Introduction

The previous chapter explored literary returns to the lost territories. In the novels of revisiting, the idea that the lives the protagonists had lived there prior to flight or expulsion were no longer of relevance was questioned: there still existed legacies—historical, moral, emotional—that needed to be confronted. parallel to these prose works, a more skeptical strain of literature was evolving, one that took issue, to a greater or lesser extent, with the official SED position that the integration of refugees and expellees had been entirely successful. Generally, East German literature of the late 1970s and 1980s adopted an increasingly critical stance toward the direction in which the GDR appeared to be going. The attempted rapid modernization of the GDR, driven by the proclaimed unity of economic and social policy (1971), led some writers to fear the over-rationalization of society (as well as environmental ruin), while the Biermann Affair (1976) shook to the core the faith of many East German writers in their state's cultural politics. Socialism, if that was what it still was, seemed to be losing its cohesive and visionary power in the atomizing struggle for economic survival. It was in this socioeconomic context that some authors began to look back to the postwar period and early years of the GDR, asking if problems of social cohesion and failing solidarity could be traced back to the very beginnings of eastern German socialism.