety of the enduring intellectual values which they represented. As Huchel wrote to Becher in August 1951, ewe must probe more deeply in order to be topical, in the best sense of the word'.99 In this respect, both journals are archetypal thick literary journals, the designation capturing not only physical properties closer to those of a book than a pamphlet or newspaper, but also a breadth and depth of content which demanded a comparable investment from their readers. Fundamental to this approach was also the covertness of editorial voice in these thick journals, which extended from the undifferentiated and uncommented presentation of contributions to the absence of direct intervention through programmatic editorial essays. While activist, thin journals in the mould of Die Kolonne, Die Linkskurve or Der Ruf maintained a direct and often polemic dialogue with their readers, Maß und Wen and Sinn und Form relied on the capacity of the contributions themselves to engage the reader. This was the 'deeper topicality' which Huchel was wont to invoke in his dealings with the SED propagandists. 100 Indeed, this was one principle which Huchel's editorial practice took to extremes. Even Maß und Wen opened each year of its publication with a strategic editorial essay by Thomas Mann. Similarly, Hans Paeschke set out an editorial programme in Merkur through occasional essays, even if they were not marked as such. Both of these thick journals also maintained a lively review section which allowed them to respond direcdy to recent publications. Huchel, by contrast, held resolutely to the principle of editorial non-intervention. He restricted his overt editorial presence to purely factual notes, or Anmerkungen, comprising biographical and publication details and was, from the outset, determined not to abide by the contractually agreed aim to include reviews. In the increasingly dogmatic environment of the early GDR, such an approach helped the journal to evade the kind of unambiguous position-taking on cultural-political matters which would have narrowed its room for manoeuvre. Of course, it was also one of the aspects which brought the journal into conflict with the Academy and not only with its SED members. Repeated attempts were made to achieve a greater immediacy and topicality for the journal. The inclusion from late 1952 of a review section headed Umschau und Kritik was Huchel's sole concession in this area, but even then it rarely featured topical reviews, save for the trusted Ihering's regular contributions treating theatre and ftlm. Instead, Huchel preferred to use the section for pieces 99 Huche1's letter to Becher of 11 August 1951 is in Huche1, Bnife, p. 99. 100 The phrase is used by Huche1 in the notes for his meeting with Kurt Hager on 4 November 1957. See Schoor, DaJgeheime]oumal der Nation, p. 107.

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he was reluctant to place in the main part of the journal. That the section was essentially unused in the 1954 double issue is telling in this respect. Instead, and as a careful reading of the 1954 double issue indicates, Huchel's editorial programme reveals itself in the selection and distribution of contributions within and across individual issues, in underlying compositional principles, rather than through explicit editorial statements. In that double issue, the programme is, in effect, set out in the opening literary contribution, the lengthy extract from Döblin's Hamlet (617-71) which occupies the first fifty-four pages and which establishes a number of key questions and common thematic strands which are then considered from complementary perspectives throughout the remainder of the issue. Through its central character, the injured and traumatised veteran Edward Allison, Döblin's piece immediately raises one of the central concerns of the journal in its founding phase, namely the war and its legacy, and this is a theme picked up direcdy in Leonhard Frank's 'Das Porträt' (859-64). Set in Berlin in July 1945, Frank's self-contained and suggestive short-story introduces four civilian survivors, sharing the rat-infested cellar of a bombed-out building: Willi, a member of the underground resistance; Sophie, twenty-two years old and emotionally indifferent to the world around her; Dr Otto, a seventy-three year-old philosopher; and G. Wollstein, the painter of the portrait which gives the story its tide. Clearly, Willi's character embodies the anti-fascist resistance efforts which were an important pre-occupation of the journal in its early years, and his apparent rejection by the authorities in the American Sector scores easy political points in the Cold War context. Sophie's stealing of the dead woman's shoes and scavenging for food offers some insight into the realities of that time. But these are not the central preoccupations of the story. As the tide suggests, this is a story about intellectual and artistic activity, embodied by the figures of Otto and Wollstein. Amidst the ruins both are constandy engaged in their respective intellectual activities, at least as long as daylight permits, and Wollstein's response to the discovery of an elegant corpse in an antique armchair is to devote himself tirelessly to capturing it on canvas. The resultant portrait of the corpse, compared elsewhere in the story to Grünewald's altarpiece, conjures an image reminiscent of Otto Dix's haunting depiction of the trenches, transferred to the Berlin cityscape: 'The background was Berlin: the hundred thousand roofless houses with the dead window holes, the gigantic ruin of the city, upon which one standing for millions - the corpse was enthroned. It was not only a portrait of the dead. It was his vision - the Second World War' (864). In this way, Frank's story epitomises the importance placed by Sinn und Form on the value of artistic production even, or especially, amidst the ruins of 1945. As Schoor suggests, Mayakovksy's observation from the opening issue of the journal acts as an apt motto

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for the entire editorial project: 'The USSR has concerns other than art. For me art is thc concern.'lOt Almost ten years on from the end of the war, the presence of National Socialism in 5-6/1954 is perhaps surprisingly palpable, a telling indicator of the particular generational experience which found its expression in the journal. Renn's contribution, 'Im femen Vaterland geboren' (723-40), is another piece to deal direcdy with the brutality of the Nazi regime, telling as it does the story of his imprisonment in the early years of the regime, his release, and subsequent decision to go into exile. t02 Again, though, the compositional emphasis lies elsewhere, and Renn's autobiographical extract fmds a companion piece in Herbert Ihering's 'Kindertage in Ostfriesland' (758-65), both contributions continuing a strong emphasis on autobiographical writing and childhood reminiscence which had been established and maintained since the opening piece in the opening issue of the journal. 103 More than this, Renn and Ihering explore the complementary themes of exile, homecoming, and self-becoming, which in turn emerge as the central strands running through all the primary literary contributions to this issue. Again, it is Döblin's novel of the returning war veteran which sets the tone. These themes, in particular as they are associated with colonial oppression and selfidentity, also serve to bind the two pieces of internationalliterature - Leino's Finnish folk poetry (672-74) and Jayakar's Indian short-stories (706-22) - into the broader conceptual complex constructed within the issue. In the vastly contrasting settings of pre-modern Lappland and industrialising India, rural female characters suffer enforced exile with brutal consequences. In the latter case, the opposition between city and countryside established in Ihering's piece is picked up and inverted; in the former case, the Lapp homeland takes on mystical significance for the returning son whose self-becoming echoes and inverts Renn's selfdiscovery in the Spanish Civil War. In turn, Leino's vision of the transcendent union between Lapp spirit and the Lapp soi! fmds its companion in Hugo Huppert's lyric rendering of the timeless symbolism of the shepherd roaming the landscape of Soviet republics of the Caucasus and the Caspian. The immediate significance of these themes in the post-1945 context is obvious enough, but the stable frame of reference provided by childhood, horne, and tradition is also oE a piece with the prevailing literary mood of the mid-decades of the twentieth-century. Above all, the emphasis on the indigenous landscape and the connection between iden-

101 Vladimir Mayakovsky, 'Ich selbst', 1/1949,52-69 (p. 65), quoted by Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 62. 102 Giving a literary voice to anti-fascist resistance and to the victims of National Socialism was a priority in early issues. The opening issue (1/1949), for example, included 'Gedichte aus der Resistance' (98-102), while 2/1949 included Gertrud Kolmar's 'Gedichte' (11-27). 103 See, among others: Romain Rolland's 'Römischer Frühling', 1/1949, 5-39 and :Jugenderinnerungen', 2/1949,85-120; Herbert Ihering, 'Zwischen Reinhardt und Jeßner', 2/1950, 6171; Ludwig Renn, 'Kindheit', 2/1954, 192-214.

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tity and local topography cannot help but remind us of the nature idiom practised by Huchel in the early 1930s and beyond. Often the connections between pieces are made by apparendy minor textual details which reward the reading of the individual journal issue as a self-contained literary text. So it is with Ihering's recollection of his first theatrical experience, a travelling theatre troupe which played in the small East Friesian town of his birth, which establishes a further connection back to the Döblin extract. Removed from its original context in Döblin's novel, the main narrative of the homecorner Edward retreats into the background behind the embedded narrative of the King Lear story, in which the travelling theatre troupe led by Jack Johnson plays such a prominent part. Through this King Lear narrative, theatricality and performance and, more contentiously against the background of SED cultural policy, the staging of the classical repertoire and the re-telling of traditional folk legends are established as a second main thematic complex. More specifically, the characterisation of the monarchist theatre director J ohnson, torn between his desire to hold up a mirror through his art to the tyrant Lear and the necessity of a commission from the court, seems to demand an allegorical reading: At that time, a travelling theatre troupe announced its presence [...] at Lear's court and offered its services. This time it was a special troupe, really fine and especially diligently led, by a director, a strange, extravagant actor, who some time before had fallen out of favour with Lear, because he understood his trade too welle For what else could one do in plays, if they were intended to have an impact, than be responsive to the mood oE the people and reflect the conditions of society and the state? (641)

Indeed, Johnson's complicity in Lear's restoration to the throne, his ennoblement (as none other than William Shakespeare), and his subsequent exile after Lear's death pose some uncomfortable questions about the function of theatre and its relationship to political power. With the Faustus debate barely cold, the presence of Brecht's reflections in 'Einschüchterung durch die Klassizität' ('Intimidated by Classicism', 778-80) on precisely the staging of the classics, among them Shakespeare and Goethe, suggests that these were problematic issues from which Sinn und Form was reluctant to shy away. As the tide of Brecht's essay indicates, his centralline of argument was set direcdy against the kind of unthinking and paralysing respect for the classics which had seen his own production of Uifaust withdrawn in 1952 and 1953. All the same, his accompanying contempt for the 'formalist "renewal" of classical works' (778) reminds us that Brecht was searching for common ground with the SED and for a genuine critical debate, rather than adopting an unequivocally oppositional stance. Brecht's 'Aufsätze zur Theaterpraxis' (778-82) are one of a cluster of four consecutive contributions which give the double issue its particular emphasis on theatre and which make a vital connection between the primary literary pieces and the essayistic contributions: Brecht's essays are followed by Mann's 'Versuch über Tschechow' (783-804) and then by Jahnn's 'Zur Tragödie Thomas Chatterton' (805-

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Establishing the Legend

09) which serves as an introduction to an extract from the play itself (810-29). Compared to lyric poetry and prose fiction, drama was a relatively underrepresented genre in Sinn und Form, as in literary journals more generally. Here, though, the generous confmes of the double issue permitted not only the publication of extracts from two of Brecht's essays on the theatre, but also two acts of Jahnn's tragedy, Jahnn's biographical notes on the eighteenth-century English writer, and Mann's warm biographieal essay on the celebrated Russian dramatist. Supplemented by Döblin's prose re-writing of the Lear legend and the autobiographical writings of Ihering, at one time the foremost German theatre critic of his generation, the double issue provided a rich variety of perspectives on theatre. Jahnn's writings on Thomas Chatterton, the icon of youthful and unrecognised genius for the English Romantics, establish a further cluster of related contributions. Georg Schwarz's biographical sketch of Wilhelm Waiblinger (741-57) is an obvious partner to Jahnn's biographical notes on Chatterton, and we are invited to consider the questions of youthful indulgence, creativity and literary recognition from a contrasting perspective through Bloch's essay 'Der junge Goethe, Nicht-Entsagung, Ariei'. In turn, Bloch's contribution acts as a point of interseetion with a number of the other strands which ron through the double issue. As Schoor has suggested, for example, Goethe had been a notable absence in Sinn und Form amidst the official celebrations of 1949, and Bloch's enthusiastic discussion of the youthful excesses of the Sturm und Drang writer permits a cultural-political reading which aligns his piece with the earlier essays by Brecht. The invocation of Ariel as the embodiment of poetic energy and imagination further embeds the essay in the tissue of Shakespearean references which is initiated by Döblin's King Lear and picked up by Brecht. Finally, the themes of homecoming and self-becoming are developed and given a distinctive literary-biographical dimension in a number of these pieces where the break with the childhood horne and physical journeying are associated with literary development and self-discovery. J oachirn ~lüller's essay (867-79) outlining the progression of the central character in the four versions of Stifter's 'Mappe meines Urgroßvaters' covers similar ground, from yet another perspective. The doctor Augustinus, we learn, 'accompanied Stifter through his whole life', developing eventually into 'one of the most important poetic symbols of nineteenth-century bourgeois humanity' (867). Ultimately, and in keeping with the programmatic publicity material composed for the journal's foundation six years earlier, Müller's concerns emerge as the central question posed by the double issue: where, and in what forms, do literary production and literary criticism embody the kind of progressive and humanist values which stand against the barbarity of National Socialism? The breadth of contributions discussed above provides one answer to that question and is in keeping with the Marxist re-interpretation of the European tradition which was a main emphasis of the journal in these early years. On two occasions

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elsewhere in the double issue, the answer is distilled into a single contribution: in Reinhard Buchwald's 'Weltliteratur und Deutsche Tradition' (675-94) and in Becher's 'Poetische Konfession' (695-705). Becher may have sacrificed much of his international credibility by the early mid-1950s, but he retained the impulses and sensibilities of a poet and his deep conviction in the inherent value of the literary tradition. These combine in the remarkable vitality and density of his aphoristic celebration of poetry, an often personal reminder of the kind of vision which had founded the journal in the first place. Indeed, through Becher's text, the network of literary figures included in the double issue is extended still further: the reproduction in full of poems by the emerging West German talents Günter Eich and Rudolf Hartung is accompanied by references to such established figures as N 0valis, Hebbel and Hölderlin; Pascal, Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Mayakovsky, Whitman and Neruda. If the condemnation of Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger is predictable enough and if the driving force of his ideology never recedes far beneath the surface, then the sheer vigour and breadth of Becher's writing carries the reader with him to his concluding defence of the ultimate humanist value of poetry: 'In such arealm, in which justice, peace and power are one, poetry also prevails, for such a "realm of humanity" is at the same time also a deeply poetic realm' (705). Comparable in its broad, programmatic potential is Buchwald's wide-ranging literary-historical essay which considers explicitly the response of German literary culture to the historical turning-points and political collapses of 1918 and 1945. At both these points - and through detailed reference to HofmannsthaI and Ricarda Huch which, again, invites a programmatic reading Buchwald explores the validity of two apparently contrasting, but ultimately perhaps complementary, responses: on the one hand, 'rootedness in the German tradition' and, on the other, 'openness to the world' or 'receptiveness towards the foreign'. It hardly needs to be said that Sinn und Form sought to provide precisely this kind of response in the wake of 1945 and that the breadth of contributions which made up the double issue of 1954 were informed by a continuing faith in the potential of that response. In this way, the compositional practice underlying the double issue of 1954 realises the immense potential possessed by a thick literary journal as a multitextual and intertextual entity, enjoying the depth and scale of a book publication and the diversity and variety of a periodical. In the absence of overt editorial programmatics and commentary, the emphasis is placed on the contributions themselves and trust invested in the reader's capacity to establish connections and contrasts between those contributions. This is what Schoor has identified as the distinctive and challenging dimension of the Sinn und Form concept under Huchel, namely the attempt to offer an opportunity for cultural education, structured around contradictory elements from which the reader is able to learn. 104 Indeed,

104 Schoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, p. 69.

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Establishing the Legend

in the way that they capture the potential of the thick literary journal as a distinctive form of literary expression and intellectual exchange, Schoor's comments are worthy of more detailed consideration: As a force which generates communication and discourse, the editorial staff have developed a particular procedure, according to which the treatment of themes and the composition of issues takes place: contradiction is elevated to the status of a structuring principle. The presentation of different perspectives on a single suhject area demonstrates that the engagement with literature and with other artistic questions must he approached as a process, in which linearity and one-dimensionality are contested from the outset. Readers are drawn into this process of engagement, not only insofar as they are ahle to agree with or reject one of the positions that is presented, but also insofar as they are challenged to intervene in the argument, that is, they are challenged to acquire the capacity to make such an intervention. lOS

In reality, this process is still more complex because it takes place across individual issues as well as within them, and the full range of texts generating discourse expands exponentially. As far as the 1954 double issue is concerned, for example, the range of texts which exert a presence stretches far beyond these twenty-three contributions, encompassing also the pre-existing texts from which they form extracts or translations, the subsequent texts through which they are re-published and re-distributed, and the vast range of other texts cited or alluded to in those contributions. In the Becher, Bloch, and Buchwald essays alone that final category soon reaches unmanageable proportions. .L-\nd yet, some attempt to map the scope of the communicative process is essential, not least because that scope is itself a measure of the capital at the disposal of a thick, review journal. Indeed, abrief consideration of the contributions made to the four preceding issues of 1954 yields immediate rewards..A. number of the contributions to the double issue, for example, exist in an implicit dialogue with Georg Lukacs's essay 'Die klassische Form des historischen Romans' which was published in two parts in the preceding two issues of the journal (3/1954, 329-46; 4/1954, 554-93). Most direct is Hans Mayer's engagement with Lukacs's narrative theory in his short essay on Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but clearly any discussion of literary tradition in the GDR in the early 1950s took place in the shadow of Lukacs's officially sanctioned position. Broadening the parameters of compositional analysis to the preceding issue has the effect of bringing Lukacs in as a direct interlocutor. Similarly, essays published in 1954 on Hölderlin, Klopstock, Lessing, and Bettina von .A.rnim broaden still further the terms of the debate about the literary heritage which dominates the double issue,106 the potentially troubling presence of Romanticism never far away from the more orthodox emphasis on nineteenth-century Realism and the Enlightenment. The Shakespeare 105 Schoor, Da.r geheime Journal der Nation, p. 67. 106 Wemer Kraft, 'Über eine spate Ode Hölderlins', 4/1954, 473-81; Hans Henny Jahnn, 'Klopstock', 2/1954, 165-89; Hans Mayer, 'Lessing, Mitwelt und Nachwe1t', 1/1954, 5-33; Gertrund ~leyer-Hepner 'Das Bettina von Arnim-Archiv', 4/1954,594-611.

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complex, meanwhile, can be traced back to the opening issue of the year and Arnold Kettle's lecture on the progressive British tradition. Kettle's contribution introduces into the reading process both a general and theoretical assessment of Shakespeare's legacy for socialism - ultimately, he prornotes the 'values of humanity' - and specific analyses of King Lear and Hamlet. 107 FinaIly, Brecht's brief obituary notice for Paul Rilla which concludes the double issue (897) takes on added force when read against Rilla's two contributions to the journal earlier in the year, 'Lessings Waffe der Philosophie' (1/1954, 34-81) and 'Literarische Kritik und Lessing-Preis' (3/1954, 461-63). Indeed, in the light of his reflections on the value of literary criticism in the second of these pieces, the 1954 double issue emerges as a tribute to Rilla and the value of literary criticism deftned in those terms. The programmatic significance of Lessing for Paeschke's Merkur should not be forgotten either. In this way, the capital accruing to this particular issue of the journal is significantly greater even than the sum of the capital which can be attached to each of its constituent contributions in isolation. Indeed, the compositional capital of the double issue can be deftned as precisely that added value which accrues to the journal by virtue of the specific positioning of those contributions in relation to one another. For a thick review journal, this is a delicate balancing act between the need to offer a broad and representative cross-section of cultural offerings and the need to provide a coherent and meaningful selection. With a significant emphasis on each of the most important literary genres - the selection of poetry from mostly unknown West German writers is positioned at the centre of the issue - as weIl as autobiographical writing and an impressive array of literarycritical, literary-historical and literary-biographical essays, the double issue clearly fulfilled the former requirement. At the same time, the clearly discernible thematic emphases which have emerged from the above analysis, together with their obvious relevance and value in the context of the early 1950s, ensured that this was no esoteric hotch-potch. Beyond this, in the field of restricted literary production there was a specific premium to be gained from an offering which rewarded the attentive and erudite reader, and the subtlety and complexity of which was capable of raising the individual issue to the status of aesthetic object in its own right. If that reading benefited from a reading of previous issues, then all the better: in the inverted market of symbolic goods, the scarcity of readers qualified to appreciate the true depth of the work and the true breadth of its frame of reference could only add value to the brand. Without doubt, the double issue of 1954 is a remarkable literary achievement which stands up not only as an internally coherent and astonishingly rich aesthetic object in its own right, but also as a constituent element in the broader composition constituted by Sinn und Form in the first six years of its existence. In other words, it meets the expectations of 107 Amold Kettle, 'Fortschrittliche Traditionen in der Kultur der britischen Bourgeoisie', 2/1954, 145-57.

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critics, academics, and consecrated writers and successfully reproduces the educated cultural idiom which is the lingua franca of the field of restricted literary production.

Readership and Reception: Trojan horse or bridge across the clivide? Of course, we might think it desirable that publications of this quality are still appearing in the Eastern zone. But the most pressing question remains unanswered, namely to what extent the sheep, which find themselves together with the wolves in the stomach of the T rojan horse, can actually claim to be safe, whether these sheep can truly hope to escape with their lives when the time is ripe. Could they possibly succeed in making the wolves vegetarians by then?10B

Sceptical critics in the West were not slow to apply a heavily ideologised Cold War interpretation to the foundation of Sinn und Form and the distribution of its opening issues in the Western zones. Indeed, if we can see beyond Terence Boylan's rather strained extended metaphor, it is apparent that he is expressing a view of Becher's journal which was widespread far beyond the pages of the CIAsponsored joumal Der Monat and which coloured reception of the journal throughout this period. The earliest and most severe response of this kind came in January 1949 from the emerging West German writer and co-founder of Gruppe 47, Wolfdietrich Schnurre. Writing in the Berliner Montags-Echo, Schnurre had been the first to deploy the image of the Trojan horse, detecting deliberate deceit in the location of the editorial seat in the British Sector and in the presence of 'purist' writers on the pages of the opening issue. The journal was 'a literary and political cuckoo's egg' that was being 'smuggled into the nest of the average unsuspecting intellectual. The camouflage is perfect: Romain Rolland, Oskar Loerke, Gerhart Hauptmann - a great deal can be concealed behind that.'109 Another to deploy the Trojan horse image was Hans Paeschke. 110 As the editor of a West German publication with comparable aspirations, Paeschke had good reason to dismiss the content of the opening issue as an 'exceedingly lukewarm infusion of things that, in part, appeared long ago and a rather weak attempt to wrap Soviet ideology in poetic clothing'.111 For many in the West it was precisely Becher's in108 Terence Boylan, 'Form ohne Sinn', Der Monat, 2 (1949), 213-14. See Schiele, pp. 333-37. For extracts from many of the responses discussed in this section, see Schoor, DaJge!Jeime Journal der Nation, pp. 159-74. 109 Wolfdietrich Schnurre, 'Das trojanische Panjepferd', Berliner MontagJ-Et:!Jo, 24 January 1949. See Schiele, pp. 318-19. 110 Paeschke's letter to Hermann Kasack of 5 March 1949 is cited by Gerhard I-Iay (ed.), ALr der Krieg Zu Ende war: Uterarist:!J-PolitiJt:be Publi~jstik 1945-1950 (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1986), p. 517. 111 Paeschke's letter to Hermann Kasack of 8 February 1949 is in Hay, p. 516.

Readership and Reception

55

volvement which gave the game away. For Julius Bab in New York, Becher was nothing less than 'the boss of Russian cultural propaganda in Germany', his journal 'one of the artfully woven nets cast by communist propaganda to trap German intellectuals'. 112 Given the strategie aims of the publication and its careful distribution outside the Soviet Zone, reception of Sinn und Form in the West was arguably the most important anatomical dimension of the whole journal enterprise. Had its resonance failed to escape these charges of thinly veiled Soviet propaganda, then the whol~ project would have lost its purpose at the outset and the journal would have been strangled at birth. Despite themselves, though, many of these same critics could not help but appreciate the quality of the journal, which appealed to their own preconceptions about the function and make-up of the kind of highbrow literary journal which they deemed an essential element in the literary field. In particular, the carefully chosen design and layout of the journal made an immediately favourable impression. Paeschke, for one, was beguiled: 'I had no idea that so many free copies of Sinn und Form made their way to the West, and with such representative publishers [Herausgebelj and with such stunning presentation, in its paper and printing. [...] The paper is positively Soviet-plutocratic and the print simply glorious; no one can emulate Stichnote in that respect.'l13 Boylan's admiring verdict on the journal's presentation was similar, but also embraced its content: 'Scarcely any West German journal today regularly prints such interesting contributions of varied origin, and in such splendid typographical form [...] and on such glorious paper.' As we have seen, Andersch was another to be seduced by the presentation of the journal, and, even if the main thrust of his review betrayed his blanket categorisation of East German cultural production, he made no attempt to conceal his admiration for one of the 'most outstanding literary periodicals ever to appear in Germany' .114 Indeed, it was precisely the ideologised dismissal of GDR culture as Stalinist propaganda from which Sinn und Form was able to profit. The starker the binarisms were that critics applied to GDR culture, the clearer Sinn und Form emerged as, in Andersch's words, 'an island amidst the flood', and the purer its non-partisan contributors and editor appeared. For Boylan, these were sheep at the mercy of the wolves of the Party; for Andersch they were aged Marxist hedgehogs curled up to protect themselves. A trap it may have been, but it was a distinguished and reftned trap which could not help but inspire admiration. 115 Caught as the journal was between the competing principles of legitimation which held in the East and West, the attractiveness of Sinn und Form to a western 112 Julius Bab, 'Sinn und Form', New Yorker StaatJ-Zeitung und Herold, 5 March 1949. See Schiele, pp. 467-69. 113 Paeschke to Hermann Kasack, 8 February 1949, in Hay, p. 516. 114 Andersch, 'Marxisten in der Igelstellung', p. 208. 115 Bab, for example, commented: 'The content is just as fine as the form'. See Bab, 'Sinn und Form'.

56

Establishing the Legend

readership left it exposed to critical opinion in the GDR. In its reception, as elsewhere, the journal trod a fme line which was just as likely to attract condemnation from both sides as approval. Initially, though, the enthusiastic promotion by the Soviet authorities of Stalin's preferred all-German policy ensured a warm welcome in the East. Tägliche Rundschau, the organ of the Soviet Military Administration for Germany (S:M.AD) and a barometer of official opinion in East Berlin, expressed its approval in a review of the first issue on 31 December 1948. 116 In the flood of post-war periodicals there had been 'missing, up to now, an organ that cultivates specifically the validity of the poetic word'. :Lv1aking good that absence, Sinn und Form had already given notice of its 'dignity' and 'weight' through its typographical design and had distinguished itself 'through the bearing and tastefulness of its whole intellectual perspective'. In short, Sinn und Form was weIl placed to become 'the leading German literary journal', thereby filling 'an intellectual vacuum that has existed hitherto in Germany'. It is difficult to imagine a clearer statement of the attributes of the thick literary journal, and it must have been difficult for contemporaries such as Paeschke to accept the sincerity of this embrace of the kind of conservative, bourgeois literary values which his own journal was seeking to promote. But this was the reality of S:M.AD cultural policy, and Neues Deutst'hland, too, voiced official approval towards 'a representative organ, the voice of which deserves a hearing and respect in the whole of Germany'.l17 Further reviews in the Leiptlger Volkszeitung and Potsdam's Märkisfhe Volksstimme in January and February 1949 were also unequivocally positive. 118 The former valued the same line of continuity to Die neue Rundst'hau and Corona which Andersch would pick out two years later and embraced precisely the lack of partisanship exhibited by the journal: 'Sinn und Form is without doubt intended for the whole of Germany; it is not a political journal, nor a journal placed in the service of a particular cause or purpose.' The latter praised the high literary standards of the journal. It was a 'literary treasure trove' which, nonetheless, remained accessible to ordinary working people. Of course, this fmal point was the journal's weak spot when it came to partisan GDR reception, and that would remain the case throughout the GDR era. Even such a well-disposed reviewer as Gerhard Steiner in the librarians' periodical, Der Bibliothekar, acknowledged that the journal was 'not easily accessible' and possessed 'an intellectual tone'.119 Bemoaning the absence of young GDR writers in Sinn und Form, Steiner proposed a host of practical suggestions designed to broaden the readership of the journal and integrate it into the life of GDR libraries. If this was an overwhelmingly sympathetic review which sought only to make 116 117 118 119

See Schiele, pp. 256-60. Dr. Sz., NeueJ DeutJdJland, 4 ]anuary 1949. See Schiele, pp. 261-62. See Schiele, pp. 266-68 and p. 272. Gerhard Steiner, 'Die Zeitschrift Sinn und Form in unseren Bibliotheken', Der Bibliothekar, 4 (1950), 584-87. Schoor, DaJ geheime Journal der Nation, pp. 169-70.

Readership and Reception

57

greater use of the value of the journal and to overcome the reserve of its editors, the same could not be said of the reviews which appeared in the Berliner Zeitung and Tägliche Rundschau after issues two and three had appeared in 1949. 120 Here, Sinn und Form began to be positioned on the negative side of the increasingly abstract binaries which would come to characterise officialliterary-critical discourse in the Formalism Campaign and beyond. In the Berliner Zeitung, Susanne Kerkhoff singled out the Jewish Gertrud Kolmar's poetry as 'cultural pessimism and ecstasy' and as 'sickly symbolism', and criticised the 'obsessive eroticism of her verses' which could now only be of limited, purely historical value. It was to be hoped that future issues would give greater room to 'progressive meaning', rather than the 'over-sweet fmit of antiquated form'. In other words, the irrational vestiges of Expressionism had no place in the officialliterary culture of the GDR. The critique exercised in Tägliche Rundschau was more general in its scope. In its last two issues, Sinn und Form had begun to lose itself 'in rarefied mountain air'; it had lost sight of reality 'through an excess of reserve and sophistication'. Indeed, much of the poetry published in those issues came close to exhibiting 'formalist tendencies', and only a clearer and more sober use of language could overcome 'the all too great distance' which had grown between the journal and the people at large. Again, it was the modernist legacy of the Weimar years which was held responsible: 'In order to avoid lapsing too far into experimentation, it is necessary to take one's measure from real people, indeed from the people of our times, who certainly no longer seek, nor value, the aesthetic fireworks of the twenties.' Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Goethe and the classical German heritage were advocated as more appropriate literary models. The greater the pressure exerted in the East by such dogmatic reviews - and in their concrete engagement with specific contributions these two fell short of the entirely abstract and utterly destructive criticism which would accompany the crackdowns of 1951, 1953, and 1956 and, later, 1965, 1968 and 1976 - the more important it was that Huchel and Becher could point to positive resonance for their journal in the West. Huchel, in particular, repeatedly sought to defend his position through reference to the success of the journal in the West, and not only in the increasingly beleaguered years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Huchel never tired of telling Becher and anyone else who would listen that, despite all the difficulties, his journal had got off to the best possible start. In a letter to Becher in J anuary 1950, for instance, Huchel proclaimed as fact that 'Sinn und Form has, in short order, established itself in spectacular fashion and is regarded as one of the best literary magazines in Europe even by western criticS'.121 This apparently could be 'seen from all the press reviews inside and outside Germany'. Indeed, in 120 Susanne Kerkhoff, 'Rausch, Tränen, und Särge', Berliner Zeitung, 27 April 1949 and Ltz., 'Wesentlich - aber per Distanz', Tägliche Rundrehau, 14 June 1949. See Schiele, pp. 276-77 and pp. 281-84. 121 Huchel's letter to Becher of 26 January 1950 is in Huchel, Briefe, pp. 79-80.

58

Establishing the Legend

keeping with the importance of the positive reception of the journal in its founding phase, reviews, letters and radio discussions were gathered and edited for use as publicity material. Confirming the impression that the end of 1954 constituted the culmination of a distinct phase in the journal's history, a special brochure was published by Rütten und Loening in 1955 which brought together many of the positive voices which had been heard over the previous six years. 122 Amongst them was an early review from the Frankfurter Rundschau which picked out many of the core values of the journal, literary quality, diversity and East-West representativity, in its opening sentence: 'In Sinn und Form a multi-coloured spectrum unfolds between East and West - and that with genuine literary significance.' Also included was a statement attributed to Radio Stuttgart which stressed the harmonious dialogue between potentially contrasting contributors, as weIl as drawing an approving and, by now, familiar comparison to the outward appearance of Corona and Die neue Rundschau. The publishers' archive also contains approving reviews of the opening issues from such diverse sources as the French Cultural Mission in Germany, the Finnish leftist periodical, Vapaa Sana, and the Hessicher Rundfunk. In each of these, the international dimension of the journal - such a notable feature of the compositional practice of the early years - is singled out for particular praise. In this respect, Huchel could justifiably claim to have achieved one of the central objectives of the journal. Or as Heinz Friedrich put it in the last of these sources: 'For once the political tumult has ftnally been silenced in this journal in favour of a common European cultural mission. [...] Here, bridges are genuinely being built.' Salient in this respect is not whether such claims hold up against the profile of the published journal, nor whether they are representative of a majority of readers. Rather, our concern lies in the value to be gained from such statements, in the capital which could accrue to the journal through them, and this depended not least on the value of the individual or institution to whom the statement was attributed and the use to which that statement was put. In both regards, this places a premium on the many statements of approval which originated from prominent cultural figures and which could then be deployed strategically in the interests of the journal. In the early years of the journal's publication, such statements had been made by, among others, Brecht, Thomas Mann, Oskar Maria Graf, Nelly Sachs, Konrad Farner, Hermann Broch, and Wolfgang Bächler. 123 The first two of these, of course, were the real trophies for Huchel and Becher. For a journal positioned so unashamedly in the field of restricted production, charismatic consecration from the most distinguished of fellow producers was a priceless source of capital. Mann, for example, wrote to Becher on 4 February 122 See Sehoor, Das geheime Journal der Nation, pp. 159-64 and p. 173. All subsequent referenees in this paragraph are taken from that souree. 123 Graf, for example, wrote to Wie1and Herzfe1de on 20 Oetober 1949: 'The journal is very good and has the highest standards'. See Sehoor, Dm' geheime Journal der Nation, p. 167.

Readership and Reception

59

1949, stressing that the journal appeared 'extraordinarily elegant' and that it would soon 'assume first place amongst German literary reviews'.124 The reading experience had been 'genuinely enriching', above all Loerke's 'harrowing poems', Ramuz's essay on Dostoyevsky, 'the [me, thoughtful and solemn' extract from Reisiger's Salamis novel, and 'the intelligent essay' by Niekisch. Brecht, meanwhile, wrote to Huchel on 1 July 1949 to thank him for the special issue devoted to him, which had been an unqualified success, both for the journal and for Brecht. He went on to praise, above all, the breadth of conception of the journal and singled out specific contributions from Lorca, Mayakovsky, Bloch, and Hermlin. 125 Approval from Sachs bore the aura of the Jewish survivor: 'The content is again aspring, from which I drank refreshment. I thank you that I can be part of this, among the poets from whom the eternal flame gloWS.'126 Of all these, it is the example of the Swiss Marxist, Konrad Farner, which provides the greatest insight into the strategie value which could be gained from the views of fellow intellectuals. Writing to Huchel in 1952, Farner went beyond a judgement on the content of the journal to make a telling comment also on its institutional status. While he acknowledged that Sinn und Form was the organ of the German Academy of Arts, he pointedly refused to see it as 'the organ of important members of the Academy'. If Huchel himself had written the letter he could scarcely have provided better ammunition in his battles with the Academy. He forwarded the letter to both Becher and Brecht on 14 June 1952, describing it, with an air of innocent understatement, as 'perhaps not without importance for the on-going discussions about Sinn und Form'.127 At this point, it is instructive to return to the double issue of 1954 and the positive reception it received from such prominent figures as Bloch, Koeppen, and Jahnn. More specifically, Huchel's strategie use of an all-too conveniently worded letter from one of his sympathetic western contributors alerts us to a letter written by Huchel to J ahnn on 11 February 1955: 'For particular reasons I would be grateful to you if you could write a few words about the double issue of Sinn und Form in your capacity as President of the Hamburg Academy.'128 For all the capital which the double issue possessed through the undoubted quality of its composition and its contributions and through the prestige of its assembled contributors, and for all the capital it inherited from the journal's prior history, there was more than a touch of smoke and mirrors about the positive reMann's letter of 4 February 1949 is in Becher, Briefe, p. 356. Brecht's letter is in Huchel, Briefe, pp. 72-73. Sachs's letter of 30 March 1950 is in Huche1, Briefe, p. 82. Huchel's letters to Brecht and Becher of 14 June 1952 are in SAdA, Bertolt Brecht Archive, 728/66, and Johannes R. Becher Archive, 1Ö638. In a similar vein, on 17 April 1953, at the height of the pressure put on him, Huche1 sent Becher a very positive review published in De groene Amsterdameron 11 March. See SAdA, Johannes R. Becher Archive, 10647. 128 See Goldmann, p. 124. A similar letter to Ernst Fischer lay behind a review on the tenth anniversary of the journal's foundation in the Austrian periodical Tagebuch.

124 125 126 127

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Establishing thc J-,cgend

ception of the journal which Huchel so regularly invoked. A skilled self-publicist, Huchel was as adept as anyone at playing the literary game and exploiting the capital which positive reception could provide, even if that reception was to some extent stage-managed. From the outset, the distribution of free copies to opinionformers in the cultural and intellectual elites of both East and West was a central plank of the publication strategy: initially some 250 copies were distributed free of charge, a figure which had doubled by 1957. By contrast, the journal had only 2,400 subscribers in 1953 and a total print-run of just 5,000 in the mid-1950s. Sinn und Form aimed, then, not for breadth of readership, but for quality of readership, and Huchel's manipulation of the journal's reception has to be seen as part of the same impetus. Understood in this way, not as a neutral and objectively quantifiable aspect of a publication enterprise, but rather as a value-Iaden process in the cultural field, as part of the jockeying for position amongst agents seeking to secure capital, readership of the journal emerges as a key element in the acquisition of symbolic capital.

Conclusion By the mid-1950s, Sinn und Form had achieved quite considerable success. Its print-run was increased and postal subscription permitted from the West, its editor-in-chief enjoyed a growing influence, not to say, pre-eminence in the literary field, and unreserved public praise was even forthcoming from the GDR's :Minister President, Otto Grotewohl, in a keynote speech in Dresden. 129 At this juncture, it seems that the carefully constructed legend of Sinn und Form had begun to acquire a life of its own. To put it another way, the journal had now accumulated substantial reserves of symbolic capital which were invested in its distinctive all-German mission to promote the values of a progressive cultural restoration. Noteworthy is that this phase in the joumal's history was in fact quite protracted. At six years, it exceeds the entire life-span of many other journals founded in the journal boom of 1945-49, and this owes much to the highly unstable nature of the field of power into which Sinn und Form was born and in which it sought to establish itself. But the tensions of the early Cold War cultural field and the increasing pressures imposed on the journal by SED cultural policies in the early 1950s were also the making of Sinn und Form. If, as Bourdieu suggests, new artistic endeavours establish themselves through an initial period 'full of asceticism and renunciation' - that is a renunciation of material profits in favour of the symbolic capital of cultural prestige - then the capacity of Sinn und Form in the early 1950s to apparently renounce the heteronomous political interests of the

129 Otto Grotewohl, 'Rede auf der Dresdener Kundgebung der Kulturschaffenden', Neues Deutsr:hland, 25 June 1955.

Conc1usion

61

SED in favour of the autonomous values of an all-German cultural ideal was the first vital step in the construction of what would become the journal's enduring legend. 130 And it is here that the significance of the crisis of 1953 lies for Sinn und Form, a watershed moment after which its success, and that of its editor, appeared to run entirely counter to the political interests of the GDR. From that point on, the joumal could construct a legend for itself founded on an autonomy which resonated with the prevailing values of the internationalliterary field. In this sense, the position of the joumal in the surrounding literary field and field of power emerges as a key factor in understanding the early success of Sinn und Form. But we have also seen in this chapter the importance of the remaining anatomical dimensions of the journal in contributing capital to the enterprise. Without the sustaining capital flowing through the institutional infrastructure of the Academy of Arts, the journal could not have survived, but that institutional framework also acted as a central site in the struggle to renounce the heteronomous power of the SED in the early 1950s..A.s is the case for the journal as a whole, 1953 also emerges as a turning-point for the editorial post, as power shifted from Becher the founding figurehead of the journal to Huchel the handson editor-in-chief, and as the latter began to shift roles from the unrecognised Professional to the charismatic Poet. Again, SED heteronomy functioned as the essential counterpoint for the construction of the editorial legend..At the narrower textuallevel, we have also seen how a prestigious assembly of contributors brought net inflows of capital to the journal through 5-6/1954 and how a complex textual composition raises the joumal to the level of symbolic aesthetic object, recognised and appropriated by those in the field of restricted cultural production possessed of suitable cultural capital of their own. Finally, the carefully directed and fiercely contested reception of Sinn und Form in these early years has emerged quite clearly as an essential pre-requisite for the process of legend building which culminates in the double issue of 1954. To return to Bourdieu's reflections on the accumulation of symbolic capital in the field of cultural production, one fmal observation provides the impetus for the chapters which follow. For Bourdieu warns of the 'wearing out of the effect of consecrated works', a process of 'familiarisation' or 'banalisation' which devalues cultural objects in the inverted economy of symbolic goods. 131 In the life cycle of artistic enterprises which depend on a rejection of material profit, the initial phase of accumulation of symbolic capital tends to be followed by an exploitation of that capital and by its eventualloss, as heretical agents innovate and gain their own consecration. Our challenge in the remainder of this book is not only to explore more fully the specific contribution made by each of the six constituent dimensions to the joumal over aperiod which covers more than sixty years, but also, above all, to understand how Sinn und Form has succeeded in escaping the 130 Bourdieu, The Rules ofArt, p. 255. 131 Bourdieu, Tbe Rules ofArt, pp. 254-55.

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Establishing the Legend

'wearing out' process to which cultural products can be expected to fall victim. In the market of symbolic goods, the journal has proved remarkably adept at maintaining its profitability and at sustaining the legend established in the early 1950s. Our attempt to explain that success begins in the following chapter with an examination of the capacity of Sinn und Form to maintain its position in the rapidly changing literary field and field of power from the mid-1950s to the present.

Chapter 2 Dynamic Mediation: The Literary Field and the Field oE Power In the previous chapter, we saw how the establishment of the Sinn und Form legend was made possible, in no small measure, by the particular relationships which held in, and between, the German literary field and the field of power in the early 1950s. From its foundation, Sinn und Form occupied an established and readily recognisable position in the literary field, that of the thick review journal. The restorative mood prevailing in the literary field at the time of the journal's foundation favoured an elite publication which advanced established literary values. At the same time, the relative autonomy granted to the literary field within the nascent GDR field of power, together with Soviet policy promoting German cultural unity, enabled the journal to accrue both literary and political capital through its representative all-German agenda. We have shown, too, that relations in the field of power in the early 1950s were highly erratic and, more specifically, that shifts in the field in 1952 and 1953 threatened the strategie position of Sinn und Form and threw its continued existence into doubt. Only the re-assertion of intellectual authority after 17 June 1953 and the easing of the heteronomous pressure which came from the integrationist factions of the SED allowed the journal to affirm its legend in the mid-1950s. Of course, such shifts in the field of power, and their impact on the cultural field, were a defming feature of the SED dictatorship. Whether triggered by external geo-political events - the crushing of the Hungarian and Czech reformist regimes in 1956 and 1968 - or internal culturalpolitical shocks - the 11 th Plenary of 1965 and the Biermann expatriation in 1976 - the literary field was periodically subject to the often ferocious force of heteronomy. By the same token, shifts in the field of power were also liable to function in the opposite direction: the liberalisations ushered in by Erich Honecker in 1971 and by :Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 had immensely significant consequences for the literary field, the latter inadvertently helping to initiate the complete rupture in the field of power which proceeded through 1989 and 1990. All the time, such shifts proceeded alongside and against the internal dynamies of the literary field and the processes of formal innovation and generational renewal which are its hallmark. It is against these constantly changing principles of legiti-

64

The Literary Field and the Field of Power

mation, literary and political, that Sinn und Form has had to secure and negotiate its position in the field. Accordingly, this chapter deploys three case-studies, each structured around specific issues of the journal, in order to explore how the Sinn und Form legend was maintained and adapted against shifts in the two overlapping fields in which its position was deftned. The first of these case-studies takes as its starting-point 1/1994, as the journal re-established its all-German identity in the post-Wende field of the new Berlin republic, positioning itself against the heteronomous values of the post-modern culture market, rather than those of the socialist system. As we shall see, this was a carefully developed position which can be traced back to programmatic publications which appeared five years earlier in 4/1989. Two further case-studies examine the situation of the journal in the GDR literary field, following contrasting re-alignments initiated by shifts in the field of power: the first of these uses the opening issue of 1966 to explore the impact on the journal of the 11 th Plenary of the SED Central Committee which, in December 1965, delivered a widespread condemnation of cultural development in the GDR; the second is structured around parallel analyses of issues 2/1972 and 6/1986, each of which exploited the new positions available in the field during phases of relative cultural liberalisation. Not surprisingly, the individual position-takings constituted by these specific issues of the journal are shaped to a considerable degree by these shifts. At the same time, a remarkable consistency emerges in the strategie function and position of the journal, above all in its capacity to adopt a mediating role, both within the literary field and between the literary field and the field of power.

A N ew Beginning? Re-establishing an all-German identity What a felicitous development when a journal like this, which previously represented the interests of the state, transforms itself - without changing its personnel - into a radically liberal forum, both politically and aesthetically! The most recent issue (1/1994) is distinguished by that balancing of extremes that is a pleasing alternative to neutral equilibrium. t

Reviewing the journal in the spring of 1994, Jörg Lau offered a timely assessment of the position adopted by Sinn und Form in the newly constituted cultural field of the fledgling Berlin republic. For Lau, the defming feature of the journal at that time was its capacity to position, alongside one another, often opposing perspectives on unification and its consequences. Typically, personal literary expression

Jörg Lau, 'Literarischer Osten: Die Bestellten und nicht Abgeholten', Merkur, 541 (April 1994), 364-69 (p. 367).

A N ew Beginning?

65

from the East was contrasted with academic analysis from the West: in the second issue of 1993, for example, Lau picked out Heiner ~füller's 'Mommsens Block' (206-11) and Tilman Moser's 'Der braune Untergrund der Charaktere' (279-89), identifying in the latter a diagnosis of the sublimated resentment of the colonised easterner expressed in the former. Similarly, in the opening issue of 1994 Lau saw in Ferenc Feher's and Agnes Heller's careful analysis of European anti-Americanism a valuable counterweight to Michael Wüstefeld's poetic depiction of the west as depersonalising bureaucracy.2 The juxtaposition of such perspectives was seen by Lau as proof of Friedrich Dieckmann's contention that literary journals from the former GDR had emerged into the 1990s better placed than their western counterparts. According to Dieckmann, writing in the same issue of Sinn und Form as Müller and Moser, such journals had proved remarkably adept at reinventing themselves for the new, unified German cultural space: 'Cultural institutions from the GDR which were given the opportunity to continue with their personnel intact, are undergoing a process of renewal; they are becoming all-German: enterprises which reflect the new German cultural space.'3 No longer bound to the state, Sinn und Form was perceived by Lau to have repositioned itself in accordance with the shift in the field of power: 'Not only the editors, but readers, too, are profiting from this new distance from the state: never again will a [me issue [...] have to be disfigured with greetings from statesmen like those of Comrade Erich Honecker in July 1989.'4 The former GDR joumal had now apparendy successfully re-positioned itself as an all-German publication befitting the new republic. In this way, 1994 emerges as another key juncture in the history of Sinn und Form. It was at this point that the journal was able to re-establish a stable and recognisable profile after the most profound of ruptures in the field of power in which it had been positioned. That rupture, of course, removed one set of heteronomous pressures from the joumal, but it also removed its source of institutional consecration and, in time, its fmancial underpinning, not to mention its core constituency of GDR writers. Many of those found the transition into a new literary field rather more difficult than the journal itself. The principles of legitimacy against which they had oriented themselves and their literary production, whether in an orthodox or non-orthodox manner, were now not only called into question, but often ridiculed and dismissed outright. Even those GDR writers who had enjoyed considerable capital in the West before the fall of the Wall found that those reserves were not necessarily protected in the upheavals of system-collapse and reunification. Indeed, it is a measure of the robustness of the cultural investment made by Sinn und Form over the first forty years of its exis2

3 4

See Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller, 'Der Dialog zwischen der Alten und der Neuen Welt' and Michael Wüstefeld, 'Absage', 1/1994, 47-46 and 108-11. Friedrich Dieckmann, 'Die vergessene Weiche', 2/1993, 360-63 (pp. 360-61). Lau, p. 367.

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The Literary Field and the Field of Power

tence that it was largely spared the vitriol poured on the critical GDR loyalists such as Christa Wolf, whose position in the literary field the journal had often shared. All the same, the fmal page of the J anuary/Febmary issue of 1994 carried a typically reserved, but nonetheless telling, statement of thanks to a list of prominent East and West Berlin figures 'for committed support and valuable help in difficult times' (157). These were the members of the Society for Sinn und Form which had been formed to secure the journal's survival over the preceding three years. That survival had become uncertain, as Sinn und Form became caught up in the protracted and often acrimonious negotiations over the future of the East and West Berlin Academies, out of which the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts had fmally emerged in September 1993. 5 Even then, the fallout from the publication of extracts from Ernst Jünger's diaries in the opening number of 1993 threatened the adoption of the journal at the inaugural meeting of the new Academy in October. 6 So outraged were some members at the Jünger publication that they argued for the liquidation of the journal. Hans Mayer, meanwhile, argued that the journal had completed its mission now that the GDR was at an end. However, the majority view differed, and 1/1994 was able to announce the continuation oE Sinn und Form, supported by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts (157). Forty years after the legend had been constructed, the January/ February issue of 1994 marked the securing of its legacy in a radically realigned literary field: if the fmal issue of 1954 had, in effect, signalled the end of the beginning of the journal, the first issue of 1994 marked the end of its new beginning. As such, that issue bears detailed scrutiny, not least insofar as it suggests continuity or discontinuity with the careful position-taking of the thick literary journal which we have seen to act as the origin of the Sinn und Form legend in the early 1950s.

New contrasts: 1/1994 That kind of close reading of 1/1994 reveals a composition constructed in layered contrasts around the central question of intellectual freedom and responsibility. At the centre of the issue are two almost mirror-image studies of identicallength, each taking an explicitly comparative approach to a pair of intertwined literary biographies, one conservative pair and one progressive pair: Gustav Seibt's 'Römisches Deutschland' (61-71) traces the intellectual trajectories of Rudolf Borchardt and Ernst Kantorowicz during the 1920s and 1930s, while J ohn Gar5

6

See Stephen Parker, 'Re-establishing an all-German identity: Sinn und rorm and German Unification', in Osman Durrani et al (eds), Uterature and Sodety in Germa'!y since 1989 (Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1995), pp. 14-27. See Ernst Jünger, 'Aus den Tagebüchern 1992',1/1993, 13-42.

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rick's 'Zwei Tiere im Kampf (72-82) charts the rivalry between Hemingway and Malraux against the backdrop of their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. In turn, these treatments of profoundly contrasting responses to the intellectual dilemmas of the first half of the twentieth-century act as linkages between two larger, and again contrasting, bodies of related contributions. The first half of the issue is structured around three essays which lend the journal something of a new flavour, more political and ethical than literary in nature: Czeslaw Milosz's essay on national and minority identity in the post-Soviet Baltic states, 'Spätschicht in Baltikum' (5-18), is accompanied by Feher's and Heller's, 'Der Dialog zwischen der Alten und der Neuen Welt' (27-46) and by Emmanuel Terray's 'Gleichheit der Alten, Gleichheit der Modernen' (47-60).7 Together, these essayistic contributions present a distinctive set of concerns surrounding liberalism, cultural understanding, and equality across a range of cultural and historical contexts. Considering the classical and modern periods, the old and new worlds, democratic and authoritarian state structures, the pieces challenge teleological assumptions about social progress and democracy. By contrast, the second half of the number seems to be devoted to purely literary concerns: poetological reflections from Mario Luzi, under the heading 'Die Farbe der Poesie' (83-91), and an interview with Wulf Kirsten (92-106), notably a Huchel enthusiast, preface contemporary poetry from a range of established and emerging writers. Throughout this second complex of contributions, the social and political responsibility of the poet recurs as a constant refrain. In this way, a composition of multi-Iayered contrasts is constructed - the oppositions functioning not only between individual contributions, but also within contributions and between groups of contributions - out of which the alternatives of isolated individual creativity and collective intellectual responsibility emerge as the deftning choice for the writer. Recent cultural and political events are never far from the surface in an issue which very much reflects the concerns of post-unification Germany and the wider post-Soviet world. While the essayistic contributions broaden the central question of the issue out into the realm of political science, the complex of poetic and poetological contributions narrows the focus down onto more familiar territory. Here, through the lens of unification, the question of intellectual responsibility is applied to two generations of GDR poets: the established generation of the 5ätvsis(;he Ditvterschule, and the poets of the alternative scene of the 1980s. In this respect, the interview with Wulf Kirsten is central, covering as it does questions of (self-)censorship, Stasi repression, and literary dissidence..A.cknowledging his own role within a generation which 'made an agreement with the state to remain silent' (101), and contrasting that with the following generation's 'open and intense confrontation with those in power' (102), Kirsten is not only holding a direct dialogue with his interviewers and with the readership of the journal, but he also 7

Milosz's essay is a review of Anatol Lieven's The Baltie Rel'Olution (1993) which first appeared in the New York Reziew rf Books.

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The Literary Field and the Field of Power

fmds implicit discussion partners in three fellow contributors who suffered the consequences of open protest against Wolf Biermann's expatriation in 1976. The best known of these is Bernd Jentzseh, whose notes written in Switzerland in 1983 (125-29) form a direct companion piece to Kirsten's interview, the physical distance of exile providing an alternative perspective to Kirsten's retrospective distance to the GDR. J oining Jentzsch are Siegmar Faust and Gabriele Stötzer; the former was twice imprisoned in the 1970s before leaving for the West in 1976, while the latter spent a year in prison for her protest against the Biermann expatriation in 1977. Faust's poem, 'Der arme Poet' (112-13), makes the most direet contribution to a set of intertexts, through which Biermann's presence runs, often overtly: 'in the confusion of his youth/ he still got/ letters of encouragement or poems of homage froml Wolf Biermann or Volker Braun or Jürgen Fuchs [...]./ I the etemal poet, this poor failure/ expects from the Gauck authority enlightenment aboutl his botched life.' Stötzer's presence alongside Faust offers another perspective. Part of the alternative scene in Erfurt in the 1980s, Stötzer used Biermann's expatriation as the impetus to start writing. N ow she too looks back at the GDR. Her unpunctuated prose poem, 'hiergeblieben' (115-17), highlights the rush of political change, the illusory nature of memory, and the confusion of personal and political history: 'Sad gdr everything went and I thought I could keep out of it it went as now the rain flows over the spot where my sister played her dream of flying' (115). As such, 111994 exemplifies the two most significant shifts made by the journal as a result of its new position in a radically altered cultural field. Firstly, having freed itself from the heteronomous legitimisation of the SED regime, the joumal made use of that former position by devoting considerable space to the cultural legacy of the GDR. More specifically, the early 1990s saw the journal seeking to document relations between GDR intellectuals and the SED and to shed light on many of the instances of repression which had remained taboo up until 1989. In between 1/1990 - which prompted discussion of Walter Janka's case through the publication of Arnold Zweig's correspondence - and 5/1992which documented Huchel's lengthy battle with the SED dogmatists - a rash of manuscripts and documents, memoirs, conversations, letters and essays gave Sinn und Form a unique position amongst German periodicals.s In Manfred Jäger's words: 'At present, I know no journal which is as commanding as Sinn und Form in the way that it presents material which allows us to reappraise the past and its consequences.'9 Kirsten's interview and the associated material are to be understood in this context. Secondly, the journal opened itself up to contributors and to strands of thought outside its natural territory, giving its published face an enhanced variety and vitality. As Sebastian Kleinschmidt would put it five years 8 9

See Amold Zweig, 'Briefe', 1/1990,30-34 and 'Der Fall von Peter J-Iuchel und Sinn und Form', 5/1992, 739-822. Manfred Jäger, 'Die aktuelle Zeitschriftenkritik', Deutschlandfunk, 8 July 1993.

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later: 'Sinn und Form has opened itself up intellectually, without reservation and without any fallback position. In future, it will be produced neither in thrall to, nor under the proteetion of, a single doctrine.'l0 The New York based Hungarian philosophers Feher and Heller are typical in this respect, as is Gustav Seibt, the long-time literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Their contributions are vital components in the compositional whole which would otherwise have a distinctly East German and more narrowly literary bias. The latter's essay on Borchardt and Kantorowicz, in particular, and its bold positioning alongside more predictable representatives of the joumal's long-standing progressive anti-fascist tradition demonstrates the enrichment of the journal's core values which the plurality of the post-Wende field permitted. Above all, that plurality offered new and challenging possibilities for the contrastive juxtaposition which was the journal's hallmark, particularly for the engagement with strands of religious and conservative thought, such as Nietzsche's legacy, which had been out of bounds during the GDR era.

Denouncing heteronomy: 4/1989 Looking back from Lau's vantage-point in 1994, this modified incarnation of Sinn und Form must have seemed a long way from the kind of position-taking implied by the inclusion of Honecker's 'Gruß an die Zeitschrift Sinn und Form' in 4/1989. For all the conventional formulations, it was clear that the SED valued its flagship literary journal: Sinn und Form is one of the internationally respected hallmarks of the socialist national culture of the German Democratic Republic. [...] Sinn und Form has always understood itself, too, as the mediator of internationalliterature and art - of works of art from the Soviet Union and of other socialist countries, as weIl as of artistic achievements by progressive artists from around the world. In the process, the journal continues to make a valuable contribution to the promotion of successful international relations, understood as a coalition of reason and realism. (701)

But Lau's reading of that contribution as a marker of a position which essentially 'represented the interests of the state' is clearly a convenient, if understandable, piece of journalistic shorthand which rather misjudges what is another pivotal number of the journal. Indeed, the fourth issue oE 1989 is positioned much closer to the post-Wende version of the journal than Lau is aware. Contrastive juxtaposition was at work here, too, and on this occasion the effect was anything but subtle. Honecker's congratulatory message - originally intended to mark the 40 th anniversary of the journal's foundation at the beginning of the year but belatedly included in the number ostensibly devoted to the 40 th anniversary of the GDR's 10

Sebastian Kleinschmidt, 'Vorwort', in Sebastian Kleinschmidt (ed.), Stimme und SpiegeL' Fü'!/.Iahrzehnte 'Sinn und Form' (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), pp. 9-12 (p. 12).

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The Literary Fie1d and the Fie1d of Power

foundation - was deployed in what was essentially a subversive, rather than confirmatory, composition. Tucked away in the middle of the same issue was Christoph Hein's 'Die Ritter der Tafelrunde' (786-829), an allegory which had become all the more telling by the time the issue was published in the summer of the 1989, as the migration crisis further undermined the SED's legitimacy.ll The following exchange is typical of Hein's satire on the GDR's gerontocracy, its exercise of power and its response to the erosion of belief in the communist system: KAY: Have we made mistakes? ARTHUR: I don't know. KAY: No, we have not made any mistakes. Not a single one. At each step, we remained undeterred. We have had to make painful decisions, we have even had to shed blood that was dear to uso But every step was necessary and correct. ARTHUR: Perhaps, Kay, perhaps we have not made any mistakes. But we have become isolated. No one comes to us; people avoid the round table. We have few friends left. KAY: Our history is without blemish, there have been no flawed decisions. (794-95)

As Seibt has suggested in his own reading of this particular issue, the function of Honecker's piece is transformed through its integration into the issue alongside such pieces as Hein's drama and Rainer Kirsch's 'Kunst und Geld' (894-96): 'The journal treated Honecker's clunky letter in a playful way: it integrated it as an element of meaning into the structure of its form.'12 Rather than acting as a signal of the journal's proximity to political power, Honecker's statement acts as a further satirical contribution to the denunciation of the faltering regime. In performing this exemplary act of denunciation, Sinn und Form was asserting its intellectual autonomy from external constraints and in the process depositing the capital which would help to pay its way through the Wende. In truth, though, this was more a symbolic expression of autonomy than a practical one; for Sinn und Form the Wende had come one year earlier when, in July 1988, Kurt Hager and the Cultural Department of the SED had backed down from their criticism of the journal and effectively signalIed the end of their attempts to control its publication policy.13 Indeed, the symbolic nature of the act undertaken in 4/1989 recalls Bourdieu's discussion of the construction of intellectual autonomy against its constraining institutions. Drawing on the case of Emile Zola, Bourdieu shows how this construction of autonomy is dependent on aseries of paradigmatic acts which mark out the break with heteronomy:

11 12 13

Hein submitted his new drama with an accompanying letter on 11 December 1988. See SAdA, 2AA, SmA, 1710. Gustav Seiht, 'Das Prinzip Abstand: FünfzigJahre Sinn und Form', Sinn und Form, 51 (1999),20518 (p. 206). Kirsch's piece reviewed Peter Hacks's Schöne WirtJchqji. Minutes ofthe 'Hager Plenary' of7 July 1988 are in SAdA, 2AA, 1397. An extract is included in Ulrich Dietzel and Gudrun Geißler (eds), ZwiJt:hen DiJkUJ:rion und DiJ;;jplin: Dokumente zur GeJt:hit:hte der Akademie der KünJte (Ost) 1945/1950 biJ 1993 (Berlin: Hensche1, 1997), pp. 522-27.

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The acts of prophetie denunciation of which ]'accuse is the paradigm become, since Zola, and perhaps especially since Sartre, so intrinsic to the personage of the intellectual that anyone who aspires to a position (especially a dominant one) in the intellectual field has to perform such exemplary acts. 14

As an agent in the intellectual field, aspiring to a dominant position, Sinn und Form undertook the denunciation of SED power as an exemplary act in the construction of its autonomy. Crucially, though, this paradigmatic distancing from the GDR field of power was not the only significant position-taking made in the fourth issue of 1989, which set out the function the journal would seek to adopt in the years to come. The denunciation of heteronomy in 4/1989 was a double denunciation. No sooner was the edifice of SED power crumbling, against which Sinn und Form had defmed its autonomy, than the journal was beginning to define itself against the other principal source of heteronomous legitimacy, the capitalist market. In 'Die Musen haben abgedankt' (4/1989, 901-04), the journal published GÜllter Kunert's scathing critique of the arts in contemporary western society which had first appeared in Die Zeit. Kunert despaired of superficial and selfreferential art, the meaning of which appeared to be determined entirely by art critics. Indeed, much contemporary art was only recognisable through art criticism; the two had conspired in a curious symbiosis in order to ward off a potentially fatal crisis of art. Significandy, Kunert ascribed this crisis to an 'anything goes' society (903), where a 'value-free multiplicity of insights and perceptions no longer permits a unified world view or a shared attitude towards life' (901). Kunert continued to diagnose the 'loss of meaning' ('Sinnverlust') of the modern world and its consequences for art: Where an established sense of meaning is no longer present, art cannot recreate it; rather, in a world perceived as meaningless, it must itself forfeit its meaning. (901) As soon as a society lacks the intellectual, aesthetic or moral obligations which used to act normatively, it is arbitrariness which becomes the creative principle. (903)

Of course, this world without meaning was the capitalist art market into which Sinn und Form would fmd itself thrown in the years to come. In this context, it is significant that Kunert's diagnosis of that environment finds an echo in Kleinschmidt's reflections on the world the journal found itself inhabiting ten years later. Commenting on the tide and function of the journal in 1999, he bemoaned the lack of contemporary resonance for the programmatic notion of meaning or Sinn: 'Some people regard it as idealism of the highest order or simply as a complete misapprehension of reality to insist on philosophical postulates such as meaning. The result: nowadays there is far less agreement over what is presumed to be meaningful than over what is essentially meaningless.'15 Or, as he put it 14 15

Pierre Bourdieu, The Field rf Cultural Produflion: EJJ'D'J on Art and Uterature, ed. by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 63. Sebastian Kleinschmidt, 'Gespräch mit Basil Kerski', Sinn und Form, 1/1999,63-72 (p. 63).

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elsewhere, in the same year: 'Evidently, the nihilistic element in the human mind is in the ascendant, while the ethereal foundations from which all meaning gains nourishment, namely religiosity and poetry, are disappearing.'16 For Kleinschmidt, too, Sinn was clearly a central category perceived to be under threat, and it was the culture of the market which posed the threat. What Sinn und Form could offer in response was its own deftnition of culture, and that was also set out in programmatic terms in 4/1989, this time by Kleinschmidt in a short essay published alongside Kunert's piece. In his immensely significant 'Kulturzeitschrift als Idee' (897-901) Kleinschmidt constructed his argument around an idealist notion of culture which he saw as the key shaping factor for the character of the journal.17 For Kleinschmidt, this deftnition of culture was unashamedly normative and humanist: In the very idea of culture, there pulsates a conception of mankind as a harmonious, free personality of substantial form and an assumption of life as a community of individuals in solidarity with one another and free of alienation. The measure of culture is the measure of humanity as it has developed across the group. This bonum humanum, understood as something that endures and endows, is the essence of culture. Our conception of culture is normative, or it is nothing at all. (898)

Seeking to defend the core values of this culture - an 'orientation towards meaning' and a 'desire for unity' - against contingence and heterogeneity, absurdity and fragmentation, Kleinschmidt appealed to culture to 'immunise' humanity against 'the forces of fragmentation and reification, of fetishising, and of idolatry' (899). He then addressed his main target: 'The post-modern privileging of the particular and the heterogeneous, becoming at horne in difference, this playful glistening of the appearance of a new freedom in the light of plurality is an intellectual capitulation in the face of the real eclecticism of market culture.' Post-modernism, as a feature of the western market economy, was the single greatest threat to the humanist notion of culture which he sought to defend. Again, this acts as a thread of continuity in the journal's position-taking between 1989 and 1999, and, as we shall see in the fmal section of this chapter, one which can be traced further back, to the mid-1980s. As Kleinschmidt put it ten years later: 'For a long time now, there has once again been something like an agnosticism of meaning per se, not to mention the post-modern aversion towards questions of meaning or their disavowal.'18 Kleinschmidt was warning of nothing less than the undermining of the subject's intellectual and moral capacity and of the dissolution of the substance of the subject. Ultimately, the principle of reason was at stake.

16 17 18

Kleinschmidt, 'Vorwort', p. 10. The essay was originally delivered as a paper at the LitcrarirdJCJ Kolloquium in West Berlin in March 1989, which coincided with the journal's 40 th anniversary. Kleinschmidt, 'Vorwort', p. 10.

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'The time of the journal' Crucially, Kleinschmidt's diagnosis of the post-modern malaise assigned a vital role to the cultural journal. It was the task of the journal to uphold his deftnition of culture, to function as a weapon in what amounted to a battle of ideas: 'What are, and to what end does one edit, cultural journals? A cultural journal is an organon which represents humanity as it is conceived in the present day. Its mission is to insist on the normative measure of culture in all its constellations, in all nuances of what is happening, to make this measure productive' (4/1989, 898). In particular, Kleinschmidt recognised the significance of periods when the cultural field was in flux and of the agency which these periods bestowed upon literary journals. Looking back ten years later in his conversation with Basil Kerski (1/1999, 63-72), for example, Kleinschmidt captured some of the immense energy which he had clearly feit at the time of the Wende, describing it as 'an ecstasy of leaming' (72). He went on: 'Such upheavals are like thunderboIts, which suddenly illuminate the noctumallandscape. One sees with great clarity what one has never seen before' (72). In the same interview, published programmatically in the 50th anniversary issue of the journal, Kleinschmidt re-asserted the key role which Sinn und Form had to play from its readily recognisable position in the literary field as an established cultural journal: As thinking beings we are, after all, still seeking something more than an endpoint which consists in the general disavowal of meaning. Perhaps this is the intellectual foundation of a journal like this. Everyone is subject to the imperative to live up to their name. We are too. If a journal is called Sinn und Form, it can be expected to take the problem of meaning seriously and not engage in blasphemy. (63-64)

Ten years earlier, the rhetoric had been more forceful, the sense of excitement and dynamism palpable. But the essential faith in the potential of the literarycultural journal as an agent in the cultural field, as a bulwark against the moral and intellectual relativism of the post-modern age was the same. eWe are living on an intellectual threshold', I