Introduction

The prose works of “Aufbauliteratur” considered in the previous chapter were written while the (re)construction they were describing was taking place. In many ways this was a literature of corroboration. it was also a literature of prospection, anticipating the deepening of integration under socialist auspices—not least for the refugees who play a significant role in many works of reconstruction prose. Flanking this literature of the 1950s and 1960s were GDR prose works that focused more on the second world war or the Nazi period as a whole, exploring their dynamics and causes. We could classify such works as a “literature of retrospection,” because their perspective stretches back to the period before the watershed of May 1945. A sharp division between GDR “Aufbauliteratur” and prose works set in the Nazi period is not always possible, given that narratives can cross the May 1945 boundary; some of the latter works, moreover, anticipate developments under socialism by, for instance, showing antifascist solidarity between German anti-Nazis and the soviets. Nevertheless, the works considered in the first part of this chapter focus mainly, if not exclusively on events under Nazism. Within this context, flight is treated as one major symptom of the collapse of National socialism—as an end point in a historical process rather than as essentially the starting point of a new one, which is the role assigned to flight and expulsion in the novels of reconstruction.