Why would Jews return to Germany after World War II and the Holocaust? Why did a good number of prominent Jewish artists, intellectuals, and politicians choose East Germany? Among the writers in that group, what were the constraints of censorship and self-censorship? How did they feel about their fellow non-Jewish Germans? How are feelings of trauma and loss reflected in their works? And how, after the Holocaust, did they respond to Soviet-inspired antisemitism?

By examining the life and work of six East German writers, this study has attempted to address these questions. With the exception of Jurek Becker, who was, in the words of the East German poet Uwe Kolbe, “born into” socialism, these writers—Anna Seghers, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Fred Wander, and Peter Edel—all chose East Germany, and they did so for remarkably similar reasons. Some of those reasons were psychological and cultural. Against Nazi ideology, they wanted to assert that they were Germans too, and moreover the representatives of the “good Germany,” the repositories of that Germany symbolized by Weimar and not Buchenwald. For them, the East German self-representation as the guardian of the German classical tradition and the culmination of progressive German history proved tremendously attractive.

Of course, their politics guided their choices as well and were generally the decisive factor. As Communists or Communist sympathizers, the heirs of a movement crushed almost completely and rather easily by the Nazis, these writers experienced the unexpected good fortune of being handed a revolution by the Soviet victors. After the war, five of our authors, all of whom had spent the war in exile or the camps or both, lived for some time in the West before choosing to move to the East. Their experiences with an incomplete Western de-Nazification, and the concomitant transformation of the Soviet Union from ally to enemy, certainly contributed to their decisions, as did a belief in the Comintern dogma that late capitalism in crisis produced fascism. Given that ideological framework, the capitalist West could hardly constitute an alternative, and the East appeared comparatively attractive and inviting, despite Stalinism. It is not clear how much these authors knew, or wanted to know, about the horrors of Stalinism, the betrayals and treachery involved in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, or the fate of German leftists who sought safe haven in the Soviet Union after fleeing Hitler.