Mensching and Wenzel: Reassessing the Proletarian Tradition

THE POLITICAL SONG scene of the GDR in many ways illustrated the interdependence of culture and politics in that state. Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Kampflieder, and indeed the whole tradition of 1920s proletarian artistic protest, was viewed as cultural Erbe and promoted as such. From the birth of the GDR onwards this tradition was nurtured in the schools, the army, and later in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ)- Singegruppen. Two writers who grew up through these institutions were Steffen Mensching (born 1958) and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel (born 1955). They are generally known in the context of the alternative young poets' scene which emerged in the vicinity of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin in the late 1970s. Not much is known, however (outside of insider circles in East Germany), about their activities in the Liedertheater group Karls Enkel. Highly popular in the Liedermacher milieu, their productions between 1977 and 1985 were deemed too risky for publication. Videos and manuscripts survive, however, in the former Lied-Zentrum of the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. From these one recognizes a clear identification with artistic techniques developed by literary cabaret, dada, and proletarian revue and theatre of the 1920s.

A major preoccupation of Wenzel and Mensching in their poetry as in their Liedertheater productions was their reassessment of the proletarian revolutionary tradition. This had always been a subject of great sensitivity in the GDR.