Strategies Under Surveillance: Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer 904201458X, 9789042014589

Table of contents :
1. Engagement: From Socialist Realism to Socialist Modernism
2. The Apparatus of Control
3. Experiments Under Control 1965-1974
4. Censorship and Surveillance
5. Reckoning: Amanda
6. The Surveyed Subject

Citation preview

AMSTERDAMER PUBLIKATIONEN ZUR SPRACHE UND LITERATUR in Verbindung mit

PETER BOERNER, BLOOMINGTON; HUGO DYSERINCK, AACHEN; FERDINAND VAN INGEN, AMSTERDAM; FRIEDRICH MAURERt, FREffiURG; OSKAR REICHMANN, HEIDELBERG herausgegeben von

COLAMINIst und ARENDQUAK

148

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2002 Geoffrey Westgate - 978-90-04-48580-8

Strategies Under Surveillance Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer

Geoffrey Westgate

Geoffrey Westgate - 978-90-04-48580-8

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1458-X ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2002 Printed in The Netherlands

Geoffrey Westgate - 978-90-04-48580-8

Contents

Acknowledgements

VI

Abbreviations

VB

1

Introduction 1. Engagement: From Socialist Realism to Socialist Modernism

18

2. The Apparatus of Control

59

3. Experiments Under Control 1965-1974

87

4. Censorship and Surveillance

158

5. Reckoning: Amanda

206

The Surveyed Subject

246

Bibliography

256

Index

270

Geoffrey Westgate - 978-90-04-48580-8

Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to record the help I have had in preparing this book, which is based on a D.Phil. thesis completed at the University of Oxford in the summer of 1999. Financial assistance during the writing of the thesis was provided by the British Academy, the DAAD and St. Hugh's College, Oxford. I should like to thank the staff of the various libraries and archives I visited: the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen im Bundesarchiv, the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der KUnste Berlin-Brandenburg, the GauckBeh6rde, the Handschriftenabteilung of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, and in particular Frau Marschall-Reiser, Dr. Jochen Meyer, Frau Christiane Rotharmel, and Jill Hughes and the staff of the Taylorian Library in Oxford. I was also able to meet privately with a number of individuals, and I am grateful to the following for their kind help with my questions: Frau Meta Borst, Rudolf Bussmann, Dr. Eberhard GUnther, Dr. Klaus Hopcke, Professor Eva Kaufmann, Herr Walter Piischel, Joachim Walther, and Dr. Carsten Wurm. I reserve special thanks for David Morgner, who granted me access to Irmtraud Morgner's Personalakte in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der KUnste and gave me permission to quote from the author's Nachlafi, and for Joachim Schreck. Herr Schreck gave liberally of his time, his knowledge, and even his library, and I remember his generosity over the past five years with fond Ostalgie. Warm thanks are also due to friends and to colleagues past and present for all their advice and encouragement, and in particular to David Barnett, Helen Bridge, Camilla Cox, Martin Dammann, Andreas and Maren Hom, Tom Kuhn, Karen Leeder, my supervisor Ray Ockenden, Ian Wallace, and Simon Ward. But without all the support given by Steve, Ros, and my parents, the task would have been daunting indeed.

Geoffrey Westgate - 978-90-04-48580-8

Abbreviations AdK ADN AIG AIM ALV AP ASt BArch Btu BStU BV DFD DGlDg DLA DSF DSV FAZ FDGB FDJ GI GMS GPG HA HV 1M 1MB IME IMK IMS KK KK-Erfassung KP KPD KZ LPG MtK MfS ND

Akademie der KUnste der DDR Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst Auswertungs- und Informationsgruppe Archivierter IM-Vorlauf or IM-Vorgang Amt fUr Literatur und Verlagswesen Allgemeine Personenablage Auf3enstelle Bundesarchiv (here Berlin-Lichterfelde) BUro fUr Urheberrechte Der Bundesbeauftragte fur die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik Bezirksverwaltung des MfS Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands Druckgenehmigung Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft Deutscher Schriftstellerverband; from 1973, Schriftstellerverband der DDR Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund Freie Deutsche Jugend Geheimer Informator Gesellschaftlicher Mitarbeiter fUr Sicherheit GlIrtnerische Produktionsgenossenschaft Hauptabteilung HauptverwaItung (VerJage und Buchhandel im MtK) Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter der Abwehr mit Feindverbindung/ 1M zur Bearbeitung im Verdacht der Feindtl1tigkeit stehender Personen Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter im besonderen Einsatz Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter zur Sicherung der Konspiration und des Verbindungswesens Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter zur politisch-operativen Durchdringung und Sicherung des Verantwortungsbereiches Kerblochkartei Karteikartenerfassung Kontaktperson Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Konzentrationslager Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft Ministerium fUr Kultur Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, Stasi Neues Deutschland

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viii NDL NSDAP NSW

00

OPK OSCE OV P.E.N. RIAS SAdK SAPMO SBZ SED StOB SV VEB VR WD ZA ZAIO ZDF ZDL ZK

ZMA

neue deutsche literatur N ationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei N ichtsozialistisches Wirtschaftsgebiet Operativgruppe Operative Personenkontrolle Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Operativer Vorgang Poets, Essayists, Novelists Radio in the American Sector Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Kiinste Berlin-Brandenburg Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde Sowjetische Besatzungszone Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands Strafgesetzbuch Schriftstellerverband der DDR Volkseigener Betrieb Volksrepublik West Deutschland Zentralarchiv Zentrale Auswertungs- und Informationsgruppe Zweites Deutsches Femsehen Zeitgenossische Deutsche Literatur Zentralkomitee Zentrale Materialablage

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Introduction If Irmtraud Morgner had not existed, it would take a leap of imagination as bold as those which typify her literature to invent her. There was little in her family background or the narrow ideology of her GDR environment to encourage the idiosyncrasy and experimentalism which characterise her work. Her belief that the socialist ideal could be realised, and that it was her duty as a writer to help achieve this, ceded painfully to a realisation that the ideal had been perverted beyond repair. From wide-eyed beginnings, Morgner's writing looks increasingly askance at twentieth century civilisation and its discontents. Morgner lived in the GDR until her death from cancer in 1990, but stated in her final interview that her home had been in literature. I This study shows the extent to which Morgner's literary home was nonetheless subject to influences and intrusions particular to the GDR. Irmtraud Morgner was a striking presence on the East Berlin literary scene. Her novels were eccentric: satirically grotesque, rather than merely critical; wilfully oblique, rather than confessional; sexually liberated, but laced with tristesse. Buoyed by a brilliant wit, they feature unlikely departures and improbable denouements. They invoke myth, legend and fairy tale, and expose their conventions. They muddle chronology, bend the laws of physics, and deflate pomposity with earthy obscenity. They are full of the fantastical impossibilities which literary fiction can indulge: trains become boats pulled by seahorse power (Die wundersamen Reisen Gustavs des Weltfahrers, published 1972); medieval poets are raised from the dead (Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura, 1974), devils and witches conjured up (Amanda: Ein Hexenroman, 1983), and puppets brought to life to wreak havoc in the East German provinces (Gauklerlegende, 1970). All means are permitted in these dramatic meditations on power, gender, desire and disenchantment, which home in on the individual's attempts to find existential orientation. Unsurprisingly, Morgner was viewed by the GDR authorities with mistrust and bemusement in equal measure. ISynnove Clason, 'Am Ende bleibt das eigene Leben. Berlin 1990: Ein Gesprlich mit Irmtraud Morgner kurz vor ihrem Tod', Die Zeit, 6.11.1992.

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Strategies Under Surveillance

The daughter of a train driver, Morgner grew up in a household without. books. At the age of twelve, she chanced upon a copy of Goethe's Faust. Fictionalised memorably in Amanda, this was a watershed moment in her life. Morgner went on to study Germanistik at Leipzig University, before moving to East Berlin in 1956. She gave birth to a son in 1967 and, having divorced her first husband, Joachim Schreck, in 1970, married the GDR poet and writer Paul Wiens in 1971. After the Wende, Wiens was revealed to have been one of the most important collaborators with the Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit in the literary field. The story illustrates the extent of the state's infiltration into the most intimate spheres of life in the GDR: Morgner's marriage to Wiens literally brought home the system's corruption. Morgner was awarded the GDR National Prize for Literature in 1977. The suspicion lingers that the award was rather more a reward for choosing to remain in the GDR whilst numerous of her colleagues were emigrating westwards and often denigrating their erstwhile home. Throughout her career, Morgner performed this tightrope walk between extra-literary quietism and literary subversion. Sceptical of posturing and speechifying, she wanted her books to do the talking; censorship meant that this was not always possible. Morgner's career in the GDR was in many ways an improbable victory against the odds. It took a heavy toll on her health. Since the reunification of Germany, the question has been asked as to whether the two literatures of the divided post-war nation cannot likewise be reunited? This study, however, does not intend to read Morgner parallel to contemporaneous literary trends in West Gennany although the influence of the neighbouring German state cannot be excluded completely from our examination. Instead, we shall highlight the peculiar contextual pressures to which GDR writers alone were subject and which convergence theories may ignore. It seems particularly valid in the case of Morgner to restrict our attention to within the confines of the GDR. The reception of Morgner has in fact often been the story of her assimilation by critics into narratives which underplay her GDR provenance. Thus, it was significantly in East Berlin in May 1990, upon the occasion of Morgner's burial in the Friedrichsfelde Zentralfriedhof, that Alice Schwarzer conceded that the GDR might have been a significant factor in Morgner's literary development: 'Es hatte diese Dichterin deutscher Sprache vielleicht nicht gegeben ohne den 2Cf. Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR: Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1996), pp.24-26.

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3

Introduction

Versuch des Sozialismus in dem einen Teil Deutschlands' (my italics).3 This study argues, in contrast, that the socialist ideal and its deformation in the GDR were of such importance to Morgner that the developments in her writing and the trajectory of her career cannot be explained without them. At her death in May 1990, Morgner had seen the end in all but name of the forty year old socialist project in the GDR, but not the completion of her twenty year old literary project, the Salman trilogy. When the uncompleted third part was published as Das heroische Testament: Roman in Fragmenten to celebrate what would have been the author's 65 th birthday in August 1998, it was both out of place and out of time in the literary landscape in Germany. Quite apart from the text's opacity as a collection of beginnings, possible developments, abandoned conceptions and telegram-style sketches, it was a thoroughly GDR novel being published nearly a decade after the Wende. In the initial aftermath of the events of 1989, a small number textswritten in the GDR, but never put forward for publication - had been produced from the bottom drawer: Anna Seghers's Der gerechte Richter, Christa Wolfs Was bleibt (both 1990), Karl Mickel's Lachmunds Freunde (1991), a collection of Franz Fiihmann texts, published in 1991 as 1m Berg: Texte aus dem NachlaJ3 - a volume in essence most akin to this Morgner publication. Moreover, Morgner's Rumba auf einen Herbst, written in the 1960s but banned by the censor, was reconstructed from the author's NachlaJ3 and published in 1992. However, the revelation of such Schubladentexte was a short postscript to the history of GDR literature. The existence of an eager West German publishing machine, and the cunning of an East German regime hungry for hard currency and therefore willing to export dissidence at a price, meant that an overtly critical GDR literature had not been obliged to wait for posterity to bring it to light. After the gradual settlement of east German literature into the new unified Germany through a decade of autobiography, Ostalgie and Wenderomane, the belated appearance of Morgner's text introduced a 'foreign' body into the literary environment and rewound to an unmediated mid- to late-eighties GDR consciousness. The critical reception in the German media of this decontextualised work - itself discussed at the end of the present study - is interesting for what it 3 Alice

Schwarzer, 'Eine Aufwiegierin', NDL, 8 (1990), 64-66 (p.65).

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Strategies Under Surveillance

reveals of late-nineties perceptions of GDR literature and of Morgner's status within that debate - or rather, as we shall see, on its periphery. The Franlifurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried the most phlegmatic response to Morgner's novel. Just as nine years ago when the borders between the two countries were opened and a West German could apparently step back in time by crossing eastwards, so 'Irmtraut [sic] Morgner irritiert das Zeitempfinden auf vergleichbare Weise'; her aesthetic is 'sonderbar veraltet, ja rtihrend romantisch,.4 The novel's pUblication is lein Gewinn in erster Linie fur Philologen, Nostalgiker und Voyeure' - at best, then, an anachronism reminding us how thoroughly antiquated the GDR was. The review in the FAZ was exceptional in that it read Morgner as a representative GDR figure - albeit to use her as a stick with which to give the GDR another beating. Other reviews, whether in eastern or western German papers, were more evasive about placing her. The Miirkische Allgemeine (Potsdam) and Leipziger Volkszeitung gave no more than a synopsis of the novel and the briefest account of Morgner's work, noting that her 'bizarren Geschichten fielen aus dem realsozialistischen Rahmen' and that she was consequently 'von den SED-Kulturwachtern skeptisch beobachtet,.5 Ursula Piischel in Neues Deutschland had praise for Morgner's lucid dissection of a post-utopian society of 'Individuen und Mitlaufer', but was critical of her disaffected view of the father figure Johann Salman. 6 A 'Jugendideal'in Amanda in what that novel described as the post-war 'marchenhafte Zeit', Salman is laid bare in the new novel as the archetypal 'Mitlaufer', never more content than when "'die Diktatur des MittelmaBes perfekt wurde, mit Hilfe des flachendeckenden Uberwachungsapparates der Stasi'" (Ptischel cites from the novel). For the reviewer, this was a revision too far, for it pricked the comforting belief that at least the beginnings of the GDR may have been heroic. Kerstin Hensel's unsensationalist review in Freitag, meanwhile, emphasised the primacy of Morgner's literary qualities: 'Wahrend der Ruhm vieler Schriftstellerinnen oft auf (auto )biografische Belange und Schriften grtindet, weil diese so gefallig die Schwachen der Literatur retuschieren und dem Leser die 4Kristina Maidt-Zinke, 'Hexen auf Montage: Irmtraud Morgners Flaschenpost', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6. I O. I 998. 5Ulf Heise, 'Dichterin gegen die Diirre der DDR-SpieBigkeit', Leipziger Volkszeitung, 22.8. 1998, and 'Doktor Faustus fur Feministinnen', Markische Allgemeine, 22.8.1998.

6Ursula Piischel, 'Liebe - Kraft der Utopie in uns', Neues Deutschland, 22.123.8. I 998.

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Introduction

5

kiinstlerischen Entdeckungen austreiben, ist Morgners Bedeutung eine ausschlieBlich literarische'. 7 Hensel thus draws a distinction between female writing understood primarily for its confessional qualities, and Morgner's aesthetic sophistication. However, her review makes virtually no mention of the current text's GDR origin, nor does it raise the question of the author's contextual significance, whether then or now. Of other reviews in the west German press, Frauke Meyer-Gosau in the tageszeitung questioned the rectitude ('Anstand') of publishing the novel at all and in particular of including Morgner's scathing, barely disguised autobiographical reckoning with her parents as representatives of a cowed but complacent East German conformity. It should, however, be noted that the editor, Rudolf Bussmann, was carrying out the author's wishes in publishing the fragments of the novel. 9 The Berliner Morgenpost noted 'mit literarischem Respekt und ziemlichem Schauder [... ], wie der Mief der DDR in einigen Pas sagen wieder aufersteht', before suggesting that the publication's primary value lay in sending the reader back to Morgner's other texts. lO Meanwhile, although empathetic, the understanding of the novel in the Suddeutsche Zeitung as the author's response to a perceived failure of feminism left its GDR identity to pass unnoticed. I I Common to these accounts of the novel was the absence of any attempt to contextualise its author. Morgner's GDR provenance was at best mentioned in passing, but was not seen to inform or influence her work significantly. The publication of a GDR novel nearly ten years after the Wende might have been expected to produce a different reaction. The omission would be surprising if it were not in fact typical of responses to Morgner in general, as we shall see below. The exceptional voice in the German press was that of Rolf Michaelis in Die Zeit. His review situated Morgner's work firmly within the context of GDR censorship pressures, noting particularly Rumba auf einen Herbst and Amanda. It was not that 7Kerstin Hensel, 'Die Universalhexe', Freitag, 2.10.1998. 8Frauke Meyer-Gosau, 'Verzweiflung und selbstgeschnitztes Gliick', die tageszeitung, 22.123.8.1998. 9Grossmann, Karin, 'Hero schneidet sich einen Mann aus den Rippen: Roman aus Irmtraud Morgners Nachlall SZ sprach mit Herausgeber Rudolf Bussmann', Siichsische Zeitung, 27.128.6.1998. IOHans-Georg Soldat, 'Ein Mann zum Herauslesen', Berliner Morgenpost, 30.8.1998. IIMeike Fessmann,

'Dies Buch gehort dem Harlekin', Siiddeutsche Zeitung,

2.13.14.10.1998.

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Strategies Under Surveillance

Michaelis saw Morgner's thematic concerns as necessarily limited to a GDR discourse. His aim was to emphasise that, although 'manche Bosheiten kommen jetzt, nach dem Zusammensinken der DDR, zu spat', Morgner's literature was involved in, and influenced by, its very immediate political environment: Vor dem Ernst dieser Frau, die nie leitartikeln wollte, sondern lieber in Irrgarten des Erziihlens lockte [... ], haben sich manche gerettet mit dem flink verliehenen Faschingsorden "Marchenfrau der DDR", "Plaudertasche", "Phantasie-Vogel". Nichts da. Hier hat eine immer bewuBt politisch denkende Schriftstellerin die Feder geflihrt. Spatestens jetzt [... ] lernen wir eine der bedeutenden, auch politisch wichtigen Autorinnen der deutschen Literatur kennen. 12

The political in Morgner has hitherto been understood primarily in terms of feminism. The question we should now address is why Michaelis's view of Morgner's politics is still atypical. One of the problems for the reception of Morgner as a GDR writer has been that her political profile was ambivalent and her (in)actions did not correspond to the dissident norm. Her critique of patriarchy and criticism of the limits of female emancipation in the GDR challenged Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but did not directly attack the ruling hegemony of the SED. She did not write politically less ambiguous work, untrammelled by a consciousness of the censor, with a view to exclusive publication in the West. She addressed only one ('closed') letter of protest to the authorities. She did not sign open letters of protest to Erich Honecker, but accepted the GDR National Prize for Literature in 1977, the year after the singer Wolf Biermann was expatriated. She was elected to the Prasidium of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR in 1978, after many seats had been vacated by the outspoken opponents of the anti-Biermann measures. In interviews with West Germans she supported the GDR until the end. For Morgner's differentiated, critical engagement with the GDR, we must look exclusively to her literature. Morgner was not, then, embroiled as outspokenly as others in the politics of writing and the political role of the writer, and has generally not been contextualised within that discourse as a result. However, since the publication of Rumba auf einen Herbst, it has been possible to reappraise her literary motivation and hypothesise a different trajectory to her career, and consequently a very different reception of her work. Had Rumba been published in 1965 - it was initially approved by the censor - Morgner would have come to prominence, perhaps 12RolfMichaelis, 'Glut in der Asche', Die Zeit, 19.11.1998.

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Introduction

7

scandalously, as the heir to Uwe Johnson, a writer more radical than Christa Wolf. Mobilising the tabooed modernist tradition in a sophisticated liberation from the dourness of WaIter Ulbricht's cuIturalpolitical orthodoxy, Morgner's novel addressed individual disjunctions from GDR society in an overtly political and socially engaged text of refined aesthetic means. The non-publication of Rumba was a traumatic and pivotal moment in the author's career. It should not be forgotten that, prior to Rumba, Morgner was a minor literary figure even in the GDR; the notoriety of being a blacklisted author kept her on the sidelines for years thereafter. Half a decade of publication problems followed, and with this came the need to reassess her aesthetic and find perhaps more oblique forms of expression so as to evade a now wary censor. However, when Beatriz was published in the more relaxed cultural-political climate of the early 1970s and seemed to fit perfectly into the contemporary Western feminist debate, Morgner was pigeonholed in the West as 'die Feministin der DDR', who had written 'die Bibel des aktuellen Feminismus' .13 It was a reception which foregrounded one aspect of her literary motivation over all others. This perspective still predominates within Morgner scholarship. Furthermore, the disproportionate prominence given to Beatriz and its innovative narrative technique has encouraged the indiscriminate shorthand typification of Morgner's aesthetic in general as one of 'montage'. This view ignores Morgner's aesthetic development over the decade preceding Beatriz and glosses over the idiosyncratic formal logic governing each of her texts. The degree to which the inauspicious stop-start to Morgner's literary career has influenced her reception becomes clear from an examination of Wolfgang Emmerich's Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR. Although the scope of his book is such that Emmerich cannot examine every author in depth, his central importance amongst literary historians of the GDR makes valid an isolation of his appraisal of Morgner, for it confirms what one might call her 'outsider' status within GDR literature. Emmerich lists seventeen authors whose work was banned in the GDR and fourteen celebrated struggles with the censor, but neither Morgner's Rumba auf einen Herbst nor Amanda is mentioned. 14 In his list of ten IlNikolaus Markgraf, 'Die Feministin der DDR: Irmtraud Morgners Roman Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz', Frankfurter Rundschau, 24.5.1975, reprinted in Marlis Gerhardt (ed.), Irmtraud Morgner: Texte, Daten, BUder (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, (990), pp.150-55. 14Emmerich, pp.57-59. Subsequent references are given in brackets.

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Strategies Under Surveillance

texts which allude to Stasi activities (of which seven could not be published in the GDR) he again makes no mention of Morgner, who first named the official but unmentionable Ministry in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel in 1968 15 and whose thematisation of the state security and surveillance complex in Amanda was a contributory factor in her two-year and ultimately successful battle with the censors. More broadly, as the heirs to Uwe Johnson with respect to a GDR reception of modernism, Emmerich identifies Johannes Bobrowski, Christa Wolf, Fritz Rudolf Fries and Hermann Kant (p.146), though he later cites Kurt Batt's list of writers, which does include Morgner, who in the 1970s show an indebtedness to a modernist tradition (p.174). Morgner's experimental work in the 1960s thus passes unnoticed here and is elsewhere relegated in importance vis-a-vis her later novels (p.34S). Although Beatriz and Amanda are rightly seen as belonging 'zum Wichtigsten der DDR-Literatur aus ihren letzten IS Jahren Uberhaupt' (p.34l), it is Morgner's work with myth and legend, her feminist purport, and her fantastical aesthetic which occupy the foreground of Emmerich's analysis, rather than the texts' reflections on more immediate GDR cultural and political concerns. In his conclusion, Emmerich gives a list of '[einige wichtige] modem und innovativ schreibenden Autoren der iilteren und mittleren Generation' (p.S22), which to a certain degree can be seen as a GDR canon: Fries, Ftihmann, Wolf, Jurek Becker, Thomas Brasch, Volker Braun, Christoph Hein, GUnter Kunert, Karl Mickel, Heiner MUller, Stefan SchUtz and Wolfgang Hilbig. Morgner's name is notably absent. Similarly, in his 1993 review of the literary and cultural-political reception of modernism in the GDR, GUnter Erbe is unable to find a place for Morgner in a roll-call of writers which includes not only the godparents of GDR modernism, Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers, and Braun, FUhmann, Rainer Kirsch, Kunert, MUlier, Wolf - that is, authors of Morgner's generation - but also the hineingeboren younger generation of Hilbig, Sascha Anderson, Uwe Kolbe and Bert PapenfuB. 16 Scholars of GDR literature, then, do not appear to think of Morgner when establishing canons; she is not seen as a writer who fits in. This study aims to redress the balance by rereading Morgner as a central and 15Cf. Irmtraud Morgner, Hochzeit in Konstantinopel (Berlin und Weimar: AufbauVerlag, 1968; repro 1986), p.26. 16GUnter Erbe, Die verfemte Moderne: Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem "Modernismus" in Kulturpolitik, Literaturwissenschafi und Literatur der DDR (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993).

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Introduction

9

aesthetically radical GDR phenomenon. The beginnings of such a reception can be seen in the prominence given to the banning of Rumba auf einen Herbst in a recent study of censorship in the first two decades of the GDR. Simone Barck not only identifies the case as 'ein besonders spektakuHirer Fall in der an Problemfallen reichen D[ruck]G[enehmigungs]-Geschichte der DDR',17 she concludes with a handful of examples illustrating briefly how Morgner's later texts reflect upon the constraints placed on literary production in the GDR. Barck's emphasis is still the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, there are few substantial studies of Morgner, and even more rarely has her oeuvre as a whole been the object of attention. Studies have often extemporised upon an undifferentiated and frequently decontextualised 'subversive utopianism' in Morgner's work. The ebb and flow of tensions and compromises which accompany a writing career under conditions of dictatorship and to which Morgner's literary texts bear complex testimony have hitherto been insufficiently appreciated. Individual studies have generally foregrounded the two Salman novels, and in particular Beatriz. Anneliese Strawstrom, for example, focuses exclusively on the 'Menschwerdungsthematik' of Beatriz, giving a descriptive account, mainly in a series of character studies, of the novel's argument for an emancipation from cultural-historical, patriarchal constructions of both male and female identity.18 Petra Reuffer also concentrates on this novel, undertaking a detailed reading of its use of myth, legend and the fantastic as one half of an analysis inspired by Adorno's 'Dialektik der AufkHirung' .19 Synnove Clason,

meanwhile, develops her own earlier work on Morgner's use of the literary heritage in an extended but occasionally eccentric analysis of Morgner's Goethe reception in Beatriz, which Clason reads as a feminist

17'Ein verschwundenes Roman-Manuskript von Irmtraud Morgner', in Simone Barck, Martina Langermann, Siegfried Lokatis, "Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer": Zensur-System und literarische DjJentlichkeiten in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997), pp.274-85 (p.274). 18Anneliese Strawstrom, Studien zur Menschwerdungsthematik in Irmtraud Morgners 'Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura: Roman in dreizehn Buchern und sieben Intermezzos' (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987). 19Petra Reuffer, Die unwahrscheinlichen Gewander der anderen Wahrheit: Zur Wiederentdeckung des Wunderbaren bei G. Grass und 1. Morgner (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1988).

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Strategies Under Surveillance

'Faustroman'.zo Although Clason ends with a summary of Goethe reception in the GDR, common to these three studies is a text-immanent methodology which tends to divorce the work from its immediate cultural-political environment. Morgner has been understood in criticism as first and foremost a feminist author. This approach has frequently placed her alongside other GDR women writers - see, for example, the work of Christel Hildebrandt/ 1 Sonja Hilzinger,22 and Dorothee SchmitziSchmitzKoster. 23 Such studies emphasise the sociological perspective: the living and working conditions of women in the GDR and how such concerns are reflected and treated in the literary works of female writers. This is also more broadly the approach taken by Kristine von Soden's anthologising 'Zeitmontage'.z4 Beth V. Linklater's is a more recent account which specifically emphasises the erotic in Morgner's work as a challenge to patriarchal constructs of the female. 25 It is a usefully differentiated study. Firstly, Linklater is sceptical of those approaches which see in Morgner's work something exemplary of an exclusively 'female aesthetic' (p.SS); secondly, she integrates the often overlooked antecedents to the Salman novels; and thirdly, she situates Morgner's work firmly in the context of a GDR cultural-political stigmatisation of the erotic. However, in tending towards a 'heroic' reading of the erotic as a constantly liberating provocation, Linklater underemphasises the frequently melancholic aspects of Morgner's treatment, which are born of an awareness of the gulf between reality and literary wish-fulfilment; 20Synnove Clason, Der Faustroman 'Trobadora Beatriz ': Zur Goethe-Rezeption Irmtraud Morgners (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994). 21Christel Hildebrandt, Zw6!f schreibende Frauen in der DDR: Zu den Schreibbedingungen von Schriflstellerinnen in der DDR in den 70er Jahren (Hamburg: Frauenbuchvertrieb, 1984). 22Sonja Hilzinger, HAls ganzer Mensch zu leben. .. ": Emanzipatorische Tendenzen in der neueren Frauenliteratur der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985). 230orothee Schmitz, Weibliche Selbstentwurfe und mdnnliche Bilder: Zur Darstellung der Frau in DDR-Romanen der siebziger Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983); Oorothee Schmitz-Koster, Trobadora und Kassandra und .. : Weibliches Schreiben in der DDR (Koln: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1989). von Soden (ed.), Irmtraud Morgners hexische Weltfahrt: Eine Zeitmontage (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1991).

24Kristine

25Beth V. Linklater, "Und immer zugelloser wird die Lust": Constructions ofSexuality in East German Literatures (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998). Subsequent references are given in brackets.

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II

my reading of Hochzeit in Konstantinopel will, for example, differ considerably from Linklater's (pp.120-21). Moreover, since her study focuses on the continuity of erotic motifs in Morgner, Linklater does not trace the development of other themes from the sixties work of Rumba auf einen Herbst to the late-seventies work of Amanda and beyond. Alison Lewis's account is hitherto the most important feminist reading of Morgner. 26 Focusing on the two Salman novels, Lewis identifies Morgner's as a 'subversive literature of fantasy' (p.l) which, more than exercising a critique of GDR state oppression, intends 'to expose the all-pervasive nature of patriarchy' (p.7). Lewis seeks to 'situate Morgner's contribution to the formulation of a feminist aesthetic and her fictional treatment of fictional themes in the broader context of Anglo-American, French and German feminist writing' (p.1I). That Lewis is less concerned with the specifics of Morgner's GDR context is revealed when she suggests at the outset, for example, that Morgner was writing 'in the last two decades of the reign of the ruling socialists' (p.l) and concludes by stating that it was Honecker who first encouraged writers to 'storm the heights of the German literary tradition' (p.302). Similarly, her assertion that Morgner's 'form of fantasy never met with official approval' (p.5) should be qualified by the knowledge that Morgner was awarded the National Prize for Literature and accepted a seat on the Prasidium of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR at politically highly sensitive moments. Lewis relegates Morgner's pre-Beatriz work to a passing significance and foregrounds the two Salman novels. However, her concern to illustrate the continuity of Morgner's feminist purport by concentrating on isolated episodes in these novels means that she draws few distinctions between what are in fact two quite different works, which reflect distinct stages in the author's career: the relative optimism of Beatriz, though to a degree self-ironising, nonetheless contrasts sharply with the post-Biermann disillusion of Amanda. Three studies have traced Morgner's career from its socialist realist beginnings in the 1950s. Eva Kaufmann's short thematic and structural analysis is exemplary in placing Morgner's development in the context of GDR cultural politics and identifying the non-publication of Rumba auf einen Herbst as a caesura in the writer's understanding of her art. 27 Gabriele Scherer's account is the most comprehensive single monograph 26Alison Lewis, Subverting Patriarchy: Feminism and Fantasy in the Works oflrmtraud Morgner (Oxford: Berg, 1995). Subsequent references are given in brackets. 27Eva Kaufmann, 'Der Holle die Zunge rausstrecken ... : Der Weg der ErzahIerin Irmtraud Morgner' (1990), in Gerhardt, pp.172-95.

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to date. 28 She uncovers many of the sources of Morgner's literary allusions and citations and relates these individual instances to an overarching conception of Morgner's intertextual aesthetic. Scherer understands this to exemplify Derridean theories of deconstruction, seen to be particularly suited to a 'female' aesthetic and 'feministisches Denken' (p.179), wherein Morgner's critique of society 'sich mehr gegen patriarchalische Strukturen im allgemeinen wendet und weniger gegen das politische System im besonderen' (p.178). Although Scherer briefly delineates Marxist theories of literary reception so as to contextualise the unorthodox nature of Morgner's use of tradition, the specifics of Morgner's engagement with GDR literary politics are not prominent in her study. Stephanie Hanel's is the most recent monograph on Morgner. The writer's situation in the GDR is the notable point of departure in a study which intends to grasp 'Widerspriichliches als Folge einer "doppelbodigen" Existenz,29 and in which Morgner is usefully identified as a 'Sonderfall' (p.3): 'keine Widerstandskampferin' (Vorwort), but 'eine Dichterin, die auf hochst eigenwillige Weise politische und gesellschaftliche Prozesse in Literatur umsetzte' (p.3). However, because she - mistakenly - perceives them to lie in a purely private sphere 'auBerhalb des direkten politischen Konflikts' (p.20), Hanel gives only cursory treatment to the late-sixties texts - a designation which will be used throughout the present study to mean Hochzeit in Konstantinopel, Gauklerlegende and Die wundersamen Reisen Gustavs des Weltfahrers, referring to the period of genesis of texts which were subject to delays because of either the publisher or the censor. Moreover, Hanel concludes by isolating Morgner's treatment of disparate political events: Vietnam, France and Prague in 1968, and the women's movement. Thus, rather than examining how Morgner's texts walked the political tightrope within the GDR context, Hanel merely shows that Morgner addressed contemporary political issues beyond its borders. Although these last three studies are exceptional in looking at Morgner's literary development from the late 1950s onwards - though none considers her earlier journalism - all were written before the publication from the NachlafJ of Rumba auf einen Herbst and are 28Gabriele Scherer, Zwischen "Bitterfeld" und "Orplid": Zum literarischen Werk Irmtraud Morgners (Berne: Peter Lang, 1992). 29Stephanie Hanel, Literarischer Widerstand zwischen Phantastischem und Alltaglichem: Das Romanwerk Irmtraud Morgners (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995), p.4. Subsequent references are given in brackets.

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therefore necessarily limited narratives. Although the novel has in the meantime been the subject of some critical attention,30 the present study is the first to place it within the broader context of Morgner's career as a GDR writer, which can now be reconstructed from her work for neue deutsche literatur in 1957-58 through to Das heroische Testament, still incomplete upon the author's death in 1990.

The Literaturstreit of 1990 often served to crystallise ex negativo the ethical problems of GDR literature, both in terms of those who had written it then and those of us reading it today. GDR writers who had not protested at the SED's totalitarian regime through emigration to the West were accused of having been 'Staatsdichter' who had written in effect a quietist literature of consolation. 3l It was argued that, rather than having undermined through subtle criticisms the hegemonic discourse of the Party and thus prepared the ground for the peaceful revolution of 1989, writers had in fact helped to prop up the state: 'Die flihrenden DDRSchriftsteller haben ihren Lesem das "Dulden" und "Ausharren" allzeit nahegelegt und die Macht einer Hingst deformierten Partei bis zum letzten Augenblick literarisch gefestigt' .32 They had been 'corrupted' by the state's according them 'privileges' not granted to the ordinary people. 33 The revelations from the Gauck-Behorde in the early 1990s which brought to light various degrees of co-operation with the Stasi by even the most supposedly anarchic (Anderson or Rainer Schedlinski) or the formerly most celebrated of state-critical GDR writers (Gunter de Bruyn, MOller or Wolf) helped to diminish further in some eyes the aura of an oppositional or morally upright GDR literature. Joachim Walther's comprehensive study of the state's covert activities in the GDR literary field has added substantial detail to this debate in terms of raw, documentary evidence. 34 Walther reveals, firstly, 30 See, for example, Agnes Cardinal, 'Irmtraud Morgner's Rumba auf einen Herbst', German Monitor, 40 (1997),141-53. 31Christa Wolf was first described as the 'DDR-Staatsdichterin' by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 1987. The designation was echoed by Ulrich Greiner in June 1990. Cf. Thomas Anz (ed.), Es geht nicht urn Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), pp.35 and 66. 32Chaim Noll in May 1990, in ibid., p.62. 33Cf. Reich-Ranicki in November 1989, in ibid., p.47. 34Joachim Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriflsteller und Staatssicherheit in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1996).

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the grotesque lengths taken by the state in its attempts to control and quell any potentially oppositional activity and, secondly, the degree to which writers were coerced or co-opted into supporting these operations. However, he does not set out to address the writers' literary response to these conditions. The present study, in contrast, aims to show the influence on Morgner's literature of precisely such state surveillance and control. The term 'surveillance' is understood in this study to be an 'overseeing' carried out by a governing authority; it is not restricted to spying by the secret police, but incorporates the broader mechanisms of control used in a dictatorship, and thus includes the activities of the censor. The notion of 'control', in tum, is used with its dual associations of 'to direct' and 'to check' or 'police'. We shall chart the political context in which Morgner was writing, both in terms of the expectations of the socialist writer as overtly proclaimed by politicians, and the covert mechanisms by which these expectations were enforced by the apparatus of control, as revealed from the archives of the Hauptverwaltung fUr Verlage und Buchhandel im Ministerium fUr Kultur (MfK), the BOro Kurt Hager im Zentralkomitee der SED, the Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit (MfS), and the Schriftstellerverband der DDR. This material exposes what had until recently been a hidden history and allows us to see how the SED's Autorenpolitik operated in Morgner's specific case. Morgner's career makes for a useful case study, since her literary output spanned more than three decades of GDR cultural policy with its shifts and revisions. It is clear that any art operating within a dictatorship which seeks a monopoly on truth cannot be wholly autonomous. Its freedom of any kind of speech arises from a negotiation with the authorities. What it is able - that is, permitted - to articulate is necessarily compromised. But in the peculiar situation of the divided Germany, the monopoly of power was not a constant either. The discourses of the controlled writer and the controlling authority were not implacably opposed, but instead subtly interrelated. We shall see this particular aspect of GDR literary reality illustrated in Morgner's interactions with the publisher, the censor and the MfS over Gustav der Weltfahrer - a work which, despite its unorthodoxy, the apparatus of control was determined to see published in the GDR. It is simplistic to reduce such complex relationships of coercion, compromise and counter-intelligence to retrospective absolutes, wherein, for example, according to Ulrich Greiner, a GDR writer's emigration to the West was the only possible ethical reaction to such conditions - and apparently also the definitive aesthetic criterion: 'Denn die besten Schriftsteller der DDR [... ] sind gezwungenermaBen

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oder freiwillig in den Westen gegangen'. 35 It could be argued that it was the writers in exile, with their renewable exit visas, who were in fact 'privileged'. After all, certain writers who remained in the GDR were often electing to remain subject to the malign attentions of the Stasi in their attempt to place in question the encrusted world view of the SED. Nonetheless, there is no denying the scale of collusion with the MfS amongst the literary intelligentsia of the GDR. Joachim Walther has identified 126 InoJfizielle Mitarbeiter (1M), amongst them sixty-six writers, and a further 350 1M identifiable only by their code names, who were active specifically in the literary field in the 1970s and 80S. 36 There is no evidence, however, that Morgner was directly involved in any way at any time with the MfS. This blunt fact is in itself noteworthy and speaks ofa certain integrity. Morgner's compromises with the authorities did not extend as far as collaboration. Equally, there is no evidence that Morgner was the specific object of operational control by the MfS. Her concern was to negotiate a position which would safeguard the possibility of literary expression. Morgner's strategies fall into two interrelated categories. First and foremost, the literary strategies: the search for a legitimate form of expression which would nonetheless still be commensurate with the need to reflect upon - and reflect, in the sense of mirror - a complex political reality. If the 'socialist modernism' of Rumba auf einen Herbst can be understood as an audacious gamble which failed, Morgner thereafter had to develop different, perhaps more subtle strategies. We shall see how the sophisticated structural logic particularly of the postRumba texts was also influenced by publication problems. This relativises the view that Morgner's aesthetic was one of simple montage, and also illustrates the physical legacy of censorship in the textual body. Close readings will highlight some of the less familiar aspects of Morgner's texts. Rather than concentrating on myth or feminist revisions, which have been the object of substantial critical attention hitherto, this study focuses on Morgner's associative textual strategies. Primarily, it was an aesthetic born of Morgner's desire for a prose which would be 'dicht', by which she meant densely allusive, but it was also a reaction to the programmatic ideology of socialist realism in general and to the problems encountered by the too-overt social commentary of Rumba in particular. This approach enables the late-sixties texts to be 35Ulrich Greiner in July 1990, cited from Anz, p.182. 36Walther, p.559.

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reassimilated as important works in Morgner's career in their own right, rather than mere preparatory work for the later novels. Where traditional expectations of political writing prefer a more outspoken dissidence, the late-sixties texts are important in showing that aestheticism may be a valid, contrary, literary answer to dictatorship. Lastly, we shall focus on those instances where the texts comment on literary politics, on the instrumentalisation and the shackling of culture in the GDR. Three literary-critical chapters chart the development of Morgner's literature from the relative orthodoxy of the 1950s, through the 'socialist modernism' of Rumba auf einen Herbst, to the late-sixties avant-garde experimentalism, the grand self-confidence of Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz, and the ultimate disillusion and cultural pessimism of Amanda. Chapter One traces Morgner's literary beginnings: her first three novels, Das Signal steht auf Fahrt (1959), Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt (1962) and Rumba auf einen Herbst (completed 1965, published 1992), her hitherto ignored journalistic work, and a propagandist text, likewise absent from bibliographies of her writings, which was published after the building of the Berlin Wall. In Chapter Three Morgner's underrated and generally overlooked late-sixties work is read as her aesthetically radical response to the non-publication of Rumba. We shall see how Morgner developed the 'short text' as her preferred mode of expression, how she adopted a more allusively satirical and ironic technique, and also how these texts are themselves directly influenced by, and bear testimony to, delays in publication and difficulties with the censor. Finally, Beatriz is reread to emphasise some of the less familiar aspects of the text: its self-reflexive thematisation of cultural-political controls and of the GDR as a Literaturgesellschaft. Chapter Five reads Amanda as Morgner's anatomy of a dictatorship. The novel is understood as Morgner's problematised and differentiated response to the expatriation of Wolf Biermann and the repressions which followed, her own defence of the anti-Biermann measures, and her discovery that her husband Paul Wiens was collaborating with the Stasi. After Rumba, these events of 1976-77 are viewed as the second traumatic caesura in Morgner's career, when the scale of the corruption of the socialist ideal in the GDR became impossible for the writer to ignore. The novel is a reckoning with the failed socialist project, the end of an era, and a review of a life: the narrator, Beatriz, calls it 'mein Lebenswerk'. We shall also consid~r Morgner's extra-literary strategies: her response to cultural-political developments, particularly within the Schriftstellerverband during PYiisidiumssitzungen or Parteiverfahren. The extra-literary utterances of the writer were overheard by the

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authorities with at least as much attentiveness as the literary word was overseen, simply because, where the written word can take refuge in subtleties or ambiguities tolerable to both parties, the spoken word may be more direct and is thus potentially more dangerous. Morgner's absolute defence of the GDR to West German interviewers is so at odds with the often savage ironies of her literary texts that it should be treated with some scepticism. She was clearly addressing the authorities in East Berlin as much as her West German readership; a good, but by no means isolated, example is Morgner's interview with Ekkehart Rudolph, which is best read as a dramatisation of free speech and its lack. 37 We shall see in Chapter Four how the MfS monitored Morgner's profile in West Germany and we shall note, for example, the apparent distress felt by Morgner at having been misrepresented in the West German media: she had been named in the same breath as more overt critics of the SED regime such as de Bruyn and Wolf. This balancing act, the performance of the expected role of a staatstreuer Schriftsteller for the benefit of the overseeing authorities, was part of the necessary process of negotiation. Morgner appears to have deemed that the protection of a literary sphere of operation, to which she gave primacy over more quotidian political engagement, would be best achieved by adopting a flexible extra-literary persona. It is no coincidence that her texts are increasingly populated by divided subjects, schizophrenics. This reading of Morgner as a GDR writer highlights the merits of a metaphorical art which may resonate beyond the borders of its immediate political context. But we should be wary of reducing the argument to the simple truism that censorship can make for' good art', in terms of a virtue born of necessity. This tends to ignore the sometimes dubious ethical compromises a writer may have had to make along the way to facilitate the publication of such work in what the author perceives to be its proper home environment. Moreover, it rides roughshod over the psychological consequences of a lifetime's practice of self-censorship and doublespeak. This study contends that the complexities and challenges of Morgner's writing cannot be understood without appreciating the formative influence exerted by the constraints on all expression in the GDR. Morgner responded to these pressures with courageous and sophisticated counter-narratives.

37Cf. Ekkehart Rudolph, Aussage zur Person: Zw6lj deutsche Schriftsteller im Gespriich mit Ekkehart Rudolph (TiibingenlBasel: Erdmann Verlag, 1977), pp.157-77.

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1 Engagement: From Socialist Realism to Socialist Modernism

In 1984 Morgner spoke of the sense of good fortune many of her generation felt to have grown up in the new socialist state. The workingclass tradition from which she came had always equated knowledge with power but, she says, had previously been denied access to this knowledge. This changed with the post-war cultural and political reorientation: 'Dieses Aneignen von bisher Vorenthaltenem gehorte zu meinen gltickhaften Grunderlebnissen nach '45. [... ] Was fur ein Glucksgefuhl, plotzlich diese riesigen Schatze in sich hineinschaufeln zu durfen,.1 The term 'Aneignen' was a key concept in the cultural-political vernacular of the GDR, but was by no means as undifferentiated as Morgner in retrospect implies. In fact, the cultural heritage officially prescribed for 'appropriation' in the immediate post-war years was ideologically determined, with an approved canon and a classical centre. Other areas of the cultural tradition were stigmatised and marginalised. This established a model of literary orthodoxy, and by extension political orthodoxy, which was challenged and modified only over the course of the ensuing decades. This chapter traces Morgner's literary development up to and including Rumba auf einen Herbst, focusing in particular on her emancipation from the aesthetic norms of the day. However, we begin by charting briefly the politicisation of the literary heritage, for it was within this discourse that Morgner's literary consciousness developed. 2 \'Der weibliche Ketzer heif3t Hexe: Gesprach mit Eva Kaufmann', in Gerhardt, pp.42-69 (p.57). 2Useful studies of the GDR Erbedebatte include Wolfram Schlenker, Das 'Kulturelle Erbe' in der DDR: Gesellschaftliche Entwicklung und Kulturpolitik 1945-1965 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) and Deborah Vietor-Englander, Faust in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). For GDR analyses, see Bernd Leistner, Unruhe urn einen Klassiker: Zurn Goethe-Bezug in der neueren DDR-Literatur (Halle/Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1978) and Hans Kaufmann, Versuch uber das Erbe (Leipzig: Reclam, 1980).

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The cultural politicians of the KPD/SED placed Weimar Classicism at the centre of the cultural heritage to which they were laying claim. If the need was initially to massage the distraught national psyche and effect an anti-fascist re-education, there was more at work than merely a pathos-laden belief in the curative, moral power of literature. The nascent socialist state was, for want of any democratic mandate, pragmatically in need of ideological legitimacy for its existence. It sought to present itself as the belated, but rightful, heir to the thwarted ideals of the progressive German humanist tradition. An exercise in monumental history indebted to Stalinist principles of the personality cult saw Goethe installed above all others as the exemplary protosocialist personality; the requirements of propaganda took precedence over any contradictions arising from such non-dialectical 'appropriation'. The 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth in 1949 presented the perfect opportunity for raising consciousness. The highpoint of the Goethe-Jahr, the Festakt in Weimar in August 1949, has been described as 'symbolisch der Auftakt fur die Bildung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik'/ which followed on 7 October 1949. The SED's Goethe-Jahr manifesto pronounced vaingloriously: 'Die groBen Ideale, die Goethe in seinem Leben und Werk verkiindete, werden durch die sozialistische Arbeiterbewegung in die Tat umgesetzt,.4 It was the first formulation of the so-called Vollstreckertheorie, which was based on a wholly decontextualised interpretation of Faust's dying words: 'Solch ein Gewimmel mocht' ich sehn I Auffreiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn'. These lines were to be prominently engraved on a building at Strausbergplatz marking the entrance to what was then East Berlin's architectural showpiece, Stalinallee, completed in 1953. They lent a certain irony to the scene of the uprising in the June of that year of a dissatisfied Volk which felt somewhat less than /rei. Although the building is now topped with a neon Coca-Cola sign, the engraving survives and bears continuing testimony to the ideological significance of Goethe's verses in the GDR's founding self-mythology. The Vollstreckertheorie was given its most triumphalist - and most absurd expression by Walter Ulbricht in 1962, the year after the 'second founding' of the GDR with the construction of the 'anti-fascist protection barrier', as the Berlin Wall was called. Apparently, it was not 3Karl-Heinz Schulmeister, cited from Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1989), II, 162. 4'Manifest: Zur Goethe-Feier der Nation (28.8.1949)', in Dokumente der SED (Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1949), p.31l.

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so much death that had prevented Goethe from writing Faust III, as an inauspicious political climate. It was the destiny of the workers and peasants of the GDR to complete the monumental work: Goethe hat ihn nicht schreiben konnen, wei I die Zeit dafur nicht reif war [... ] Erst we it tiber hundert Jahre, nachdem Goethe die Feder fur immer aus der Hand legen muBte, haben die Arbeiter und Bauem, [... ] haben aIle Werktiitigen der DDR begonnen, diesen dritten Teil des Faust mit ihrer Arbeit, mit ihrem Kampf fur Frieden und Sozialismus zu schreiben. s

But the prescription of the humanist tradition, the exemplary Goethe, and above all his Faust drama and Faust figure, was not merely intended as a polemical, ideological Abgrenzung from the West before this was cemented with bricks and mortar. It was to be a medicine for internal consumption with both curative and preventative powers. Swingeing restrictions were placed on variations on the Faust theme, as Hanns Eisler was to discover when publication of his Johann Faustus libretto was stopped and the opera itself never performed. Goethe's Faust was placed in 1953 under the stultifying cultural-political Denkmalschutz of the SED: Die GroBe von Goethes Dichtung und ihr unverrtickbarer Platz in der Literatur unserer Nation machen, ohne daB man von Goethes Faust ausgeht, das Schaffen einer deutschen Nationaloper mit dem Titel "Johann Faustus" unmogJich. [... ] Niemals [... ] kann das Zurlickgehen auf frlihe, primitivere Formen [... ] eine Hoherentwicklung gegentiber Goethes Leistung ermoglichen. 6

By the early 1950s, a Goethe reception that had begun with a general emphasis on anti-fascist reorientation was assuming ever more the contours of a binding cultural-political programme, to question which was to challenge the authority and 'leading role' of the SED itself. History was to be viewed positively: the GDR was, after all, Sieger der Geschichte. Protagonists were to be 'heroes', positive role models, and the non plus ultra was Faust, whose tireless labour and the salvation it won him at the death became examples for emulation by workers and peasants striving to meet ever higher work norms and the demands of five-year plans. The lines from Faust II OWer immer strebend sich bemiiht / Den konnen wir erlosen' became staple features of politicians' sWalter Ulbricht, 'An aIle BUrger der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik! An die ganze deutsche Nation!', cited from Vietor-Englander, pp.59-61 (p.60). 6'Faust - Held oder Renegat in der deutschen Nationalliteratur?', in Alexander Abusch, Kulturelle Probleme des sozialistischen Humanismus: Beitrage zur deutschen Kulturpolitik J946- J967 (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1967), pp.145-61 (p.161).

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heritage speeches. 7 Furthermore, the determination to protect this legacy from the pernicious influence of 'American imperialism' led to the repeated invocation of the formalism campaign of 1951 which had raised formal orthodoxy to a matter of national survival: 'Der Formalismus [ ... ] fordert den Kosmopolitanismus und bedeutet dam it eine direkt UnterstOtzung der Kriegspolitik des amerikanischen Imperialismus,.8 The largely interchangeable terms 'modernism', 'cosmopolitanism', 'pessimism' and 'decadence' - all manifestations of 'formalism' subsequently carried the associations from that first programmatic articulation. The stigmatisation of such non-realist modes of expression was to last into the 1970s. It justified excluding the likes of Kafka, Joyce or Proust from official literary discourse and was the corollary of the binding socialist realist aesthetic. Although Georg Lukacs provided the cultural politicians with a systematising approach to the literary heritage, dividing it into progressive and reactionary, humanist and fascist, good and bad, it would be wrong to posit a concordance ofviews.9 Out of Lukacs's more differentiated analyses, the politicians produced programmes that were often crass, tailored to the needs of the day. Lukacs was no disciple of the Vollstreckertheorie, nor was he a devotee of the Goethe personality cult, as his Goethe-Jahr address of 31 August 1949 made clear: 'Dieser Goethe [war nicht] in irgendwelchem Sinne Sozialist, auch nicht Vorlaufer, nicht einmal Vorahner des Sozialismus'.IO The SED's transhistoricising, uncritical 'appropriation' of the heritage, rather than Lukacs's comparatively differentiated reception, compromised the orthodox Marxism-Leninism to which the Party all too frequently paid only lip service. The term 'kritische Aneignung' soon lost the implications that Lenin, cited as the authority on the issue, had intended: 'Lenin sprach [ ... ] mit dem "Aneignen" zugleich vom "Verarbeiten", an einer anderen Stelle vom "Umarbeiten", namlich des Wertvollsten der 7Cf. 'Faust - Held oder Renegat. . .', p.147. 8'Der Kampf gegen den Formalismus in Kunst und Literatur, fUr eine fortschrittliche deutsche Kultur', in Dokumente zur Kunst-. Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972-84) I: 1946-70, ed. by Elimar Schubbe (1972), pp.178-86 (pp. I 79-80). 9For a comprehensive study of the reception of Lukacs in the GDR, see Caroline Galh5e, Georg Lukacs: Seine Stellung und Bedeutung im literarischen Leben der SBZlDDR 19451985 (TUbingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1996). IOLukacs, 'Unser Goethe', in Goethe und seine Zeit (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1950). pp.15-40 (p.37).

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Kultur der Vergangenheit. Das heiBt: es kritisch verarbeiten und weiterentwickeln,.l1 In the ideological exchanges of fire of the early Cold War period, the need to find historical legitimacy, and moreover to provide a feel-good factor of moral superiority as the West German state soon gained the economic upper hand, meant that deformations in the propagandist cause were inevitable. With anti-fascism elevated to the level of an identity-defining state doctrine, the West German state could then be typified as the heir to the fascist tradition, unworthy of 'nurturing' the 'treasures' of, always, 'our heritage'. In 1956 Lukacs involved himself, albeit temporarily, in the Nagy government in Budapest. This supposedly counter-revolutionary political action led the SED orthodoxy to round on him for what had now apparently always been dubious theoretical positions and to expel him from the Marxist pantheon. The Hungarian developments were a shock to the SED and gave evidence of the sympathy amongst intellectuals for alternative interpretations of the socialist project - for example, the Donnerstagskreis, under the umbrella of Aufbau-Verlag, was seen as a GDR version ofthe Hungarian Petafi Circle. In response, the SED took a more offensive approach to internal criticism. However, there was no retreat from the monopoly position of Lukacsian realism ostensibly in the spirit of Weimar humanism. The chimera of liberalisation that followed the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev's revelations of the latter's crimes in his speech to the 20 th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 has been called 'ein Tauwetter, das keine war' .12 Thaw or not, a new crackdown was abruptly signalled in East Berlin in December 1956 with the arrest and subsequent conviction of the leading 'counter-revolutionaries' at Aufbau-Verlag: Walter Janka, Gustav Just, Wolfgang Harich and Heinz Zager. The constructive campaign which followed these repressions sought to place greater emphasis on the development of the 'socialist national literature' in a renewed propaganda campaign intended to rob opponents of fertile ground. The Bitterfeld Conference of April 1959 concluded with two programmes. In order to address the obviously insufficiently convincing representation by the literati of the heroic socialist Aujbau, the worker himself was exhorted to take up the pen: 'Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!' Meanwhile, in the primitive hope of overcoming the perceived IIAlexander Abusch in the 1949 essay 'Goethes Erbe in unserer Zeit', in Kulturelle Probleme des sozialistischen Humanismus, pp.121-39 (p.122). 12Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf Erinnerungen, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), II, 117.

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gulf between the intellectual and the worker in the classless society, the former was encouraged to participate in a consciousness-raising registration for voluntary hard labour on the factory floor. As Ulbricht's address made clear, this was to be effected in the spirit of Goethe and Schiller, who had been involved in the actualities of their day, and was intended to achieve '[eine] innere Einheit der Tradition der klassischen deutschen Literatur mit den neuen Problemen der sozialistischen Revolution in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik' .13 The SED's cultural gurus had followed the Soviet example and established a yardstick against which to measure the permissibility of the literary product and an array of terminology with which to castigate the deviants. Morgner's earliest works are best understood in the context of these restrictive expectations of literature and the writer. Morgner's Early Texts After completing her degree in Germanistik in Leipzig in 1956, Morgner moved to Berlin, where she worked initially for the Allgemeine Deutsche Nachrichtendienst for two months from 1 September to 31 October. By the end of the year she had a position as an editor for neue deutsche literatur. 14 Morgner's earliest texts were written for this journal. Her output consisted of twelve articles in three areas: firstly, reviews of new publications, secondly, observations on cultural phenomena both at home and in West Germany, and, finally, one report on a cultural conference in East Berlin. Although they scarcely comprise a substantial body of essayistic work, these articles show the clarity of the young author's aesthetic and political attitudes at this embryonic stage in her literary career. Morgner's three contributions to the miscellaneous news section of the journal are characterised by a coolly ironic tone. One summarises an article in the West German magazine Die Gegenwart which had focused on the economics of publishing in the Federal Republic. 15 Although IJWalter Ulbricht, 'Fragen der Entwicklung der sozialistischen Literatur und Kultur', in Schubbe (ed.), pp.553-62 (p.560). 14Cf. Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Kiinste Berlin-Brandenburg (SAdK), Archiv des Schriftstellerverbandes der DDR (SV), Personalakte Irmtraud Morgner. lSIrmtraud Schreck, 'Nicht zuriickgeblieben', NDL, 2 (1957), 168-69. From 1954 to 1970 Morgner was married to Joachim Schreck. For the sake of clarity, I shall refer to the author as 'Irmtraud Morgner' in the main body of the text.

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living costs were seventy-two percent higher in 1955 compared to the pre-war period, the cost of books had risen by eighty percent. Morgner's conclusion is curt and triumphalist, as she mocks the apparent backwardness and the commercialisation of culture in the Wirtschaftswunder: '''Die Bucher sind also zumindest nicht hinter der allgemeinen Preisentwicklung zuruckgeblieben." Und das ist ja wohl ungemein trostlich, auch wenn sie in anderer Hinsicht zuruckgeblieben sein mogen.' In a similar vein, the article 'Geistige Gilter' laments the results of a recent survey carried out in West Germany according to which a mere ten percent of those asked said they had bought a book in the last month, compared to thirty-four percent who claimed 'dergleichen sei ihnen noch nie passiert' .16 A further forty-seven percent said they did not possess a single book. In 1956 Johannes R. Becher had coined the term 'Literaturgesellschaft' to describe the GDR, to mean literature as 'gesellschaftliche[ sJ Zusammenleben', involving publishers, editors, booksellers and above all readers, 'die nicht als ein Konsument, als ein Partner dem Schriftsteller entgegenstehen, sondern dem Schriftsteller immanent sind [ ... J als sein besserer Teil, als sein Gewissen'.17 The contrast between this notion of the Literaturgesellschaft DDR and the image of the Federal Republic suggested by Morgner's statistics does not need to be made explicit; Morgner merely comments: 'Peinlich'. The satirical edge is instead provided by juxtaposing the results of this 'Volksumfrage' with the West German government's recent decision 'ohne die Bevolkerung zu befragen' - to introduce military service: 'Zur Verteidigung der geistigen Guter des Abendlandes', as Morgner archly puts it. The fact that Morgner makes an issue of democratic principles is clearly not uncomplicated, even if it is only to imply that the West will sacrifice them when military concerns are at stake. But although the level of political analysis may not be the most sophisticated, the rhetoric is neatly barbed. Morgner's sarcasm also sought out targets closer to home than the cultural philistinism of the Federal Republic. An essay for cultural philatelists in the GDR publication SammlerexprefJ which had offered 'einen "Blick in die deutsche (und franzosische) Literatur von den vorhandenen Postwertzeichen ausgehend'" is given withering treatment. 18 Morgner begins by ridiculing the commentary relating to the 16Irmtraud Schreck, 'Geistige Gilter', NDL, 7 (1957),167. 17Johannes R. Becher, 'Von der GroBe un serer Literatur', in Werke, III, 432-68 (p.455). 18Irmtraud Schreck, 'Bemarkenswerter Blick', NDL, 6 (1957), 166-67.

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German stamps. In the contest for the heavyweight title of poet laureate, for example, ' [werden] Wieland und Herder in der VorschluBrunde ausgezahlt, die "gegentiber Goethe und Schiller im allgemeinen zurtickstehen", . Goethe, for whom apparently 'die "Verehrung... nicht groB genug sein kann''', is crowned the victor in the subsequent deciding bout. The guide to more recent German literature is seen by Morgner to be just as facile - for example: 'Bei dem Verfasser der Weber ertibrigt sich ein besonderer Hinweis. Denn: "Nicht nur die Briefmarke von Gerhart Hauptmann dtirfte bekannt sein, sondem auch seine Werke.'" Finally, Morgner's precocious elitism is brought to bear on the inadequacies of the "'Streifzug durch die franzosische Literatur"'. Noting in passing the essay's unearthing of a '''Dichter des Mittelalters'" by the name of Michel Montaigne, Morgner continues: 'Eine Sensation fur die Balzac-Forschung [verspricht] die Entdeckung des bisher unverOffentlichten Romans "Menschliche Komodie" [zu werden], der neben "Vater Goriot" einige Geltung hat.' Morgner's sarcasm is directed at the ill-informed, petit bourgeois understanding of literature. The idiosyncratic choice of material together with the sureness of the ironic tone, particularly evident when contrasted with the dryness of the surrounding articles, indicate a young writer keen to stamp her identity on the meagre column space allotted to her. In contrast, the article 'Ein ungarischer Beitrag zur Kulturkonferenz' focuses on a less peripheral issue: the cultural-political ramifications of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, following a conference held in the Akademie der Ktinste under the aegis of the SED.19 The article is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it reveals Morgner's involvement, albeit from the fringes, in the most important cultural-political debate of the time: the conference came barely half a year after the show trials of Harich, Janka, Just and Zoger. Secondly, it performs a delicate balancing act in resisting the all too common language of the witch-hunt. Morgner writes largely in the subjunctive, simply transcribing the address given by the Hungarian Istvan Kiraly - for example, his conclusion: 'Denn der konterrevolutionare Putsch in Ungam habe gewissermaBen klassisch die tragische Konsequenz geistiger Liberalisierung und ideologischer "Abweichung" demonstriert.' The employment of hard-line terminology is thus largely deflected away from the writer/reporter to the speaker. However, there are moments when the distancing SUbjunctive is dropped and we appear to be reading 19Irmtraud Schreck, 'Ein ungarischer Beitrag zur Ku1turkonferenz', NDL, 12 (1957), 15153.

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the reporter's own opinion. Thus, the Julius Hay affair is introduced in the subjunctive, but soon moves to the indicative: Julius Hay sei, nach ersten Angriffen gegen die Bilrokratie, bereits Ende 1954 eine der fiihrenden Person1ichkeiten der politischen Agitation gegen die Partei geworden. Hay spielte a1s Publizist eine groBe RoBe. Am 4. November 1956 wurde er zum offenen Verrater, a1s er, seine Popu1aritat ausnutzend, in einer Rundfunkaussprache die Westmachte urn Unterstiltzung gegen die Sowjetunion aufrief, dieses Land, das ihm einst das Leben gerettet hatte.

The shift of mood enables the reporter to suggest a subtle distinction, according to which, in contrast to the opinion expressed by Kiraly, inciting internal debate may not be entirely reprehensible (hence the speaker's critical comments are recorded in the subjunctive), but appeals to the West are clear and incontrovertible evidence of treachery. As we shall see, it was this distinction between home affairs and outside intervention that Morgner was later to draw during the Biermann affair. Of particular interest is the speaker's presentation of the role played by Georg Lukacs and, again, Morgner's reporting of this. Kiraly offers a differentiated analysis, noting Lukacs's initial scepticism towards Nagy and his preference for the so-called 'third way' beyond the diametric antagonism of the capitalism-or-communism discourse. After some two hundred words of reported speech, Morgner shifts to the indicative for one sentence, as if to offer her own judgement: 'Lukacs hat politisch

schwer versagt, als er die jugoslawische Botschaft urn Asyl bat und die Partei in schwierigen Tagen allein lieB'. Whilst it does suggest a sense of personal disappointment, the tone is markedly detached from any orthodox vilification, with criticism of Lukacs being restricted once more to his apparent desertion. Kiraly's conclusions are then placed once more in reported speech: Lukacs is too important a theoretician for his 'political failure' to be understood as the 'senility of an old man'. His theories need to be re-examined - a task which the SED has conscientiously carried out. The author finishes by passing no comment on Alfred Kurella's assertion that Kiraly's speech has confirmed the correctness of SED policy. The majority of Morgner's contributions, though, were reviews of recent literary publications. If the report on Lukacs was characterised by cautious reserve, the common feature of these articles is their selfassured judgements. Two reviews treat West German literature. Elisabeth Meyer-Hauser's SudJranzosisches Intermezzo is given summary, though not malicious, treatment: 'Das ist Frankreich, so, wie es ein junges Mlidchen sah, das ein Jahr in diesem Land lebte. Ein

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Tagebuch' .20 Valentin Rabis's Am seidenen Faden, which was awarded the FDGB Literature Prize for 1957, narrates the return in 1951 of Helmut Hollermann from Soviet captivity to the land of the economic miracle and his principled solidarity with the striking metalworkers in Hessen.21 From this preamble, one might have expected a favourable review to follow, but Morgner silences neither thematic nor aesthetic reservations: human conflicts are treated simplistically; the vocabulary is unimaginative; dialogue and speaker are not suited to one another; landscape descriptions are mere lists of facts. For Morgner, good politics does not excuse mediocre art. The remaining six reviews examine GDR publications. A largely sympathetic reading of Irmgard Keun's exile novel Nach Mitternacht, the story of the often devastating experiences of a naive nineteen year old girl during the Third Reich, concludes nonetheless by noting the limitations of its concentration on the petit bourgeois milieu?2 Eine Ziffer iiber dem Herzen, a semi-autobiographical report relating the twelve years of SS persecution suffered by the former KPD politician Jakob Boulanger as ghostwritten by Michael Tschesno-Hell from Boulanger's notes, is welcomed with personal gratitude and pathos in equal measure: 'Ich habe den Faschismus nur als Kind erlebt. Und gerade fUr uns Jiingere scheint das Buch geschrieben: Vermachtnis und Aufruf.23 Similarly, although the girls in Anna Metze-Kirchberg's Entzauberte Kindheit all suffer tragic fates, the review praises the author's convincing evocation of her young protagonists' resilience, 'ihre schlummernden geistigen Krafte [... J, die, einmal erweckt, fahig sein werden, die Welt zu verandern,?4 These last two reviews share a political idealism also evident in the most unreservedly enthusiastic of Morgner's articles, which considers two stories by Erich Kohler, Der Pferd und sein Herr and Die Teufelsmiihle. 25 Both texts follow the quasi-autobiographical progress of protagonist and/or narrator through the war to a renunciation of fascist ideology and, in the first story at least, to the logical next step in anti2°Irmtraud Schreck, 'Sommerlektiire', NDL, 7 (1957), 157. 21Irmtraud Schreck, 'Heimkehr nach Frankfurt', NDL, 9 (1957), 149. 22Irmtraud Schreck, 'Nacht ohne Hoffnung', NDL, 4 (1957), 143-46. 23Irmtraud Schreck, 'Vermachtnis und Aufruf, NDL, 11 (1957), 141. 24Irmtraud Schreck, 'Jugend im Schatten', NDL, 12 (1957), 149-50. 25Irmtraud Schreck, 'Ein neuer Name', NDL, 5 (1958), 133-36.

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fascist development: the decision to move to the SBZIGDR (Kohler himself had come to the GDR from the West in 1950). Morgner hails the then twenty-nine year old farmworker Kohler as 'meisterhaft', 'ein echtes erzahlerisches Naturtalent', who does not merely have a story to tell: 'Er geizt mit den Satzen, beschwert sie, verdichtet, dichtet. In seiner Sprache spurt man die Leidenschaft zur Prazision des sprachlichen Ausdrucks.' It is worth noting the early importance given here by Morgner to the idea of 'Dichtung', to which we shall return later in this study. Her only criticism of Kohler is significantly reserved for the occasional lack of clarity of the political standpoint, interestingly crystallised in the use of the word 'uns': So bleiben an einigen Stellen politische Fragen im Zwielicht, weil dort eine korrigierende Erhellung fehlt. Ott [the 'positive' protagonist of Der Pferd und sein Herr] sagt zum Beispiel: "Die Winteroffensive, die uns [italics as in original] Belgien und auch das EIsaB zuriickbringen so lite, war Hingst zum Stehen gekommen." Wer ist "uns"? Der Autor diirfte die Antwort darauf nicht der Interpretation des Lesers iiberlassen - obwohl natiirlich nicht zweifelhaft ist, daB der Ott, der die Geschichte erziihlt, sich nicht mehr mit diesem "uns" identifiziert [... ] Hier wiinscht sich der Leser, daB Erich Kohler die verworrenen Ansichten des Soldaten Ott entwirrt - natiirlich nicht durch belehrende Erlauterungen, sondern durch jene knappe Methode der dialektischen Wahrheitsfindung, die Kohler so ausgezeichnet beherrscht, durch Gegenliberstellung antithetischer Satze.

When Morgner concludes her piece with the hope that Kohler will not remain for much longer a new name 'in unserer Gegenwartsliteratur', it is by then clear what 'uns' means for her. The question of authorial partiality must not be left open to even the slightest ambiguity. That the young Morgner defends the agitprop function of literature is perhaps no great surprise. More interesting is her rejection here - 'naturlich nicht durch belehrende Erlauterungen' - of the overtly didactic narrator. Morgner gives. Jurij Brezan~s Christa the most neutral reception?6 The novel tells of the young daughter of a Jewish mother and fascist father who is expelled by her father from the family home when four months old, abandoned by her helpless mother (who later dies in a concentration camp) and adopted by foresters, but who is then demanded back by her legal father fourteen years on to work as a domestic servant to him and his second, equally anti-Semitic, wife. The plot would appear to set up as grand themes the conflict of generations and the confronting of past guilt. However, according to Morgner, Brezan evades the

26Irmtraud Schreck, 'Die Geschichte einesjungen Madchens', NDL, 1 (1958), 146-47.

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essential issues and writes a mere 'Mlidchenbuch' of appeal only to young female readers. Morgner had reached no such concessive conclusion in her first piece for NDL; instead she had suggested that the book in question should never have been written.27 It is Morgner's debut article, her first comments in print altogether, and it bears the hallmark of the author's seizing a long-awaited opportunity to voice clearly formed opinions. Hans Buchmayer's Das Modell may belong to the genre 'Unterhaltungsliteratur' but, Morgner argues, this should not exempt the author from attaining certain basic literary standards. Her criticisms in this respect are directed at the publisher too; the twenty-three year old neophyte critic pulls no punches. She can find no evidence of 'das aus eigenem geistigen und ktinstlerischen Ringen geborene echte Anliegen des Schriftstellers', whilst other shortcomings with respect to aesthetics include 'Entgleisungen in den farblosen Agit-Prop-Jargon', 'mangelnde ktinstlerische Uberhohung der Alltagssprache' and, notably, 'fehlende Verdichtung' . Buchmayer's attempt to reflect contemporary aesthetic discourse is met with withering contempt in a passage worth citing at length. Morgner denounces the schematisation of literary production into little more than writing-by-numbers and distances herself from the cliches and simplifications of contemporary cultural-political discourse: Aber Schtittenhelm ist fortschrittlich - und "natiirlich" Realist. Hier sein Programm: "... die Zeit des Naturalismus ist vorbei. Wir streben eine realistische Gestaltung an. Diese muf3 selbstversUindlich substantiell verdichtet, komprimiert sein." Und wiihrend der Leser noch tiber den Sinn des letzten Satzes ratselt, wird eines klar: Realist ist Realist. Als Realist zeichnet der Held Plakate zum 1. Mai, fertigt Linolschnitte, "in deren Mittelpunkt die Friedenstaube als Symbol" steht, und "fligt" im Gesprach mit seinem Vater "Gedanken zum kunsttheoretischen Tagesgesprach 'Formalismus-Realismus'" ein. Da sich ein Realist auch mit dem Erbe beschaftigen muf3, arbeitet Schtittenhelm theoretisch tiber "Ilja Repin und der russische Realismus" [... ] Das Rezept verlangt neben dem "positiven Heiden" auch einen gesellschaftlichen Konflikt. Bitte sehr: Das "ktinstlerische Tagesgesprach tiber Formalismus und Realismus" wird in Personen aufgelost. Die Fronten sind klar: Alles, was nicht auf der Seite des Realisten Schtittenhelm steht, gehort selbstverstandlich zum Formalismus. Der negative Gegenspieler ist der Maler Kotteritzsch mit dem bezeichnenden Vomamen Fredd; er stammt aus Westberlin, spricht - wie konnte das anders sein - mit amerikanischem Akzent und flihrt Riasschlagworte wie "Kulturbolschewismus" und "Ostzone" im Munde. Unverkennbar eine Abart

27Irmtraud Schreck, 'Konfektion in Ganzleinen', NDL, 1 (1957), 141-43.

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Strategies Under Surveillance des "Agenten" in der Kunst, als Kiinstler "selbstverstiindlich" dekadent, unproduktiv, Nihilist.

Morgner concludes by citing an authority beyond reproach, Johannes R. Becher, according to whom there is an aesthetic category which exists beyond all the so-called '-isms', namely art which is quite simply "'schlecht'''. Morgner is obviously placing Buchmayer's book in this category. Her citation of Becher, however, and her own comments regarding the ostensible realism-formalism antithesis clearly indicate her own less than dogmatic approach. Significantly, this review was published in January 1957, before the effects of the cultural-political crackdown illustrated most clearly by the arrests of Walter Janka and others at Aufbau-Verlag in December 1956 had been able to filter through. This first article indicates an emancipated consciousness; those that were written thereafter suggest, in its light, a tactical circumspection. On the dust jacket of the first edition of her first book, 'LM.' states: 'Als Redaktionsassistentin einer Literaturzeitschrift bekam ich vom Manuskriptlesen Lust zum Schreiben'.zs Morgner said more about the progression from editor to author in an interview three years later. Firsthand involvement with raw literary material that was often in need of refinement had vanquished the excessive respect for the literary word 'Jedes Dichterwort ein Heiligtum' - she had learnt at university?9 Morgner also thanked the Schriftstellerverband for reshuffling the editorial board of NDL and giving her the sack - and with it the time to write her manuscript. The question we should now address is how her first venture as a creative writer compared with the exacting standards she applied to the efforts of others as a critic. The genesis of Das Signal steht auf Fahrt preceded the Bitterfeld Conference, but its publication soon after made it appear an affirmation of the programme nonetheless. Writing in 1960, Hans-Jiirgen Geerdts, certainly counted it as evidence for his conclusion 'daB wir [... ] in vielen Hillen die ersten FrOchte der Bitterfelder Konferenz bereits zu schmecken bekommen' .30 The milieu of Morgner's novel is industrial, 28Irmtraud Morgner, Das Signal steht auf Fahrt: Erzahlung (Berlin: Autbau-Verlag, 1959). References to the novel are given hereafter in brackets. 29Giinter Ebert, 'Negatives Musterbeispiel', Sonntag, 14.10.1962, p.lO. 30Hans-Jiirgen Geerdts, 'Die Arbeiterklasse in unserer neuesten epischen Literatur', NDL, 5 (1960),117-41 (p.141).

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proletarian; the protagonist, Hans Hubner, a figure of - ultimately positive identification; the language simple and direct; the dramatic present-tense narration naive, a demonstration of what was meant by volkstiimlich. Soviet work norms (the 'Lunin-Methode', p.6S) and technical superiority (in the form of the sputnik, p.99) are praised, as is the Soviet literary Vorbild when Hubner's wife Martha is encouraged by reading Gorky's Mother to leave behind her downtrodden housewifery and channel the grief for her dead son into work for socialist justice. The moral superiority of the GDR is emphasised throughout, leading to the proclaimed 'Sieg des Sozialismus' on which the story can climactically end (p.123), following the arrest and imprisonment of the traitor, a spy for the West and inevitably a former Nazi. The plot too follows a formulaic model. The opening and closing scenes focus on the work brigade as a collective - initially divided, ultimately united - with each member having a voice. The chapters in between, meanwhile, follow a number of individuals, principally Hans and Martha HUbner. They experience a series of difficulties which lead to an inevitable crisis, symbolised by Hubner's hubris-induced fall from his locomotive. The crisis can be resolved only by accepting the correctness of socialist principle. 'Vom Ich zum Wir' in a mere one hundred and twenty-three pages. This summary suggests a cliche-ridden schematism. Indeed, a particular weakness is the use and summary resolution of an espionage sub-plot within a story to be published by Aufbau-Verlag and set in 19S7, a particularly inauspicious year for witch-hunts having the pretext of thwarting a counter-revolution. However, whilst in many respects the text does conform to orthodox expectations of the socialist realist genre, there are some signs of divergence. The choice of protagonist is the most immediately obvious departure from prescription. Hubner is a hangover from the past, the apolitical, conformist Kleinbiirger par excellence, always ready with a hand-medown proverb to justify his inflexibility: 'Nach den kleinen Leuten geht es nie' (p.20); 'Sparsam ist nicht geizig' (p.S3). He is happiest tidying his cellar, the little kingdom of order which is the touchstone for his sceptical view of the new age. Of the Brigadefiihrer Latussek, presented by the narrator as exemplary but mistrusted by HUbner for his incessant 'Politikerei' and the fact that he still manages to idle away his little spare time with books, HUbner comments: 'Na, ich mochte nicht in den seinen Keller gucken .. .' (p.4I). In a neat example of the 'dialektische Wahrheitsfindung, [... ] die GegenUberstellung antithetischer Satze' which Morgner had recommended in her Erich Kohler review as a

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suitable method for achieving authorial didacticism, the focus shifts back and forth over three pages between Latussek's agonising over how to win Hubner for the socialist cause, whilst Hubner fusses over which corner of the cellar he should move his potatoes into today (pp.41-44). The lesson Hubner must learn, of course, is that unpolitics is dangerous politics. He had grudgingly joined the Nazi Party so as to be able to realise his fanatical ambition of becoming a train driver and thereby uphold the family tradition - we hear anecdotes of Hubner's father Gustav, to whom Morgner was later to devote a novel. As sons may follow the example of fathers, so Kurt had joined the Hitler Youth, and, aged fifteen and deaf to the protests of his parents, had martyred himself in the Wehrmacht. The parents' guilt and their determination to be even more wary of politics than before is less heavy-handed than the contemporary parallel which ultimately brings about Hubner's conversion to socialism: Hubner loses his 'adopted' son, the stoker Heinz Jacobi, to the machinations of Paul Richter, a secret capitalist and secret agent, who entices him to Republiliflucht, whereupon Jacobi joins what else but the Bundeswehr. Hubner finds secular absolution when he transforms himself into a socialist Held der Arbeit (p.l 07), assists in the unmasking of Richter, accepts his wife's right to work, and finally joins the Party. The didacticism may at times appear crude, but the presentation of a mediocre protagonist with a Nazi past and a burden of guilt has a more sympathetic and authentic ring than the more common mythology according to which all socialists had been resistance fighters and Nazis with (or without) a guilty conscience were to be found exclusively in West Germany. There are occasions too when the aesthetic constrictions are momentarily overcome. A virtual taboo is placed throughout on interior monologue: it threatens the desired impression of omnipotent narratorial control. Thoughts are transcribed in inverted commas, distinct from the quotation marks used for speech, and are pre-/suffixed with 'denkt erlsie'. When this rigid adherence to a stilted form as a matter of ideological principle breaks down, it betrays the repression of a naturally idiosyncratic narrative voice. This is glimpsed most clearly in the portrayal of the marital conflict. In one confrontation, Hubner is finally writing his proposal to improve work practices about which his wife has been nagging him for some time. He naturally does not want her to find out that he is following her advice, but he needs her help with some spelling: Hubner ftihlt sich ertappt. Soil etwa seine Frau erfahren, daB er, der Haushaltungsvorstand, seine Meinung geandert hat? Peinlich, peinlich. Denn

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schlieJ31ich zahlt der Satz "Ein Mann, ein Wort" immer noch zu Hiibners Lebensgrundsatzen und Idealen. Selbstkritik halt er deshalb zwar fur praktisch und eigentlich verniinftig, aber nicht fur "ideal". Seine Frau geht arbeiten, er duldet es, aber seine alten Ansichten dariiber widerrufen - kommt nicht in Frage. Ein Dickkopf kommt ihm irgendwie mannlich vor. (pp.l0304)

The text alternates between interior monologue and sober narration until ultimately the narrator comes down off the fence to wade in with a sarcastic·last word. Nonetheless, such formal innovations appear more as aberrations within the text as a whole. The convenient conflict resolution and breathless speed with which the plot is accomplished result in a socialist realism 'lite', smoothly bereft of genuine drama. Although there appears to be a discrepancy between the aesthetic standards she advanced in her NDL reviews and this evidence of her own literary practice, it is unlikely that Morgner wrote her book with a cynical eye on the market. Her reviews give evidence aplenty of her conviction in a literature of social engagement and the importance of the authenticity of the writer's opinion. At this early stage in her literary career, the debate she wanted most to influence - solidarity with the GDR - was presumably deemed best effected by a more programmatic clarity of expression. Das Signal steht auf Fahrt had marked Morgner out as a talent. It was awarded the prize of the Ministerium flir Kultur of 1959. Further encouragement came in the form of invitations to attend literary Lehrgange - for example, the 'Erzahler-Lehrgang' held in Petzow in November 1960', of which Morgner gave the following resume: Fiir mich war das Wichtigste das Vorlesen und das "Auseinandernehmen", weil praktisch erprobt werden konnte, was theoretisch gelehrt wurde [... ] Prinzipiell aber hat mir alles gut gefallen. Wiirde mich freuen, wenn ich wieder mal an einem Lehrgang dieser Art teilnehmen konnte. J1

Despite this auspicious beginning, Morgner's second work of fiction does not feature in any bibliography of her writings. 'Wo du hingehorst' was published in the Berliner Zeitung in August 1961.32 A young man, Jiirgen Barnitzke, registers at the border checkpoint. He has a job with Kunzmann & Sohn in West Berlin and the border guard cannot persuade him to stay and work in the East. The guard, Fritz Emmrich, had known both Barnitzke's dead mother and his boss Kunzmann, and cannot understand how the son can value the Deutschmark above his mother's 31In SAdK, Archiv des SV, Nr. 70, Bd.!: 'Junge Autoren 1958-68'. 32Irmtraud Morgner, 'W 0 du hingehiirst', Berliner Zeitung, 19.8.1961.

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memory. Perhaps he does not know the full story? In the summer of 1943 Barnitzke's mother, six months pregnant, had stopped on her way home from work - at Kunzmann & Sohn - and given bread to a starving Soviet Zwangsarbeiterin. A car had driven up, two drunken men had got out and would have beaten her to death, and the unborn Barnitzke with her, had not Emmrich's bystanding brother intervened. One of the men was Kunzmann, who saw to it that the guard's brother ended up in a concentration camp. Two days after hearing this tale of unlikely coincidences, Barnitzke registers for work in a Volkseigener Betrieb. The context in which the piece was published appears to make it an example of the uses and abuses of propaganda. Morgner's was one of many texts sent to the Zentrale Agitationskommission des Deutschen Schriftstellerverbandes. 33 Presumably, contributions had been invited on the subject of Grenzgiinger and Lohndriicker for use in the media. Given the atmosphere of disinformation of the 1950s Cold War, the tangible economic disadvantage of the GDR compared to the West, and the idealism of the young socialist writer, one need not doubt the sincerity of Morgner's albeit crudely expressed convictions. Her text was placed in a folder entitled 'Literarische Arbeiten zum 13. August'. However, Morgner makes no reference to the Wall, but instead argues for solidarity with the GDR on ethical grounds. Perhaps Morgner meant her text to imply that, since such coincidences as bring about the volte-face in Barnitzke's behaviour are the stuff of fiction, the erection of the Wall was indeed a necessary act of self-preservation on the part of the East German state. Or perhaps the Berlin Wall was actually built between the time of her writing and the assessment of her story by the Schriftstellerverband. Her text appeared on 19 August 1961 amidst a host of other contributions and vox populi soundbites thanking Walter Ulbricht, the 'master builder of socialism', for his latest construction. 34 There is no unambiguous written evidence for Morgner's attitude to the Berlin Wall. It is possible that the misappropriation of this short text, if such it was, led the author to draw certain conclusions, for whilst it is equally engagiert, Morgner's second novel is notably less compliant and less open to abuse. The inspiration for Das Signal steht auf Fahrt had been in part autobiographical: Morgner's father was a train driver who had joined the Nazi Party. According to the curriculum vitae which 33SAdK, Berlin, Archiv des SV, Nr.368, Bd.3. Morgner's typescript is not dated. 34'Baumeister des Sozialismus' was the title of a eulogising sixtieth-birthday film portrait of Ulbricht made in 1953. Due to the June uprising of that year, it was never shown in the GDR. It premiered in 1997. Cf 'Poesie des Traktoristen', Der Spiegel, 13 (1997), p.226.

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accompanied Morgner's membership application to the Deutsche Schriftstellerverband of 10 February 1960, her father had joined the NSDAP in 1940 'aus Berufsfanatismus und politischer Unwissenheit': only Party members could become train drivers; unlike his fictional counterpart, Johannes Morgner did not go on to join the SED.35 In contrast to Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt was conceived directly under the auspices of the Bitterfelder Weg. In keeping with the demands of the day for Schriftsteller an der Basis and typically defiant of the gender~based scepticism of the Bauakademie, Morgner had enrolled with a Maurerbrigade in 1959 to work on a building site in Heidenau. 36 Significantly, unlike the 'fantasy' socialist realism of Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, her second novel, set in 1958/59, is informed by first-hand experience of socialist reality at work. The writer is less naive and presents less than a paean to the inestimable heroism of the socialist worker. Brigadier Kurt Mayer's goal in life had always been to own his own house. Frustrated in his aims by the Nazis and the war, he is at last able to fulfil this ambition in the GDR, as he happily exceeds all work norms so as to earn as much money as possible for his own private Aujbau project. Even 'vorbildliche Genossen' cannot impress him; his reactionary view of the work collective is of a group of individuals who meet in order to earn money together. 37 At the end of the first part ofthe novel, he moves his family into his house on the edge of town and on the fringes of society. The character of Haus-Mayer, as he is known, is fixed like that of his literary forbear HUbner by a staple supply of 'Lebensweisheiten' , his favourite being 'Jeder ist sich selbst der Niichste' (p.16). In a plot mechanism reminiscent of Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, Dieter Kendzia, a young member of the work brigade, leaves for the West but then returns after his parents had tried to fob him off into the Bundeswehr citing, as their justification, Haus-Mayer's very own maxim of self-sufficiency. Haus-Mayer now realises where his principled selfishness can lead. He decides the time has come to change his life, and he pledges himself fully to socialism. The limited success of his conversion is the focus of the third part of the novel. 3S'Lebenslauf, 10 February 1960, in SAdK, Archiv des SV, Personalakte Irmtraud Morgner. Morgner became a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschafi Junger Autoren in August 1960 and a full member.ofthe Schrifistellerverband in November 1963. 36'Lebenslauf, 30 August 1963, in ibid. 37Irmtraud Morgner, Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt: Roman (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1962), p.16. References to the novel are given hereafter in brackets.

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Haus-Mayer is no hero, but he is presented as a Faust-figure. The venerable old communist Erich Witt identifies his condition: 'Ich glaub, der Kurt hat zwei See len in seiner Brust, eine Arbeiterseele und eine Hausbesitzerseele' (p.SS). Problems mount at work: schedules are not met and, following the example of their Brigadier, workers moonlight to earn extra cash. Conflicts deepen in the home that was to be his longdesired haven of calm: his daughter has married, of all people, an idealistic young socialist member of his work brigade, and Haus-Mayer and his wife are not on speaking terms. Haus-Mayer now begins to hear voices in his head. He consults the medical encyclopaedia: 'und erstarrte: "Schizophrenie, Seelenspaltung, Spaltungsirresein ... '" (p.lSO). The point is not laboured, the confines of realism are not challenged, there are neither devils nor witches (although Mayer does succumb to temptations of the flesh with a young cleaning lady). Nonetheless, there is a stark distinction between Morgner's 'sick' worker and the superheroic Faustin-the-factory promulgated by the cultural politicians, and it has a deliberate satirical point. A critical edge is also lent by the fact that, in contrast to Hilbner, Haus-Mayer is not an ordinary worker, but the Brigadier himself. Commonly the exemplary socialist, patient pedagogue and shepherd to the flock - for example, Latussek in Das Signal steht auf Fahrt or Hamann in Brigitte Reimann's Ankunfl im Alltag - and owing much to a hangover of the paternalistic personality cult surrounding Stalin or Ulbricht, the Brigadier should have all those qualities which Haus-Mayer lacks in abundance. Just as Haus-Mayer represents a departure from the expectations of the socialist realist protagonist more marked than that seen with Hilbner, so the novel's structure is likewise unconventional. The novel is divided into three books. The primary conflict of personal and collective interest, symbolised by the Mayers' antisocial move away from the centre to the less than splendid isolation of the fringes, has been resolved by the end of the second book with Haus-Mayer's conversion to socialism. The novel could conceivably have finished there. The third book, however, illustrates that good socialist intentions do not of themselves necessarily constitute a happy ending. Whilst Haus-Mayer finds extra-marital satisfaction, his wife Hilde is left alone to reflect on the emptiness of her life (p.27S). She has become his unloved and unpaid personal secretary, copying out great swathes of the Marx and Engels he now reads and uses in his meetings at work, oblivious to their indictment of his own private attitudes. Her fightback leads her to attend a Brigadeversammlung chaired by Haus-Mayer which is to vote on the work brigade's acceptance ofthe principles of 'socialist

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morality'. Here, she reveals to everyone present just one instance of her husband's hypocrisy: '''Jetzt, in der Brigade, predigst du sozialistische Moral, und heute frUh, zu Hause, verbietest du deiner Frau, arbeiten zu gehen'" (p.281). Enraged at what he perceives as his wife's treachery, Haus-Mayer decides to divorce her for his lover - a plan which falls limp when the latter rejects him on account of his chauvinism. Typically, he is relieved that the 'catastrophe' is avoided: he will not now have to give up his house after all (p.308). His petit bourgeois, egotistical attitudes survive to the end. Though they continue to live under the same roof, there is no reconciliation between husband and wife by the end of the novel. Meanwhile, like her mother, the daughter Britt has been abandoned by her husband. Having lost patience with his young wife's desire for a better life - meaning a larger flat: like father, like daughter - Jochen has finally decided to register with the Volksarmee for a two-year posting to the Baltic. The long-postponed decision, the ostensibly heroic sacrifice of personal happiness so as to defend the brotherlands against the threat of a repeat Hiroshima, is thus also shown with its contradictory origins in the private sphere. Army life is presented as obedience to often unjust authority. And Britt becomes subject to the not entirely unsolicited attentions of Heinz Janik, the ponytailed cynic from her FDJ days, who presents his-disaffected world view to her thus: "Es wird zuviel geredet auf der Welt. [... ] Die Menschen reden und reden, und plotzlich merken sie, daB sie ihr Leben verquasselt haben. Auf Sitzungen verquasselt und versessen. Das Leben besteht aus Arbeit und Sitzungen - und fUr Ehepaare einmal in der Woche zwanzig Minuten Befriedigung der Bediirfnisse - mehr schwlicht die Arbeitskraft und geflihrdet die Planerfiillung." (p.267)

Britt, a flawed figure with whom the reader should nonetheless empathise, 'fuhlte sich von seinen Worten zugleich abgestoBen und angezogen' - an authentically problematic response, but not the neatly didactic 'dialectical juxtaposition of viewpoints' identified four years earlier by Morgner in her Erich Kohler review as the means of guiding the reader to the 'correct' conclusion. Just as the older generation's differences are left unresolved, so the question of Britt and Jochen's harmonious arrival in everyday socialism remains open too, as each travels up or down the country to a spontaneous rendezvous with the other partner who for one reason or another may not be waiting at the destination. Critical studies of Morgner have tended to dismiss the novel in the same breath as Das Signal steht auf Fahrt as programmatic socialist

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realism. However, the novel's divergence from expected practice was recognised at the time: in contrast to its predecessor, Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt was given a conclusively negative reception in the GDR. Though unanimous faint praise was found for Morgner's humour, all three reviews damned the novel for fundamental shortcomings. Giinter Ebert conceded the relevance of Morgner's 'gripping' presentation of the issue of the Haus-Mayers of the GDR, but lamented the insufficient interaction of the Mayers with their more progressive colleagues and neighbours. Morgner's novel consequently fails to fulfil Ebert's still eminently Lukacsian prerequisites for what constitutes a novel (though the authority himself could no longer be invoked): 'Irmtniud Morgner [... ] bietet im einzelnen gute Beobachtungen [... ] - noch aber sind diese Einzelheiten nicht verwoben zu einem gro6en Gefuge epischer Fiille'. 38 Sigrid T6pelmann, who later became a Lektorin at Aufbau-Verlag and worked with Morgner on the publication of Amanda, identified some twelve shortcomings of this novel. 39 For example, Haus-Mayer's extreme egotism was implausible, the process of 'Umdenken' far less convincing than in Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, the role of the exemplary Genossen, Jochen and Erich Witt, too peripheral, and the 'leading role of the Party' underemphasised as a result. Certain pivotal events relied on a tone of 'political journalese'. T6pelmann did not, though, identify the emphasis given by Morgner precisely to the contradictions between personal and private motivation, which relativises any glib socialist moralising in her novel. The reviewer concluded that it fell short of the benchmark set by publications over the last two years - though she did not mention which ones. The review for the Zentralorgan of the SED, Neues Deutschland, was unsurprisingly the most forthright in naming and shaming the novel for its ideological failings. 40 Beginning with the assertion that Morgner's Das Signal steht auf Fahrt had. lost none of its relevance and that it rewarded repeated reading, Marianne Schmidt identifies the similarities between the two texts in their presentation of the successful transformation through labour of the petit bourgeois individual to a member of the socialist collective. However, the reader, Schmidt argues, is at the end left 'etwas ratlos: Mit welcher der Gestalten soll er sich J8Giinter Ebert, 'Irmtraud Morgner: Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt', Sonntag, 10.2.1963. 39Sigrid T1ipelmann, 'Hausbesitzerseele kontra Arbeiterseele', NDL, 6 (1963), 159-62. 40Marianne Schmidt, "'Haus-Mayer" und der Sozialismus', Neues Deutschland, 23.2.1963.

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identifizieren?' For the characters are not human beings 'mit ihren vielseitigen und verschiedenartigen Beziehungen' (though the adulterous Haus-Mayer might beg to differ). The author, Schmidt continues, compromises any possible identification of reader with character, 'indem sie darauf verzichtet, die einmal angelegten Konflikte zuzuspitzen und zu einem konsequenten Ende, zu einer echten Entscheidung zu ftihren.' She concludes that the book cannot therefore be called a novel. The discomfort of the monopoly ideologues of the SED in the face of unresolved ambiguity comes fully to the fore in this false syllogism which illustrates neatly their primitive literary logic. Thematically, then, Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt was an unwelcome critical engagement with problems of the socialist Aujbau. Aesthetically, however, it was largely in keeping with prescribed norms. There was little to suggest the great leap forward to Rumba auf einen Herbst barely three years later.

"Rumba auf einen Herbst" Morgner thoroughly distanced herself from her first book, Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, when in 1973 she criticised its 'undialektische, autoritar-didaktische, besserwisserische, unmarxistische [... ], Uberhebliche Haitung' .41 She had merely been following 'alle damals im Lande kursierenden Ratschlage' (p.21). In that sense, the book had been written 'vorbildlich' (p.21). In another sense, however, it had not: 'Ich schrieb das Buch, als ob ich nie Bticher gelesen hatte. Schon musealen Blicken auf Grimmelshausen, Goethe, BUchner und andere Autoritaten war me in SelbstbewuBtsein da nicht gewachsen, von Umgang ganz zu schweigen' (pp.19-20). This same lack of self-confidence, she says, accounts for the book's routine anonymity: 'Da ich [... ] nicht wagte, direkt oder indirekt in me in erstes Buch zu treten, wurde es keins' (p.23). She considers Hochzeit in Konstantinopel to be her first book. Morgner was to repeat the analysis in the 1980s, only by then, the political climate was such that she was able to refer to the banned Rumba auf einen Herbst as her 'first book' .42 These comments of Morgner's are well known and suggest that it was in later years that she distanced herself from her 'juvenilia', confident 41Irmtraud Morgner, 'Apropos Eisenbahn', in Gerhardt, pp.17-23 (p.22). Subsequent references are given in brackets. 42Cf. 'Der weibliche Ketzer heiJ3t Hexe', in Gerhardt, p.63.

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that her curriculum vitae proved she had moved beyond them. In fact, the first signs of a reckoning had come in 1963 - the year in which Morgner completed the first draft of Rumba. Morgner discussed the craft of the Bitterfelder Weg in an unobtrusive article in the BZ am Abend whose title, 'Poesie unter gelbem Himmel', was taken from her definition of the movement in the piece: 'Damit soli angedeutet sein, daB Poesie nicht nur unter blauem, sondem auch unter abgasgelbem Himmel sozusagen auf der StraBe liegt. Diese Poesie zu entdecken und sichtbar machen flir viele, darin besteht die Kunst' .43 Morgner does not question the emphasis given to the worker and the work place, nor challenge the importance of the writer's first-hand experience of the factory floor. All too often though, she argues, it is not acknowledged that such factors, noble though they may be, are merely the prerequisites for writing: Manchmal werden dafiir schon Lorbeeren verteilt, und man liest: Der Autor Soundso hat sich in den und den Betrieb begeben und wird darUber das und das Buch schreiben [... ] Es ist nicht gesagt, [... ] ob es ein gutes Buch wird. Denn, sagt Anna Seghers, "eine Dichtung wird nicht allein dadurch eine gute Dichtung, daB der Standpunkt des Autors richtig ist."

Invoking the irreproachable Anna Seghers enables Morgner to make a criticism that could have proven too controversial under her own name. Lucidly reflecting upon a literary career a mere five years old, Morgner then looks at her first two books: Ich kann nicht schreiben, ohne zu lesen, was die Meister geschrieben haben [... ] Trotzdem mu/3te ich, gelemter Germanist, nach dem Studium erst eine gewisse Naivitat zurUckgewinnen und zwei BUcher Uberwinden, urn Uber diesen Umweg eine produktive Beziehung zur Tradition zu erringen.

Morgner understands her first two works as necessary obstacles which had to be overcome, written with the umbilical cord to tradition severed. In a letter of 1965, Morgner describes Rumba as indeed 'meinen ersten Roman' .44 The nature of this new and productive relationship with earlier literary masters is in part indicated by the author in the postscript to Rumba: Die Autorin mochte nicht versaumen darauf hinzuweisen, daB sie hier und da Worte von Weisen und Dichtem und Heiligen in ihren Text eingeklebt hat

43Irmtraud Morgner, 'Poesie unter gelbem Himmel: Die Schriftstellerin Irrntraud Morgner plaudert aus ihrer Werkstatt', BZ am Abend, 11.7.1963.

44Cf. RudolfBussmann, 'Die Utopie schlagt den Takt: Rumba auf einen Herbst und seine Geschichte', in Irmtraud Morgner, Rumba auf einen Herbst (Munich: dtv, 1995), pp.32134 (p.322).

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aus SpaJ3 und Ernst und Ubermut. Sie bedankt sich flir die Worte und bittet deren SchOpfer n6tigenfalls urn Vergebung. 45

The reason commonly advanced for the startling experimental daring of Rumba was first given by the author herself. Morgner suggested that the potentially cataclysmic Cuban missile crisis in the autumn of 1962 was a personal watershed for her, and Rumba consequently the first book she 'had' to write. 46 It makes sense: the threat of apocalypse concentrates the mind, and curbing self-expression in order to satisfy a mandate imposed from above suddenly seems less justified. Nonetheless, Morgner's account does not tell the whole story, and we can usefully consider other influential factors. The sealing of the border between East and West Berlin in August 1961 solved the problem of the internal stability of the GDR. With the need for ceaseless Uberzeugungsarbeit to persuade the populace not to desert westwards now less immediate, the rose-tinted spectacles through which the internal situation was viewed could conceivably be removed. Rumba was Morgner's first text to be situated in the post-Wall GDR, and it addresses this new context. Furthermore, it was also the first of Morgner's novels to be situated at least in part in Berlin. Although Morgner had moved from Saxony to the Frontstadt Berlin in 1956, her first two novels, Das Signal steht auf Fahrt and Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt, were anachronistically provincial in setting - though in terms of the backward, state-approved aesthetic, their 'provincial' expression was entirely contemporary. The confrontation of ideas and ideologies unique to the divided Berlin is evaded in her first two novels, but begins to be reflected in Rumba auf einen Herbst. That is not to say Morgner had lived an entirely secluded existence before her arrival in Berlin. As a student of Germanistik at Leipzig University from 1952-56, she had been a member of Hans Mayer's seminar. The breadth of Mayer's outlook would have been a liberation from the rigidity of FDJ dogma, a transgression of geopolitical restrictions and ideological borders. His differentiated approach to the Erbe was a seed planted in the early 1950s which first began to germinate a decade later with Rumba. Mayer's first essay in his first GDR publication had praised Lukacs's Deutsche Literatur wiihrend des Imperialismus as a 'Lehrbuch' and a 'Programm' for the development of

45 Rumba,

p.318.

46'Der weibliche Ketzer heiflt Hexe', in Gerhardt, p.64.

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literature in Germany in the years to come. 47 Morgner purchased her copy of Mayer's text in 1952, her first year at university in Leipzig. Although the articles on Lukacs are marked with a star, Mayer's essays on Thomas Mann - 'Thomas Manns Tagebiicher vom Anbruch des Dritten Reiches' and 'Thomas Manns Aufsatze zur Humanitat' - were more closely studied. Morgner's closely read copies of Lukacs's Fortschritt und Reaktion in der deutschen Literatur and Thomas Mannand here in particular his study of Doktor Faustus, 'Die Tragodie der modern en Kunst' - were also purchased in 1952. 48 Thomas Mann resonates in Morgner's work through to Amanda, as we shall see in Chapter Five, but her reception begins in Rumba auf einen Herbst. Mayer's reception of Goethe owed a clear debt to Lukacs. In his first public lecture in the GDR, delivered before an FDJ audience in Weimar on 21 March 1949, Mayer distanced himself from the ever more common formulae of 'appropriation': 'Wir sind weit davon entfernt, aus Goethe einen sogenannten "Vorlaufer des Sozialismus" machen zu wollen' .49 An appropriate Goethe-Bild for today must be 'weit entfernt von einem unverbindlichen Denkmalskult' .50 This affirmation of Lukacsian positions was consonant with the immediate post-war demands for anti-fascist reorientation. However, during the 1950s, Lukacs became for Mayer more a touchstone than a bible. Regarding both Romanticism and what was for Lukacs its anti-rationalist, antirealist successor, Modernism, Mayer's position contradicted that of his erstwhile mentor and challenged the cultural-political orthodoxy. It was in his 1956 essay 'Zur Gegenwartslage unserer Literatur', published in Sonntag on 2 December 1956 before the editorial board was realigned in the wake of the Christmas purges at Aufbau-Verlag, that Mayer expressed most famously his concern that the modernist tradition should not be kept hidden away under lock and key. To overcome the poverty of contemporary GDR literature, Mayer argued, the modernist tradition must be confronted, and in particular Kafka and Joyce, since 47Stephan Hermlin/Hans Mayer, Ansichten uber einige Bucher und Schriftsteller (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, n.d.), p.17. This was a reprint of the 1947 edition for Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden. Morgner's copy was generously given to me by Joachim Schreck. 48Georg Lukacs, Fortschritt und Reaktion in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1950) and Thomas Mann (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1950). Morgner's copies were generously given to me by Joachim Schreck. 49'Goethe in un serer Zeit', in Hans Mayer, Unendliche Kette: Goethestudien (Dresden: Dresdner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1949), pp.65-85 (p.68). sOIbid., p.77.

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'moderne Literatur ist nicht maglich ohne Kenntnis der modernen Literatur,.51 The orthodox SED riposte was issued by Alexander Abusch in February 1957. Describing Mayer as the 'bourgeois snob' to accompany the 'intellectual aristocrat' Lukacs, who had by then fallen from grace, Abusch affirmed that Joyce had nothing to say to the socialist world: his chaotic formal(ist) experimentalism was a flight from reality, the very symptom of bourgeois decadence, a dead end, 'the death of art' itself. 52 The debate concerning modernism, in which Kafka was the principle point of reference, was not limited to the immediate post-Stalin thaw. 53 Neither could its persistence be seen as a perverse bonus of Lukacs's demise. For whilst the latter's name was erased from official memory, his convenient apartheid of the literary tradition was upheld. Indeed, the building of the Wall, which resolved the GDR's own immediate existential crisis, perhaps made Kafka seem even less relevant to the Party ideologues than he had been before. Thus, Alfred Kurella's response to the Kafka Conference held in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, in May 1963 sought once and for all to end the fanciful speculation that Kafka might be relevant to contemporary socialist reality: alienation was the condition of the exploited worker under capitalism; the process of overcoming it began even before the proletarian revolution, with the assumption of class consciousness; the poverty of Kafka's realism, his preference for parables, symbols and codes was indeed the quintessence of decadence. Marxism, Kurella concluded, was enriched precisely by the rejection of such alien systems of thought. 54 The dogmatic closure of the modernist debate; the reaffirmation of Lukacsian notions of decadence and formalism; the departure of Hans Mayer from the GDR in 1963: these factors all led to the inauspicious, but doubtless also challenging and provocative climate in which Rumba auf einen Herbst was conceived. We shall see in the following examination how, in the spirit of Mayer's 1956 essay, Morgner sought to SIHans Mayer, 'Zur Gegenwartslage unsere Literatur', cited from Uber Hans Mayer, ed. by lnge Jens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp.65-74, p.72. s2Cf. Abusch, 'Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart unserer sozialistischen Literatur', in Abusch, Humanismus und Realismus in der Literatur, pp.124-33. slFor a discussion of the reception of Kafka in the GDR, see Erbe, Die verfemte Moderne, pp.88-11 O. s4Alfred Kure1la, 'Der Friihling, die Schwalben und Franz Kafka', first in Sonntag, 31 (1963), cited here from Klaus Jarmatz (ed.), Kritik in der Zeit: Der Sozialismus - seine Literatur - ihre Entwicklung (Halie/Saale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1970), pp.532-44.

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forge a link with precisely this stigmatised modernist tradition and how the novel's fragmented form and multitude of voices confirmed for Morgner the death of the socialist realist author at a time when official cultural-political discourse was proclaiming its exclusive legitimacy. The inadmissibility of doubt and resignation in the world view of the SED, and the impossibility of alienation and meaninglessness in socialism, had been made clear in politicians' pronouncements during the Kafka debate of 1963. Morgner's novel heretically raises the question regardless, in variations on a suitably unresolved theme. The absurdity of an apparently imminent atomic confrontation in the Caribbean provides the world-historical backdrop for the existential questions asked by various characters in the novel. But it is the catalyst for their self-inquiry, rather than its cause. In the first story, 'Blues', the two architects, Lutz and Evelyne, find only a temporary answer, as they reject the disciplined logic of stable structures, cross the borders of wedded morality and surrender to the hedonism of an illicit affair which will presumably last no longer than their littoral escape from the city. Meanwhile, in 'Cantus firmus', Ev's husband Uwe's crisis is only precipitated by the current assignment for his newspaper which has prevented him from accompanying his wife on holiday. Alone in East Berlin, constricted by its concentric circles, all too aware of the geographical border that cannot be crossed, unable to write his state-critical article on the Produktivkraft Wissenschaft because he does not dare, and having reached the watershed age of thirty, Uwe is hamstrung by the thought that he is 'ein Mensch, der nie zum Thema kommt' .55 Ev is also thirty. Both Uwe's desperation to 'arrive' in his work and in life, and Ev's confidence, as we shall see below, that she has, are reverse sides 'of the same coin, namely the determination of the author, likewise thirty, to announce herself with this novel. Uwe's father had been a Nazi, and the meaning he had found in Stalin as a fatherfigure and had clung to after his death was revealed at the 20 th Party Congress to be an illusion. It is as if he has lost a father three times, since God the Father is dead too, and 'man kann nicht aile in dieses ungeheure Loch ausftillen, das entstanden ist, als wir Gott begruben' (p.255). The reader is aware that Uwe's insecurity with regard to his wife is not entirely ungrounded. In his own extra-marital dalliance with Maud, Uwe is very much the passive victim. Meanwhile, his ersatz mother, 55Rumba, p.299. References to the novel are given hereafter in brackets.

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Ev's mother Berta, is about to enter a marriage which Uwe feels he must prevent. Relationships with women clearly offer no comfortable escape from solitude. 'Labil' now, where before the death of Stalin he had been 'stabil' (p.273), Uwe's drifting aimlessness is graphically illustrated by his attraction to the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn: 'Er muBte nicht auf den Weg achten. Er lieB sich bef6rdern' (p.269). The conflict symbolised here between purpose, definition, rigidity and closure on the one hand, and whim, spontaneity, fluidity and openness on the other, is one of the novel's central themes. Moreover, one of the further joys of the S-Bahn is that it enables an escape from solitude in the crowd (p.223). In the same story, Ev's mother Berta wonders whether she and her partner Katschmann - a communist convert following captivity as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union - should not go to church at least once a year, just in case. Life appears to Berta to be governed everywhere by chance, and a God would at least bring rules and order into the chaos (p.249). The most desperate individual in the story, though, is Maud. Widowed during the war and now aged thirty-nine, she appears to end the story again on the brink of suicide - a taboo theme in GDR literature - having earlier aborted an attempt to gas herself in the oven. Her search for meaning is grotesquely reduced to the animalinstinctual need for a man, for physicality, an end to solitude: 'Ich suchte und suchte [... ], an der Leere danach merkt man, daB vorher nichts war, [... ] und ich werde mich totsuchen, wenn ich nicht aufhore mit diesem elenden Leben' (p.3II). Whereas Uwe has in effect lost his father three times, Oskar Pakulat has lost three sons. The first had fallen in the war, the second, Lutz, has married and moved out of the paternal home. The two parts of 'Schalmeientwist' concentrate on Pakulat's loss of his prodigal third son, then his quasi-biblical quest to find him and bring him home. The story reflects vividly the conflict of generations in the second decade of the now established GDR, as the younger generation appears to take for granted the achievements won with such sacrifices by the old. It is a poignant examination of the psychology of an individual whom, on account of his age, society has determined to be superfluous to its needs, and ofthe repercussions this has on the particular father-son relationship. Pakulat lives in a large, still war-damaged house, the many rooms of which he lets out. He contemplates his soon to be empty life: a worker, he has just one week left to work, though he is only fifty-nine years old; a husband, his wife Anna has been dead for six years; a father, he has thrown his youngest son, Benno, out of the family home the previous night. Pakulat had responded in rage and incomprehension to his son's

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irreverent 'Vertwistung' of an old Arbeiterlied at his school concert the previous evening; it had been as if Benno were making mock of his 'Lebenswerk' (p.130): the honest toil, the class struggle, the suffering of the Nazi years, and his post-war achievements in the socialist Aujbau. Pakulat is in despair at the pointlessness of his life: 'Seit gestern war alles sinnlos' (p.93). At the start of the story he is concerned about bequeathing his house to one of his sons. It becomes clear that the house is merely an extension of, a metaphor for himself. He is the war-battered, shell-scarred 'Kasten', traumatised by the memory of air raids, forever wondering if it is 'Fliegerwetter' (p.142). Pakulat resolves to find his son, in order to protect all that he has spent his life constructing from the tide of modernity that is threatening to wash it away: 'Er muBte ihn finden, damit der Kasten die virtuelle Flut ilberstand' (p.143). But Pakulat realises that, like a snail, he will carry his shell until his death, that he is 'verwachsen mit dem Kasten' (p.146). And he realises in resignation the contrast with Benno and his contemporaries, the swarms of apparently idle students Pakulat sees taking over his city, for whom life is seemingly carefree, light: Er [konnteJ sich wirklich nicht vorstellen, wie das sein wiirde, ohne Kasten leben [ ... J Wenn man bloBlebte und lebte und lebte. [... J Vielleicht haben sie gar keinen Kasten. Vielleicht leben sie ohne diese Last. Vielleicht wuBten sie gar nicht, was das war: ein Kasten. Weil es eigentlich vollig sinnlos war, sich mit so was abzuschleppen. (pp.147-48)

For Pakulat, though, it appears to be too late: the end of work, the end of his quest, the end oflife: 'Tot. Verloren. SchluG' (p.148). The latter, with all its relations, is the key word in his story: 'Sch1i.issel', 'schlieBen', 'aufschlieBen', 'verschlieBen', 'schlieBlich', 'SchloG', 'SchluB'. For company in his empty house, Pakulat can only disturb his indifferent tenants, opening their doors one by one with his huge bunch of keys. Desperate for clues as to his son's whereabouts, to say nothing of his character, he breaks the lock on Benno's desk, where he finds the boy's diary. He breaks the lock on this too, with the justification: 'Ein Sohn verschloB sich nicht vor seinem Vater' (p.146). The irony is that Pakulat's 'Kasten', his house, his body, his burden of memory, is his own private prison; sitting alone in the kitchen, for example, 'er konnte sich mehr behaupten gegen die Wande [... ] Die Wande rilckten zusammen, immer enger, Gefangnis, Zuchthaus, Einzelhaft' (p.108). Though effectively his own gaoler, he cannot find the key. The story ends with him unlocking the mailbox to find Benno's note announcing his departure for Schwedt.

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Karla, Pakulat's daughter-in-law and Lutz's wife, is also a prisoner of her husband and her body. The third story, 'Notturno', opens with her having just discovered she is pregnant again, for the third time, by accident. The creation of human life during such' Spitzensport' (p.204) as she sarcastically terms the formulaic ritual of dominance and subjugation she suffers with Lutz - would be absurd enough on its own without the looming threat of atomic conflagration. Now, with respect both to her own life and to that of the unborn child, she is forced to ask even more urgently: 'Was war ein Leben eigentlich wert?' (p.174). As a wife and mother, Karla has sacrificed her own ambitions for her husband and two daughters, and is left disenchanted. Cut off from society - '[ sie] kam selten mit Menschen zusammen' (p.197) - she is paradoxically never alone. With the birth of her first daughter, 'schloB sich der Kreis urn mich: nie mehr allein' (p.166). Karla's perceptions are fixated on the notion of curvature. The pale midday sun is 'eine geschlossene ebene Kurve konstanter Kriimmung' (p.15S); the pallid walls of her kitchen are 'gleichmaBig gekriimmt'; the walls of the kitchen cupboards' gleichmaBig konkav gekriimmt' (p.15S); the kitchen windows 'ebenfalls konkav gekriimmt' (p.171). The Pi formula ghosts incessantly through her head; for her, the perfect circle is 'die haBlichste aller geometrischen Figuren: ein Gefangnis' (p.lS0). Karla examines the smooth flatness of her belly - she is only in her third month - and then imagines her grandmother who bore fourteen children. It appears that her idee fixe is determined by her changing, ever maternal body. The compromises of motherhood have left her 'ein halber Mensch'; she notes with resignation that a caged animal simply gets used to the limitations of its existence (p.176). At the end of the story, the reader is unsurprised to learn that the architect of her curvaceous kitchen was Lutz himself. Karla's one hour of freedom whilst the children are asleep is given over to daydreaming and to the melancholy realisation that 'der Anfang war die gliicklichste Zeit meines Lebens' (p.ISI). She remembers her three days and nights of self-indulgence with Kai, the maverick individualist, 'bourgeois aesthete', Don Juan and 'negatives Beispiel' (p.200) of the Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Fakultat. He was the antithesis of her then fiance Lutz and would, for example, shun the latter's 'Lernkollektiv' because he did not like the sound of the word (p.212). Unperturbed by Lutz's warning that his uneven Abitur marks would see him barred him from university as evidence of his unreliability, Kai would respond with a dandyish nonchalance and non sequitur: "Die Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens list] eine Scheinfrage. Leben ist weder sinnvoll noch sinnlos. Ihr konnt ihm natiirlich einen Sinn geben, der

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For Lutz, unsurprisingly, '''der Sinn des Lebens ist, zu arbeiten'" (p.191). But it is precisely to Kai' s amoral, absurdist logic that Karla resorts in her situation of matrimonial and maternal bondage: 'Man muBte was draus machen aus diesem vertrackten Leben, das Bestmogliche. Ja. Es war nicht gut. Es war nicht schlecht. Es war weder gut noch schlecht. Es war einfach - fertig' (p.202). This sober, resigned acceptance of what she elsewhere calls 'Schicksal' (p.180) overcomes regret. In its modest expectations of life, it is not far removed from the conclusion reached by the professor in 'Blues', who finds that the best justification for life that can be given in the face of the terrifying infinity of the cosmos is: "'Dem Alltag Wtirde abzugewinnen'" (p.46). The text juxtaposes various individual, subjective perspectives. Existential questions are raised, but not resolved. Apparently disparate elements are linked by leitmotif, with music, as the title of the novel suggests, providing a paradigm for the overarching theme of liberation: the rumba evolved from the rhythm-driven music of West African slaves transported to the Caribbean plantations; the primordial evocation of the sound of their homelands was a form of resistance and a temporary release from oppression. Improvisation as anarchy, irrationalism as emancipation, and the pleasure principle as creative impulse are themes introduced in the first story which are developed and modulated later in the text. The pompous professor in 'Blues' would have jazz stamped out: '''Ich stehe nicht an zu bekennen, daB ich in diesem Fall fUr Diktatur bin'" (p.34). Lutz, in the futile battle with his weakening conscience and sense of order and propriety, determines that jazz must be rejected as a matter of principle: 'Die anarchistischen Elemente sind unverkennbar' (p.19). But he has danced with Ev. Trying to think of Karla, his thoughts are distracted, 'ein nicht lineares System' replaces his previous certainties, 'er hatte den Blues' (p.19) - but not in any traditional sense of melancholy. At the end of the story, he surrenders to the rhythm of the music, which is the eternal rhythm of the waves lapping the shore of the lake: 'Der See schlug das Ufer, rhythmisch' (p.14). The lake is the Freudian sea of the id, and out of 'das Chaos des Sees' (p.7S) a bikiniclad Ev is seemingly always emerging - seemingly at least to Lutz: 'Er dachte, warum kommt sie immer aus dem Wasser?' (p.73). He becomes her lover. Ev, meanwhile, is a genuine jazz and blues lover who from the outset is in sync with the 'Rhythmus des Sees, Blues-Rhythmus' (p.IS). Lutz may be a master of logic, but 'wenn er definiert, konnte Evelyne B.

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biswei,1en durch ihn hindurchsehen' (p.13). Ev breaks down borders. Whereas she is inhibited by the difficulties of saying 'ich' amidst the 'Gewtihl in den StraBenschluchten' in the city (which later, in Uwe's story, the reader discovers is East Berlin), in the absolute calm of her walk into the local town 'wuchs das Ich [ungeheuer], tiber sich hinaus und immer weiter, als ob es keine Grenzen gabe' (p.4S). She is as unpredictable as her music. Whereas Lutz, in the psychological imbalance born of his half-hearted resistance to the erotic, points out the white-capped waves of the stormy lake, Ev in her equilibrium sees only its calmness (p.54). Having expressly wanted to visit the church in town, she then capriciously rejects Lutz's offer of a guided tour, in order to steal apples, in the rebellious tradition of her biblical near-namesake. Ev synthesises opposites, and this synchronicity of conflicting notions is expressed in the text by the word 'Swing', which again has musical associations. Thus, the lake is 'nicht traurig und auch nicht froh. Traurig und froh. Swing' (p.24). Ev studies Lutz with 'Abneigung und Zuneigung, gleichzeitig, Swing' (p.35). Lutz dreams of Woman, or Ev: 'Aile Frauen, aIle, ich mochte aile, ich mochte, ich, sie hat ja was vom Kopf, sie spinnt ja, wenn sie spinnt, hat sie grtine Augen, Abwehr, Angriff, Swing, die Unruhe swingt, schaner Schmerz' (p.56). The philosophical implication is that a sensual apprehension of the world approaches an existential harmony with it. Moreover, the aesthetic implications of a balance of differing or conflicting perspectives, to say nothing of the political implications of the wilful ignorance oftaboos and the undermining of absolute systems of thought, become clearer as the following stories unfold. The conflict in 'Schalmeientwist' between a waning but worthy older generation and an irreverent and impatient younger one is crystallised by the treatment given to Pakulat's 'Lieblingslied' (p.98) by Benno's school jazz band. The father recalls it as an accompaniment to street demonstrations and marches behind the red flag, leading him to imagine that he might 'noch einmal mit dem Taktstock den Gleichschritt bestimmen, linkszwodreivier' (p.96). For the son, however, it becomes an excuse for syncopation, the antithesis of rigid forms and two-threefour-four time, hedonistic fun which has no need for arguments and manifestos. Pakulat finds hope of winning back his son when he discovers that, amidst the pictures of pin-up girls, Benno also has a picture of Fidel Castro on his bedroom wall. Though Pakulat is sceptical of Castro's 'hitziges Temperament', his 'viersttindige Reden [ohne Konzept]', and his youth, he is at least a communist leader, and the father concludes that the son is not entirely lost (p.117). The irony is that

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Castro's unorthodoxy - his dialogue with the audience, his interaction with hecklers, the endless improvisation of his speeches - is precisely what makes him attractive to Benno, as Pakulat discovers when he reads the boy's diary. The Cuban revolution will be followed not just by marching, says Benno, but by dancing: 'Ich werde mit meinen BarbudoStompers eine Rumba draus machen' (p.132). It is revolution in the guise of a street party, a link to the old sailor's reminiscence of the Havana carnival in 'Blues' (p.28), and scarcely the disciplined corrective to adolescent anarchy that the father associates with his own revolutionary past, for example in his conversation with his comrade Katerbaum. Moreover, the novel's references to Cuban socialism carry the further subversive edge that, in contrast to the GDR's origin and status as a satellite of the Soviet Union, Cuba had effected a revolution from below. Chopin provides the theme tune for 'Notturno', his Opus 32 No.1 being the melancholy stimulus for Karla's daydreams in an everyday in which the rumba is merely a memory and a fantasy. Her husband Lutz complains that she lacks pragmatism: "'Du romantisierst deine Erinnerungen'" (p.182). The recession of Karla's ideals into an intangible distance is symbolised by the pallid blue colour of her piano, which matches the pallid blue linoleum floor of her kitchen prison. The piano had been bought by her mother and painted blue by her largerthan-life grandfather who would entertain her with tall stories of fantastical escapades in far-flung lands. (He is an embryonic Gustav der Weltfahrer.) Karla draws comparisons between him and her fleeting lover Kai, who would strike 'die Pose des GroBvaters' (p.195) and who was 'mindestens so groB [... J wie der GroBvater' (p.21 0). During the musical evenings at the Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Fakultat, when renditions from a more classical heritage were expected, Kai would play jazz - and would be chastened by Lutz, since: 'Jazz ware Kosmopolitanismus, und Kosmopolitanismus ware Dekadenz, und Dekadenz lehnten wir ab' (p.190). It is Kai's transgression of rules and flouting of convention which momentarily, fantastically, banish Karla's schizophrenic projections of her fragmented self. Thus, in the first of several defenestrations in Morgner's work, Kai throws Karla's projected alter egos - the cynical 'GroBe' and the 'Kleine', a 'Muttertier' (p.204) out of the window before sitting down at the piano to play '''eine Rumba natiirlich'" (p.205). Suddenly, in Karla's imagination, anything is possible: a metre-wide gap appears in the 'Mauer' (which 'Mauer' we are not told), a lion escapes from a nearby circus, the world is animated: 'Und Kai spielt [... J und singt natiirlich dazu das Blaue vom Himmel herunter' (p.206). Karla later recalls her three days and nights spent as a

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student with Kai in his room, where he played on her blue piano 'und die blaue Blume auf der Tapete blOht auf' (p.216). This allusion to the 'blue flower' of Novalis - whose Heinrich von Ofterdingen was, for Lukacs, the epitome of Romantic introversion and the antithesis of Goethe's exemplary realism 56 - adds retrospective resonance to the previous evocations of the colour blue in Karla's story. It is therefore no accident that the blue of the present is pallid compared to that of the past. Moreover, the juxtaposition here of the prosaic and the fantastic - the wallpaper of a student bedsit, and the blossoming of its heavily symbolic imprint - is typical of the simultaneous lyricism and bathos of Morgner' s aesthetic in this text. When Karla concludes one daydream by suggesting that Kai has been 'living inside' the piano for the seven years of her marriage (p.207), she implies an acceptance of the fact that her inner disharmony can only be overcome during fleeting moments of private nostalgia such as these. The novel returns briefly, but allusively, to the blues theme in the final story, 'Cantus firmus'. Kai seeks vodka-soaked consolation for an unspecified unhappy love affair. Assuming the guise of Orpheus - as whose descendent he has already been cast in 'Notturno' when, to his piano-playing, 'die bereiften Baume vor dem Fenster verneigen sich' (p.216) - Kai narrates his ultimate failure to free Persephone from Hades. Having used his trumpet to charm Charon, Cerberus, the three judges of death and Pluto, and whilst sounding the way out of the underworld with the number How High is the Moon, impatience had caused him to look back and thus lose her forever (p.294). Significantly, the explicit link with the novel's mythological framework is made by reference to music, and more particularly blues. Morgner's text understands by the term 'blues', together with the aforementioned 'swing', a mode of expression which, when transcribed into the literary idiom, enables suggestion, association, metaphor, wordplay - it is 'doppe\bOdig, doppeldeutig' (p.82). The term 'blues' is employed in this sense as a model for the rejection of the realist idiom, allowing a more sophisticated compositional practice which plays with the associative possibilities of text. Moreover, it is a paradigm for improvisation on a given theme or structure, which is precisely what Morgner's specific modification of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is undertaking and, in a broader sense, what the four stories perform with respect to the central existential theme of the novel.

56Cf. Lukacs, 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre', in Goethe und seine Zeit, p.67.

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Kai's temporary metamorphosis into Orpheus merely makes obvious the cross-fertilisation of the four principal stories with the episodes that constitute the text's mythological framework. Here, Persephone's nine months of freedom are drawing to a close and she spends one last day and night with her lover Orpheus. In these episodes too, the fear of apocalypse is prominent, with two suns in the sky, and the existential concern this time involves a goddess who wishes to be mortal. Whilst Orpheus longs for immortality, Persephone argues that life without death is 'pointenlos' (p.152). Human beauty, she concludes, resides in courageous acceptance. She finds hope in human sensuality and is unimpressed when Orpheus assumes the guise of a conqueror and subjugator of nature. The passing of the imminent threat of destruction in the final episode precipitates Persephone's ecstatic celebration, which is both confirmation and dissolution of the self and which, in recalling central motifs from the other stories in the novel, subsumes them into its elemental affirmation of life. The 'Raubvogelfangen' (p.3l6) which dig into Persephone's flesh do so 'rhythmisch', a word which throughout the text is associated with an elan vital: the waves, the 'rhythmische Schlage' of the S-Bahn (p.311), which is the same epithet used for Lutz's aggressive sexual thrusting (p.203), and of course the rumba. Persephone is carried to an island, to the Bay of Baracoa - to Cuba, then - whose primordial forests contain one tree which towers above the others (Kai notably is a 'baumlange[r] Kerl', p.297) and which bears blue fruit; the gulf between self and other is bridged, 'swingend zwischen Schmerz und Lust' (p.317). Finally, the metaphor of navigating a boat on the River Jordan recalls the text's thematisation of fluidity - not least in its predilection for stream of consciousness expression. The four main stories are themselves subtly pervaded by myth. As Lutz lies on his hotel bed trying to think of his wife, he is tormented by erotic visions of a moon with Ev's features to whom he, given the circumstances, somewhat comically tries to explain his aversion to jazz. The scene is refracted later in the fifth episode in the framework, as Persephone catches Selene flirting with a sleepwalking Orpheus. She wonders if Pluto has been faithful to her during her absence from Hades, and the issue of adultery and emotional insecurity is thus replayed on another level. Other allusions, even if they are not leitmotifs, add to the suffusion of the novel's consciousness with myth. In 'Blues', Ev is forever emerging Venus-like from the waves. It thus makes sense that the hotel waiter, who used to work in Berlin's Hotel Adlon, is renamed' Adlonis' by her

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(p.36). The designation is amusingly taken over by the narrator, who now refers to the character 'Adlonis' where previously he had been an anonymous 'Kellner' (p.43). Meanwhile, Karla names Kai's disorderly bedsit 'Atlantis' (p.216), suggesting a fantastical and scarcely accessible world. Moreover, it adds a cataclysmic resonance and finality to her remembrance of drowning in tempestuous seas upon his embrace - such ecstatic dissolution indeed now belongs in a mythical past. Lastly, although Pakulat's search for his son resonates with biblical echoes, including epigrams from Luke's Gospel and references to the Flood, his odyssey across the city through the night and the following day by foot, by tram, by taxi, meeting with help and hindrance from friend and stranger, clearly owes a debt to the tradition of the epic quest. As a reception of a classical tradition, this subtle infiltration by myth of the everyday narrative and the (sub)consciousness of its characters stands in creative contrast to the dryly academic, objectively detached interest of the professor in 'Blues'. It recalls the practice of the proscribed modernist tradition, of which there are other more specific echoes elsewhere in the text. Standing on the pier waiting for the fishing professor to get a bite, Ev folds an old tram ticket into the shape of a hat, converts this into a boat, boards it, navigates across the lake, up a canal and into the adjoining river. Confidently sailing in midstream, she arrives at a small town of paper and wood models made from her architectural plans. Having tried unsuccessfully to set fire to them, as they have been adjudged 'failures' by her boss Hadrich, she recalls how she defended her work to him: Meine EntwUrfe sind gut [... J Jahrelang nur Zweifel, Fragmente, zermUrbende Arbeit, und man hfirt den und jenen und jeden und friBt RatschHige in sich hinein und Kritiken und friBt und friBt. Aber irgendwann kommt die ausgleichende Gerechtigkeit: Es ist gut. Wenn diese Oberzeugung besW.tigt wird von anderen - sehr schfin. Aber wichtiger ist, daB man sie selbst hat. Und ich hatte sie und ich habe sie, unerschUtterlich. Zum erstenmal. (p.69)

These words are clearly relevant for Morgner's literary development and her sense of having found her own idiom with this novel. The problem with Ev's designs, though, according to Hlidrich, is that they are too impractical, too extravagar¢, 'zu dekadent' (p.7l). The existential theme and the leitmotif of irrational music are the most obvious evocations of a 'decadent' tradition, but the novel also makes direct intertextual allusions. Morgner subtly acknowledges the delicacy of the musical analogy. When Karla sits down to playa Chopin Nocturne, 'die GroBe' suggests that Schonberg would be more appropriate (p.l69) - a nod towards Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus,

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which for GDR reception was the model critique of proto-fascist, irrationalist, solipsistic subjectivity by means of a musical paradigm. 57 Elsewhere, Der Zauberberg is evoked. The hotel in 'Blues', for example, recalls the sanatorium, with a world war looming. 58 Lutz, the solid 'Ingenieur' (p.34), plays Hans Castorp to Ev's sophisticated, green-eyed Clawdia Chauchat, who sees through him to the skeleton with her X-ray eyes - 'nur das Gerilst blieb stehen, eine ilbersichtliche Konstruktion' (p.l3) - and who gradually breaks down his erstwhile secure morality too. Meanwhile, Karla's timeless, placeless walk through the snow to Kai's magical room echoes Castorp's snowblind epiphany on the magic mountain. More generally, the text's interaction with myth has Mann as a significant forbear. Thomas Mann was for the GDR a legitimate modernist, but Morgner significantly draws on certain subjective 'irrationalist' moments. On the same theme of maverick individualism as the reference to Adrian Leverkuhn via SchOnberg above, is the fleeting, typically bathetic, allusion to Nietzsche. That Kai sports a Superman sweatshirt (p.288) is unlikely to be due to a taste for American comics, but evokes what for official GDR reception was Schundliteratur of a different kind. We saw earlier how his world view was secure beyond the death of God; we also learn that Kai is a master of rhetoric, 'hat Effekte notig. Ironie, Kraftausdrilcke, Bonmots' (p.192). He goes on to justify his irresponsible unorthodoxy by citing with Nietzschian logic the law of the 'strong': "Kleine Charaktere miissen flei/3ig sein, wei I sie immer ein Alibi brauchen, um sich zu rechtfertigen, vor sich, vor den anderen: Ich habe heute das und das gemacht, ich habe nicht umsonst gelebt, und vergib uns unsere Schuld, Amen. [... ] Weil sie Angst haben, die Kleinen, vor dem Tod haben sie Angst, die lieben Kleinen. [... ] Starke Charaktere brauchen kein Alibi, sie haben nicht notig, sich vor irgend jemandem zu rechtfertigen, sie liegen in der Sonne, sie konnen sich leisten, aufAnerkennung zu pfeifen, sie ruhen in sich selbst". (pp.193-94)

Though not a direct citation, Kai recalls the provocative relish with which 'slave morality' is attacked particularly in Zur Genealogie der 57See, for example, Abusch, 'Faust - Held oder Renegat', in Kulturelle Problerne ... , pp.159-60. Abusch relies heavily (but tacitly) on Lukacs's 1948 study 'Die Tragodie der modernen Kunst' (in Thomas Mann), which Morgner too had studied closely. 58In a letter to me of 23 June 1998, Joachim Schreck wrote: 'Das Hotel in 'Blues' triigt auch deutlich Ziige des 'realen' Schriftsteller-Erholungsheimes "Friedrich Wolf' - so der offizielle Titel -, das sich in Petzow bei Potsdam befand. I.M. absolvierte dort zwischen 1958 und den achtziger Jahren zahlreiche Aufentha1te.'

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Moral. Later, Kai plays a rumba on Karla's blue piano, which sets free a lion (p.206) - an evocation of Zarathustra's rebellious beast, a symbol of emancipation: 'Freiheit sich schaffen und ein heiliges Nein auch vor der Pflicht: dazu, meine BrUder, bedarf es des Lowen,.59 Notably, the text does not condemn Kai. His defence in 'Cantus firmus' of scientific enquiry, placing it in the tradition of Renaissance humanism and citing Dante on creativity, liberates his enterprise from political ideologies. Just as his musisch nonconformism had seduced Karla, so Kai manages to win over even the hardened communist Franz Kantus. Ev's father Franz Kantus has an unobtrusive but significant biography. He had escaped from the SA to the Soviet Union in 1933, but from 1937 nothing was heard from him until he returned to the GDR 'rehabilitiert' in 1955 (p.254). A victim of the Stalinist purges, he had spent 'achtzehn Jahre unschuldig' in a gulag (p.287). Although Stalin's crimes were officially denounced in the GDR after 1956, in the early sixties they were still a highly sensitive subject for literary treatment. The Kafka debate in the GDR, meanwhile, had centred on the relevance of alienation in the socialist world view. Morgner's reception engages with this discourse, but textually goes beyond it, particularly in the story 'Cantus firmus'. Uwe's sense of inadequacy is sexual as well as ideological, and he is troubled by Kafkaesque Mdnnerphantasien. His journalistic assignment sends him to a scientists' conference held in a town outside the city where the primitive, pre-industrial form of transport is - 'vorzugsweise' - the bicycle (p.241). A stranger in an already strange world, he is even more unsettled by the endless corridors in the labyrinthine institute building. Behind the doors lurk voluptuous female laboratory assistants, 'unerhort blond' and in pristine white lab coats (p.259), who are uniformly dismissive of his attempted flirtations. One towers above him when she rises from her chair - 'sie harte nicht auf zu wachsen' (p.261) - recalling Georg Bendemann's father in Das Urteil. 60 Travelling by S-Bahn is laden with voyeuristic possibility - the story opens with an attractive pair of legs that could belong to a 59Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke, 15 vols (Munich: dtv, 1980), IV, 30. In 1955-56 Morgner had written an Examensarbeit for Hans Mayer, 'Frank Wedekind: Erdgeist und Biichse der Pandora', which had drawn extensively on Lukacs, but also on Freud and Nietzsche - notably Also sprach Zarathustra -, neither of whom was published in the GDR until the late 1980s. I am indebted to Joachim Schreck for enclosing extracts from Morgner's dissertation in a letter to me of 12 August 1998.

60In a letter to me of 23 June 1998, Joachim Schreck wrote: 'Diese Einrichtung zur Grundlagenforschung war der Ort [eines] tatsachlichen Aufenthalts [der I.M.] im "Institut fUr Grundlagenforschung" in Zeuthen bei Berlin in den Jahren 1963/64.'

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'Laborantin' (p.224) - and yet contributes to his psycho-sexual trauma: Uwe's unwelcome seducer, Maud, is an S-Bahn driver. Her sudden bestial manner upon accosting him in the corridor makes a role reversing allusion to JosefK.'s slavering over Fraulein Biirstner in Der ProceJ3: Sie umk!ammerte ihn mit beiden Armen, sie trampe!te [... j und schrie und verkrallte ihre Hande in seinem Hemd, sie schrie und schrie, immer nur das eine Wort, [... j das eigent!ich gar kein Wort mehr war, sondem ein tierischer Laut: Nein. Er versuchte ihr den Mund zuzuha!ten, aber es ge!ang ihm nicht, wei! sie biB, sie kratzte und biB und schrie. (p.236)

Lying awake in his 'verkehrsgiinstigen Haus' (p.271) thinking of Ev, of Maud in the upstairs flat, of his own vulnerability, and sex, the 'rhythmische Schlage' of the trains which pass his flat every ten minutes resound in his head (p.3II). Uwe's insecurity is not restricted to women, however. His one track mind causes him to think that Kai's beloved 'Persephone' is one of his own so desired 'Laborantinnen'. He is humiliated by Kai and, in an allusion to Die Verwandlung, feels like an insect being crushed underfoot (p.295). The narrative perspective of the stories, which eschews omniscience in favour of the subjective perceptions of the relevant protagonist, has again Kafka as its modernist forbear. The thematisation of the city Mensch and Masse, neonlight and electric transport, the interrelationship of 'Trieb', 'Triebwagen' and 'getrieben werden' - falls wholly within the modernist vernacular. On a more specific level, the stream of consciousness narrative, which seeks also to interweave myth with the often banal everyday events of a single day (or in this case, usually two), attempts a rediscovery of Joyce. This is most explicit at the close of 'Cantus firmus'. The long interwoven interior monologues of Uwe and Maud, which are broken only by occasional interjections from the narrator, climax with an allusion to Ulysses. In contrast to Molly Bloom's ecstatic exclamation which concludes Joyce's novel, however, Maud's shriek is an ambiguous 'Nein' (p.3II): is she rejecting suicide, or crying "No" to life? But perhaps the most audacious scene of avantgarde modernism in the text is the cacophonic dramatisation in 'Blues' of Lutz's drunken crisis of conscience as he fights with his desire for Ev (pp.57-63). To the portentous commentaries of a (Greek) chorus, he is berated by his alter ego, the 'Betriebsleiter', before the judgement from above of a Christian morality (a nod to Faust) is indicated in a stage direction, and Ev is burnt at the stake as a witch. Whilst Benno and his friends tear down a picture of Schiller from the wall in their school (p.131), Proust supplies the epigraph to 'Notturno'. Taken together, these instances show Morgner's intent with Rumba auf

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einen Herbst to move beyond the excessive respect for one cultural tradition and the denigration of others which might be equally fruitful, an ambition encapsulated in the novel's clarion call of aesthetic emancipation: 'Nieder mit dem Vorbild, es lebe die Variante' (p.77). The resolution of the Cuban missile crisis does not enter the novel's purview and does not pre-empt a resolution of the crises experienced by the novel's characters. Eager to hear whether the old salt's romance with a Cuban girl will reach the desired conclusion of marriage (as if marriage were a conclusion), the spinster in 'Blues' is dissatisfied with his evasive answer, protesting: "'Die Geschichte muB doch irgendeinen SchluB kriegen'" (p.3 7). It is Ev who interjects that closed stories suggest "'eine intakte Welt"', with the implication that the world is in fact fragmented thus providing a philosophical justification for the text's openness. Paradoxically, Ev appears to be the most balanced and least fragmented of the protagonists. It is significant that the only story which does reach closure is 'Schalmeientwist', one of whose leitmotifs is precisely the notion of finality, Pakulat's 'SchluB'. The protagonists of Rumba auf einen Herbst are integrated into society as architects, journalists, scientists, train drivers, builders, printers, or mothers. There is no euphoria, however, at participating in the 'construction of socialism'. The worker is no longer a 'hero', but an individual whose rough edges are not smoothed away to leave an orthodox Vorbild. Lutz's designs are solid, but doubtless uninspired; Ev's are inspired, but inadmissible. Uwe dare not write his critical article against the ersatz state religion of scientific progress. Maud's motivation as an S-Bahn driver is presented as specifically existential. She, like Uwe, is a 'Fahrende(r), (p.241), and both are understood as deracinated characters in flux, who may one day 'arrive' (p.305) and who contrast with the other S-Bahn driver Katschmann. Though he too travels, Katschmann remains immutably fixed 'an ein und demselben Platz' (p.251). Pakulat, meanwhile, feels bitter that retirement is being forced upon him early and that his achievements are not valued. Motherhood is presented entirely unromantically as a series of compromises, sacrifices and self-betrayals. Ev's announcement to Lutz at the end of 'Blues' that she wants a child "'erst jetzt"', as her flirtation with him reaches a head, can scarcely be read as a resolution of the issue of motherhood problematised in the novel. Of all the characters, Kai is perhaps the most fulfilled in his work, but this is in no small part due to his unconventional, post-ideological understanding of its significance.

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The text has a similarly open mind about the closed borders that hem in its characters. Ev feels 'grenzenlos' notably when away from Berlin and by the water, whilst Lutz is oppressed by a sky which is 'vergittert' (p.73), until he makes for the pier, where the proximity of the 'chaos' of the water causes the bars of his prison to dissolve. In the next scene he has surrendered to instinct and to Ev. Lutz's wife is the prisoner of habit, her kitchen, her body. Pakulat is held hostage by history, and though he is liberated temporarily by a willingness to be carried along by the city, by its 'tragen Strom der Leiber' (p.95), the city is his 'zu Hause', his 'Lebenswerk', and thus also his confinement. Ev's husband Uwe is explicitly aware of the insurmountable borders in Berlin, lying awake with the sounds of 'Verkehr' - the trains which can in places still cross the border (p.228) - and of a 'Lautsprechergefecht entlang der Grenzmauer' repeatedly playing in his head (p.229). His selfidentification with the city is due precisely to its division: 'Er: die Stadt. Die gespaltene Stadt' (p.241). Given the official GDR designation of the Berlin Wall as the 'anti-fascist protection barrier', the use of such naked terminology here, and in the context of schizophrenia, suggests a differentiated understanding of the structure's meaning. Rumba auf einen Herbst offers no exemplary individuals in the spirit of socialist realism, but instead incites empathy for them,and particularly for their weaknesses. The novel is far removed from agitprop; it offers neither eulogy nor apologia for the socialism of Ulbricht. However, in focussing on a broad spectrum of individuals and conflicts silenced by official discourse, it exemplifies a spirit of genuine social engagement which eschews the narrow partisanship demanded of the socialist writer by politicians. Whilst the authorial hand of composition may run unmistakably through the text, recalling, refracting and unifying the disparate strands, the master narrative of omniscience has here been replaced with the democratic co-existence of interwoven perspectives. Morgner's novel is an eloquent literary representation of the complex social, political and subjective realities pertaining even in the Stalinist GDR, which cannot be bludgeoned into the binary opposites of ideology. At the end of his story, confused and alienated from his son, Pakulat approaches an important insight: 'Vielleicht war die Welt nur deshalb schon, weil sie so verwirrend vielfliltig war' (p.147).

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2 The Apparatus of Control

Until the GDR's demise, the Kulturpolitik of the SED CQuid only be examined in terms of its official, public presentation. Such announcements outlined an ideological programme, rather than conceding the means of its implementation. For all that exceptional instances such as the imprisonment of Walter Janka or the expatriation of Wolf Biermann revealed the illiberality of the system and meant that there could be few illusions as to the oppressive realisation of culturalpolitical directives, the mechanisms which had brought about these events remained necessarily hidden. However, since the Wende, exceptional access has been granted to government documents from the former GDR and it has become possible to reconstruct the state's methods of surveillance and control in the cultural field.) This chapter begins to illustrate how these methods were employed in Morgner's case and traces developments as far as the authorities' decision not to grant publishing permission for Rumba auf einen Herbst. We start with a brief exposition concerning the respective organs in the GDR cultural body politic. As the ZK-Sekretiir for Kultur, Volksbildung und Wissenschaft and a member ofthe PolitbUro, Kurt Hager was from 1957 to 1989 the highestranking politician in the GDR with responsibility for the cultural field. A letter to him of 13 July 1969 from the head of his Abteilung Wissenschaften, Johannes Hornig, indicates what can be termed the 'unofficial' official attitude towards censorship. Precisely because it was for internal consumption only, this communication is a clear example of the doublespeak at the heart of the system: Es handelt sich urn die als Anlage beigefilgte Novelle Heldenbericht [...J Wir haben mit den Genossen des Mitteldeutschen Verlages - Verlagsleiter, IThe normal thirty year moratorium on the public availability of government documents does not apply to GDR political parties, including the SED; the Bundesarchiv grants access to documents from certain GDR state departments, including the Ministerium filr Kultur; the Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz of 20 December 1991 has enabled documents from the Ministerium filr Staatssicherheit to be consulted in the Gauck-Behtirde.

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The state apparatus has had to prevent publication of an unsuitable book and has thus been compelled to assume the apparently alien role of censor, a responsibility which is said to lie with someone else, namely the publisher. The disingenuousness of this self-stylisation will become apparent later. First, let us tum to the role of the publisher. The head of the publishing house had a key function in the GDR's literary-political apparatus. He or she was responsible for the overall profile of the house, but only within the parameters permitted by those higher up the ladder. The tasks of the Verlagsleiter included submitting a programme of publications planned for the following year to the Ministerium fur Kultur for confirmation, approving the suitability for publication of every manuscript before it too was submitted to the relevant MfK department, and overseeing the activity of the Lektoren. For the Lektor was in the vanguard of the battle to ensure the ideological purity of GDR literature. A study prepared for the MfK in 1974, 'Gedankenexpose zu Problemen der Lektorentatigkeit und ihrer gesellschaftlichen Anerkennung', gave the importance of the Lektor dramatic emphasis: Der Autor hat es in der Regel nicht mit dem Verlag, sondem mit einem Lektoren zu tun [... J Von seiner Verantwortlichkeit (die der Verlag entwickeln muJ3!), von seiner Flihigkeit, eine eigene Meinung zu vertreten (die er sich im Kollektiv des Verlages bilden muJ3!), - von seiner poetischen und fachlichen Qualifikation also hangen Ansehen und Stellung des Veriages, der Kultur- und Wissenschaftspolitik, letztlich der Partei und des Staates ab. 3

The areas of expertise required by a Lektor in the literary field are spelt out clearly, and in a revealing order of merit: Ein guter Lektor zeichnet sich durch reiche Kenntnisse aus: - in der marxistisch-leninistischen Weltanschauung und Theorien (von den Schriften der Klassiker des Marxismus-Leninismus bis zu den Beschliissen der Partei), - iiber die Entwicklung der sozialistischen Gesellschaft (insbesondere der

2Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-BArch), DY30 IV A2/2.024!71, p.\38. 3Bundesarchiv Abteilung DDR, Berlin (BArch), Bestand DR1 (Ministerium fur Kultur)/1699, 1-28, p.l.

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DDR), - in Philosophie, Asthetik, Literaturtheorie [... ] und der Literaturgeschichte. 4

Ruth Glatzer serves as an example of this ideal Lektor made flesh and of the importance attached to his or her work by the apparatus of control. Chejlektorin at Autbau-Verlag from 1966, Glatzer was recruited as an unofficial collaborator by the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit in 1970 as Gesellschaftlicher Mitarbeiter for Sicherheit (GMS) "Ruth". On 3 November 1970 she wrote her declaration: '1m Interesse [... ] insbesondere der Sicherung der fuhrenden Rolle der Partei im geistigkulturellen Bereich verpflichte ich mich hiermit freiwillig mit dem An Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit zusammenzuarbeiten'. 5 'Auskunftsbericht' of 18 October 1968 contained the following positive assessment of her work at Autbau-Verlag and served consequently as evidence of her suitability for conspiratorial collaboration: Sie [... ] hat bewiesen, daB sie treu und fest zur Politik der Partei steht. Genn. GLATZER besitzt einen festen Klassenstandpunkt und ist in ihrer fach!.politischen Arbeit konsequent und parteilich. 1m Verlag ist sie urn die Durchsetzung der Kulturpolitik der Partei sehr bemiiht und scheut dabei keine Auseinandersetzungen mit z.T. erfahrenen und versierten Lektoren und deren liberalistischen Ansichten. Dabei nimmt sie auch perstinliche Anfeindungen (man wirft ihr Engstimigkeit, Dogmatismus u.a. vor) in Kauf. 6

The first meeting after her recruitment took place on 20 November 1970, when Glatzer's Fuhrungsojfizier Joachim Tischendorf named the following 'Schwerpunkte' for her work with the MfS: 1. Autklarung der ideologischen Position der Mitarbeiter des Lektorats des GMS. 2. Verbindungen zu Schriftstellem und Lyrikem der DDR [.. .]. 3. Wie verhalten sich die Mitarbeiter des Lektorats zu feindlichen Tendenzen in der Literatur? 4. We1che Verbindungen bestehen nach Westdeutschland und dem kapitalistischen Ausland? 5. Wie wird die Kulturpolitik von Partei und Regierung im Lektorat durchgesetzt? Der GMS erklarte dazu, daB er mit der Erledigung so1cher Aufgaben einverstanden sei, weil sie ihm auch gleichzeitig bei der Klarung der politisch-ideologischen Probleme im Lektorat helfen. 7

4Ibid., p.13. 5Der Bundesbeauftragte fUr die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU), Zentralarchiv (ZA), Allgemeine Personenablage (AP) 36855/92, p.23. 6Ibid., p.14. 7Ibid.,

p.25.

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In a meeting of 13 January 1971, Glatzer refers in particular to problems with the Lektor Gunter Caspar, head of the Lektorat fUr Zeitgenossische Deutsche Literatur (ZDL), and to the continuing disruptive influence of Joachim Schreck, a Lektor at Aufbau-Verlag from 1957-69 whose position became untenable after he refused to sign a retraction of comments criticising the intervention of the Warsaw Pact forces in Czechoslovakia in August 1968.8 Of Lektor Gunter Schubert, she noted in the same meeting that Morgner was one of the 'schwierige Autoren' he had to supervise. On 30 August 1971, after Glatzer has discussed the problems with Morgner's manuscript Gustav der Weltfahrer, Tischendorf stresses once more the importance of her official work for Aufbau-Verlag - and her unofficial work for the MfS: Daran ankntipfend erkUirte der Unterzeichnete dem GMS nochmals unser Anliegen: Durch eine saubere politische Atmosph!lre im Verlag, speziell im Lektorat ZDL, soli erreicht werd~n, daB auch in der Arbeit mit Autoren politisch einwandfreie Literatur entsteht. Aus diesem Grund ist es notwendig zu wissen, welche politisch-ideologische Position jeder Lektor besitzt, welche Vorbehalte und Bedenken er zur Kulturpolitik von Partei und Regierung liuBert und mit welchen Autoren, die ebenfalls politischideologische Schwlichen und negative Meinungen haben, er sympathisiert. Das helfe sowohl dem GMS als auch, im Rahmen der Zusammenarbeit mit ihm, unserem Organ. 9

Such was the emphasis placed on the political role of the Lektor that it is scarcely surprising the state apparatus refused to countenance demands from writers, who were often left in the dark as to publishing decisions, that the system be made more transparent. Writing to Kurt Hager on 13 March 1972, Abteilungsleiter Hornig mentions a request made by the Deutsche Schriftstellerverband that, before making decisions as to the suitability of manuscripts for publication, the Lektorate in the respective publishing houses should allow the DSV to discuss them first. Hornig stresses the importance of rejecting such a request, since it is contrary to the 'Prinzipien unserer Verlagspolitik', which he spells out thus: Der Partner des Schriftstellers ist und bleibt der Verlag. Mit der Ubemahme des Manuskripts und der Entscheidung tiber die Herausgabe des Manuskripts tibemimmt der Verlag nicht nur die Okonomische, sondem auch die politischideologische Verantwortung fUr die Wirkung des Buches. [... ] Die Forderung [... ], daB Lektorate vor Entscheidungen tiber Manuskripte diese dem Verband zur Diskussion tibergeben sollten, scheint mir aus [...] Verkennung der 8Ibid., p.30. 9Ibid., p.54. Glatzer's comments on Morgner's manuscript are examined in Chapter Four.

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The Apparatus of Control Verantwortung des Verlages zu resultieren. [... ] Ich bin dagegen, daB der Verleger seine Verantwortung fUr die Publikation auf Personen bzw. Institutionen auBerhalb des Verlagswesens abschieben kann.lO

The publisher's decision on the manuscript - based amongst other things on what were often, for the writer, anonymous appraisals - is to remain final, presumably because the publishers are felt to have the more malleable 'politische Verantwortung' towards society~ The efficiency of the Lektoren was such that it has been argued that 'der hauptsachliche Teil der Zensurarbeit fand weniger in der staatlichen Literaturbehorde selbst statt, die die Kriterien diktierte und steuerte, und auch nicht als 'Schere im Kopf des Autors, sondern in den Verlagslektoraten,.1\ The politicians' aim, apparently, was to populate the Lektorate of GDR publishing houses with automata programmed by ongoing MarxistLeninist indoctrination. However, in the eyes of party officials, the Lektoren remained as potentially unreliable and destabilising as the authors they were supposed to be monitoring. Such imperfections in the system were a source of consternation to the absolutists and commanded the highest level of political attention. In June 1979 Erich Mielke sent a twenty page report to Erich Honecker detailing the problems encountered with Lektoren. The duplicitous Aufbau-Verlag Lektor named in the following extract from this report was Morgner's Lektor for Amanda: In den letzten Jahren sind wiederholt problematische Manuskripte und darin enthaltene politisch .falsche oder sch!idliche Aussagen trotz Vorlage in Verlagen und Bearbeitung durch Lektoren nicht oder nicht rechtzeitig erkannt oder sogar verschwiegen worden. Zum Teil wird von Lektoren unterlassen, rechtzeitig auf problematische Manuskripte hinzuweisen oder zu informieren, sobald diese Probleme erkannt werden [... ] So zeigen zum Beispiel die Vorglinge urn die beim Autbau-Verlag seit Ende 1977 vorliegende 4. Erz!ihlung zum Buch Das ungezwungene Leben Kasts von Volker Braun eindeutige Versliumnisse in dieser Richtung. Vnter solchen Bedingungen wurde es dem Lektor (Schlosser, Kristian, SED) ermoglicht, die Leitung des Verlages Uber die in dieser Erz!ihlung enthaltene, gegen die DDR gerichtete Aussage zu tlluschen, befUrwortende Gutachten selbst zu verfassen bzw. zu organisieren, die Druckgeoehmigung zu erlangen und die Offentliche AnkUndigung im Verlagsprogramm durchzusetzen. 12

IOSAPMO-BArch DY30 IV B 212.024/78 [unpagioated]. IlSiegfried Lokatis and Stefan Tiepmar, 'Verlagsarchive der DDR: Ein Uberblick', Leipziger Jahrbuch der Buchgeschichte, 6 (1996), 451-66, p.452. 12Cited from Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, p.765.

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For Mielke, the master of subterfuge, it was clearly intolerable to be outwitted in such a manner. The second regulatory body, independent of the publishing houses, incorporated into the MfK, and consequently able to apply Party directives more stringently, was indispensable. In the GDR's cultural-political hierarchy, the MfK was subordinate to the Abteilung Kultur im ZK der SED, and the Minister of Culture occupied a lower rung on the party ladder than Kurt Hager. The state control of literature in the GDR in fact preceded the establishment of the MfK under Johannes R. Becher in 1954. The first incarnation of a specific authority to this end was the Kulturelle Beirat set up by the Sowjetische Militaradministration in 1947. This was responsible 'fUr planwirtschaftliche Steuerung des Verlagswesens, fUr kulturelle Forderung [... ] und fUr politische Aufsicht' and thus established the parameters for the control of literature in the GDR which remained in place until 1989.\3 The Amt fUr Literatur und Verlagswesen (ALV) was founded in 1951 as the successor to the Kulturelle Beirat and, though a separate department, it fell initially under the auspices of the ZK der SED. In 1956 it was subsumed into Becher's MfK, restructured and renamed the Hauptverwaltung Verlagswesen. A further reorganisation took place in 1958, when it was retitled the Abteilung fUr Literatur und Buchwesen. Not until 1963, though, when virtually all the publishing houses together with the organisations responsible for the book trade the Leipziger Kommissions- und GroBbuchhandel and the Volksbuchhandlungen - had been placed under the control of the MfK, was the centralisation of this cultural and economic area complete. 14 As its all-encompassing name suggests, the newly established Hauptverwaltung fUr Verlage und Buchhandel im Ministerium fUr Kultur (often abbreviated to HV Verlage, or even HV) assumed the task of the day-to-day administration and co-ordination of this vast sector. The department within the authority relevant for publishers and writers was the Abteilung fUr Belletristik, Kunst- und Musikliteratur. This in tum was divided into various sectors: for example, 'Auslandsliteratur' , 'Kinder- und Jugendliteratur', 'Literaturwissenschaft', and the one most 13Siegfried Lokatis, 'Verlagspolitik zwischen Plan und Zensur: Das "Amt flir Literatur und Verlagswesen" oder Die schwere Geburt des Literaturapparates der DDR', in Historische DDR-Forschung: Au[siitze und Studien, ed. by Jilrgen Kocka (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993), pp. 303-25 (p.305). 14Por a detailed analysis of the structural changes in the censorship authority, see Lokatis's chapters in Barck, Langermann, Lokatis, "Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer", pp.19226.

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germane to this study, 'DDR-Literatur'. The Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel was the final and most stable refinement of the system and survived from 1963 until the Wende of 1989. The statute of the Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel defined its three principle tasks as follows: Die Verlage zu lizenzieren, die unterstellten Veri age anzuleiten und fUr eine zweckentsprechende Arbeitsteilung zwischen den Verlagen Sorge zu tragen; die thematische Jahres- und Perspektivplanung der Verlage anzuleiten, zu koordinieren und ihre Erfiillung zu kontrollieren; die Manuskripte der Buchverlage und die Erzeugnisse der nicht lizenzierten Verlage zu begutachten und Druckgenehmigungen zu erteilen. ls

The publishing sector was no different from any other economic sector in the GDR in that it was part of the centralised planned economy. A publishing house was granted a licence on the condition that it conform to the directives of the HV, which included the submission of the publisher's intended programme for the coming year, a procedure known as Themenplanung. The publisher's Themenplan was as necessary in economic terms as it was useful in terms of censorship; in fact, the two principles are often difficult to divorce from one another. The Themenplan, coded 'PI', of each individual publishing house would be subject to revision by the HV and would be amended to the so-called 'P2'. These individual plans were then collated to form a Gesamtthemenplan for the publishing output of the GDR in that particular year. On the basis of this exhaustive survey, the required paper quantities could be allocated, sales and marketing co-ordinated and subsequent revenue calculated. The authority was likewise responsible for fixing the number of copies of each individual title to be published, within the framework of the quantity of paper that had been allotted to the particular publishing house for that particular year. This enabled book production to be influenced in a subtle manner, such that a socalled Schwerpunkttitel - that is, one deemed politically important would be allocated a high number of copies. Given the limited and fixed supply of paper, this inevitably prejudiced the less socially 'useful' titles - a fate experienced by certain of Morgner's texts. The more obvious intrusion of the state as censor was, however, the so-called Erteilung der Druckgenehmigung - again a euphemism for the actual practice, suggesting that literature was being enabled, rather than ISCited from Ernst Wichner and Herbert Wiesner (eds.), Zensur in der DDR: Geschichte, Praxis und '.4sthetik' der Behinderung von Literatur (Berlin: Literaturhaus Berlin, 1991), p.l9.

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the opposite. It was not a method new to the HV Verlage und Buchhandel, having been deemed an integral part of the planned system since the 1950s. No book, nor magazine, academic text, calendar, and so on, could be published without the approval and certification of the HV. Once the manuscript was finished and considered by the publisher to be fit for publication, it was sent to the HV along with an accompanying form signed by the Verlagsleiter and an assessment of the manuscript by the relevant Lektor: the Verlagsgutachten. The HV then obtained an evaluation of its own: the Auftengutachten. In some cases, the publisher submitted what then amounted to a third report, compiled by an expert not affiliated to the publishing house: the Verlagsauftengutachten. In the light of these vari0us appraisals and, in difficult cases, after discussions in the relevant department of the HV and sometimes also with the writer, the manuscript, with a confirmed or revised print run, would then either be awarded the Druckgenehmigung or not. The head of the HV was often called upon to adjudicate in the most problematic cases and therefore had an executive power and influence beyond his apparently subordinate status of stellvertretender Minister for Kultur. However, although the latter was often referred to as the GDR's 'Chief Censor', the designation is not undisputed, since in many cases the fmal word lay with Kurt Hager. The process of granting publishing permission was extremely longwinded, time-consuming, subject to changing criteria, and consequently often opaque to both writers and publishers. One of the problems of a system such as this was that, because the schedule had to be planned so far in advance, it was inevitably blind to potential political developments. A manuscript which had been permissible before might suddenly become subject to a reappraisal. Publication approval might be revoked; it was not unknown even for already printed books to be recalled and pulped. The suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, for example, Honecker's assumption of power in 1971, or the expatriation of Biermann in 1976 changed the cultural climate and the parameters of what was considered tolerable. Morgner's Rumba manuscript was a victim of such unpredictable developments: initially afProved for publication, the decision was overturned following the 11 Plenum of the ZK der SED in 1965, as we shall see below. The impossibility of achieving synchronicity between ZKlPolitbiiro directives and their efficient implementation in the HV was symptomatic of the bureaucratic and logistical difficulties of the planned economic system itself. However, the rejection of manuscripts by the HV on the basis I of

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Gutachten received from reviewers who remained anonymous to the author reveals the conspiratorial ethos of the apparatus of control. The ALV had been idealistic enough in the 1950s to conceive of a time when the need for Druckgenehmigung would be superfluous. The principal idea was that Begutachtung should be taken over entirely by the Lektorate in the publishing houses. By the time the ALV had been subsumed into the MfK in 1956, and in the context of the post-Stalin thaw, plans had been drawn up for the democratisation of publishing in the GDR. However, the PolitbUro responded to Becher's liberalising proposals in 1957 instead by making the practice of Begutachtung even more stringent. 16 It was some thirty years before any comparable measure was to be envisaged. After the protests at the loth Writers' Congress in 1987, notably from Christoph Hein and GUnter de Bruyn, the head of the HV, Klaus Hopcke, drew up a plan to revise the procedure which would entail more robust intrusions at the publisher's level whilst maintaining the HV as the final instance - an invidious circumvention of the writers' real grievances. The plan was ready in January 1989, was sent by the Minister of Culture Hans-Joachim Hoffmann to the MfS in September and was approved by Mielke on 3 October 1989. Swiftly overtaken by somewhat less piecemeal changes elsewhere in the GDR, it was never put iIito practice. I? The MfK also housed a second, more indirect, authority of control: the BUro fur Urheberrechte (Btu). Established on 1 January 1957, it was responsible for approving contracts with publishers abroad and was thus empowered to prevent the foreign publication of politically dubious texts. The GDR Penal Code (Stra/gesetzbuch §219, paragraph 2) criminalised the individual who conveyed or had others convey on his or her behalf 'Schriften, Manuskripte oder andere Materialien, die geeignet sind, den Interessen der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik zu schaden, unter Umgehung von Rechtsvorschriften an Organisationen, Einrichtungen oder Personen im Ausland'; the offence was called Ungesetzliche Verbindungsaufnahme. However, the policy of establishing such an authority was not without a certain sharp practice on the part of the SED. The Btu had the economic function of ensuring that the GDR did not miss out on the opportunity to cash in on the hardcurrency potential of exporting its literature to the Nichtsozialistische Wirtschaflsgebiet. It could thus profit vicariously from a dissident \6Cf. Lokatis, 'Verlagspolitik zwischen Plan und Zensur', p.321. l7Cf. Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, p.284.

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literature not granted publication permission at home, but welcomed across the border. The BfU was politically as well as economically useful. Failure to comply with the licensing regulations could be used when expedient as a pretext for disciplining difficult writers. Stefan Heym was notoriously convicted of the offence and fined in May 1979 following the un sanctioned West German publication of Collin. Although it was nominally in charge of the HV Verlage und Buchhandel, the MfK often had more an administrative than an executive authority over it. The Minister of Culture was not a member of the Politbi.iro and was subject to directives received from the Abteilung Kultur im ZK der SED. His deputy, as head of the HV, made decisions and recommended excisions, but those instances that were too controversial for him to resolve were passed directly to Kurt Hager. The Minister's role was usually merely to sign the relevant letter. Manuscripts whose suitability for publication was still undecided even after their often lengthy passage through the various stages of vetting and alteration in the publishing houses and the HV were left to Hager's ultimate adjudication. Whereas in the early years of the GDR ideological considerations were paramount in the approval or rejection of a manuscript, this was modified later to a more differentiated tactical approach, with auftenpolitische or so-called autorenpolitische Griinde often a more important factor than the political correctness of the text itself. Slightly different rules applied to the dead writer than to the living, for the former was at least unable to compound the damage caused by any inappropriate language within the text by making unwelcome comments outside it, and was similarly unable to protest at ideologically motivated misreadings. The apparent liberalism signified, for example, by the previously unthinkable publication in the 1980s of Freud and the planned publication of Nietzsche - the two volumes Die frohliche Wissenschaft and Unzeitgemiifte Betrachtungen were finally published by Reclam Leipzig in 1990 - should be understood in this light. Such compromises were intended to present an image of relative tolerance to the outside world, and particularly to West Germany, upon whom the GDR was becoming increasingly financially reliant. An internal political resonance was also sought, to suggest that acts of goodwill were possible towards those who did not seek to collaborate openly with the 'opponent' or 'enemy', as West Germany was termed. In response to an enquiry from Klaus Hopcke of 11 July 1987 as to whether Monika Maron's Flugasche should be published in the GDR, Hager stated bluntly on 21 September 1987: 'Ich kann nicht einsehen, weshalb wir Flugasche veroffentlichen sollten. Die Autorin tritt laufend in der

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BRD gegen uns auf .18 The chances of publication for writers who did not accept this principle of diplomacy were automatically prejudiced. For all that its network was astonishingly far-reaching, its shroud of secrecy nigh impenetrable, its operational measures shocking, and its pervasive intimidatory influence immeasurable, the Ministerium fUr Staatssicherheit was but one organ in the apparatus of control. The MfS did not conceive of itself as an autonomous entity pursuing its own agenda, but was rather the faithful implementer of directives received from the Politburo. However, whilst the approach of the SED leadership was frequently short-termist and involved the propagation of often shortlived campaigns (in the literary field, for example, anti-formalism, the Bitterfelder Weg, and so on), the MfS was concerned with the long-term perspective, tracking individuals and monitoring significant institutions across decades. Unhampered by the requirements of realpolitik which caused the policy makers to have to adapt their strategies, the MfS was able to pursue its activities from the position of a stable ideological fundament. This was namely the class struggle, preparing the victory of socialism, for which art was required to agitate. Any deviance from these guidelines or questioning of the leadership of the SED, whose selfproclaimed role was to pave the way from socialism to communism and was therefore beyond reproach, would automatically be staatsfeindlich, potentially counter-revolutionary, and would consequently merit the attention of the MfS. However, as it was not the task of the MfS to be an incognito ersatz government, its influence on decisions made in other Ministries, including the MfK and its sub-department the HV Verlage, was by no means absolute and its involvement depended on a number of variables. In the literary field, the apparatus of control was extensive and multi-layered, and the MfS was not the all-dominant player. The correlation between the erosion of the SED's authority and the mushrooming expansion of the MfS became evident after the Wende. It was a gradual process born of an interpretation of events at home and abroad which, particularly after the borders were sealed in 1961, became less concerned with protecting against destabilising 'imperialist' influences from outside and located the 'enemy within' as the primary threat to the status quo. Established by a law of 8 February 1950 under Wilhelm Zaisser, the MfS did not initially devote a great deal of attention to the literary field. Until 1958, for example, the MfS did not 18SAPMO-BArch DY30 vorl. SED 40124 [unpaginated].

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have a single source in the entire MtK. 19 The situation began to change when Erich Mielke became Minister for State Security in October 1957. The infamous Hauptabteilung (HA) XX - referred to by Markus Wolf in 1990 as 'das eigentliche Zentrum der Staatssicherheit,20 - was created in March 1964 under the control of Generalleutnant Paul Kienberg. However, it was only after the Prague Spring of 1968 had demonstrated the potentially destabilising influence of a reform-minded, or 'counterrevolutionary', intelligentsia that a department charged solely with the surveillance of the cultural field was established. Mielke's 'Befehl 20/69' of 18 June 1969 created the Abteilung 7 in the HA XX and set the parameters for the comprehensive monitoring of literature in the GDR in the years to follow. Subsequently, the expatriation of Biermann in November 1976, the hard-line approach from above this signified, and the controversy it provoked, led the MiS to raise the Linie Schriftsteller for the first time to a Schwerpunktbereich. These structural changes and refinements of emphasis were accompanied by the requisite increase in both official and unofficial personnel. By 1989 the HA XX/7 alone had 40 hauptamtliche Mitarbeiter 21 - substantially more than any other department in the HA XX and testimony to the mistrust with which the cultural elite was viewed. As the Schild und Schwert der Partei, the MiS had a dual function which exceeded its Volksmund description as the Firma Horch und Guck. Rather than merely listening and looking, the MiS used the passive gleaning of information as the prelude to active operations. The infiltration of the cultural field by the MiS was comprehensive. In April 1982 the following institutions were amongst fifty-six Objekte listed by the MiS as subject to its attentions: the MtK, the HV Verlage und Buchhandel, the Btu, the Akademie der Klinste der DDR, AufbauVerlag, neue deutsche literatur, Sinn und Form, Sonntag, Weimarer Beitrdge, and the Schriftstellerverband der DDR. The priority of the MiS was gathering information, and the preferred means for doing so were the InoJfizielle Mitarbeiter. An internal MiS study from 1973 assessed the importance of the 1M thus: '1m Zeitalter der modernen Technik gibt

19Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, p.150. This summary of MfS activity in the literary field is indebted to Joachim Walther's invaluable study. 2°Cited from Joachim Walther and Gesine von Prittwitz, 'Mielke und die Musen: Die Organisation der Uberwachung', in Feinderklarung: Literatur und Staatssicherheit, pp.74-88 (p.78). 21Walther, Sicherungsbereich Literatur, p.179.

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es [... ] nichts, was der Kunst und den Fahigkeiten eines Menschen zur Erforschung der Gedankengange des anderen gleichkommt. ,22 The preferred 1M would be the one co-operating on the basis of an unwavering politisch-ideologische Oberzeugung. This was the easiest 1M to recruit and control, for he or she would accept the fundamental necessity of the MfS and its operational logic of denunciation. Of course, not all 1M corresponded to this ideal model. Venal motives played a role for some: the possibility of career advancement, financial or other bonuses, for the MfS saw to it that their 1M did not go unrewarded, with gifts ranging from books, cameras, money or the conferring of honours, to a bunch of flowers for the female informer on Frauentag. Other individuals were seduced by the frisson of adventure inherent in such a dangerous liaison. Others still were attracted by an initial and often short-lived utopian belief in the ethical value of an organisation supposedly countering the threat of fascist imperialism. Finally, numerous individuals were simply intimidated and blackmailed into cooperation. All aspects of the biography of a potential 1M would be thoroughly vetted: political and religious attitudes, social status, social circle, career development, family, health. This procedure was the IM-Vorlauf A Kontaktgesprach would ensue, which, if satisfactory, would be followed by the official Werbung to become an 1M. The last stage - though this final formality was not always observed - would be the selection by the 1M of a Deckname and the signing of the Faustian Verpjlichtung. Walther has suggested that 'angesichts der Menge der IM-Vorlaufe liegt die Vermutung nahe, daB es nur wenige DDR-Schriftsteller gegeben haben dUrfte, die vom MfS nicht angesprochen worden sind,.23 Morgner appears to have been one ofthese rare cases, as we shall see later. The extent of unofficial collaboration with the MfS tells a sobering story; after all, it was on the co-operation of individuals that the efficacy of Stasi operations depended. There appear to have been nearly five hundred 1M active in the literary field in the 1970s and 80S. 24 Whilst the reduction of individual biographies and motivations to undifferentiated statistics is an unjust simplification of the collaboration and resistance complex, it helps to illustrate the degree of permeation achieved by the MfS. Individuals in high-ranking, so-called Schliisselpositionen were 22Ibid., p.469. 23Ibid., p.716. 24Ibid., p.559.

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particularly highly sought after as 1M. Alternatively, tried and tested agents were planted in such positions when they became vacant. The head of Aufbau-Verlag from 1963 to 1983, Fritz-Georg Voigt, the head of Mitteldeutscher Verlag from 1973 to 1989, Eberhard GUnther, and the head of Eulenspiegelverlag from 1965 to 1972, Kathe Krieg, were 1M. The President of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR from 1978 to 1989, Hermann Kant, had been an 1M from 1963 to 1976 , when he was elected to the SED Bezirksleitung in Berlin. The First Secretary and eminence grise of the Schriftstellerverband from 1966 to 1989, Gerhard Henniger, and the heads of the HV Verlage und Buchhandel Bruno Haid (1963 to 1973) and Klaus Hopcke (1973 to 1989) were ofjizielle Quellen, socalled Kontaktpersonen. By 1987, twelve of the nineteen members of the Prasidium of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR were 1M. An 1M was expected to serve the MfS for life, as was the case, for example, with Paul Wiens. Unwillingness on the part of the 1M might cause the MfS to break off the contact: a potentially lengthy period of loosening ties and lessening co-operation. More direct an approach on the part of the 1M was so-called Dekonspiration: once the cardinal rule of absolute secrecy was broken and the individual was known to be an 1M, he or she would cease to be useful to the MfS. It should be remembered that deconspiracy was not necessarily a straightforward task, for the intimidated 1M would fear the potentially adverse consequences of such an action. Moreover, the deconspiracy dilemma not only confronted the 1M. As we shall see later, Morgner herself also had to face the issue when, in the late 1970s, she learnt of the unofficial collaboration of her husband Wiens. The MfS was integrated into the apparatus of control and censorship of literature, and the head of the HV Verlage, as an official Kontaktperson of the MfS, functioned as a central intermediary between the MfS, the publishing house,.the HV, the MfK and the ZK der SED. The MfS could at any time directly influence the fate of any given manuscript. The concern of the MfS was less with the fate of the particular literary text than with that of the particular person. Just as 1M were sent to attend public readings in order to be able to report back on the comments of the writer and the overall tenor of the meeting, so the interest of the MfS in those manuscripts under consideration at the HV Verlage likewise went beyond the literary-critical. The aim of Stasi Gutachten, mostly compiled by expert IME, was not merely to determine whether the censor should intervene. They were also intended to assess the conformity or otherwise of the writer in question, or even the criminality of specific utterances in the text. These appraisals were then

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termed strafrechtliche Einschiitzungen and made their way out of the HA XX!7 to the HA IX, the legal department of the MfS. The shift from passive surveillance and patient data collection to operational action occurred in stages of steady intensification. The first stage would be the identification of a correlation between the suspicions of a number of 1M. This could lead to the instigation of an Operative Personenkontrolle (OPK), which sought to assemble information on the individual from all possible sources. The aim was to establish the factual basis for suspicion, whereupon measures could be undertaken to neutralise the danger (MfS-speak: unterbinden). This might, for example, involve an attempt to blackmail the individual into cooperating as an 1M. However, in the event of all efforts at so-called vorbeugende Verhinderung proving unsuccessful, the final stage of Stasi activity would come into effect: an Operativer Vorgang (OV). The aim of the OV was no longer pre-emptive and preventative, but instead in its very conception already punitive. Whilst the OPK sought confirmation of suspicions, the OV sought confirmation of criminal activities, in accordance with the GDR StraJgesetzbuch (StGB). The most common offence of which writers were found guilty was so-called StaatsJeindliche Hetze (§ I 06 StGB), which might, for example, be identified for the MfS by the Gutachter of a manuscript. The most arbitrary was so-called Dffentliche Herabwurdigung (§220 StGB), which could be invoked whenever opportune, since most critical comments could theoretically be construed as a public slandering of the GDR. However, whereas show trials of publishers were held in the 1950s, after the GDR had signed the Grundlagenvertrag between the two German states in 1972 and the Helsinki OSeE accord in 1975, writers were rarely charged in court for their allegedly criminal offences. The OV must be understood as the implementation of all the covert machinery and methodology of a modem dictatorship, which goes beyond its apparent Kafkaesque model in that the accused - necessarily 'guilty' for proceedings to have been started - was not even informed that he or she was on trial. The sentence always comprised psychological persecution, was executed during the course of the investigation, and the judgement would never be communicated. The preferred operational measure of the MfS was so-called Zersetzen. This involved such practices as discrediting the public reputation of the individual by spreading rumours which were plausible and difficult to disprove; organising professional failures - comparatively easy to achieve with writers by withholding publication permission or ensuring that publishers did not respond to letters; refusing travel

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applications; organising anonymous phone calls, telegrams, or letters; isolating the individual by confiscating mail; unsettling the individual by confiscating mail already delivered; or spreading false reports in West German newspapers to undermine the reputation a writer might have as a dissident. An Operativer Vorgang sought to encircle the individual and curb his or her influence by indeterminate measures carried out by official MfS personnel and 1M unaware of the overall context of their specific actions: Neutralisieren or Veranlassen zu gesellschaflsmaftigem Verhalten. The vague awareness of the omnipresence of the MfS, coupled with an ignorance as to its actual means; the permanent potential threat of criminal proceedings for nonconformist actions of any, often arbitrary, description (any non-Party gathering could, for example, be interpreted as staatsfeindliche Gruppenbildung); the opacity, if not invisibility, of operational measures: these factors combined to create a pervasive climate of insecurity and mistrust which functioned as an arguably more effective anaesthetic in the post-1950s political climate than open repression. From "Signal" to "Rumba": The Censor's View Morgner's first two literary works passed the censor's examination without controversy. On 13 April 1959 Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, 'Einzelobjekt Nr. 242 zum Produktionsplan 1959', was submitted by Autbau-Verlag to the HV Verlagswesen im Ministerium fur Kultur for the approval of a print run of 7,500 copies. 25 As a slim socialist realist volume with a modest Aujlagenhohe which would not stretch the paper allowance, the manuscript was a fast-track candidate for publication. By 25 April the Druckgenehmigung had been issued, with the comment from the HV: 'Keine Bedenken!' The Lektorin Ingeborg Ortloff at Autbau-Verlag had stressed in her Verlagsgutachten (ppA-5) the authentic realism of Morgner's narrative - she was after all 'Tochter eines Eisenbahners' - and praised first and foremost her ideological standpoint: 'Sie hat konsequent parteilich und mit gutem Einfuhlungsvermogen einen echten Konflikt dargesteUt.' Due to its

25BArch DR 11504 I. The references in brackets are to consecutive HV pagination.

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'Problematik und [... ] Parteilichkeit' it would enrich the Aufbau-Verlag series 'Die Reihe,?6 AufJengutachter for the HV, Paul Friedlander, likewise acknowledged the supposed verisimilitude of the story, but was not blind to the text's shortcomings: 'Die Gedanken und Handlungen werden derart ins einzelne erlautert, daB dem Leser zum eigenen Denken nicht viel ubrig bleibt' (p.3). However, this excessive narrative intrusion at least left no room for ideological grey zones. Friedlander concluded: 'In den ideologischen Grundlagen ist die Erziihlung sorgfaitig ausgearbeitet. Es bestehen keine Bedenken.' His appraisal is dated 25 April 1959, and was the formality required for the green light to be signalled. Certification was sent to Aufbau-Verlag on 29 April and the text appeared later that year. The procedure shows how rigidly the HV adhered to the guidelines: even in the most apparently uncontroversial cases, the publisher'S support for a manuscript was not to be trusted until that assessment had been seconded by an outsider. On 1 June 1962 Aufbau-Verlag submitted to the newly established Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel 'Einzelobjekt Ni". 95 zum Produktionsplan 1962', Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt, seeking approval for the publication of 10,000 copies?7 The seven-page Verlagsgutachten from Morgner's new Lektor, Gunter Schubert, gives a detailed account of the novel: its plot and its stylistic shortcomings (pp.l2-lS). Interestingly, the title of the manuscript is given in type at the top of the appraisal as 'Aber was wird aus der Liebe', but has then been corrected by hand to 'Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt': either the Lektor had made a mistake or the sentimental initial title was subject to a late revision. The book has been written 'mit Sachkenntnis und mit politischem VerantwortungsbewuBtsein' (p.12); the absence of a 'Happy-End' is noted (p.17). The novel, though, undertakes too much: 'Dieses Buch stellt eine Fulle von Problemen unserer Tage zur Diskussion, sicher zu viele [... ] GewiB ist alles wichtig und aktuell, aber weniger ware hier mehr gewesen' (p.17). The text is uneven, the early chapters 'ziih und holperig', and Morgner's desire, presumably in keeping with her literary education, to avoid 'allerlei Kunstelei in Form, Sprache und Inhalt' has resulted in extremes of 'Untertreibung, Naturalismus, Banalitat' (p.IS). Schubert concludes that it is a 'Talentprobe' which, although ultimately 26In a letter to me of28 October 1997, Joachim Schreck noted ofingeborg Ortloff: 'Eine damals sehr junge Lektorin, von der auBer redaktionellen und technischen Hinweisen keine Hinweise fUr das Manuskript ausgegangen sein dtlrften.· 27BArch DR 11504 1. The references in brackets are to consecutive HV pagination.

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lacking 'die letzte Reife', nonetheless deserves to be published: 'Sein Anliegen und Thema verdienen es' (p.18). Gerhard Holtz-Baumert supplied the concise AuJ3engutachten (pp.911). Critical of the schematic nature of the narrative, he suggests that the book is redeemed by 'das ursprungliche Erzahltalent der Schriftstellerin' (p.9). One of the positive aspects is the writer's genuine sense of humour, the 'komische Ziige, die man bei ihr eigentlich nicht erwartet' (p.IO), though he does not explain why Morgner's humour should be so unexpected. Holtz-Baumert goes on to voice other reservations, lamenting, for example, the fact that a 'Mannerbuch' has been written and that the female characters are not fully formed. This dubious criticism of the manuscript is worth noting if only because it will never be said of a Morgner book again. Nevertheless, Holtz-Baumert argues that any revision would probably be counter-productive, taxing the writer disproportionately and ultimately proving to the detriment of the book. The novel should therefore be published as it is, so as not to put unnecessary difficulties in the path ofthe developing writer, who should, though, be informed of the manuscript's shortcomings for future reference. The assessor's summary is double-edged. Convinced on the one hand 'daB man dem Buch ohne Anderungen auf den Weg helfen soUte' since it is 'eine echte Bereicherung der Gegenwartsliteratur' (p.11), Holtz-Baumert is sceptical as to Morgner's future development: 'Ob unsere Kritik auf der Hohe ist und Irmtraud Morgner hilft, die Mangel der ersten groBeren Arbeit zu durchschauen und zu einer hoheren Stufe der Iiterarischen Gestaltung zu kommen, bleibt leider sehr ungewiB' (p.ll). The decisive AuJ3engutachten arrived at the HV on 11 July 1962, enabling the Druckgenehmigung to be issued on 12 July. Morgner's distance from the censor's ideal requirements was not so great that it could not be beneficently overlooked. On the form sent in by the publisher accompanying the manuscript and the Verlagsgutachten and on which the various procedural stages at the HV were indicated, it is noted that 'in einem person!. Gesprach mit Gen. Schreck [Le. Morgner] wurde am 12.7.62 das Gutachten [Holtz-Baumert's] zur Kenntnis gegeben'. Whilst this appears to belie the notion that the HV was a secretive and impenetrable entity, the authority probably did not mind being the bearer of what were essentially glad tidings. Morgner was soon enough to encounter its stonier countenance. In 1963 Aufbau-Verlag rejected as too problematic a first draft of Morgner's Rumba auf einen Herbst manuscript. It was also the year in which Hermann Kant gave the MfS what is currently the earliest

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reference to Morgner discovered in the Gauck-Behorde: '1st Sekr. einer Parteigr. ist sehr begabt, politisch i. Ord. hat jedoch ein Haufen unklarer Frag. 1st hinzukriegen. Der Mann mtiBte mehr positiv kUirend wirken,?8 Morgner's revised Rumba manuscript soon brought her more prominently to the attention of the apparatus of control. The shady story of the manuscript itself - lost somewhere between the publisher, various departments of the MtK, the ZK der SED and perhaps the MfS; a nonexistent novel which nonetheless appeared in Beatriz, was mentioned in numerous' interviews, and which was reconstructed posthumously from the NachlaJ3 of the author in whose possession a fragmented second copy must have been all the time - has more than a touch of Borges about it. It was a notorious example of the problematic functioning of the GDR censor, whose operational logic in this instance can now be more fully explained. Following the rejection ofthe initial manuscript in 1963, and in spite of the received wisdom which suggested that rejection by one publishing house was akin to rejection by them all, Morgner handed in a new draft to Mitteldeutscher Verlag in 1965. She had undertaken a thorough revision of the initial manuscript, which 'durchaus nicht im Sinne der vom [Autbau-] Gutachten gewiinschten Korrekturen ausfiel' .29 Instead of providing any clarifying synthesis, Morgner had added a further narrative stratum: the mythological interludes. In doing so, she had stepped off the straight and narrow Bitterfeld path for good. 'Einzelobjekt Nr. 12 zum Produktionsplan 1966' was submitted by Mitteldeutscher Verlag to the HV on 8 November 1965 along with two Gutachten for the approval to publish a first edition of 10,125 c~pies.30 The five-page Verlagsgutachten from Werner Liersch of 6 November 1965 is so cautious that it does not even offer the usual concluding argument in favour of publication. It is almost as if the publisher had decided to take a chance by sending in the manuscript, but wanted to protect itself from possible recriminations from the MtK. The Lektor emphasises the text's existential foundation: it is a novel of 'individuelle Konflikte' (p.3) which examines 'die Frage nach der Existenz der Menschheit' (p.l) and 'das Schicksal der Menschheit' (p.3), and looks 28Cited from Karl Corino (ed.), Die Akte Kant: 1M "Martin", die Stasi und die Literatur in Ost und West (Reinbek: RowohIt, 1995), p.160. 29Bussmann, 'Die Utopie schlligt den Takt', in Rumba, p.327. 30BArch DR1I2167. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent documents are located in this file; the references in brackets are to the pagination of individual documents. The file on Rumba stretches to forty-four pages in total.

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for 'die Bedingungen eines sinnvoll gelebten Daseins' (p.2) and the solution to 'das Problem der individuellen Existenz' (p.l) or 'das individuelle Problem der sinnvollen Existenz' (p.3). Unfortunately the hoped-for resolution is not always at hand. Of the stories of Ev and Karla, both working women, but troubled in different ways about the role of motherhood, Liersch notes: 'Die Dialektik [dieser Problematik] scheint sich nicht geniigend durchsetzen zu konnen, es bleibt die positive und mogliche Synthese aus, die andere Seite der Berufung und Erftillung der weiblichen Existenz' (p.4). This comment was deemed by the HV functionary to be worthy of a stroke of emphasis in the margin, as was Liersch's underwhelming conclusion, a plea to the HV for tolerance. The manuscript's 'shortcomings' - that is, its unconventional elements should not be overscrutinised, because the text is in essence socialist: Es [sind] nicht Fehler in konventionellem Rahmen, hierin ist ein Durchgangsstadium in der erzahlerischen Entwicklung der Autorin zu sehen, unbewaltigten Bereichen in einem Experiment, auf neue Weise einem so bedeutungsvollen Thema beizukommen, wie der Schaffung des Menschen in Liebe und Arbeit in der sozialistischen Gesellschaft. (p.S)

The VerlagsaufJengutachten, dated 30 October 1965, was provided by Horst Nalewski, who had studied with Morgner at Leipzig University (and later became a prominent Rilke scholar). His appraisal of the novel is, in contrast, so enthusiastic as to suggest a deliberate tactical manoeuvre on the part of the publisher: the Verlagsgutachten is perhaps of necessity cautious because the AufJengutachten - written first, then sent back to the publishing house to be forwarded with the manuscript to the HV - is so positive. Rather than measure the text dogmatically against a predetermined set of criteria, Nalewski responds to it empathetically. The appraisal emphasises throughout those instances where the manuscript clashes with socialist realist expectations - weg von Bitterfeld, rather than Bitterfelder Weg. Nalewski's opening is confrontational, stressing from the outset the text's rare, innovative aesthetic qualities. The musical-rhythmical structure and the mythological framework together constitute the attempt to overcome what Nalewski bluntly identifies as the 'Misere eines Gro13teils unserer jiingeren Literatur', which stems from the desire for a simplistic reflection of reality, mere Naturalism (p.l). These two elements - music and myth - also lend the work a thematic and stylistic unity despite the anti-epic fragmentation of the narrative. Morgner's language is sober, unromantic, yet full of longing; it is intellectual, but vital. The narrator is unobtrusive and non-didactic (p.3). The lack of an obvious single figure of identification is explained thus: 'Der einzelne Mensch kann

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schwerlich Reprasentant der ganzen Gesellschaft sein, vielmehr ergeben die gegensatzlichsten Typen die Reprasentanz einer Gesellschaft' (p.4). This argument, which rejects the entire fundament of the exemplary socialist hero, is met by the HV with a question mark in the margin. Where Liersch had emphasised the problematic and unresolved nature of the existential discourse, Nalewski identifies a fundamental optimism to the text, in its evocation of Eros as an 'elementare Macht gegen die Macht der Zerstorung, des Todes, der Resignation' (p.l). He concludes that the novel is 'wertvoll', 'ehrlich und parteilich-suchend', 'kritischaufbauend', and, significantly mentioned last, 'klinstlerisch' (p.5). On the basis of these two appraisals, the HV functionary Meta Borst issued the Druckgenehmigung on 4 December 1965, co-signed by Dr. Anneliese Kocialek of the HV Abteilung fur Belletristik, Kunst- und Musikliteratur. In her 'Bemerkungen' to the manuscript, also of 4 December, Borst did, however, note some of her own reservations. Sexual relations were described in too much detail; style and language frequently approached 'modernistische Spielerei' (p.2). These concerns, though, were outweighed by the following conclusion which affirms the text's fundamental ideological soundness: 'Die Hauptprobleme werden parteilich behandelt und [... ] im sozialistischen Sinne beantwortet' (p.2). Borst appends a note which seeks to explain why Morgner has changed publisher, a development which obviously aroused suspicion - although there is nothing in the file to indicate that the HV was aware that Aufbau-Verlag had rejected the manuscript two years before: 'Die Autorin ging nach meiner Kenntnis vor aHem aus personlichen Grunden (Lektor Schreck ist ihr geschiedener Mann) vom Aufbau-Verlag zum Mitteldeutschen Verlag' (pJ). Borst was in fact misinformed. Schreck and Morgner were not divorced until 20 October 1970/ 1 and it seems more likely that Morgner changed her publisher simply because AufbauVerlag had rejected her manuscript. Borst also drafted a letter to Verlagsleiter Fritz Bressau at Mitteldeutscher Verlag on 11 December 1965 to accompany the sending of the Druckgenehmigung certificate Nr. 300112/66. This letter identifies a series of problems with the manuscript: there is too much sexual detail in describing relationships which are, moreover, adulterous; interior monologue rarely leads to dialogue; Oskar Pakulat is too embittered and pessimistic; Uwe Pamitzke's reaction to the 20 th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party is too ambiguous. To resolve these difficulties, llCf. the divorce certificate in Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA), ManuskriptnachlaB Irmtraud Morgner: Verschiedenes. Autobiographisches.

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Borst suggests that a meeting be held involving the publisher, the author, and two representatives of the HV: herself and Dr. Eberhard GUnther. This discussion took place on 20 December 1965 and appeared to allay Borst's doubts. In a document entitled 'Betr: Druckgenehmigung flir den Roman Rumba auf einen Herbst von Irmtraud Morgner', dated 22 December 1965, she concludes: Nach dieser Aussprache und nach grUndlicher Oberlegung der vom II. Plenum unserer Partei gegebenen Hinweise bin ich fur die Aushandigung der Druckgenehmigung an den Verlag. [... ] Meine ursprUnglichen Bedenken gegenUber diesem Roman (siehe Bemerkungen vom 4.12.65) stelle ich u.a. [... ] nach dem Gesprlich mit der Autorin zurUck.

Borst now sees Rumba as in essence an 'Antikriegsbuch' which articulates 'Konflikte unseres sozialistischen Lebens'; as they overcome these conflicts, 'die Heiden bleiben nicht einsam und resignieren nicht', but have instead a 'lebensbejahende Auffassung und Haltung' (p.l). Nonetheless, though the censor's ideological concerns appear to have been satisfactorily answered, final approval is still deferred and a further meeting proposed for early January 1966. Certain stylistic amendments suggested by the HV need to be discussed: 'Ich meine, daB doch einzelne "Stellen", blieben sie unverandert, zu Kritiken AniaB geben k6nnten, die evtl. ein Fehlurteil tiber den gesamten Roman hervorrufen ki::innten' (p.2). Furthermore, Borst is still not happy about the chapter 'Schalmaien-Twist' [sic]. The manuscript was, though, by now caught up in the maelstrom of the aftermath of the 11th Plenum of the ZK der SED in December 1965, which had identified and stigmatised a growing tendency towards pessimism, nihilism and individualism in the cultural field. 32 Following the 11 th Plenum, the Minister of Culture had asked the HV in letters of 9 and 10 December 1965: 'Welche in Vorbereitung befindlichen Programme bzw. BUcher [... ] usw. halten bei nochmaliger Prtifung den Prinzipien unserer. Kulturpolitik; nicht stand und mtissen deshalb zurUckgezogen werden?' In its response, the HV identified Rumba as 'problematisch,.33 HV policy then becomes a mixture of confusion, contradiction and accusation. Borst's decision to confirm publication on the basis of the 20 December meeting was sent to Abteilungsleiter 32Cf. GUnter Agde (ed.), Kahlschlag: Das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965. Studien und Dokumente (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1991). 33These documents are not in the Rumba file and are cited here from Barck, 'Ein verschwundenes Roman-Manuskript von Irmtraud Morgner', in "}edes Buch ein Abenteuer", p.275.

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Giinther. Though he had been present at that meeting and might therefore have been expected to share Borst's opinion, Giinther in fact overrules the decision she had reached in the document of 22 December in a handwritten note of his own dated 24 December: Ich habe das Manuskript auf die Bitte der Genossin Borst gelesen, naehdem die Druekgenehmigung bereits untersehrieben war. reh halte den Roman von I. Morgner fUr so problematiseh, daB ihn mehrere Genossen in der Abteilung ansehen und diskutieren soBten. Die Druekgenehmigung wird dem Verlag nicht ausgehiindigt!

Giinther's self-exoneration that he had only now actually read the manuscript was then qualified by Borst, evidently unhappy at being made the scapegoat for the allegedly overhasty decision and ensuing confusion. Annotating Giinter's note on 28 December, she writes: 'Dr. Gii. wurden Teile des Ms. in der Zeit bis zum 4.12.65 vorgelegt [... ] er konnte das ges. Ms. erst bis zum 20.12 lesen.' There is no evidence that the meeting planned for the start of January went ahead; the manuscript was presumably still being subjected to the collective study within the department announced by Giinther. On 2 February 1966 the HV noted three possible further Auj3engutachter for the manuscript - Werner Neubert, Elisabeth Simons, Werner Herden but there is no indication that the HV actually pursued this option. The following document, dated 4 February, rendered such a measure superfluous anyway and was the death knell for the manuscript's chances of publication. In eight pages of handwritten notes, presumably the result of the departmental deliberations, Borst systematically lists the text's ideological and aesthetic shortcomings, as she revisits earlier concerns more emphatically and rescinds earlier arguments definitively. For Borst, the novel's thematic concerns - the treatment of 'our problems' in 'our society' in 'our time', the attempt to place individual conflicts in a social context, and to enquire as to the conditions under which the socialist personality can develop - are still acknowledged as 'wertvoll' and 'wiirdig'. The few fantastical moments find unexpected favour as evidence of a 'bunte Phantasie, die zur Bereicherung der Palette unserer Liter. beitragen konnte' (p.8). However, the artistic realisation is otherwise unacceptable. Too many details are 'miBverstiindlich' (p.7). The language is 'uns zunachst fremdartig und ausgesprochen intellektuell' (p.2), 'diister und intellektualistisch' (p.2), 'intellektualistisch versponnen, mitunter nicht ganz nachvollziehbar' (p.8). The mythological framework is questionable: '1st das fUr unsere sozialist. Literatur legitim?' (p.2). There are numerous ideological difficulties, notably 'eine Anhaufung negativer Stimmungen,

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pessimistischer Lebensauffassungen' (p.7). Entirely contradicting her earlier assessment given in the document of 22 December, Borst now identifies one of the particular weaknesses of the novel to be the apparent isolation of the characters: Aile Figuren setzen sich in diesem Buch mit tragischen Kontlikten z. groBten Teil allein auseinander - das ist ein wesentIicher Mangel in diesem Buch hier kann berechtigt eingewandt werden, daB es skeptische Tendenzen hat widerspricht das evtl. doch nicht dem Prinzip unserer soz. Ges.? (p.4)

Another shortcoming is the ambiguous nature of the conflict resolution: 'Die Beantwortung nach dem Sinn des Lebens ist nicht im herkommlichen Sinne eindeutig positiv' (p.2). For example, Ev's and Maud's affirmative positions are reached with male partners who are married: 'VerstaBe gegen die sozial. Moral u. Ethik' (p.7). The problematic relationship between the older and younger generation dramatised by the 'Pakuleit' [sic] chapter is apparently unrepresentative: '[Es] widerspricht der Tendenz in unserem Leben. 1st das nicht ein "Einzelfall", "untypisch"?' (p.6). The question is raised as to whether the entire 'Schalmeien-Twist' chapter should not simply be excised altogether: 'Zu dem Kapitel [... ] gibt es die starksten ideol. und kompositor. Schwachen' (p.S). The analysis concludes with the surprisingly unobtrusive criticism (in the form of a nigh illegible annotation) of the text's handling of the Stalinism issue: 'Die Autorin ist mit d. Problem XX P.T. nicht fertig etwas konfuse Andeutung des Problems Stalin' (p.8). Scepticism and pessimism, individualism and subjectivism, intellectualism and immorality: the manuscript is guilty of all the relevant trangressions; its fate is sealed. The writer has fallen into disfavour with the moral and ideological guardians of the HV and now becomes subject to their favoured additional disciplinary measure: silence. There is no evidence that the HV made any further attempt to communicate with the author. The final document in the Rumba file is a letter from Morgner to the HV dated 20 February 1966, following a meeting with Gunther and Borst on 15 February which Morgner had to request so as to discover the reasons for what she calls in the letter 'die Verweigerung der Druckgenehmigung'. Appended to this letter is a 'Stellungnahme' dated IS February 1966 and copies of which Morgner also sent to Mitteldeutscher Verlag, to the Minister of Culture, to the Parteileitung, the Leitung and the Vorstand of the Deutsche Schriftstellerverband, and to the Abteilung Kultur im ZK der SED. Both the letter and the statement are signed 'Irmtraud Schreck'. The statement constitutes a lucid and forthright defence of the text's artistic and ideological

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integrity. It is also a determined attack, courageous in its directness, on the perversions of cultural-political dogma. It is the only example to come to light hitherto of Morgner addressing her concerns in this way to the GDR's highest cultural-political authority, Kurt Hager. The fact that she did not receive a reply may well have discouraged her from employing such a strategy in the future. Morgner argues that the grounds for refusing to grant publishing permission are 'nicht stichhaltig und gefahrlich' (p.l). First and foremost, Morgner stresses the contemporary importance of her 'Antikriegsbuch', set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and relevant now given the Vietnam conflict. Rejecting the argument that the text focuses excessively on the inner lives of the various individuals, rather than demonstrating how social conditions provide the basis for the resolution of individual problems, she asserts: Die Starke einer gesellschaftlichen Ordnung sind die Menschen, die diese Ordnung hervorgebracht haben und die diese Ordnung hervorbringt, erzieht. Es gibt keinen besseren Spiegel fUr die Kraft einer gesellschaftlichen Ordnung als die Kraft ihrer Individuen. (pp.1-2)

Besides, for all of her characters 'ist Hingst eine Realitlit, daB dem Sozialismus die Zukunft gehort. Auf dieser Ebene bewegen sie sich' (p.2). The accusation that the text represented a generational shift, articulating the new, anti-Stalinist (and consequently anti-Ulbricht) 'Miindigkeit' of the thirties generation - the 'children of the revolution', as it were - is strongly countered: Die Unterstellung, es sei ein Buch der "WachabI6sung" - und zwar im schlechtesten Sinne - verweise ich entschieden zurtick. Wie ich mich tiberhaupt dagegen verwahre, mein Buch auf skeptische, miBtrauische Weise nach Belegen fUr derartige Behauptungen zu durchsuchen [... ] Ein Kunstwerk ist kein Rechenexempel. Ein nicht geneigter Leser wird immer irgendeine Angriffsflache tinden, wenn er lange genug sucht und tiber demagogische Fahigkeiten verftigt. (p.2)

In an argument which in the context has to dare even to state the obvious, the aesthetic demands of the day are scorned and the productive, interactive role of the reader is defended: Die immer wieder vorgebrachte Forderung nach Totalitat, mit der man praktisch jedes Buch angreifen kann, ist eine unktinstlerische Forderung: selbst ein groB angelegter Gesellschaftsroman spiegelt nur einen winzigen Ausschnitt der Realit!!t. Mein Buch ist zudem kein groB angelegter Gesellschaftsroman. Er steht in einer gesellschaftlichen Realitat. Der Leser lebt in dieser Realit!!t. Also ist diese gesellschaftliche Totale immer gegenw!lrtig. In einem Buch werden Schicksale einzelner Menschen

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This is Morgner's first formulation, at a notably early date, of an aesthetic creed expressed most prominently in Beatriz, as we shall see. Morgner concludes her statement with an unambiguous indictment of the current cultural-political climate, whilst at the same time emphasising her own loyalty to the cause - although what exactly this can be in such a climate is unclear: Die Kritik, die gegen meinen Roman vorgebracht wird, ist nicht konstruktiv, sondem verreilknd. Die Unterstellungen empfinde ich als eine Verletzung meiner Ehre als Genosse. Ich glaube, daB sie Ausdruck von Verzerrungen und Entstellungen der kulturpolitischen Linie der Partei sind, die uns objektiv schaden. Ich bin fest Uberzeugt, daB ich mit meinem Roman der Partei und damit unserer Sache nUtze. (p.3)

This is the final document in the file. There is no documentation as to the reaction of the HV to the 15 February meeting, no response to Morgner's letter and her accompanying statement, no comment as to when and by whom the ultimate decision not to publish was taken - and no indication as to the final physical fate of the manuscript. In response to my queries in this regard, Meta Borst wrote to me: 'Bei allen Versuchen, mich zu erinnem, zu "Rumba auf einen Herbst" habe ich keine naheren Ausklinfte parat,.34 The last words in the file - they scarcely constitute a document - are in the form of an undated handwritten note on a tom-off scrap of paper, initialed by Meta Borst: 'Original-Ms. hat Gen. Haid (etwa seit 20.3.66).' It is peculiar that the stellvertretender Minister fur Kultur and head of the HV, Bruno Haid, should begin to busy himself with the manuscript a full month after the decision not to publish had apparently been taken within the censorship authority. Moreover, since this note is not dated, it is impossible to say for how long the manuscript had been in his possession. Although Haid was a Kontaktperson of the MfS, there is hitherto no evidence of Stasi involvement in the Rumba story. This may be in part because the documentary trail is hard to follow. MfS involvement would never be noted in MfK files and, since he was a Kontaktperson, Haid's information was strewn across innumerable Stasi files rather than being collected in just one. Moreover, the file kept on Mitteldeutscher Verlag contains only documents from the years 1979 to 1985/ 5 Eberhard 34Letter to me from Meta Borst, 2 September 1997. 35BStU, AuBenstelle (ASt.) Halle, Sachakte 447.

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GUnther was recruited as IMS "Richard" only in 1975, when he was Verlagsleiter at Mitteldeutscher Verlag,16 and the file of his superior, Anneliese Kocialek, IMK "Erika" from 1954 and co-signatory with Borst of the Druckgenehmigung certificate of 4 December 1965, does . not refer to Rumba at all. 37 The last reference to the manuscript discovered thus far in the archives comes in a letter of 17 May 1966 located in a general file from the MfK . .Kocialek confirms to Gerhard Henniger, First Secretary of the Deutsche Schriftstellerverband, that the Druckgenehmigung for Rumba will not be issued - the manuscript is 'ideologisch nicht vertretbar' - and she asks for his support in further discussions with the author: Gemeinsam mit den Vertretern des Mitteldeutschen Verlages nahmen Genosse Dr. Giinther und Genossin Borst [... ] an zwei Diskussionen mit der Autorin Irmtraud Morgner teiL Genossin Morgner hat den Kern der am Manuskript geiibten Kritik noch nicht akzeptiert. Wir schlagen vor, im Deutschen Schriftstellerverband gemeinsam mit Vertretern des Mitteldeutschen Verlages und der Hauptverwaltung eine Diskussion mit der Autorin zu fiihren. Das Manuskript stellt der Mitteldeutsche Verlag zur Verfugung. 38

There is no reference to this development in the Rumba file and no indication as to what, if anything, had taken place in the three months since the last meeting with Morgner. It is unclear if this subsequent meeting in the DSV went ahead. Although the suggestion here is that the manuscript had by now been returned by the HV to the publisher, it seems unlikely that Mitteldeutscher Verlag would be then unable to return it to the author. Such a meeting in the DSV could not be initiated solely by the HV, but would need the approval of a higher authority: the Abteilung Kultur im ZK der SED. Perhaps the manuscript ended up here? Dr. GUnther has written to me with his thoughts: Ich vermute nun: B. Haid las das Ms. [... ], erkannte die Brisanz der Angelegenheit und gab das Ms. inoffiziell an den Minister f. Kultur oder direkt an die zustiindige Abteilung im Apparat des ZK der SED weiter mit der Bitte urn eine Riicksprache. Dort hat es zumindest Lucie Pflug, die fur die Anleitung der HV zustiindig war, gelesen. Ohne ein Placet von dort war eine Entscheidung dariiber, daB im Schriftstellerverband eine 'klarende' Aussprache mit einem immerhin gro13eren Kreis von Teilnehmern stattfinden so lite, normalerweise nicht moglich. Ob es dazu kam oder warum es evtL nicht dazu kam, wei13 ich nicht. Zumindest erinnere ich mich nicht mehr. Es 36BStU, ASt Halle, XV 1778170. 37BStU, ZA, AIM 8800/91. 38BArch DRlI1815.

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The only concrete reference to Rumba in Kurt Hager's ZK Buro, however, appears to be an undated evaluation of the manuscript written by Gunther in which he identifies the book's principal weakness as the author's failure to see that 'unsere gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit nicht nur jene Konflikte, sondern vor allem die Kraft zu deren Uberwindung hervorbringt', a failure which is deemed to be evidence of 'der noch ungenugenden Einsicht der Autorin in die Gesetzmafiigkeiten des sozialistischen Lebens' .40 Whether the manuscript was genuinely lost due to bureaucratic incompetence or was actually confiscated thus remains a mystery. However, the loss of a manuscript in such circumstances and apparently without trace cannot but seem sinister. Morgner's attempts to recover it proved futile, as did my efforts to uncover its fate. All she was left with was 'ein stellenweise kaum leserlicher Durchschlag' .41

39Letter to me from Dr. Eberhard GUnther, 2 November 1997. 4°SAPMO-BArch DY30 IV A2/9.04/489 [unpaginated]. 41Bussmann, 'Die Utopie schlligt den Takt', in Rumba, p.332.

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Rumba auf einen Herbst was a work of aesthetic emancipation unique to its time in the GDR. Morgner's rejection of socialist realism and rediscovery of modernism proved too provocative for the censor. Instead of having a positive influence on the wider literary discourse in the country, the novel was overwhelmed by the more powerful consequences of the 11th Plenum of the ZK der SED. The ramifications for Morgner's career over at least the next half-decade were significant. The degree to which the banning of the novel was a traumatic caesura in the author's career is suggested by the comments she made in an interview nearly twenty years later in 1984. Morgner refused the invitation to become retrospectively nonchalant about the unwelcome tum of events: whilst Goethe was correct to suggest that 'gewisse Widerstande' might prove productive for the writer, the same could not be said of such 'enorme Widerstande' as when 'Literatur nicht als Literatur verstanden wurde, sondern als Anleitung im Stile von Instruktionen oder Hausmitteilungen zum praktischen Umorganisieren von etwas'. She put the blame for such wilful misapprehension on 'Provinzialismus'. I Rumba had been enabled by the writer's desire to influence culturalpolitical discourse and, problematically, reflect the reality of the GDR. Following the 11 th Plenum, Morgner saw little hope for her manuscript. She expressed her utter dejection in a letter which reveals the extent of the existential crisis caused her by the Rumba affair: 'Ich sehe flir mein Buch nicht mehr viel Chance, ich sehe uberhaupt nicht vie I Chancen flir mich in diesen elenden Breiten, ich bene ide den Emigranten Ovid, man muBte seine Koffer packen und abhauen und in einer menschlicheren Gegend arbeitend abwarten, bis die Schlachterei vorbei ist, aber die Zaune sind zu hoch'.2 The rejection of the manuscript and its subsequent disappearance led to a shattering loss of faith in a system whose I'Der weibliche Ketzer heiBt Hexe', in Gerhardt, p.64. 2Letter from Irmtraud Morgner to 'Lieber H.', 29 November 1965, in Rumba, pp.336-37 (p.336).

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capriciousness one might have been able to ignore before, but had now experienced at first hand: 'Ich bin hier geboren, dies ist me in Land, ich bin daran gefesselt in HaB-Liebe, ich bin nicht das, was die Zeitungen von diesem Land abbilden, aber ich schame mich, [... ] und am meisten vor meinen Freunden im Ausland,.3 The bond to the state is now more a chain, one's nationality less a matter of political allegiance than an accident of birth. These are emotions born of the recognition of an impotence that is both political and creative: 'Mit dieser Art HaB kann man nicht schreiben,.4 Moreover, there were immediate practical consequences, including the loss of income on a book deemed unfit for publication and a yearlong struggle to obtain the return of copyright and the cancellation fee to which she was entitled. 5 More damaging still was Morgner's unsought status as a pariah on the fringes ofthe literary establishment: '1m letzten Jahr [1966] nur Absagen nach monatelangen Lagerungen - ein Verbot spricht sich schnell rum'. 6 In 1968 Eulenspiegel Verlag decided not to submit Die wundersamen Reisen Gustavs des Weltfahrers for publication. Laconically going through the motions of filling in progress reports for the Schriftstellerverband, Morgner barely concealed her bitterness. The entry· for 1966 under the heading 'Neue Veroffentlichungen' indicates 'So gut wie gar nichts'; for 1967 she tells of work 'an einem romanartigen Buch,.7 This was presumably Hochzeit in Konstantinopel. Here, in the light of her last novel, Rumba auf einen Herbst, Morgner perhaps intends an ironic pun on the meaning of 'artig'. Prior to Rumba, the author had been an occasional newspaper columnist and the subject of interviews for literary journals, and had been feted as one of the burgeoning talents of a new literary generation. Following the banning of that novel, Morgner was not to speak to the GDR populace in any form other than her literary texts until the Honecker years. It is therefore exclusively to these literary texts that we must look for the author's testimony on the difficult interim years between Rumba auf einen Herbst, which should have ensured her literary breakthrough, and 3Letter from Irmtraud Morgner to 'lieber Paul', 6 January 1966, in Rumba, pp.337-40 (pp.337-38). The editor Bussmann comments that the addressee is Paul Wiens. 4Ibid., p.340. 5Barck, 'Ein verschwundenes Roman-Manuskript', in "Jedes Buch ... ", p.283. 6Letter from Irmtraud Schreck to Paul Wiens, 10 January 1967, in SAdK, Paul-WiensArchiv Nr.2465, Bd I. 7SAdK, Archiv des SV, Personalakte Irmtraud Morgner.

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Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz naeh Zeugnissen ihrer Spieljrau Laura, the work which finally brought her to the attention of more than a few cognoscenti nearly a decade later. This chapter looks initially at Hoehzeit in Konstantinopel (1968), Gauklerlegende (1970) and Die wundersamen Reisen Gustavs des Weltfahrers (1972). Despite their actual publication dates, we can usefully think of these as Morgner's 'late-sixties texts' since, with the exception of the changes demanded by ·the censor of Gustav when it was resubmitted in the early 1970s, this largely describes their period of composition. These texts have been almost completely passed over by literary scholarship in favour of Beatriz and Amanda. At best, these earlier works have been seen as stepping stones on the way to the later, more significant ones, which in tum are then seen to provide a kind of retrospective justification for the shorter Vbungen. The absence of any more thorough examination of the internal dynamics of the earlier works has meant that their richness and sophistication has been largely overlooked. Finally, we shall tum to Beatriz, which, despite the fact that parts of the text date back as far as the early 1960s, is in its totality a product of the initially more tolerant cultural-political climate under Honecker. The Bequest of "Rumba auf einen Herbst" Since the publication of Rumba auf einen Herbst in 1992, it has been possible to examine· the relationship between that work and those that followed, which were written in the author's very different, more difficult circumstances after Rumba had been banned. Rumba shows that Morgner was already redesigning her aesthetic approach in the early 1960s. The innovations of the late 1960s can, then, be seen in part as a logical progression. Nonetheless, the significant differences between the late-sixties texts and what had preceded them make a substantial case for the argument that the non-publication of Rumba was an important contributory influence on the development of Morgner's aesthetic. One of the most underrated aspects of Morgner's writing is its experimentation with form and the writer's discovery of a fundamentally different internal structural 'law' for each work. In 1984, Morgner put it thus: 'Jeder Stoffverlangt, das Gesetz zu finden, das im Stoff steckt, das Gesetz fUr das Experiment,.8 She went on to identify the law which had governed Rumba: a'Der weibliche Ketzer heiBt Hexe', in Gerhardt, p.61.

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Die Wahl der offenen Fonn erfolgt [... ] nicht aus Formschwache oder Faulheit, sondern aus Fonnzwang, Trieb nach Strenge, nach Dichte. [... ] Strenge [kann] nur im Detail versucht werden. Daher mein Bestreben, Prosa aufs Wort zu machen und zum Beispiel durch vielfliltige Verbindungen von Motiven ein festes Geriist zu bauen. Dieser komplizierte Bau muB dem Leser im einzelnen nicht immer erkennbar sein. Aber fUr den, der schreibt, ist diese Art von Strenge notwendig. [... ] Hochzeit in Konstantinopel war der zweite Versuch, sich einem Experiment zu stellen, rigoroser als Rumba auf einen Herbst. 9

However, such formal experimentation was a heretical practice in a literary climate in which ascribing meaning to form was considered nigh counter-revolutionary. For all that recurring themes and self-citation may indicate a degree of consistency throughout the author's work, the considerable formal differences mean that no one Morgner text can be said to be quite like another. We shall see below the significance of the particular structure of each of the respective texts. Suffice to say for now that what the late-sixties texts particularly have in common with Rumba is the predilection for formal tightness and the imposition of a governing architecture which offers coherence to what might otherwise appear to be a fragmented narrative. Whilst the formal principles may be familiar from Rumba, the latesixties texts differ substantially from the earlier work in their expression. The significant developments in Morgner's style were induced by, and were crafted as an aesthetic response to, the non-publication of a text which had sought to work in a quite different manner. By means of a heightened poetic realism, Rumba articulated something of a snapshot, a Bestandsaufnahme, a day in the life of a variety of East German individuals in 1962 across the gender and generation divide. Whereas Rumba did not eschew overt socio-critical engagement, the later texts are altogether more circumspect. This begins with their (dis)location. Hochzeit in Konstantinopel is set in transit: to, in and from a resort hotel- as in 'Blu'es', only here'by the sea rather than a lake. We are also further from home, somewhere between the real Dalmatian coast of what was then Yugoslavia and 'Constantinople' - in a game which recalls the waiter in 'Blues' being referred to as 'Adlonis' by Ev, Bele renames the resort 'Konstantinopel' after their tour guide Konstantin. JO We return to the GDR for occasional stories within stories whose topography situates them in East Berlin, or for reminiscence of another seaside holiday, spent 9 Ibid.,

p.65.

IOInntraud Morgner, Hochzeit in Konstantinopel (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1968; repro 1986), p.8.

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in 'SchloB W.' on the Baltic coast. Gustav, meanwhile, merely begins and ends his incredible world travels in his - and Morgner's Heimatstadt of Chemnitz-Hilbersdorf. Hilbersdorf might appear relatively idyllic, were it not for the fact that the happy homecoming of the fantastic voyager is a staple ingredient of the genre with which Morgner is playing and that her tongue is therefore never far from her cheek. The nature of the genesis of Gauklerlegende gives it a special status. It was written as a commission for a publisher wanting a textual accompaniment to an illustrative book featuring the Amstadt Puppenmuseum. Nonetheless, although Amstadt is mentioned by name, the location of the 'Konferenzstadt' itself remains a mystery throughout. The late-sixties texts prefer an allusive, and sometimes even too elusive, mode of expression. Whereas Rumba engages in a more direct manner, these texts are indirectly satirical - and satirical more often than comic. The exuberance of Gustav der Weltfahrer is the exception rather than the rule. The texts often shine with an intellectual brilliance derived from concision, laconic paradoxes and rhetorical Pointe. The pervasive mood, however, is one of melancholy, attributable perhaps to the author's political and existential discomfiture. The texts are also emphatically non-didactic and non-partisan in any socialist realist sense. They work instead by a process of intratextual association, wherein meaning cannot be ascertained cumulatively as one reads, but rather retrospectively when the text is reviewed as a whole. Both of these aspects bear some resemblance to the compositional principle of Rumba. However, in Rumba, the thematic emphasis on rhythm and flow is expressed syntactically by long, non-subdivided chapters and occasional lengthy unpunctuated sentences. Here, in contrast, the preference is for short texts, whether self-contained prose pieces (Hochzeit in Konstantinopel), individual chapters (Gustav der Weltfahrer) or staccato sections (Gauklerlegende). These sub-divisions give rise to a Verfremdungseffekt which keeps at bay the emotional involvement of Rumba. In its place we have a tightly controlled and consciously artificial environment conducive to offering the reader an intellectual challenge. The meditation within Hochzeit in Konstantinopel and Gustav der Weltfahrer (but not Gauklerlegende - in this sense too we see its special status) of various facets of the relationship between author, text and reader lends further support to the notion that the non-publication of Rumba caused Morgner to reappraise her aesthetic. The closest Morgner's texts had come previously to this kind of introversion or selfreflexivity was Ev's interior monologue in Rumba, when she recalled

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Hadrich's dismissal of her designs as 'zu dekadent' and ironically uttered the pejorative designation for the modernist aesthetic which the novel exemplifies. In the late-sixties texts, self-reflexivity goes further and is less introverted too. Not only are questions of writing conditions, external expectations, and self-censorship addressed, not only are the marks borne by the texts as a result of intrusion from third parties openly identified, but the relationship between author and reader is dramatised on the page and becomes a fundamental structural principle of the text. The programmatic illustration of the didactic function of literature seen in Das Signal steht auf Fahrt when Martha Hubner reads Gorky is by now a distant memory. If Rumba auf einen Herbst sought to rediscover a stifled modernist tradition, the late-sixties texts are influenced by more disparate models and antecedents which were eccentric in terms of the GDR's prescribed heritage: biblical, medieval, Romantic. Moreover, Morgner's late-sixties texts exist ultimately more independently of their models. Although the narrative framework of both Hochzeit in Konstantinopel and Gustav der Weltfahrer is lifted from the Arabian Nights, the flavour of these texts is further removed from the model than was 'Blues' from Der Zauberberg or 'Cantus firmus' from Kafka. There is no literary precursor for the amalgamation in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel of the diary form with a miscellany of archly constructed short texts such that the two narrative levels interweave and interact. Meanwhile, the sophisticated fusion and cross-fertilisation of text and image in Gauklerlegende could be termed avant-garde. The eccentric nature of the texts' literary antecedents and of the texts themselves in terms of literary precedent is wholly in keeping with, and in part arises from, Morgner's own position on the margins of cultural discourse in the GDR at the time. In the following, we shall consider Hochzeit in Konstantinopel, Gustav der Weltfahrer, and lastly Gauklerlegende. Although this order is not chronological in terms of actual publication dates and although Gustav der Weltfahrer was not finalised until the early 1970s, it allows us to consider Hochzeit in Konstantinopel and Gustav der Weltfahrer in terms of their roughly contemporaneous genesis in the period immediately following the Rumba affair. It will therefore establish them as Morgner's first reaction to this affair. Gauklerlegende, meanwhile, deserves separate attention, since the circumstances of its composition are so different. Finally, we shall tum to Beatriz, which we shall see not so much as the culmination of the groundwork laid by the late-sixties work, but as a new departure, encouraged and enabled by very different political and personal circumstances.

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"Hochzeit in Konstantinopel" In 1963 Morgner published a short text in the journal Das Magazin. 'Konopke' tells of a girl's holiday flirtation at a ski resort - an altogether kitsch affair, since verschollen from Morgner's bibliography and in some ways indeed best forgotten. I I It is, though, an isolated example of the successful publication of a short text outside a compendium for AufbauVerlag, which had published the first version of 'Notturno' in 1964 and 'Kopfstand' in 1965. This latter text was subsumed into Hochzeit in Konstantinopel along with, for example, the 'GroBmutter-Variationen', which appeared in the Aufbau-Verlag Almanach of 1967. 12 As early as 1962 Morgner had lamented the practical difficulties she experienced with short texts. Instead of offering grants to young writers, she had argued, it would be better if the state were to give greater financial support to literary journals, thus providing writers with more publication possibilities since 'Erzahlungen und Gedichte nehmen Zeitungen und Verlage nicht gern,.J3 Her response to the interviewer's protestations to the contrary is a curious non sequitur: 'Je mehr der Sozialismus ausreift, desto schwerer wird es, echte Kurzgeschichten zu schreiben. Antagonistische Widerspriiche werden seltener.' Moreover, it is so inconsistent with Morgner's own developing literary practice that one suspects her real response was subject to some creative editing. In a later interview of 1971 before an anonymous committee of members of the Schriftstellerverband, Morgner explained her preference for short texts: compression - 'PreBluft' - and minimalist precision can say more, and more successfully, than (en)forced attempts at epic totality.14 PostHochzeit, Morgner was more explicit than in 1962 when asked by the committee to indicate publishers' reactions to her short texts: Sie sind relativ geneigt, weil ich Ensemble [sic] von kurzer Prosa anbiete, mit einem durchglingigen Handlungsband, wodurch die Arbeiten wenigstens nach dem dicken Ideal (Roman) riechen und von Werbung und Vertrieb auch so losgeschlagen werden. Obrigens leicht, Erziihlsammlungen, die nicht in diesem idealischen Geruch stehen, sollen schwerlich verkauflich sein. llIrmtraud Morgner, 'Konopke: Eine romantische Liebesgeschichte', Das Magazin, 2 (1963),16-18. 12For details, see Bibliography, I1(b)(i) and (ii). l3Ebert, 'Negatives Musterbeispiel', Sonntag, 14.10.1962. 14Irmtraud Morgner, 'Antworten auf Fragen zu kurzer Prosa', in SAdK, Archiv des SV, Nr. 394: Vorstandssitzungen, Bd. II: 1971.

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She concluded: 'Meine kurze Prosa kann ich einzeln kaum, fast nicht verkaufen'. Morgner did not have the reputation of a Glinter Kunert. 15 These remarks suggest that the basic form of Hochzeit in Konstantinopel, namely short texts interwoven with the diary 'plot', was born of necessity. 'Konopke', meanwhile, shows that Morgner was writing short texts in the early sixties. In other words, Morgner did not first discover this means of expression post-Rumba. Rather, it came then to appear more attractive and a refinement in technique occurred. As Morgner's circumstances within the GDR became less favourable, she was obliged to adapt her writing to suit the monopoly desires of state publishers looking to work within strict guidelines. There was no incentive for them to invest paper, and risk, in her contrary snippetry. Before examining how the diary relates to the short texts - a relationship more sophisticated than merely providing a motivation for the stories through reference to the Scheherezade model - we should first look at the short texts themselves. The novel contains twenty-one short texts. The reason for including twenty-one texts in the first place is because the holiday lasts three weeks. Or perhaps one should rather understand the author's desire to include precisely these twenty-one texts to have determined the duration of the holiday and therefore of the diary too. In the genesis of Hochzeit in Konstantinopel, it appears that the diary was the last element to be completed. From the NachlafJ we can ascertain the following dates for the completion of. certain of the short texts: 'Begegnung mit einem Faun' [sic]: 18119.3.1964; 'Kopfstand': 22.3.1965, 'Gericht': 26.2.1966, 'April': 22.4.1966; 'Wie ich einen totlachte' (later renamed 'Das Duell'): 21.6.1966; 'Saldo': 23.9.1966; 'GroBmutter-Geschichten': October 1966; 'Flir die Katz': 18.2.1967; 'Himmelbett': 5.3.1967; 'Wie die Hauser gebaut wurden': 11.5.1967; 'Die Wanne': 19.5.1967; 'Sternstunden': 26.5.1967. The remaining short texts are undated. The diary text, however, is dated 21.10.1967. 16 An analysis of the position of the short texts within the novel reveals something of the author's unobtrusive attention to structural design. For the purposes of providing an overview, the texts can be divided into the following groups according to their theme. The first group contains five texts which offer melancholy perspectives on male-female relationships 15 Though she admired him as a writer - see 'Vexierbild: Irmtraud Morgner iiber Giinter Kunert', in Liebes- und andere Erkldrungen: Schriftsteller uber Schriftsteller, ed. by Annie Voigtliinder (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1972), pp.201-0S.

16In DLA, ManuskriptnachlaB Irmtraud Morgner, "Hochzeit in Konstantinopel. Roman" and Konvolut Geschichten.

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fleeting utopian moments, wistful reminiscence of erotic bliss, a temporary overcoming of existential isolation, the sense of impermanence: 'Schattenspiel', 'Das Hotel', 'Faungesicht', 'Gericht', 'Wie mir ein Orden geliehen wurde'. A second group contains six texts which treat female experience independently of men: 'Himmelbett', 'Hollenfahrt', 'April', 'Wie die Lauben abgerissen wurden', 'Wie die Hauser gebaut wurden' and 'WeiBes Ostern', a text about childbirth in which the implicit male-female relationship is conspicuously not the focus of attention. A third group of five texts recalls (auto)biographical and family history: 'Die Wanne', 'Wie meine GroBmutter starb', 'Wie meine GroBmutter lebte', 'Wie meine GroBmutter glaubte', 'Sternstunden'. The final group contains four texts which we shall call 'programmatic', implying not that they are predictable or formulaic, but that they encapsulate various aspects of what might be termed the novel's Programm. These texts meditate on art and aesthetics, poets and scientists, the constraints of bourgeois morality and the thrill of defying it: 'Das Duell', 'Filr die Katz', 'Kopfstand' and 'Pferdekopf', the only one of the above texts that is not a first person narrative. The one text that has not been grouped in the above scheme is 'Saldo'. It is the odd one out: a realist narrative in the third person telling of Oskar P.'s visit to his wife's grave. It is both thematically and stylistically distant from the novel's only other third person narrative, 'Pferdekopf', for this gives exotic treatment to a subject close to the narrator's (and author's) intellectual home, namely aesthetics and the role of writers. It also contrasts with our third group of stories, though it shares their realism, in that these provide accounts of the narrator's (and author's) autobiographical home. The temptation is to read the Oskar P. of 'Saldo' as the Oskar Pakulat we now know from Rumba auf einen Herbst. We might then understand the inclusion of this short text in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel to be an example to precede Beatriz of Morgner smuggling extracts from a banned text into a later work. This argument is not tenable, however, since the biography of Oskar P. is slightly different from that of the Oskar Pakulat of Rumba. Although the early death of his wife is consistent with Rumba, the Oskar P. of 'Saldo' has a daughter rather than three sons. Perhaps the text derives from an early form of Pakulat before his biography was changed to enable an examination in 'Schalmeientwist' of the conflict between father and son, a new theme in Morgner's writing? This would be of interest in terms of the genesis of Rumba and would render its inclusion here an example of Morgner recycling a text which would otherwise merely have sat in a folder of preliminary notes. Its inclusion in Hochzeit

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in Konstantinopel is, however, an anomaly. Conceptually, the other short texts antecede the novel into which they then are productively subsumed. Both thematically and structurally, 'Saldo' is scarcely integrated at all. This grouping of the texts is not the only possible arrangement, since the texts do have associations which suggest possible alternative schemes; the two crucial and most obvious groups are the 'programmatic' texts and the family history texts. The reason for grouping them at all is not so as to establish any brutalist compartmentalisation of the sort of texts Morgner was writing at the time, but rather because without some basic understanding of the differences between the texts Morgner decided to include in the novel, we cannot fully understand the internal dynamics of the structure of the novel - that is, the order in which Morgner introduced these texts into the novel. They are not introduced at random; on the contrary, the order of their inclusion has its own formal design. The following table best illustrates this idea. It presents the texts in order of their appearance in the novel and groups them according to the above scheme with a shorthand designation: P = Programm; MF = male-female relations; F = female subjectivity; H = history. The alphabetical designations are then translated into a number to show more clearly how the structure of the first nine texts is initially repeated in the second nine, then abandoned: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Das Duell Schattenspiel Das Hotel Himmelbett Die Wanne Hollenfahrt April WeiJ3es astern Flir die Katz

P MF MF F H F F F P

I 2 2 3 4 3 3 3 I

---------------------------- ... ----------------------------------

10. II. 12.

GroJ3mutter starb GroJ3mutter iebte GroJ3mutter glaubte

H H H

4 4 4

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Kopfstand Faungesicht Gericht Sternstunden Wie die Lauben ... Pferdekopf Saldo Wie mir ein Orden ... Wie die Hauser. ..

P MF MF H F P ? MF F

I 2 2 4 3 I ? 2 3

-------------------------------------- ... ----- ... - .. ----------------

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Clearly, the structure is not rigidly symmetrical. The important point is that it is not arbitrary either. The 'GroBmutter' stories come, at least numerically, at the heart of the novel and divide the texts on either side into two groups of nine. The first set of nine texts opens and closes, and the second set opens, with a 'programmatic' text (1); both sets follow the opening text with two 'male-female' texts (2), before the symmetry is lost in the second set. The novel as a whole plays with framework structures and the notion of closure. Much of the beginning ofthe first diary entry on 13.6. - the journey to the resort - is mirrored and inverted in the last entry on 4.7., the journey back to East Berlin. The opening and closing sentences of the novel are identical: 'Eigentlich hatten sie nach Prag reisen wollen' .17 Morgner appears to make a sly reference here to the Czechoslovak reform-socialist project: Prague was not the most neutral city to place in two such prominent positions in a literary text in 1967/68. Interestingly, an undated draft of the text in the Nachlaft opens with the line 'Eigentlich wollten wir nach Krakow rei sen '.18 Certain individual short texts - 'Schattenspiel', 'Das Hotel', 'Hollenfahrt', 'WeiBes Ostern', 'Ftir die Katz', 'Faungesicht', 'Wie die Lauben .. .' and 'Pferdekopf - also operate according to this 'circular' principle, with the opening sentence or a central epigrammatic phrase being recalled and either repeated or modified slightly at the end. It is appropriate, therefore, that the order of the short texts, particularly in the first set of nine, strives towards this same principle and creates a mise-en-abime. The loss of symmetry towards the end of the novel has a textual justification. The premature position of 'Pferdekopf, which as a 'programmatic' text should occur as text 21 and not as text 18, can be accounted for thus: 'Paul [... J verlangte eine Geschichte tiber Konstantinopel' (p.l63). This intrusion, and the desire to meet its demands, effectively denies the narrator the freedom to determine which story should he told when. Moreover, the breakdown of Bele and Paul's relationship on their return to Berlin, as Bele jilts Paul on the way to the Standesamt and pledges her troth instead to 'das absolute Experiment' (p.l99), suggests a preference for spontaneity over rigidity, or openness over closure. As such, it is fitting that the second set of nine texts breaks with symmetrical structures and frameworks - much in the way that Bele ultimately breaks with the computational order of the scientist Paul. 17Hochzeit, p.7 and p.199. References to the novel are given hereafter in brackets. 18DLA, Manuskriptnachla13 Irmtraud Morgner, "Hochzeit in Konstantinopel. Roman": Vorstufen.

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Though short in length, the texts' composition is highly concentrated, minimalist, dicht. Yet a literary text is also, Morgner says, 'sehr abstrakt, sehr weitmaschig' .19 It appears to be a paradox, but the aesthetic intent is to use language in a way which is compressed, concise and preferably therefore associative, rather than bluntly literal. She advises: 'Langsam lesen! - So nur merkt man, ob ein Buch dicht ist, Dichtung ist'?O We saw in her reviews for NDL the early importance Morgner placed on this notion of 'Dichtung'. Because the short texts in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel do not have to be concerned with narrative - which distinguishes them from all of Morgner's other writing - and are determined to exist as a haven of possibility beyond realism, they can take unadulterated pleasure in exemplifYing such precepts. The least self-consciously stylised are the family history narratives of the grandmother, and of the narrator's childhood in the Third Reich (' Die Wanne') and the early post-war years at school ('Sternstunden'). The post-ideological, autobiographical treatment of the Third Reich - for Bele's experience is also that of Morgner - breaks new ground in GDR women's writing of the time, preceding the more substantial treatments given by Helga Schlitz's Vorgeschichten oder Schone Gegend Probstein (1970) or Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster (1976). The intention of Morgner's texts is to recount hitherto untold proletarian female histories close to home. In keeping with their theme and provincial setting, they are stylistically exceptional too with respect to the other texts in the novel, for they have a pre-modernist realism which these other texts seek precisely to avoid. 'Kopfstand' (pp.122-2S) is a good example of this other kind of text although, as a 'programmatic' text, it is perhaps more arch than others in that it consciously thematises art and aesthetics and discursively problematises the limitations of a realism which it has itself left behind. A 'Kopfstand' is an inversion, something perverse, contrary. The text questions Bitterfeld notions of industrial realism; its title already implies the critique that follows of what in the GDR context is a received literary wisdom. The following detailed analysis of this one text is intended to serve as an exemplary illustration of Morgner's aesthetic practice in other short texts in Hochzeit in Konstantinopel.

19'Der weibliche Ketzer heiBt Hexe', in Gerhardt, p.45. 2oIbid., p.58.

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The narrating 'ich' visits a strange house accompanied by Robert, whom the reader might assume to be one of the short texts' many variants on the Paul figure of the diary (others include the poet Franz in 'Schattenspiel', Jan in 'Das Hotel', Richard in 'Flir die Katz', Ben in 'Faungesicht' and Wenzel in 'Gericht'). The house is lit both within and without by many searchlights. The artificiality of the illumination already suggests a stage, and a staging. The all-penetrating 'Scheinwerfer' also imply a totalitarian environment, without secrets or grey zones. Suddenly the lights go out, and in the ghostly blackout 'benutzte [Robert] geistesgegenwartig die Gelegenheit' (p.122). But the opportunity for the private indulgence intimated here proves short-lived, as the dazzling, innumerable searchlights are soon turned on again. The illumination is so bright, 'daB wahrscheinlich in der Stadt der Strom abgeschaltet werden muBte': higher authorities have evidently decided that this performance is more important than the provision of basic everyday living standards to the populace. The lights then fall on a central object draped in a material which is drawn aside mechanically, like a stage curtain, to reveal a locomotive, 'die zischte und Funken spie und auch sonst aussah wie eine richtige Zweiundzwanziger.' It is surrounded by men, 'angezogen [... ] wie richtige Eisenbahner', who smear across their faces a substance 'wie richtiges Schmierol'. The theatricality of the setting, emphasised by the 'wie', indicates a sham dressed up as something authentic. A 'Lehrausbilder' then appears on the stage and in the 'Sprechgesang' of declamation he gives a lecture on the modus operandi of the machine. His appearance is the cue for audience participation, such as it is: [... ] aile oder doch fast aile [hatten] in dem Augenblick, da der Lehrausbilder an die Rampe getreten war, ihren Kopf aufgeschlossen und die Schreibgerllte herausgeholt. Und nun notierten sie, was der Lehrausbilder langsam zum Mitschreiben sang. (p.123)

The 'ich', however, has forgotten her 'Kopfschllissel' - a not uncommon occurrence when she goes out with Robert. So, whilst everyone else is slavishly copying down the content, she, lacking the tools to do likewise, concentrates instead on the form of the delivery. By making literal here the usual metaphorical associations of the word 'aufgeschlossen', the meaning is turned on its head: the audience of silent scribes dutifully following precepts from above is anything but open-minded; they are mere dumbshow players following their cues. The fact that the narrator has 'forgotten the key to her head' suggests that her relationship with Robert is one of transgr~ssion. She feels bad conscience.

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There is an interval. The audience does not so much leave as rush out of the room, and their cowed bad faith is made clear by Robert's subsequent ingenuous comments. There has been applause and he asks why. She asks, surprised: "'Bist du etwa dagegen?"'. He asks "'Wogegen?'" and she replies: "'Na gegen die Pause?'" She is suggesting that it is not the speaker they have been applauding, but the fact that his lecture has finished. In a nice inversion of traditional stereotypes, the man's naivety is gently mocked by the apparently worldly-wise woman, who thinks: 'Wer so was fragt, taugt wirklich hochstens fUr die Liebe.' During the interval, everyone except Robert, it seems, goes outside for a drink and a chat and a very rebellious few even play their electric guitars (pace the 11 th Plenum). This offers a moment's respite and self-indulgence (,Ich machte mir auch ein paar lustige Minuten') now that the 'Schreibgerate' have been locked away again. They return for the second half, but it is not long before Robert ushers her from her chair and drags her out. As the searchlights bathe the locomotive in brightness once more, and the 'ich' imagines the town plunged into darkness again, Robert fires up a light of his own, his cigarette lighter: 'Obgleich der Umgang mit offenem Feuer verboten war.' It becomes clear that Robert represents enlightenment of a quite different kind to the dictatorial lecturer on the stage with his arsenal of artificial trickery. For the apparently sophisticated, cynical 'ich', who is in truth still caught up in the coercive but clear logic of that particular performance, Robert is a kind of Settembrini, the would-be mentor drunkenly reproached by Hans Castorp during the Walpurgisnacht carnival: 'Da kommst du und drehst das elektrische Licht an, sozusagen' .21 The difference is that Robert's form of enlightenment emphasises intuition more than a Settembrini would like. Robert objects to the artificiality of the locomotive: it may look real, 'echt', but it is in fact made of cardboard. "'MuB es denn unbedingt echt sein?"', she asks; it was, after all, a very persuasive fake, "'wirklich tauschend ahnlich'" (my italics). "'Ich mache mir nichts aus Tauschungen'", he replies, "'eine tauschend ahnlich gemalte Lokomotive ist immer schlechter als eine echte'" (p.124). A fake remains a fake, however real it may look. He demands instead insight and precision, '''nicht dies en zeitraubenden unsinnigen Umweg tiber die, nun, Kunst.'" Here at last it is spelt out that the performance has been no ordinary lecture describing the mechanical workings of the locomotive, 21Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, in Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), III, 456.

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with the accompanying features common to any institutionalised Inszenierung of this kind, but is intended as a metaphor for art, particularly in the GDR context. The streets outside are indeed in darkness, suitable conditions for a heretical conversation, and Robert lights the way with the 'blauliche Flamme' of his cigarette lighter, which in this context is more than just a realist detail pertaining to a gas-filled lighter. It recalls the associations in Rumba auf einen Herbst with the colour blue, in the story 'Notturno' in particular, and more particularly still with the character Kai, the maverick individualist and nonconformist scientist; Robert is in fact more of a Kai-figure than a Paul-figure. Robert's prognosis is that the current means of artistic production will soon be carried out by computers, that composers will become unemployed and writers superfluous. As if symbolic of the dangers inherent in his words, Robert nearly bums his hand on the lighter's flame of inspiration. She, still in thrall, gives him a warning as to the dangers of playing with fire ("'Du verbrennst dich noch"'), which he spurns: "'Manner merken so was gar nicht.'" She cries a few tears, but not for him, not "'wegen Mannern. Ach, die Dichter, die armen ... "'. This tension between his apparently unfeeling, lucid and rational certainty and her more sensitive insecurity is what the text then proceeds to examine. The only hope for writers that Robert can offer is that they get their act together: "Es sei denn, sie raffen sich auf [... ] Wer seine Zeit mit der Nachbildung von Lokomotiven und der soziologisch reprasentativen Widerspiegelung von Bedienungspersonal vergeudet, und waren es die modemsten Modelle, der letzte Schrei, wird von der Konkurrenz der Datenverarbeitungsmaschinen aufgefressen werden. Behaupten ktinnen wird sich nur der Dichter, der der imposanten Erfindung einer elektronisch gesteuerten Lokomotive eine ebenbiirtige, das heiBt nicht vergleichbare, mithin gleichberechtigte Erfindung entgegenzustellen hat."

A realist treatment of even the most ostensibly modem subjects, even with the most supposedly modem sociological awareness, is, in the technological age, an outdated and irrelevant aesthetic practice, the last hurrah. Robert argues that, taken to its logical conclusion, contemporary aesthetic thinking will lead to a literature of science fiction incomprehensible to the layman and anyway superfluous to the expert. His prescription is somewhat different: '''Eine technisierte Welt wird den Kiinstlern abzwingen, was ihre Maschinen und Formeln reprasentieren: Phantasie'" (p.125). The humdrum task of mere representation can be achieved faster by a machine. What is required of the writer is no

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different from what is required of the scientist - namely what in patent terminology would be called 'inventive step', for which the prerequisite is imagination. In response to what she sees as Robert's rather eccentric prognosis, the 'ich' still attempts gentle, but by now less self-assured, amusement: "'Robert, du taugst wirklich hochstens fUr die Liebe.'" For the first time, she defines herself as a 'Dichter' (interestingly, not as a 'Dichterin'). Then, attempting to use her own bodily presence as contrary evidence of the existence of writers and of the longevity of tangible corporeality over abstraction, she invites him to touch her and, as it were, doubt no more: "'Hast du denn iiberhaupt schon mal einen Dichter angefaf3t? [... J Muskeln sind dauerhaft.'" Robert, though, is unimpressed: "'Wer mit Muskeln denkt, ist bereits iiberfliissig.'" She then puts to him a question which could be either genuinely soliciting enlightenment in her confusion, or else is defiantly rhetorical, as if to ask why it is to her that he is expounding this thesis when she is anyway a writer of dubious conscience: "'Und wer immerzu seinen Kopfschliissel verliert und nicht an sein Schreibzeug kann?'" His optimistic answer, heralding an age of individualism over collectivism and its attendant controls, is that "'Kopfe werden morgen nicht mehr zum Aufbewahren von Schreibgeraten benutzt, sondern zum Denken'" (p.125). He seals these portentous words as he replies to her tentative question '''Mein Kopf auch?'" with an action on which the text concludes and whose ambiguity is left fittingly unresolved: he holds his bluish flame so close to her eyes that it singes her eyelashes. It may be a marking out or branding, or perhaps a warning of the dangers inherent in following this enlightened path and of the need to be inured to pain. Also, shining a light into the eye causes a temporary blindness, which will encourage one to look within. But there is the inescapable implication too that a writer whose eyes are blind and who cannot therefore look with empathy or differentiation on a tangible world beyond fictitious invention or mathematical abstraction will be as diminished and one-dimensional as the copyists in the auditorium. Robert's role is didactic, though clearly he is not as dictatorial as the 'Lehrausbilder' on stage. Nonetheless, it is suggested that any artistic product must be a successful synthesis of both Robert's theory and the writer's (future) practice, rather than a mere playback of even his certainties. Art will be a dramatisation of possibilities, thriving on tensions. It is no accident that Robert's analysis of the limitations of realism and his implied emphasis on the artifice of all art can be read not only as

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a farewell to Bitterfeld, but more specifically as a commentary by the author on her own Das Signal steht auf Fahrt, which was conceived as a homage to the locomotive in its new socio-political context, a more or less socialist realist homily. The significant point here is that, in contrast to Rumba auf einen Herbst, which was stylised and consciously modernist, this text is self-consciously stylised and self-referential to boot: no mere academic treatise on aesthetics, it is instead an allusive enactment of its own prescription. In its' juxtaposition of texts which can appear to have very different aesthetic aims, Hochzeit in Konstantinopel teases the reader throughout with notions such as artificiality, authenticity, realism and fantasy. For example, the pre-modernist authenticity of the family history texts becomes relativised as an aesthetic judgement when the latter are read in the light of a text such as 'Kopfstand'. In other words, one is led to read them as equally self-conscious texts, only this time deliberately attempting 'authenticity' rather than artificiality. Made aware of the conscious fictionality of the short texts by their motivation as bedtime stories told by a character in a novel, the reader is perhaps tempted to understand the diary as a more 'authentic' fiction. However, the diaries, though different in tone, are likewise allusive and self-referential, and are shot through with references to the short texts such that one cannot overlook the controlling artifice. In the 'Nachbemerkung der Verfasserin', Bele H. testifies to the incursions of the publisher to whom she had sold her diary: Ich verkaufte das Tagebuch fur eine erkleckliche Summe [... ] und die Bedingung, es zu bearbeiten, einem Verlag. Die Anderungen fuhrten zu einem grammatischen Wechsel von der ersten in die dritte Person singularis. Die Geschichten wurden teilweise neu gelogen. (p.200)

Making ironic reference within the text to censorship influences exerted upon it from without will hereafter become a feature of Morgner's writing. What is interesting here is that a distinction appears to be drawn between the 'Tagebuch' on the one hand and 'Geschichten' on the other, as if the former were an authentic document and the latter merely revised versions of previously acknowledged fictions. We are not told why the publisher has required the diary's narrative voice to be changed to the third person, and neither Morgner's Nachlaft nor the Aufbau-Verlag archive reveals the actual degree of revision demanded by the publisher. We must suppose that it was in order to introduce a level of distance and objectivity into a text which would otherwise (with the exception of the short texts 'Pferdekopf and 'Saldo') be written exclusively from a subjective first person perspective. However, it is a cosmetic measure,

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for the third person narrative voice here is not the impartial, omniscient narrator of Ein Haus am Rand der Stadt. The diary profits as a result from a blurring of boundaries between the authentic and the fictional, between the apparently objective third person voice and the subjective bias shown nonetheless for Bele's perspective. There is a tension between the received wisdom of the diary as authentic voice, which in the GDR context recalls a Bitterfeld thesis extolling it as a suitable medium for proletarian factory confessionals, and Morgner's subtle revelation in this text of its fictionality.22 In contrast to the formal neatness of most of the short texts, the diary entries are structurally more loose. Generally one long uninterrupted paragraph, they have the appearance of an unselfconscious stream of thought. It is no accident that they resemble in this the most obviously 'naive' of the short texts, namely the stories reminiscing about the grandmother. This ostensible holiday diary has all the features that one might expect: description of travel, hotels, fellow guests, mealtime conversations, local colour, day trips. However, the entries become progressively given over to reminiscence of another holiday Bele had spent, this time alone, in 'SchloB W.' on the Baltic, a recuperative holiday spent after the break-up of her first marriage. The fact that this past holiday rather than the present one becomes increasingly the subject of her thoughts, and therefore the content of the diary, hints strongly that the liaison with Paul is not after all going to lead to the more permanent union mischievously suggested by the novel's title. 23 However, these shifts of time and location are unannounced and the narrative makes confusing leaps between them. The entry for 2.7., for

22In a letter to me of 26 September 1998, Joachim Schreck confirmed: 'Es fand tatsachlich eine Reise von I.M. nach Jugoslawien statt. Ende Juni/Anfang Juli 1965 flihrte sie zu einem Erholungsaufenthalt an die montenegrische Adriakiiste in das Stadtchen Ulcinj [... J Sie verblieb dort etwa drei Wochen.' Bele's diary is based on these experiences of the author. 23In a letter to me of 8 October 1998, Joachim Schreck wrote: 'Das "Schlo13 W." - Schlo13 Wiepersdorf - Iiegt realiter im heutigen Bundesland Brandenburg, nahe der Stadt Jiiterbog. Es gehiirte einst (oder jetzt wieder?) den von Amims. [... J ZU Zeiten der DDR war es ein Erholungsheim flir Kulturschaffende und war dem "Kulturfonds der DDR" unterstellt. In die Erinnerungen an "Schlo13 W.", das von I.M. kurzerhand an den Ostseestrand verlegt wird, mischen sich offensichtlich Erinnerungspartikel und Figuren, die sie bei einem Ferienaufenthalt in Ahrenshoop (1957) fand.' Morgner thus interestingly appears to relocate the Schlo13, with its Romantic associations, to the Baltic village which Johannes R. Becher cultivated after the war as a retreat particularly for high-ranking SED politicians and functionaries.

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example, opens in 'Konstantinopel', with news having arrived from East Berlin, but then shifts unsignalled to W.: Ei!brief von Brandis. Er schrieb, Klatt lage im Krankenhaus, ob Paul den Vortrag in Budapest iibemehmen k5nnte. Paul telegrafierte zuriick und begann zu schreiben. Bele ging auf der StraBe spazieren, die durch die Stadt und den Kiistenwaldstreifen fUhrte. Kiefemwald, viel Windbruch, ein Feriengast des Schlosses hatte dem Wald die Bezeichnung Forst abgesprochen, Sandwege. (p.176)

Although the word .'SchloB' provides a clue, it is not until seven lines further on that the reader is told unequivocally that Bele is 'in' W. Similarly, Bele reflects upon the time she had spent working as a 'Laborantin' at the institute where she had met Paul. The entry for 26.6. begins by describing a day of sunbathing, then a sudden shift takes us to dinner in the institute in East Berlin, and from there we pass to W., before returning to the sunloungers in 'Konstantinopel': Bele hatte eine Pritsche und einen Sonnenschirm gemietet, wei! sie nicht baden konnte, Paul besuchte sie, wenn er etwas gefunden hatte oder eine Pause fUr angebracht hielt. [... J Nun breitete sich Bele iiber die Pritsche, zahlte die blauen Punkte im Schirmstoff und wartete auf den nachsten Fund oder die nachste Pause. 1m Institut hatte sie immer auf die Mittagspause gewartet. [... J Bele hatte arn Laborantentisch gesessen. Gegen eins. Da war er nur noch schwach besetzt gewesen. In W. hatte Bele mit zwei alteren Darnen den Tisch getei!t. Zu Beginnn der Mahlzeit pflegte die eine der anderen zu sagen: "IB langsarn". - "Das tu ich auch", sagte die andere, die Darnen waren Zwillingsgeschwister. Die Zwillinge hatten ihre Lippen und Nasen mit Zinksalbe bestrichen. Bele erwiderte den GruB, indem sie den rechten FuB hob. (pp.127-28)

The twins wearing zinc cream on their noses are in fact on holiday in 'Konstantinopel'. Although the pluperfect tense here ('hatten bestrichen') initially suggests the same remembrance of times past as the earlier instances ('hatte gesessen', 'war gewesen', 'hatte geteilt'), it is misleading for two reasons. Firstly, the holiday in W. took place in a rainy autumn when zinc cream would not be required, and secondly, Bele's reaction by lifting her foot in the imperfect tense brings us clearly back to the narrated present. The reader is faced with the difficulty of keeping up with these sudden shifts, as associations suddenly enter Bele's mind. The effect is to create an interior monologue which is scarcely objectified, and arguably made more cOQfused,by the fact that a subjective 'ich' has been replaced throughout with the third person 'Bele'. Although these random associations may give the diary the superficial appearance of an interior monologue (what one might term the subjective aspect), the

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overarching control (or objective aspect) is indicated by the subtle links between it and the short texts. These links fall into six categories. Firstly, there may be a straightforward, almost causal link between the events of the day as narrated in the diary, and the short text as narrated to Paul that night. For example, the story 'Fur die Katz', which treats of male possessiveness, follows the diary entry of 21.6. in which the hotel cat is kicked by a waiter and Bele reflects on Paul's restrictive treatment of his previous wife: 'Wiebke durfte nicht allein ins Theater gehen, als sie noch Pauls Frau war' (p.87). Similarly, 'Pferdekopf follows Paul's demand on 30.6. for a story about Konstantinopel (p.163). Secondly, the idea of a story may be hinted at somewhere in the diary without there being any overt causal relationship between the daytime events and the night-time tale. The diary entry of 14.6. presents the problems experienced by Bele and Paul over their hotel rooms; the text 'Das Hotel' the following night features Jan leading the 'ich' narrator through a variety of hotel rooms. The diary entry of 15.6. recalls Bele's grandmother (p.27); two nights later, she features in the story 'Die Wanne' and she is the focus of the three texts at the heart of the novel. In the diary entry of 17.6., Bele recalls participating in a school play and she watches the shooting stars; the story 'Sternstunden' is told on 28.6. and is a recollection of school days in the early years of the GDR spent in a town where the industrial pollution was so great that, even though there was a makeshift observatory in the roof of the school building, the stars could not be seen. In the final example, the short text precedes the diary entry. The story 'April', which features the 'ich' in sole command of a sailing boat, is followed two days later by the entry of 21.6. where Bele tells of her desire to be either 'Triebwagenftihrerin oder Kapitiin' (p.87). Later, on 28.6., Bele reminisces about W., where her favourite pastimes included 'Segeln in der Luft oder auf dem Wasser' (p.142). Thirdly, there are subtle links made by individual words which, because they are isolated instances, differ from the leitmotifs we shall examine later. For example, Bele spends the day of 26.6. sunbathing on a 'Pritsche', unable to go swimming because at last, three days late, her period has arrived: 'Bele war froh, daB sie nieht baden konnte. Sie genoB den angstlosen Tag, der Monat hatte nicht viele' (p.128). The idea of security from pregnancy might already have put the reader in mind of the short text 'WeiBes Ostern', concerned with pregnancy's final outcome, but the fact that Bele has spent the day on a 'Pritsche' seals the link with a common vocabulary: upon her arrival at the hospital in the first throes of labour, it was to a 'Pritsche' that the 'ieh' in 'WeiBes Ostern' had directly been led (p.78).

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Similarly, 'Himmelbett' gives the following description of the East Berlin television tower, then still under construction: 'Die Luftsicherungslampen des Fernsehminaretts standen hell tiber die Stadt: neun rote Augen' (p.36). The diary entries of 14.6. and 22.6. note the minarets of 'Konstantinopel' (p.18) and Dubrovnik (p.91), thus providing both a geographical and a suitably literary link for this Arabian description of a GDR landmark. The fantastical subject of 'Himmelbett', meanwhile, involves night-time journeys around East Berlin on a hospital bed: a typically bathetic image of an earthbound, wheel-driven, non-transcendent 'magic carpet', which offers some escapism from the confines of a hospital ward, but which can nevertheless still be stopped and cautioned by the police. Finally, in the diary entry of 15.6., Bele recalls the occasion when, as a girl, she had locked away her grandmother. She remembers her youthful prank as a heady victory over authority: 'Ich [... ] labte mich an der Ohnmacht eines Erwachsenen, die Welt stand eine Stunde kopf (p.27). The title of one of the novel's central short texts, 'Kopfstand', is thus anticipated and its theme of turning order and orthodoxies on their head contextualised further. Bele had locked her grandmother 'in ihrer Laube' (p.27). It is a word echoed in the title of one of the last stories, 'Wie die Lauben abgerissen wurden', which, moreover, is told on the night following Diepolt's tale of his friend who had built his replica cathedral in such a 'Laube' (p.143). Furthermore, the 'ich' in 'April' hires her boat from a man in his 'Laube' (p.68), whilst in 'WeiBes Ostern' she recalls a neighbour of her aunt who had spent the summer with his mother, his aunt, and a woman called Maria in such a 'Laube' (p.84). The text, 'Wie die Lauben ... ' is a protest at the increasing dehumanisation and concretisation of 'Neubauwohnungen' (p.159) in what can only be the GDR urban environment. These earlier references ensure that the 'Laube' already has a symbolic value as a pre-industrial, even prelapsarian, private, and now apparently superfluous sphere. This particular short text thus has greater resonance in the context of leitmotif, the fourth category. In contrast to the associations brought about by an isolated but resonant individual word, leitmotif functions by interweaving recurring words or phrases throughout the text as a whole. It is used most often to give a heightened presentation of the Bele-Paul relationship. The weather in 'Konstantinopel' is hot, and Bele gives the temperature in her diary, on 19.6. for example: '39 Grad im Schatten' (p.63). The short texts, in contrast, are characterised by cold, wintry landscapes (' Schattenspiel', 'Hollenfahrt') and snow ('Das Hotel', 'Hollenfahrt', 'WeiBes Ostern', 'Faungesicht', 'Gericht'), with the narrator noting 'ich/man fror'

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('Schattenspiel', p.21; 'Hollenfahrt', p.59) or 'wir froren' ('April', p.69). In the diary entry of 1.7. towards the end of the holiday, a rainy day in 'Konstantinopel' leaves Bele cold. Paul lends her his sports jacket, but 'sie fror trotzdem' (p.l68). His response to her experience of tangible physical coldness is casual and lightweight and therefore as ineffectual as his response to her sense of emotional coldness. On 30.6., Paul asks the obvious question: "'Warum spielen deine Geschichten vorzugsweise in kalten Jahreszeiten?"', and seems to take at face value her apparently contrary, all-too-obvious answer: "'Weil es hier so heiB ist'" (p.l63). However, the superficial warmth of the location is no remedy for the einotional coldness which many of Bele's bedroom stories attempt to articulate to Paul. The absence of an overcoat as a metaphor for emotional vulnerability is a leitmotif which occurs in all of the following short texts: 'Schattenspiel' (p.2l), 'Das Hotel' (pJO), 'Hollenfahrt' (p.62), 'Kopfstand' (p.l22), 'Faungesicht' (p.13 1), 'Gericht' (p.136) and 'Wie mir ein Orden .. .' (p.179). Other more general leitmotifs in the novel include the colour blue,with the same wistfully utopian associations it had in Rumba auf einen Herbst, whilst those relating specifically to Paul include haircuts and the inclining of the head. Not so much leitmotifs, but relating likewise to the description of male figures in the text, are extended phrases - our fifth category. These appear first in apposition to Paul, then recur with respect to one of the characters in the short texts, or vice versa. The description of Paul on 19.6. - 'Er war geschmUckt mit einem briiunlichen Teint und schonen Schultern und einer dUnnen Scheibe Speck auf den Rippen' (p.64) - is used verbatim for the description of Ben in 'Faungesicht' (p.131). The 'ich' then expresses disappointment with Ben's haircut: 'ich [... ] verfluchte die Friseure, die immer zuviel abschnitten' (p.l3l), which recites an earlier entry in the diary after Paul's return from the barber's (p.57). This chronology is sometimes reversed. Wenzel in 'Gericht' is described as follows: 'Wenzel schlang schweigend. GroBe blicklose Augen. Vnter der Schliifenhaut,