C01 Interventionist Writing: From the Proletarian-Revolutionary Literature of the Weimar Republic through to the Literature of the GDR and West Germany
This research project examines literary and journalistic writing interventions linked to demands for social transformation. It takes German-language 20th century literature as its subject matter, while reflecting upon and revising the artistic repertoire of forms. As a result of changes in the industrial working environment that led to a fundamental reflection on the social space of literature in the Weimar Republic (or its situatedness), literature between 1930 and 1970 followed on from the historical literary avant-garde, with the additional elaboration of new dynamics of intervention. In a transitive sense, these interventions sought to actively reshape the working environment and to fundamentally transform the conditions of literary production and reception via critiques of existing and alternatively proposed models. At the same time, the aesthetically traditional repertoire of forms in literature experienced a transformation in the intransitive sense insofar as previous forms of representation were revised, with a shift towards collective practices and procedures focussing on documentation. This sub-project analyzes concepts of proletarian revolutionary literature in the final phase of the Weimar Republic (SP 1), writing interventions in GDR literature prescribed by cultural policy (SP 2) and forms of documentary writing in the context of the 1968 movement in the post-war Federal Republic (SP 3).
Head of Project
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Brokoff (SP 1)
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Andrea Schütte (SP 2)
Dr. Andree Michaelis-König (SP 2, until March 31, 2024)
Doctoral Researcher
Henning Podulski (SP 3)
Jana Maria Weiß (2022)