Dates

With McFit, it takes eight weeks to feel stronger; in a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle, you feel the effect immediately. An affirmative reference to real socialist history, be it merely folkloristic or actually conceptual, has a subterranean function in the present. It enables even marginalized leftists to fit into a narrative of determination, focus, efficiency, in short: strength.

But even the opposing declaration of wanting first and foremost to do everything completely differently from the real socialists has functions that transcend the purely logically determined level of analysis. Even before a single worker has been liberated or a single ruined farmer has found a livelihood in the global South, the negation of the political concepts of the CPSU, SED etc. appears as an emancipative, almost moral act, although in reality it has only taken place - without consequences - at a cozy desk at home.

What forms of interested reference to real socialism are widespread in the contemporary left? What political consequences does this have? And what could an appropriate, productive reference to real socialist history look like? These and other questions will be addressed in this lecture.

Rüdiger Mats is a political scientist and historian who occasionally publishes analyses on the history of real socialism and other left-wing topics.

DEFA-Filmkomödie von Erwin Stranka (1989)

What are two computer science students and friends supposed to do when people are fighting over them? One is a theoretician and the other is a leader in practical implementation. But after successfully completing their studies, they want to continue researching and developing together. Now they live in a small country, the GDR, where everything seems to be in order. With a stroke of anarchist genius, they paralyze Leipzig University and are transferred to Finsterberg-Dodeleben. After some confusion, however, the ingenious duo prevail at the Leipzig Trade Fair. But until then, there is still a lot to laugh about.
This film was released in the fall of 1989 and became a cult film even after the social upheaval in the GDR, as it covertly or openly denounced grievances and some statements even became catchphrases.

Basics of the economic system of the GDR

The uprising of the working class on June 17, 1953 already made it clear that the "people's property" on which the socialist development of the GDR was to be based did not belong to "the people", but to the nomenklatura installed by the Soviet Union, the Politburocracy. The "people's property" existed only nominally and legally. In real terms, the economic property functions such as the decision on the goals of production or the economic proportions, such as those of accumulation and consumption, were exercised exclusively by the unelected nomenklatura. However, the command-based administrative system of "planning and management of the national economy" adopted from the Soviet Union was considerably modernized between the 1950s and 1980s, without, of course, overcoming the fundamental deficiency of the system: The lack of autonomy of the immediate producers and the resulting hostility to innovation.

Bernd Gehrke is a historian and deals with the history of the GDR, the history of the workers' movement and factory struggles. He was part of the left-wing opposition to the GDR - at the end of the GDR he was active in the "United Left". Today he is involved in the "AK Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen Ost-West".

After 1945, there were numerous industrial centers in the territory of the GDR with a militant working class whose consciousness and experience fascism had not been able to extinguish. When the workers in the GDR went on strike in June 1953, this tradition of an autonomous, organized workers' movement was very much alive. The workers' uprising ended in defeat, Soviet tanks crushed it, the strike leaders were arrested, strikes, assemblies and any autonomous organization were virtually banned. They were replaced by a state trade union which, alongside the party, was part of the factory management and had to ensure that the plan was fulfilled. It was not only open violence, but above all these Stalinist structures that ultimately led to the demise of an autonomous workers' movement in the GDR. It is strange that a left-wing debate on the character of the "real socialist" countries, in which the working class otherwise always plays a central role, does not make this a decisive criterion in its assessment.

Renate Hürtgen is a historian and studies the history of the GDR, in particular working life and trade union organization in the GDR. She was part of the left-wing opposition to the GDR and co-founded the "Initiative for Independent Trade Unions*" in October 1989.* Since then she has been part of critical trade union initiatives and grassroots movements. In 2003, she co-founded the "AK Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen" (History of Social Movements Working Group), of which she is still a member today.

With the existence of an industrially differentiated Soviet economy based on the division of labour in the 1950s, the extremely centralized economic system that had emerged under Stalin during the industrialization leap entered a crisis. Its basic features, which included planning and accounting in physical units of utility value such as tons or meters in addition to the exclusive command of the state headquarters, were even transferred to the economically more developed countries of the Eastern Bloc after 1945. Since then, reform debates have focused on whether and how the obviously existing "commodity-money relationships" could be "exploited" to improve the self-interest of factory management and workers. After the attempts made during the soviet revolutions in Poland and Hungary in 1956 to combine pending reforms with "workers' self-management of enterprises" were suppressed, the CPSU put technocratic economic reforms on the agenda in 1962, the Liberman reforms. In the GDR, the New Economic System of Planning and Management emerged, which gave way to a new recentralization in the 1970s. Only during the Prague Spring of 1968 - and 1980/1981 - during the Solidarność movement - was another attempt made to combine the decentralization of the economic system and workers' self-management. Both attempts were bloodily suppressed. For any new debate on a socialist economy, knowledge of these reform debates and attempts is indispensable.

Bernd Gehrke is a historian and deals with the history of the GDR, the history of the workers' movement and factory struggles. He was part of the left-wing opposition to the GDR - at the end of the GDR he was active in the "United Left". Today he is involved in the "AK Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen Ost-West".

The idea of communism consisted of the rational organization of the social production process. In real socialism, however, a huge state and planning apparatus was realized. No, no, that was not communism! - could be the slogan. But why was the ideal of communism not realized? Were the circumstances adverse? Did the revolution and the construction of communism go wrong back then - and we would know better today? Or was the failure rooted in the very idea of communism?

If you want to find answers, you first have to find out what the protagonists were striving for in 1917 and in the following years and decades, what problems they encountered and how the centrally administered economy came about. Was it considered to be the realization of a communist economy or was it a stopgap measure? Were they aiming for a demand-oriented mode of production? Was worker participation a goal? Should goods and money be abolished? These and similar questions will be discussed in the workshop using the example of the GDR. The speaker will join the workshop online and will be supported by a moderator on site.

Hannes Giessler Furlan, born in 1979, grew up in Leipzig, published a book on the subject in 2018 (Verein freier Menschen. Idee und Realität kommunistischer Ökonomie), now works as a German teacher in Brazil and occasionally as a freelance journalist.

What was the GDR, what is its afterlife, is there such an afterlife in the singular? My contribution seeks to outline in the necessary brevity the specific nature of a system of rule and society that would not have existed without the presence of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the GDR was more than a Soviet crown colony. It offered opportunities for advancement and participation to classes and strata that had previously been disadvantaged in public life, and yet it controlled its own life. It emerged from an anti-fascist mission, but offered little scope for an anti-fascist democracy. It invoked Marxism for some reasons and - it must be said harshly - falsified essential basic principles of the political work of Marx and Engels, Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The emergence of the GDR with its persistent contradictions is thus placed in a historical perspective that poses new questions for those born later.

Prof. Dr. Mario Keßler, born in Jena in 1955, is a Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. His work focuses on the history of anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism and the relationships between them, as well as exile research. He has published 30 books and several hundred essays on these and other topics in German and English. He has taught at the University of Potsdam, Yeshiva University in New York and has been a visiting professor at numerous other universities, mainly in the USA.

Using personal notes and documents, Wühlen tells the story of the sisters Franz and Kris. Their mutual friend Ana tries to bring order to the spiral notebooks, exercise books and therapy reports that they have left her.

The three women were born in the 1980s in provincial Saxony. Ana's mother came to the GDR from Poland as a contract worker. Franz and Kris experienced the political upheaval of 1989 as a turning point in their families. In the present day, all three are at a new breaking point: their alternative - and precarious - ways of life are becoming increasingly threatening.

From reports and letters, research on the transformation period and radio contributions, Wühlen assembles a literary archive on feminist concepts then and now, on the GDR and the present, punk and psychiatry. In this way, it makes the question of a feminist narrative explicit and documents the search for a form of dealing with history that seems to be occupied by the interpretative claims of dominant social forces.

Carolin Krahl, writer, part of the editorial collective of the magazine PS: Anmerkungen zum Literaturbetrieb/Politisch Schreiben and of the bookshop collective drift in Leipzig.

The communist ideal in the GDR was to reverse the traditional power structures and give workers control over their work and the means of production. But this power ultimately lay in the hands of the SED. This discrepancy between ideology and reality raises the question of how workers dealt with conflicts when their own needs did not coincide with the party's demands. Using brigade diaries and prose texts, this lecture will examine how this contradiction affected the workers' consciousness.

Jeanne Franke lives in Berlin.

Guided tour of Chemnitz city center

The narrative about Chemnitz is usually that of an uninteresting city, the "gray mouse" among the major Saxon cities. This city tour through the inner city aims to correct this image somewhat, to make some of the city's gems shine.
Chemnitz was and has always been a workers' inner city, and this has shaped it. Chemnitz is also home to a medieval robber baron's castle with a wealth of legends, as well as one of the largest collections of 20th century art. There are also some architectural features to admire in Chemnitz city center.

The state-ordered liberation from the bourgeois nuclear family in the GDR, including the integration of women into the education system and working life, the establishment of more open forms of relationships as well as less rigid marriage and divorce laws (compared to the FRG) and good childcare options can rightly be regarded as partially successful emancipation measures. However, this 'women's liberation from above' does not hide the fact that young women firstly rebelled against "conformity and boredom" (Knabe 2024)* and secondly also drew attention to social and ecological problems in GDR socialism. In the course of the 1980s, more women also became active in youth scenes or in oppositional artists' and protest groups. In the workshop, special attention will be paid to this part of the "GDR from below" and the traces of women will be traced and their resistance and work contextualized.

* Andrè Knabe (2024) in the PodCast Musi*Sociology (S2E4)

Jana Günther, Prof. Dr., Social Sciences, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, specializing in social inequality, social movements and classical feminist theory.

In the GDR, equal rights for women were a matter of state policy. The socialist understanding of emancipation was based on the professional activity of women. Despite numerous women's policy measures, patriarchal gender relations persisted. The contradictions between propagated equality and the real situation became increasingly apparent towards the end of the 1970s. As a reaction to the stagnating and even regressive women's policy, a non-governmental women's movement emerged in the GDR, which critically examined the real situation of women under real socialism.

In the workshop, we want to use the example of Saxony to look at the non-governmental women's movement, its actors, topics and networks. What did the women's groups understand by feminism and emancipation? What did women's activism mean under dictatorial conditions?

Dr. Jessica Bock studied Medieval and Modern History at the University of Leipzig. With a scholarship from the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, she completed her doctorate on "Women's Movement in East Germany. Awakening-Revolt-Transformation in Leipzig 1980-2000". Her dissertation was awarded the GenderConceptGroup dissertation prize at TU Dresden in 2019 and was published by Mitteldeutscher Verlag in 2020. She has been a research assistant at the Digital German Women's Archive since 2016. In 2023, with the support of weiterdenken Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung-Sachsen e. V., she published her study "Kontrollierte Selbstbestimmung. Abortion in Saxony from 1945 to 1990".

The legal situation for lesbians and gays between the 1950s and 1990s differed massively in the FRG and the GDR: the GDR de facto stopped prosecuting so-called homosexual acts between adults as early as the 1950s. In 1950, the GDR returned to the old version of Section 175 and finally abolished it completely in 1968, while the FRG did not abolish Section 175 until 1994, retaining the Nazi version. Abortion was largely possible and unpunished, whereas it is still criminalized in the FRG today.

Although the legal situation for LGBTQI* people in the GDR was much more emancipatory, their lives and everyday lives were largely invisible - until today.
Since literature in the GDR in particular tells of the everyday lives, dreams and fears of lesbians, gays and queer people, we want to use it in the workshop to approach the lives of LGBTQI* people in the GDR.

Franziska Haug works as a postdoc in the project "Queer literatures and cultures under socialism" on queer GDR literature. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the relationship between work and gender in literature and pop culture. Her other fields of research are materialism, Marxism, gender studies and anti-Semitism. She is part of the "DiasporaOst" collective based in Frankfurt am Main.

In the lecture, I would first like to give an overview of the repression against anti-authoritarian leftists in the state-socialist regime of the GDR - from the crushing of the remnants of the anti-authoritarian workers' movement from the Weimar period in the Soviet occupation zone, to the ban on alternative youth cultures in the 1960s and the suppression of the new left after 1968.
We then want to discuss together the reasons the party and state leadership had for this repressive course and what long-term consequences this history of repression had and still has for our movement and developments in East Germany.

As part of the lecture, I will also present the brochure "... hostile-negative elements ...", which was published by left-wing opposition activists Renate Hürtgen, Bernd Gehrke and Thomas Klein in 2019.

Konstantin Behrends is a trade unionist, supports social and political prisoners and deals with the history of the movement in East Germany.

TBA

In the first years after the collapse of the GDR, its self-image as an "anti-fascist state" played a key role in debates about its character and legitimacy. Its defenders regarded anti-fascism as an exemplary tradition worth preserving, while the opposing side sought to deconstruct it with adjectives such as "instrumental", "decreed" or even "illegitimate". However, the content of the dazzling term "anti-fascism" usually remained more or less undefined. In contrast, the lecture aims to show the historical roots of the anti-fascist self-image in the GDR. In addition to the experience of communist resistance against National Socialism, fundamental sociological and historical-philosophical assumptions of orthodox Marxism are just as important as the rapidly changing political constellations and power relations both before 1933 and during the Cold War. Ultimately, the on the one hand complex and on the other increasingly static character of GDR anti-fascism contributed to the fact that its broad social impact already declined during the lifetime of the GDR and that it quickly sank into insignificance after 1989/90.

Christoph Classen is a historian and researches in the "Contemporary History of the Media and Information Society" department at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF).

Whether the GDR was an "anti-Semitic state" is still the subject of controversial and emotional debate today. However, both blanket condemnations and blanket exonerations are often motivated by historical politics and miss the point - an analytically based criticism of anti-Semitism in the GDR. Against the backdrop of persistent anti-Semitic resentment in parts of the left-wing spectrum - especially since October 7 - a differentiated, critical reappraisal of "left-wing" history and its ideologemes is more important than ever. The workshop will show that anti-Semitic resentment in the GDR was fed by two ideological sources: on the one hand, the state-supporting ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the anti-imperialism that went hand in hand with it were closely linked to anti-Semitic thought patterns. On the other hand, these structurally anti-Semitic thought patterns were combined with unresolved, repressed and therefore persistent anti-Semitic resentments in post-Nazi (East) German society. In the second part of the workshop, text excerpts by Jewish authors from the GDR will be used to discuss the effects of anti-Semitic discourses and practices in the GDR on those affected and their consequences, which continue to this day.

Dr. Anja Thiele is a literary scholar at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Her research and teaching focuses on German-Jewish literature, anti-Semitism and discourses of remembrance in literature. Her dissertation "Die Shoah in der Literatur der DDR" was published by Winterverlag in March 2024.

"Antisociality" is booming. The word is used in public discourse, in the media and even in academia. It always means the devaluation and exclusion of people who supposedly do not "belong" due to certain characteristics. However, people rarely ask what the word actually means.

This has a long tradition. Until recently, for example, those persecuted under National Socialism as "asocials" were among those who were not recognized as victims of National Socialism. However, the construction of those affected as a group was adapted to the requirements of the time, which contradicts their self-image. Rehabilitation proceedings were mostly unsuccessful both after 1945 and after 1989, because the stigmatization both in the memory and in the sources still has an effect today, as can be seen in the GDR with the introduction of the asocial paragraph in 1968. There, the example of the Soviet Union was (also) followed, where so-called "parasites" and "gypsies" had been persecuted since the end of the 19th century. The complex interaction between the repressive authorities, the police, the judiciary and the MfS, with the welfare authorities and the "population" as a vertical and horizontal network of attribution has remained blurred to this day. Both the language of the acts of rule and the public portrayal in contemporary discourse usually assume an unquestionable conglomerate of group attributions with regard to the figure of "asociality". For this reason, the term must be examined as a source concept for its concrete and general functionality and contextualized with the sparse self-statements of survivors and descendants. In the workshop, we will use exemplary sources to trace the lives of survivors who belonged to the Sinti and Roma group and, on this basis, reflect on the structure of the stigma of "asociality".

Dr. Katharina Lenski works on "asociality" in the 19th and 20th centuries in Vienna. She completed her doctorate on the history of GDR universities in the context of state security using the example of the FSU Jena and was research and study coordinator at the Research Training Group "The GDR and European Dictatorships after 1945" in Jena. From 1991 to 2011, she set up the Thuringian Archive for Contemporary History "Matthias Domaschk", a dissident archive on the GDR, which received the Thuringian Archive Prize in 2011. Before 1989, she was part of the GDR Òpposition in Berlin. Numerous publications on youth culture, science and universities, "asociality" and Sinti in the GDR can be found here.

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, they did so on the premise that their revolution would only be the first of many. After the upheavals of the world war, they were certain that the workers of the leading industrialized countries would take power and lend a helping hand to Russian communism, which had "come too early" so to speak. Until then, it was important to practice international solidarity and to subordinate one's own actions to the prospects of the world revolution. A position that was popular not only among the party leadership, but also among grassroots activists- the hope of world revolution helped to cover up their own difficulties. However, this consensus quickly collapsed: the world revolution failed to materialize, the temporary pioneering role of the Russian proletariat turned into Russocentric chauvinism, and "internationalism" was turned inwards in the Stalinist Soviet Union, understood as "friendship between peoples" with Russia as the "big brother (people)". How and why did this happen? In the workshop, we will discuss this and examine some source texts on the reception and practices of internationalism in early Soviet society.

Gleb J. Albert is Assistant Professor of Modern General and Eastern European History at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland). He researches the history of the early Soviet Union and the international communist movement as well as the history of software piracy and computer use in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2017, he published the book "Das Charisma der Weltrevolution: Revolutionärer Internationalismus in der frühen Sowjetgesellschaft 1917-1927" (Böhlau Verlag; English translation: Haymarket Books 2024).

We will provide the description text shortly.

Cassettes, noise and art in the subculture before the fall of the Wall

On both sides of the Cold War confrontation line, scenes of independent sounds developed that circulated on self-distributed cassettes. While there was a DIY euphoria in the West, there were no other means available to the subculture in the East and even the first copying was illegal.

By the end of the seventies, a scene had already developed that worked in a linguistically experimental, multi-media or performative way, but experienced a radicalization with punk. Driven by boredom, equipped with plenty of time and free from economic constraints or opportunities, it labored without product awareness and almost never published. Only the partial opening up with the onset of the system agony in the mid-1980s changed the conditions for impact.

Alexander Pehlemann from Leipzig, publisher of the magazine Zonic and several Zonic special books on the eastern subculture, presents the topic with sounds, films and images.

Reading and talk with Henryk Gericke

The underground was never a strategy, at least not the punk underground. It was intoxication, elemental violence and an immoral feast for the senses, which you paid for because you didn't give the state anything.
"Tanz den Kommunismus" (Dance Communism) exclusively portrays punk bands that were active in an illegal environment and consistently countered the obligation to be classified by the state with a playful drive that didn't care about permission. In order to reproduce the soundscapes of a counterculture in texts, it is not enough to limit oneself to working through band histories. The individual portraits make a passionate attempt to create a kaleidoscope that reflects the bands through themselves as well as through their cultural and socio-cultural environment.

Henryk Gericke, born 1964 in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, lives there. Author, publisher and gallery owner. 1981-82 Singer of the East Berlin punk band The Leistungsleichen. 1985-89 publisher of independent editions and samizdat magazines (Caligo, Autodafé, Art. 27, Braegen) and author in other independent editions (Anschlag, Ariadnefabrik, Liane, Verwendung and others). 1990 co-founder of the publishing house Druckhaus Galrev. Since 1997 also active as a DJ under the second name Nic Sleazy. 2004 Alfred Döblin Scholarship from the Berlin Academy of the Arts. Since 2005, various books, publications, exhibitions, radio productions and a documentary film on the subject of subculture in the GDR. 2010 Foundation of Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg. Since 2019 publisher of the record edition "tapetopia - GDR Undergroundtapes". 2021 Alfred Döblin Scholarship of the Academy of Arts Berlin. 2022 Literature scholarship at the Künstlerhaus LUKAS/Ahrenshoop. 2024 31st castle writer at Beeskow.

The tour sheds light on the urban and architectural development of Karl-Marx-Stadt / Chemnitz from the 1950s onwards. The three revisions of the construction plans, bold visions for the creation of a model socialist city and European influences are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the ensemble of listed buildings on both sides of Brückenstraße. There is no other place in Europe where socialist modernism is more impressively visible. The development of the second major axis, the Street of Nations, was modeled on the Lijnbaan in Rotterdam. However, the Stadthalle with Stadthallenpark, inaugurated in 1974, and the high-rise hotel building also contribute to the cityscape. In addition to modernist architecture, modern architecture has developed since 1990 with an impact beyond the borders of Saxony. The tour also looks at past and current urban planning challenges.

Norbert Engst, born 1983 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, 2000-2003 vocational training in reinforced concrete construction, later studied civil engineering and landscape architecture. Landscape architect and project manager for a Swiss planning office since 2014. Publications on the subject of urban development/ Eastern Modernism: The "Fritz Heckert" residential area - building in new dimensions (2019); The south of Chemnitz - aerial views from eight decades (2020); Matrix Moderne I Ostmoderne: Chemnitz and Eastern Modernism: a formative era (2023); Heckert. The transformation (from summer 2024).

In 1990, architecture in the GDR was widely regarded as "architecture without architects", everything was "slab" - industrial mass housing and the simultaneous decay of inner cities became synonymous with the failure of the GDR. The postmodern and neo-historical zeitgeist was programmed for "deconstruction" (demolition) before the time of the GDR, at best with respect for the buildings erected during the building policy of the "national traditions" (1950-1955). The "Old Debt Assistance Act" decreed the privatization of municipal housing stocks, "shrinking cities" led to their publicly subsidized demolition. More than thirty years after German unification, a system comparison can be drawn in East Germany. If we ask about the desirable strategies for building after the GDR, its architectural history will also be reorganized. It can no longer be thought of only from its end. The workshop invites you to determine the phases of the history of architecture and building in the GDR, its social mission, the material and technical basis and the changing understanding of architecture.

After working in administration and politics (Center for Art Exhibitions, Ministry of Culture, Head of the Prenzlauer Berg Cultural Office, City Councillor for Construction in Berlin-Mitte, Senator for Culture and Science in Berlin), Thomas Flierl has been working as a freelance architectural historian and publicist since 2007, he headed the Hermann Henselmann Foundation from 2007 to 2022 and has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, since 2021.

Ronald M. Schernikau wanted to "write, be gay, be communist" all his life.

As a child, he left the GDR - hiding in the trunk of a car with his mother - but he was always drawn back. The "Zone" became his place of longing: not a utopia, but a concrete place that would finally make his life as a writer possible. In contrast to West Berlin, where he enjoyed the scene and nightlife, but couldn't find an apartment and had to eke out a living with precarious jobs.
In 1986, he was finally allowed to return to Leipzig to study literature, and shortly before the fall of the Wall, he became a citizen of the GDR again. With great effort, he completes his mammoth work "legende", in which the gods come to West Berlin to introduce communism.

We will listen to the one-hour radio feature "Die Schönheit", with texts and unpublished sound bites from Schernikau and his circle. This will be followed by a discussion with the two authors.

Johanna Tirnthal is a radio producer and works with her collective Audiokombinat and for WDR and Deutschlandradio on culture and social policy.

Richard Pfützenreuter is a dramaturge at the Neue Bühne Senftenberg. For years, his freelance theater work has revolved around the (post-)GDR, its liquidation and what remains.

Sometimes referred to as an Austromarxist and sometimes as a Western Marxist, Leo Kofler immigrated from exile in Switzerland to the Soviet Occupied Zone in 1947. Kofler interpreted the end of the war and National Socialism as the possibility of democratic socialism. The SED leadership in Saxony-Anhalt envisioned a university career for him and, with Kofler's habilitation at MLU Halle, prevailed against the old university committees and tried to consolidate its own power at the university. However, he soon found himself in the crosshairs of their purge mania.

The subject of the disputes between Kofler and the cadre philosophers were Marxist-methodological questions, to which both parties ascribed great relevance with regard to the development of socialism.
Kofler neither wanted to leave the GDR despite his defamation by the SED, nor did he subject himself to self-criticism. It was only when he was (allegedly) warned of his arrest that he left the GDR at the end of 1950.

After a concise input on Kofler's life and the foundations of his Marxist thought, on Kofler in the GDR and the main tendencies of his critique of Stalinism, we will read a text by Kofler together. We can then discuss the following questions, for example: What does his criticism of Stalinism consist of on the one hand, and on the other hand, what did he come up against in practice in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR? What can we learn from Kofler about the GDR and Stalinism? What can we learn from Kofler about Marxist thinking and what about left-wing socialism between 1945 and 1950?

Janika Schmidt is studying history in Jena.

Criticism and censorship in real socialism

From today's perspective, the GDR's cultural policy interest in its own literature is often seen as a restrictive octroi that wanted to bring art and literature into line and prohibit criticism. Such a view is not historically accurate. The flip side of the authorities' strictures was the enormous revaluation of the importance of literature, in practical terms. The GDR attributed an essential role to literature for its own development. It was precisely this that developed its own attraction for writers. The 1950s were characterized by a spirit of optimism, especially in literature, to help build an anti-fascist socialist Germany, a project of global political significance. Of course, censorship did not begin with the so-called "Kahlschlagplenum" in 1965, but accompanied the project from the very beginning and with the greatest severity. Nevertheless, the authors were not deterred; in the spirit of the great Bitterfeld conferences, they created their version of a society capable of consent, right up to the "arrival literature" of the early 1960s. Regardless of bans, the authors struggled with their own criticism of the reality of social reconstruction, mostly with the firm resolve not to question the project under any circumstances. The attempt to come to terms was unmistakable. The authors were correspondingly dismayed that the SED did not appreciate this attempt, but only perceived and sanctioned the inadmissible division. The same dismay promptly turned into hope when Honecker changed the cultural policy directives and promised that there would be no more "taboos" in the field of art - a hope that was dashed by the state when Biermann was expatriated in 1976. From then on, the authors fought for recognition as critical voices, which earned them the laudatory title of "dissident" in the West and reinforced the suspicion of hostility to the state in the East. Artists were forced out of the GDR in droves. Very few left voluntarily, despite all the repression.

During these 30 years, the relationship between authors and the GDR changed fundamentally. To understand this, it is not enough to look at the key dates of censorship. Rather, it is necessary to clarify what the state's mandate for literature was and what standards censorship was based on. How exactly did the authors understand the mandate, and what criticism did they develop of real socialism? After the fall of communism in 1989, the public shook its head at the loyalty of so many writers who had stayed in the GDR or saw their departure as "exile". But to what social idea was this attachment directed?

Andrea Jäger, Professor of Modern and Contemporary German Literature at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg from 2002 to 2022, research and publications in particular on the literature of the GDR, the expatriation of writers from the GDR and literature after the system change in 1989.

Following in the footsteps of the poet and
queer communist Ronald M. Schernikau (1960-1991), who wandered between West and East Germany, we would like to attempt an aesthetic and socio-analytical approach to a genre that only appears trivial on the surface. In a listening session, we want to indulge in the intimate yet political pathos of selected "Zonen" hits. We want to play music, share history and stories, and talk about it with you. We will be inspired by Schernikau's text "Über Schlager in der DDR" from 1983, including his Schlager hit parade, and record what we find remarkable. Petra Zieger and "Abends in der Stadt" are among those taking part, as we are particularly interested in the officially unspoken feminist utopias of the GDR on the one hand - and its housing policy approaches on the other.

And what was that about communism again?

By and with: Robin and Saša, enthusiasts for female writing in the GDR and the right to the city in general.