| With a dominant concentration on the cultural politics in the GDR, Germanists have neglected topics in landscape, environment and nature, despite East German authors' central role in advancing the ecological discourse. This project unearths and explores historically recognizable backgrounds and progressive ambitions in East German environmental literature to reveal ecology as a manifold literary subject embodying a spectrum of anthropocentric and natural foci, within yet above the socialist political framework of the GDR. Through archival documents from the East German Ministry for State Security (or Stasi)---which introduces a new reception methodology to literary scholarship---and detailed literary analysis of works by the East German authors Erwin Strittmatter, Johannes Bobrowski, Hanns Cibulka, Monika Maron and Christa Wolf, this study traces a narrative of regional and global environmental consciousness beginning in the nineteenth century with Theodor Fontane and leading up to German reunification, thereby challenging normative perceptions of East German literature as insular. The project investigates East German literature's relationship to its contemporary environmental context and answers the following critical questions: How did ecological consciousness inform the works of key GDR writers; what forms did their expressions take; how do these forms fit within the broader scope of (East) German literary history, and conversely, how did their literary works influence the development of the real-world East German environmental movement? To contextualize these issues historically, the project also examines the political history of environmentalism in the GDR, particularly the official Umweltpolitik and the oppositional organizations influencing environmental policies. German environmentalism's progression from the nineteenth-century conservative Heimatschutzbewegung to a contemporary progressive movement is intriguing, for ironically, the common use of conservative literary motifs of landscape and regional Heimat mark the path toward progressivism. |
