German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects.
Günter Schabowski was an East German politician who served as an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Schabowski gained worldwide fame in November 1989 when he improvised a slightly mistaken answer to a press conference question about the future of the Berlin Wall. That raised popular expectations much more rapidly than the government planned and so massive crowds gathered the same night at the Wall, which forced its opening after 28 years. Soon afterward, the entire inner German border was opened.
Christa Wolf was a German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany.
Articles related to East Germany include:
Karl Wolf Biermann is a German singer-songwriter, poet, and former East German dissident. He is perhaps best known for the 1968 song "Ermutigung" and his expatriation from East Germany in 1976.
Jurek Becker was a Polish-born German writer, screenwriter and East German dissident. His most famous novel is Jacob the Liar, which has been made into two films. He lived in Łódź during World War II for about two years and survived the Holocaust.
Helmut Flieg was a German writer, known by his pseudonym Stefan Heym. He lived in the United States and trained at Camp Ritchie, making him one of the Ritchie Boys of World War II. In 1952, he returned to his home to the part of his native Germany which was, from 1949 to 1990, the German Democratic Republic. He published works in English and German at home and abroad, and despite longstanding criticism of the GDR remained a committed socialist. He was awarded the 1953 Heinrich Mann Prize, the 1959 National Prize of East Germany, and the 1993 Jerusalem Prize.
Anna Seghers, is the pseudonym of German writer Anna Reiling, who was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).
Johannes Robert Becher was a German politician, novelist, and poet. He was affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) before World War II. At one time, he was part of the literary avant-garde, writing in an expressionist style.
Irmtraud Morgner was a German writer, best known for works of magical realism concerned predominantly with the role of gender in East German society.
Hans Mayer was a German literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist.
Volker Braun is a German writer. His works include Provokation für mich – a collection of poems written between 1959 and 1964 and published in 1965, a play, Die Kipper, and Das ungezwungene Leben Kasts (1972).
Alexander Stephan was a specialist in German literature and area studies. He was a professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University (OSU).
Franz Fühmann was a German writer who lived and worked in East Germany. He wrote in a variety of formats, including short stories, essays, screenplays and children's books. Influenced by Nazism in his youth, he later embraced socialism.
Adolf Endler was a lyric poet, essayist and prose author who played a central role in subcultural activities that attacked and challenged an outdated model of socialist realism in the German Democratic Republic up until the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. Endler drew attention to himself as the "father of the oppositional literary scene" at Prenzlauer Berg in the eastern part of Berlin. In 2005 he was made a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt.
Daniela Dahn is a German writer, journalist and essayist. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, Dahn has been an outspoken critic of the reunification process. Her highly personal style of writing, and her strident political opinions, have stirred controversy within Germany, but Dahn, who considered herself a dissident within East Germany before 1989, advocates for a critical journalism that continues the democratic tradition of challenging the government and policies of reunified Germany.
Helga Königsdorf was an East German author and physicist.
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
Aufbauliteratur is the name given to the literature produced in Eastern Germany between state foundation and construction of the Berlin Wall, that is between 1949 and 1961, by authors close to the state's ideology and congruent with the ruling party's political program. It was aimed at the intellectual construction of the Socialist state. The area is preceded by the less directed and only marginal literature produced post the Second World War, and followed by Ankunftsliteratur, the literature written to internalize a sense of arrival which was much less ideological but practical and realistic, still aligned with the SED.
Paul Wiens was a German poet, translator and author of radio plays and screenplays in the German Democratic Republic.
