Schriften des Erich Maria Remarque-Archivs.

How did literature written, published and read in the Western and Soviet Zones of Occupation, in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the GDR become two German literatures? In attempting a history of the changing relations between the two, this book looks at the conditions of producing, distributing and reading literature, dominant discourses and genres of writing. Because of links as well as separations, it suggests a periodisation which does neither question the caesura of 1945 nor rely on the concept of generation, but assumes decisive changes around 1949, 1961 and 1976. Thus the changes in, for instance, literary ways of thematising the Nazi past emerge with the discursive turns from ‘the question of guilt’ to ‘antifascism’ vs. ‘antitotalitarianism’ to ‘modernisation’ to ‘national identity’. For each sequence, one chapter scrutinises an element of the literary life (for instance, censorship), another one a dominant genre - from short story to documentary and autobiographical literature. Any analysis of an exemplary West German text will lead to an East German counterpart, e.g. Wolfgang Koeppen’s The Death in Rome to Stephan Hermlin’s The Female Commander (1954), taking into account their contemporary reception as well as later canonisation (and decanonisation).