Censorship in the Dutch-language literature the GDR

Abstract

In this article, I first give a detailed sketch of censorship in the GDR. I start from a 2019 interview with German writer and publisher Gerhard Wolf. He tries to explain the acceptance in the GDR of the censorship introduced by the new state in his youth. In doing so, I use a general definition of censorship drawn up by Christine Haug, then go into the early years of that censorship and then make clear the essential difference between censorship in the GDR and that in other communist countries in Eastern Europe during these years. Censorship in the GDR was supported in part by authors who had returned from exile, such as Arnold Zweig. I also quote Bertolt Brecht’s warning in his play Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) against the still vibrant National Socialist ideology in the years after 1945. Next, I describe the HV, the department at the Ministry of Culture that dealt with censorship from 1963. It was responsible not only for the libraries and the GDR’s entire literary production, such as sales, imports and exports, including the import of literature from the Soviet Union but also for the exchange of literature between the GDR and the BRD. I then discuss the content of the reading reports: the structure, the specific questions and the authors Finally, I describe the novel Wolfsgetij by Dutch author Theun de Vries and show that this edition involves two forms of censorship.