Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

»die Träume gehören zweifellos zur Wirklichkeit«

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Caroline Roeder
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Dream Narratives ◽  
Literary System

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] Theodor Storms Kindermärchen Der kleine Häwelmann, von dem Autor 1849 für seinen Sohn Hans verfasst und 1850 veröffentlicht, ist in seiner moralisch-komischen Form ein exemplarisches Exponat der Kinderliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Gemäß der biedermeierlich gestimmten, belehrenden Funktion des Textes steht kindliche Allmachtsfantasie im Mittelpunkt des Geschehens. Die Haltung des ›Mehr-mehr‹ überschreitet indes die Grenzen der Moralerzählung. Entgegen der abschreckenden Funktion scheint vielmehr der kleine Häwelmann in der Verschränkung von Norm-Übertritt und Eskapismus ein ›modernes‹ Kind seiner Entstehungszeit zu sein und durchaus mit den Figuren des Struwwelpeters vergleichbar, die der Arzt und Kinderpsychiater Heinrich Hoffmann 1845 entworfen hat.   »Dreams Undoubtedly Belong to Reality«Dream Narratives About Childhood and for Children The call for ›more!‹ is the force driving the protagonist of Theodor Storm’s literary fairy tale Der kleine Häwelmann (1850) on his imaginary journey through the night. This dream narrative is a combination of an exciting exploration of transcending borders with a hint of the moral tale, and can be seen as a model for the configuration of the dream motif in children’s and young adult literature. Although the dream narrative has a prominent place there, its investigation has hitherto almost exclusively taken place within the con­text of fantasy; the didactic functions of the dream, however, and the motif of the dream journey have largely been neglected. This article looks at how post­1945 children’s dream narratives explores representations of childhood. Benno Pludra’s Lütt Matten und die weiße Muschel (1963), a children’s story from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is analysed and situated within the context of its literary system. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is next considered in relation to Pludra’s text in order to pro­vide a contrastive view to a key text from the Western literary system. Both texts were hugely innovative for their time and respective systems, both use Storm’s Häwelmann as an intertextual anchor, and both, as this analysis shows, reveal recognisable societal discourses about childhood and cultural policies for children.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

Exporting Soviet Culture: The Case of Agitprop Theater

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Mally
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Global Influence

In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.

Weaving New Dreams From Old Cloth

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-234
Author(s):  
Anna Katrina Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Schema Theories

This chapter discusses the significance of Gaiman's creative disruptions of scripts and schemas in two of his visual retellings for young adults: The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014) and the graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999). By weaving the old, well-worn cloth of fairy tale narrative scripts together with new schematics, Gaiman and his collaborators present sometimes radical ideologies clothed in the comfortable garb of rehearsed, longstanding traditions. As much as this action masks the changing cultural attitudes represented by the "new cloth," Gaiman's weavings also reveal to careful readers how narratives become ubiquitous and achieve metanarrativity. To understand how our minds interpret scripts, schemas, and metanarratives, this chapter will bring to bear conceptual blending and schema theories on my examination of the verbal and visual interplay of source texts and Gaiman retellings

City Plans

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
City Center ◽  
German State ◽  
Design Competition ◽  
East German ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
The City

Between 1945 and 1949 a series of modernist plans were developed for Berlin. In this time of political turmoil, planners and politicians projected a broad range of meanings onto the plans. After the founding of the East German state, Lothar Bolz orchestrated the adoption of socialist realism as state policy, requiring a return to traditional urban design. This theory included a range of tenets guiding planning, but Walter Ulbricht intervened to assure that planning would be dominated by a concern for parade routes leading to an immense square in the city center. In response to West Berlin’s international building exhibition, the German Democratic Republic held their own design competition for a “socialist” city center in 1958. The recent introduction of industrialized building, along with uncertainty and debate over the nature of “socialist” architecture, was evident in designs with a range of influences, including international modernism, midcentury modernism, and socialist realism.

The Leipziger Synagogalchor in the Service of State Propaganda

2021 ◽  
pp. 267-280
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Performance Context

Having received solid funding from the state, the Leipziger Synagogalchor began to adopt a new image to conform to the GDR’s cultural policies. By the early 1980s, its representation of Jewishness became ever more opaque. The choir maintained loose connections to the Jewish communities, while also entering deeper into the political web of the Democratic Republic through the state’s award system and through negotiations allowing travel to represent antifascist values. The choir found itself in additional contexts, in which aspects of Jewish culture intersected in other ways with GDR politics. At the same time interfaith efforts increased throughout East Germany, providing another performance context for the choir. Discussions about the Leipziger Synagogalchor are juxtaposed with the declining musical life of the Jewish communities.

The Archives and Library of the Berlin Mission Society

1996 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 411-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich van der Heyden
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Points Of Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Missionary Societies

This paper highlights a rich source of history of the cultures of foreign peoples hitherto referred to little by academics—the archive and library of the Berlin Mission Society, now the Berliner Missionswerk. It will discuss the immense opportunities that the library and the archives offer for academic research. It is not intended to be a history of the Berlin Mission Society or its institutions but will rather suggest initial points of interest for further investigation. I shall also refer to the present state of research in both history and anthropology of foreign peoples based on an assessment of the materials available in the mission societies in the former German Democratic Republic. This paper then is less a contribution to theoretical problems than an attempt to draw the attention of historians, anthropologists and others to the resources of the Berlin Mission Society.In the street called Georgenkirchstrasse, No. 70, in East Berlin, opposite the fairy tale Fountain of Friedrichshain and the famous park, is the Berlin Mission House, built in 1873—the location of the Berlin Mission Society, founded in 1824. Until 1991 the latter was called the Ecumenical Missionary Centre/Berlin Mission Society (Ökumenisch-Missionarisches Zentrum/Berliner Missionsgesellschaft).As one of the largest missionary societies, its missionaries have worked since the mid-nineteenth century in South Africa and later in China and East Africa. In the long history of the Berlin Mission many printed and unpublished texts, as well as drawings, maps, and photographs were collected. The archives retain 270 meters of file. There are also the records of other missions, as well as the largest specialist library for missions and ecumenical movements (50,000 volumes and scholarly papers) in the former GDR.

scholarly journals Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres: Reading Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” As a Female Bildungsroman

MANUSYA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-72
Author(s):  
Phacharawan Boonpromkul
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Female Bonding ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Female Bildungsroman ◽  
Gender Aspects ◽  
Complex Characterization

Built on the storyline of the traditional fairy tale “Bluebeard,” Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) contains striking alterations in the use of the first-person narrator, ambivalent and complex characterization, explicit sexual description and a revised ending; all of which have given rise to heated arguments among feminist scholars and literary critics. This paper relies on a close reading analysis and engages in the ongoing discussions by considering the problematic categorization of the story—as a fairy tale, a pornographic fiction, a gothic horror, and especially as a bildungsroman novel—in relation to several gender aspects such as power relations between the sexes, the concept of gaze, sadomasochism and the representation of men and women and their relationship. By focusing on gender issues in the short story and using the narrative structures of these genres as a framework, Carter’s ingenious revision of the norms becomes a sharper critique of the restrictions of the traditional genres, as well as the oppressive social and patriarchal ideologies hidden in them. Also, the study reveals how the short story can be a totally different read with the education of the female narrator at the center because the lesson learnt is not a reproof of female curiosity as the traditional “Bluebeard” endeavors to deliver but is her own sexual awareness, readjustment of certain values and the realization of female bonding and realizable autonomy outside the conventional realm of matrimony.

“Keep the Home Fires Burning“: Fairy Tale Heroes and Heroines in an East German Heimat

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Fritzsche
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Black Forest ◽  
Harz Mountains ◽  
East German ◽  
Feature Adaptation ◽  
Live Action ◽  
The Devil

The article argues that the films Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart, 1950) and Der Teufel von Mühlenberg (The Devil of Mill Mountain, 1955) functioned in two ways-as fairy tales and also as new Heimat or “homeland“ tale. Besides Wolfgang Staudte's The Story of Little Mook, these two films were the only two live action fairy tale films that appeared before East Germany's DEFA made its first Grimm feature adaptation in 1956, The Brave Little Tailor. Yet, unlike the Grimm-based films that take place in a generic “forest,“ these first two films take place explicitly in the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains, two locations synonymous with the beauty and timeless nature of past notions of German Heimat. The two films also engaged with the growing monetary and symbolic success of the West's postwar Heimatfilme or homeland films. The article focuses on how The Cold Heart and Mill Mountain contributed to the rearticulation of the emerging Heimat discourse in the early German Democratic Republic, with a particular focus on gender.

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