Literatur oder Leben? Das gemeinsame Interesse an der DDR-Literatur und seine Grenzen

The author of the article gives an account of his encounters with literature specialists from East Germany. Those encounters go back to the early 1970s and their frequency increased in the last decade of the existence of the GDR. The fact that the author himself, as a teenager, escaped from East Germany had an influence upon his experience, although later, already as a citizen of West Germany he sympathized with the movement of 1968, and the main object of his scholarly interest became the literature of the GDR. In the period of the breakthrough, conspicuous differences between the literatures of divided Germany became visible: the subject matter of the East German literature had an existential meaning for East German authors and colleagues; it was related to their real life. For the Germanists of the FRD it was nevertheless ‚just‘ literature.