houses: Neues Leben (New Life) founded in 1946 under the name Verlag der Jungen
Generation (New Generation Publishers), and Der Kinderbuchverlag (Children’s Book
Publishers), established in 1949 as the publishing arm of the Junge Pioniere [Young
Pioneers] youth organisation.
At all points—in the printing and distribution process, the system of awards, the
organs of criticism, and involvement in education through schools and other institutions
—society had a pervasive, visible and effective influence on the children’s writer. The
history of East German children’s and youth literature is largely a story of adaptation to
and interaction with official cultural-political criteria and desirable role models. This
interaction can be discerned even in changes of literary-theoretical viewpoints and of
style, in authors’ modes of writing and rhetorical strategies, and in the choice of
particular genres and subjects.
It is, however, not right to regard GDR children’s and youth literature as a more or
less successful imitation of that of the Soviet Union. Admittedly the Soviet military
administration went to great pains immediately after the war to secure publication of
translations. Up to 1949 alone about eighty titles appeared, including major works of
the Soviet youth literature canon such as Nicolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was
Hardened (German 1947) and Arkady Gaidar’s Timur and his Band (German 1947).
Such works as Nicolai Nossov’s school stories (I was a Bad Pupil, German 1955) or the
fantasies of Alexander Volkov (The Magician of the Emerald City, German 1963) inspired
by L. Frank Baum also gained considerable popularity in ensuing years. Trends of
Soviet literary and cultural politics also influenced the East German publishing scene—
particularly its organisational structure—considerably at all periods. However, the
constant official demand to follow the model of the Soviet Union in all ways, and in
particular to imitate its children’s writing, was never whole-heartedly espoused; at any
rate, no great wish to imitate Russian texts is discernible in the relevant East German
writings themselves.
GDR children’s literature attempted to produce an independent tradition by carrying
on from the proletarian children’s literature of the Weimar Republic and the work of the
emigrants driven from Germany after 1933, not a few of whom returned to East
Germany; to some extent it also looked to representatives of the ‘inner emigration’. Thus
it was not chance, but a statement of policy, that one of the earliest significant
publications was Hans Fallada’s (pseud. of Rudolf Ditzen, 1893–1947) Geschichten aus
der Murkelei [Stories from Murkelei] (1947) and Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956) Der
verwundete Sokrates [Wounded Socrates] (1949). Among the most important texts
published or republished by the mid-1950s which entered the GDR canon were Alex
Wedding’s (pseud. of Grete Weiskopf, 1905– 1966) story of class struggle in the city, Ede
und Unku [Ede and Unku] (1954, first published 1931), and Auguste Lazar’s (1887–
1970) Sally Bleistift in Amerika [Sally Pencil in America] (1948, first published 1935),
about the solidarity of a group of children asserting themselves in a racist environment.
For the rest, the GDR did share with West Germany the heritage of a kind of children’s
literature that supplied comfort by fleeing from reality or by excluding problematic
aspects of real life, whether that meant the inimical conditions of the National Socialist
regime or the privations of the post-war period. Over against this, officially propagated
writing defining itself as contemporary and socialist could provide only an affirmative
736 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE