Delayed Impact? Heinrich von Kleist in the GDR

IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR YEARS, there were formidable obstacles to the reception and transmission of Kleist’s works in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Even sympathetic readers, such as critic Walther Victor, found it difficult to get past the way in which Kleist’s texts had been appropriated in the Third Reich. After all, the Nazis’ chief theater censor had described his plays as the cornerstone of the repertoire. While socialists were keen to reclaim works that they deemed part of the “progressive” cultural heritage, Georg Lukács had made it clear that — in his view — there was relatively little in Kleist’s oeuvre that could be salvaged. In 1937, Lukács had described Kleist as a bigoted Prussian Junker and a forerunner of most of the decadent trends in later bourgeois literature, a judgment that had provoked the novelist Anna Seghers into issuing a defense of Kleist. While differences of opinion did thus exist within the socialist camp, Lukács’s cultural authority was unassailable in the late 1940s and early 1950s. So although the 1947 school syllabus for the eleventh and twelfth grades included eight works by Goethe, five by Schiller, and four by Lessing, none of Kleist’s works were recommended for study. His plays disappeared entirely from the theater repertoire, as managers opted for texts that lent themselves more readily to the task of anti-fascist reeducation. The first postwar Kleist production did not take place until 1952, when the Berliner Ensemble staged Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1811). This was the only one of Kleist’s texts that Lukács had endorsed unreservedly, on account of its realism.

There is no doubt, then, that Kleist’s cultural impact in the Soviet-occupied zone and German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) was initially subject to delay. But the situation had already begun to change by the early 1950s: Walther Victor’s Kleist reader was published in 1953, and it entered its eighth edition in 1968. A new GDR edition of Kleist’s works was published in 1955, and the editor — Heinrich Deiters — even tried to claim a place for Kleist in the “progressive” cultural heritage.