Rekonstruktionsversuche

On November 9, 1989, the peaceful revolution in the GDR led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and paved the way for German unity. Even though the once divided Germany has grown together in many ways, there are still areas whose reappraisal is still in its infancy. These include the scholarly examination of the individual disciplines of East German history, including East German German studies. The present study focuses on a subfield of East German German studies, namely its perception of and research methods for GDR literature itself. The starting point is the 1970s, when the first major publications on this field emerged in the GDR. Of particular interest is the view "behind the scenes" and "between the lines": What were the concerns of the Germanists from the GDR, what peculiarities characterized their scholarly work, what is their retrospective view of their publications today? In the form of conversations with contemporary witnesses about their texts and on the basis of materials made available by them for the first time, the specialist history of East German German studies on GDR literature since the 1970s is "reconstructed", whereby the works of East German Germanists produced in more recent times are also included. In the process, new subject areas are opened up that have not been considered until now.