“Lesen und Schreiben”: A Flawed Manifesto

CHRISTA WOLF'S “LESEN UND SCHREIBEN” was one of the most influential essays published in the lifetime of the German Democratic Republic. Setting out an unexpectedly radical program for restoring credibility to East German literature as a vehicle for the authentic representation of the experience of its authors, it exposed the limitations of the official cultural doctrine of socialist realism and helped to initiate an internal debate that gradually undermined its authority. It was to change the nature of the creative prose writing produced by East German authors, not just in the remaining two decades of the GDR's lifetime but (for those who lived beyond 1989 and weathered the storm provoked by the “Literaturstreit” that followed the collapse of the GDR) in postunification Germany as well. “Lesen und Schreiben” was written in the summer of 1968, the year after Wolf completed her prose text Nachdenken über Christa T., itself one of the relatively few undisputed classics of East German literature that survived the transition to unified Germany unscathed, and complements the latter neatly as an example of literary theory based on an impressive breakthrough in literary practice. As the priority of recent years to map out postunification culture as a whole gives way to the need to reassess the historical contexts from which central strands of the new culture have emerged, the longer-term impact of “Lesen und Schreiben” on the still highly contested field of autobiographical narratives by authors from the former GDR merits fresh examination.