Page:CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7.pdf/43

 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7

great symphony orchestras of Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig, embalmed in their 19th century repertoires, the 18th century boys choirs of Leipzig and Dresden, and the world renowned festivals honoring Bach (Leipzig), Handel (Halle) and Schumann (Zwickau). Even the theater, whose world impact is much more recent in time, has become a living museum, with Felsenstein's Comic Opera, the State Opera, and Brecht's Berliner Ensemble rating high with students of the art visiting East Berlin, and the theaters in Leipzig, Dresden, Rostock, Halle, and Weimar faithfully reproducing to full houses the classics of the pre-Communist era.

The Communist authorities consider the content of all cultural activity a "transmission belt" for indoctrinating the people. The primary restriction the authorities place on the creative artist is organizational. All creative artists are organized according to their disciplines into officially sponsored unions or groups which in turn are associated with the Deutscher Kulturbund (German Cultural Union), which work hand in hand with the Ministry for Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Department of the Central Committee of the SED. Control within these groups is exercised where possible by a proregime majority; where this is not possible, control is given over to the group's officers or special emissaries from the SED Central Committee. If persuasion by the majority or the orders of the authorities do not suffice to bring an errant artists around to the regime's point of view, the organization's controls over disseminating creative works—publication, performance, and exhibition—are effectively used. The creative artist is not permitted to work independently because this is considered antisocial.

Many German intellectuals of the prewar and war periods who were Communists or had leftwing sympathies naturally gravitated toward East Germany after the war. The playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) returned from the United States; the poet Johannes Becher (1891-1958) and novelists Theodor Plievier (1892-1955) and Willi Bredel (1901-64) came back from the U.S.S.R.; novelists Anna Seghers (1900-) and Ludwig Renn (1889-) returned from Mexico, and Arnold Zweig (1887-1968) from Palestine. Many of their better works, which the East German regime claims to its credit, were actually written during the 1920's or their period of subsequent exile. The regime encouraged the return of such intellectuals by soft-pedaling Communist principles in favor of the broader "anti-Fascist" front in which democrats and socialists, the middle and left of the political spectrum, could participate in good conscience.

By 1950, however, the regime adjusted its approach toward the intellectuals closer to the narrow Zhdanovist principles than constraining artistic and in intellectual expression in the Soviet Union. Many of the intellectual collaborators of the early postwar period fell silent or fled to West Germany. As the dull uniformity of "socialist realism" settled over East German arts and letters, vitality waned and the public became more and more uninterested. The artistic merit of new works by the recognized writers, for example, proved markedly inferior to their earlier works. Communist officials, taking their cue from the doctrines announced at the 1959 Bitterfeld Conference ("Bitterfeld Way"), urged creative artists to draw inspiration from the working masses while they condemned "formalism" and "schematism," defined as excessive attention to style at the expense of clarity in content.

By the early 1960's East Germany was out of step with the Soviet Union and several of the Eastern European countries in which varying degrees of innovation had been permitted. East German delegates to Communist conferences in the various creative disciplines found themselves criticized and ridiculed for the old-fashioned, Stalinist approaches to the arts which continued to be enforced in East Germany. Under pressure from its Communist colleagues, the regime in 1963 permitted a certain degree of "thaw" on the East German scene. A few plays, novels, and paintings appeared which were daring by East German standards, and they quickly led to controversy for exceeding the implicit limits of regime permissiveness. Perhaps the most controversial works of the early 1960's were the play Die Sorgen und die Macht (Problems and Power), written in 1958 by Peter Hack (1928-) and first performed in 1960; the 1963 novel Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven) by Christa Wolf (1929-); a motion picture based on the novel Das Kaninchen bin Ich (I am the Rabbit) of Manfred Bicler (1934-) produced in 1966 by Kurt Maetzig (1911-) but never shown publicly; and the 1966 film version of a 1964 novel Die Spur der Steine (The Trail of Stones) by Erik Neutsch (1931-).

In early 1968, the state-controlled Deutsche Film AG (DEFA) produced what Western observers termed its best picture since the unfettered early postwar period. The film, Ich war Neunzhen (I Was Nineteen), is a skillful and surprisingly honest account of a few days in the life of a 19-year-old Russian propaganda officer of German emigrant parents who returned to Germany with the Soviet occupation forces following World War II. The film poses such issues as the appeal of Nazism to many Germans, their reverence for military traditions, and the dilemma of a divided

38

APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7