The Reception of Heine’s Jewishness in the Soviet Zone/GDR, 1945–1961 1

Heine was seen in the Soviet Zone/GDR after 1945 as a ‘revolutionary’ German poet whose contacts with Marx made him an ideal part of the German literary tradition to be claimed by the new socialist state. However, Heine was also a Jew, and the early years of the GDR were marked by show trials that were carried on in a distinctly anti‐Semitic atmosphere. This paper examines the treatment of Heine’s Jewishness in literature on the poet published in the Soviet Zone/GDR to 1961. It establishes that there were three phases in the reception of Heine’s Jewishness: the surprising openness of the period up to 1952, the silence in the wake of the show trials, and finally a tentative reopening of the issue in the late 1950s. The paper argues that German critics, who attached varying degrees of importance to the question of Heine’s Jewishness, were allowed to publish only in accordance with the prevailing political wind. The paper also distinguishes between the many German critics for whom Heine’s Jewishness played a significant part in his development as a poet and Soviet critics published in the GDR who dismissed the poet’s Jewishness as irrelevant

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · German · Ideal (ethics · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Silence · State (computer science · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy