Estímulo y censura

The German Democratic Republic (GDR), the ephemeral country born from the partition of the Reich after World War II, has remained in the collective imagination as an example of political and social censorship. However, this essay will focus on analyzing the practice of this censorship in the field of fictional literature and how it developed under such conditions. Ibon Zubiaur reconstructs the history of this political system and complements it with the vision of the protagonists through their letters, diaries and memoirs. In addition to an accurate historical analysis of the emergence, consolidation and end of the censorship system, it selects and analyzes some novels -by authors such as Fritz Rudolf Fries, Alfred Wellm, Stefan Heym, Brigitte Reimann, Volker Braun, Christoph Hein, among others- that illustrate the disparity of fates that a book could suffer in those times. This research seeks to return to books the prominence that they should never have lost. How those books developed in a censorship system and how this not only conditioned their reception, but also their emergence. Against the prejudice that the GDR only produced monotonous books, we will see that the literature of that country was characterized precisely by its plurality. The result was a very lively literature and, above all, receptive to the social tensions around it.