Excerpt from: At a Crossroads between Paris and Moscow: Sinn und Form, Latin America, and the Socialist

Republic of Letters 1949-1981 Author: Stacy Hartman Submitted September 2008 to the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures at the University of Manchester

Chapter One Theorising the Socialist Republic of Letters

In autumn 1967, the East German literary journal Sinn und Form devoted an issue to commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, presenting fiction, poetry, and essays by writers from such disparate locations as Brazil, Vietnam, France, the GDR, and the Soviet Union. This issue serves as a microcosm of what I shall refer to throughout this dissertation as the socialist republic of a letters. Wladimir Stscherbinas essay from this issue, Roter Oktober und Weltliteratur, delineates one conceptualisation of such a republic: Die Oktoberrevolution gab der Idee von einer gemeinsamen internationalen Kultur neuen Auftrieb, sie frderte die Entwicklung der Weltliteratur als einheitlichen Prozess auf neuer geschichtlicher Grundlage (5/1967: 1229). Stscherbinas essay evinces a nationalistic bias toward the USSR that prevents it from granting proper weight to other regions and describing the socialist republic of letters more accurately. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that despite vast geographic and cultural distances between, for example, China, Cuba, the GDR, and the USSR, the international language of socialism, the struggles for, within, and even against socialist states, and the isolation resulting from the Cold War created a common basis from which writers within these countries could and did speak to each other across divides of language, space, politics, and even time. In other words, they created a socialist republic of letters deeply rooted in transnational literary exchange. The concept of a socialist republic of letters is therefore far from new, but it has heretofore never been properly theorised. In this dissertation, I will trace the development of the socialist republic of letters through the medium of Sinn und Form and its contributions by Latin American writers over the course of the three decades that comprise the editorships of Peter Huchel and Wilhelm Girnus. Chapter One develops the relevant theory, drawing on Pascale Casanovas The World Republic of Letters and Pierre

2 Bourdieus concept of symbolic and political capital. I will then turn my attention to Sinn und Form itself and the Latin American literature published therein, both as individual pieces and as part of a greater compositional strategy encompassing individual and consecutive issues. Chapter Two examines the Huchel years (1949-1962), with special emphasis on 2/1951, which contains a selection of Latin American lyric poetry. Chapter Three focuses on Sinn und Form under Girnus (1964-1981), with particular attention paid to 3/1973, a Sonderheft devoted to Latin America. Throughout, I will use Casanova and Bourdieu to conceptualise the shifting balance of power between Latin America and the GDR within the world republic of letters in an attempt to formulate a more complete vision of the socialist republic of letters. 1.1 The world republic of letters and the cracks in Casanovas theory In her epic scholarly work The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the domain or letters or world literary space (2004: 3) as a fascinating but violent realm that is linked to, and yet separate from, the political-historical world: this world republic of letters has its own mode of operation: its own economy [] and, above all, its own history (Casanova 2004: 11). This history is one of incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature itself an endless succession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults, and revolutions (Ibid.: 12). Such struggles take place in a frothing sea of transnational exchange, where the currency is translation and the primary commodity literariness, which is bestowed upon dominated citizens by consecrating authorities, charged with responsibility for legislating on literary matters, which function as the sole legitimate arbiters with regard to questions of recognition (Ibid.: 12); such authorities often reside in Paris, the literary Greenwich meridian (Ibid.: 8) and capital of Casanovas world republic of letters. Finally, and most importantly, this world republic of letters is not a place of equality. It has its own modes of repression and its own forms of violence (Ibid.: 11), usually invisible to all but those who suffer them directly that is, to its most marginalized citizens. But at certain moments of literary or historical upheaval, these modes of repression become visible even to those at the republics centre, often because they find themselves abruptly displaced.

3 There are clear advantages to using such a comprehensive theory to analyse instances of transnational literary exchange. Claudio Maz explicates some of them in his essay on Latin American boom literature and its relationship to the world republic of letters:
Un modelo de interpretacin de ese cariz permite instaurar las relaciones entre ciertos espacios que exceden los reduccionismos nacionales []. Una transnacionalidad cultural puede enhebrar los cabos sueltos de una misma condicin factible de descubrir en territorios, en apariencia, tan dismiles como Mosc, Viena, Buenos Aires, Barcelona y tambin Salamanca, por medio de los cambios de sensibilidad. (2006: 227) (1)

However, the primary strength of Casanovas theory the sheer audacity of its scope is also its weakness. Although it works well on a general level, it often breaks down when used to examine specific examples of literary exchange, especially between spaces that fail to adhere to Casanovas definition of literary as avant-garde and politically autonomous. Moments of turmoil and disruption in particular reveal the hairline fractures in Casanovas theory. She pays mere lip-service to the post-World War II upheaval in the world republic of letters, stating dismissively and with extreme simplicity that the establishment of literary autonomy was abruptly interrupted (2004: 193) in central and eastern Europe by communism. Furthermore, she claims that,
under such circumstances, writers [] are obliged to conform to a narrowly political and national definition of cultural identity. Deprived of their independence, they find themselves faced with a choice similar to authors in emerging worlds of letters: either to produce a political literature in the service of national interests or to go into exile. (Ibid.: 194)

It is undeniable that within the literary field of East Germany, writers and intellectuals consistently struggled with officials of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) for literary and artistic freedom. However, in her eagerness to privilege literary autonomy, Casanova disregards all attempts at nuance and resorts to a rough dichotomisation of terms: autonomy or dependence, collaboration or exile, politics or literature. By making assumptions about relationships between writers, literature, and politics, she precludes even the possibility of a socialist republic of letters but these

4 assumptions are false and her map of the Cold War world republic of letters suffers in accuracy for them. 1.2 Sinn und Form: Literary journals as mediums of exchange The problematics of Casanovas theory are further illuminated by the specific example of Sinn und Form. The journal was founded just after the Second World War in the Soviet Zone of occupied Berlin by Johannes R. Becher and Peter Huchel (Parker 2007: 519), both of whom went on to become key consecrating authorities in the GDR. From the journals founding, claims Uwe Schoor in a history of Huchels Sinn und Form, in den zahlreichen vergleichenden Literaturbetrachtungen und in den Beziehungen, die Texte verschiedener Kultursphren im Nebeneinander der jeweiligen Komposition eingehen, sind internationale Zusammenhnge der Literaturentwicklung prsent (1992: 71). In other words, far from being dominated, politicised, and isolated from the world republic of letters as Casanova would assume, Sinn und Form accrued for East Germany noteworthy amounts of what Pierre Bourdieu terms symbolic capital. Bourdieus brief remarks from The Rules of Art about literary journals clarify certain aspects of how this was achieved:
The gathering together of the authors and, secondarily, of the texts which make up a literary review has as its genuine principle [] social strategies close to those governing the constitution of a salon or a movement even though they take into account, among other criteria, the strictly literary capital of the assembled authors. (1996: 273)

This gathering together of literary personalities under a common habitus or ethos (Ibid.: 273) eventually establishes, according to Bourdieu, a core of contributors. In terms of Casanovas theory, the establishment of a core of international contributors to Sinn und Form, including such heavily consecrated Latin Americans as Pablo Neruda, allowed the journal either to hijack (Casanova 2002: 5) material and incorporate it into its own symbolic capital, or, conversely, to consecrate it, thereby elevating it to a higher level of literariness. Literariness, however, is not the only form symbolic capital may take, and in a literary subfield heavily influenced by politics, it may not always be the most important. Bourdieu divides the symbolic from the political, but for the purpose of analysing a

5 literary journal produced under communism it may be more useful to consider the relative symbolic weight of literary and political forms of capital. In her essay on the history of Latin American intellectuals and the literary journal, Beatriz Sarlo claims that the syntax of a journal, i.e. its composition, and the politics of a journal cannot be divorced:
Conviene recordar [] que la sintaxis de una revista es casi siempre producto de juicios de valor tanto como la eleccin de los textos que se ordenarn segn esa sintaxis. La poltica de una revista es un orden, una paginacin, una forma de titular que, por lo menos idealmente, sirve para definir el campo de lo deseable y lo posible de un proyecto. (1992: 12) (2)

Although Bourdieu and Sarlo both place emphasis on journal composition, Bourdieu is more interested in the gathering together of literary producers and their aggregated literary capital, while Sarlo emphasises the political capital of journal composition. These emphases need not and indeed should not preclude each other; both the literary and political aspects of journal composition are crucial to an analysis of Latin American literature in Sinn und Form. Such an analysis must begin with the question of equality. Casanova frames all transnational literary exchanges in terms of either consecration (i.e. from a dominated literary subfield to a dominant one) or accumulation (vice versa). Although this may be yet another example of false dichotomisation within Casanovas theory, consecration and accumulation are useful terms in that they acknowledge the inequalities inherent within the world republic of letters inequalities that exist to no lesser degree within the socialist republic of letters. A number of factors determine whether the exchange between Latin America and the GDR in Sinn und Form is an example of consecration or accumulation, including the language of the original text and of the journal, as well as the relative standings of the national literatures in question as either dominant or dominated within the world republic of letters. Regarding, first of all, the matter of language, there is no legitimate way to approach Latin American literature in Sinn und Form without acknowledging that the literature has been translated. Casanova states that far from being the horizontal exchange and pacified transfer often described, translation must be understood, on the contrary, as an unequal exchange occurring in a strongly hierarchised universe (2002:

6 2). Casanova is far from the first to acknowledge this; in 1978, Itamar Even-Zohar theorised the relative centrality or peripherality of translated literature (1978/2004), concepts which correspond roughly to Casanovas accumulation (in dominated national literatures where translations occupy a central position) and consecration (in dominant national literatures where translations are peripheral). The nature of the exchange between the GDR and Latin America varied greatly over the course of the thirty years comprising Huchel and Girnuss editorships; at times the GDR was dominant and it was clearly one of consecration, while at others it was unusually symbiotic, with both sides benefiting. Throughout, the translation occurred from a less literary language (Latin American Spanish) into a more literary language (German). This dissertation is an analysis of Latin American literature in Sinn und Form; as such, most quotations will derive from the German translations. However, the original Spanish will be used for comparison where appropriate for the discussion. The second factor, the relative standings of the two national literatures, renders the discussion even more complex. The status accorded to GDR literature within the world republic of letters of the mid-twentieth century is anything but straightforward, and Latin Americas own status underwent an enormous shift in the 1960s. Once again, the application of Casanovas theory to this specific instance of exchange breaks down due to her privileging of autonomy:
The autonomy enjoyed by the most literary countries is marked chiefly by the depoliticisation of literature: the almost complete disappearance of popular or national themes, the appearance of pure writing [], and [] the emergence of formal experimentation, which is to say of forms detached from political purpose and unencumbered by non-literary conceptions of literature. (Casanova 2004: 199-200)

GDR literature was antithetical to this. Throughout its forty year history, periods of varying liberalisation and repression allowed degrees of formal experimentation, but official cultural policy consistently favoured Lukcsian socialist realism and discouraged Formalism or decadence. Pierre Bourdieu also employs the term autonomous, albeit in a slightly different way: he uses it to refer to art for arts sake (1996: 216). Neither was GDR literature autonomous in this sense. In both Bourdieu and Casanovas terms, then, GDR literature was dominated. Even as early as the 1950s, however, the nascent

7 but significant subfield of the socialist republic of letters assumed an interdependent relationship between politics and literature to be a theoretical given. In this context, the GDR, which was still capable of drawing (albeit selectively) on the long literary history of the German language, was anything but dominated. To further complicate matters, the status of Sinn und Form was not synonymous with that of the GDR. The journals foundational conception as a prestige project designed to impress and influence opinion outside the Soviet zone (Parker 1992: 134) and its dedication to the Wieder- und Neuherstellung der kulturellen Einheit Deutschlands (Schoor 1992: 28) allowed it to achieve a breadth and depth that belied assumptions of an underlying sectarian agenda (Parker et al. 2004: 160). In 1950 the journal was taken under the wing of the East Berlin Akademie der Knste, which provided anchorage for editorial policy in the notion of aesthetic quality that cut across simple binary oppositions of ideology (Ibid.: 156-157). The acquisition also opened the journal up to direct editorial influence from the Party, but Huchel maintained his commitment to literary quality even in the face of attack from both sides: in the West for dressing up Soviet ideology in literary garb; in the East for its support of formalism, or its neutrality on political matters (Williams and Riordan 1992: 3). In other words, Sinn und Form was founded for the purpose of accruing symbolic capital for the GDR in the eyes of the West, and it continued to do so even after GDR cultural policy grew significantly more repressive. But what comprises symbolic capital is not necessarily consistent; Huchel, for example, would have assigned it chiefly literary value, while GDR cultural politicians such as Alfred Kurella and Alexander Abusch would have argued for the primacy of politics. Girnuss position grew increasingly complex over the course of his editorship; as a loyal Party member he considered politics to be of utmost importance, and yet he often chose to expend the journals political capital on problematic pieces of high literary quality, including those by Latin American writers. 1.3 The mercurial status of Latin America in the world republic of letters In light of this tension between the literary and the political, which ebbed and flowed during the lifetime of the GDR but certainly never vanished, one of the advantages of international literature was that it could accrue both literary and political

8 forms of symbolic capital while avoiding some of the hazards associated with problematic GDR writing. There was little risk, for example, that the West would utilise Latin American writing against East Germany the way it might dissident GDR writing. For these reasons, a wide array of international literature was published in the journal from its very beginning: die literarische Landkarte des ersten Jahrgangs [von Sinn und Form] verzeichnet Frankreich, die UdSSR bzw. Russland, die Tschechoslowakei, Polen, England, Ungarn, Spanien, Italien, China, die USA und Chile (Schoor 1992: 40). The inclusion of Chile in this list is significant; the very first Latin American contribution that Sinn und Form published was a collection of five poems by Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral in 4/1949, and the most consecrated and frequent Latin American contributor by far throughout the Huchel era was Pablo Neruda. Over the course of the following three decades, Sinn und Form published lyric poetry, fiction, and essays by writers from Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Mexico, with the Latin American presence in the journal reaching its peak in a 1973 Sonderheft organised by Girnus. The crucial question at this juncture is, of course, why Latin America? Schoors analysis of the literarische Landkarte shows that it was not the only foreign region in which Sinn und Form invested symbolic capital; nor was it the only third world region represented in the journal. But Latin America was the only non-Eastern Bloc region consistently present throughout the journals forty-year GDR history. Some regions, like China, have significant presence under Huchel but not Girnus, while others, such as India and Africa, were granted Sonderhefte under Girnus but have no presence under Huchel. In contrast to these regions, Latin America acts as an element of continuity across three decades of Sinn und Form. A list of Latin American writers published in the journal is a roll call of the left-wing Latin American canon of the mid-twentieth century; in addition to Neruda and Mistral, the journal published work by Miguel ngel Asturias, Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortzar, to name only the most frequent contributors. It is not, then, a matter of the consecration of a single writer, but rather of an enormous body of work that carried its own mercurial status within the world republic of letters. The reasons for this special interest in Latin America are, unsurprisingly, both literary and political. With regard to the latter, Latin America was a politically contested

9 space during the Cold War. In The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Greg Grandin asserts that,
[The Cold War] was [] an intensified phase of a larger conflict, an international civil war []. This tension was acute in Latin America, where Catholic humanism, liberal nationalism, Native American conceptions of justice, conservative defence of collective rights, socialism, and in some countries the radicalism of militant working-class immigrants combined in different proportions to produce an extraordinarily insurgent twentieth century. (2004: 17)

Grandin argues that the role of Latin American writers in these violent, Cold War contests was to construct competing myth-epic national or continental histories that reveal the continuous, enforcing violence of the state in order to discredit that state and create the possibility of a new, more genuinely popular, revolutionary identity (Ibid.: 172). Jean Franco concurs in her history of Latin American Cold War cultural politics: The prestige of literature derived, in part, from the alternative realities it represented. In the 1960s and 1970s, literature became the mirror in which the antithesis of the real state was reflected (2002: 7). Considering the overt political dependency of GDR literature, the political engagement of the writers the journal chose to publish, and the spike in interest from Sinn und Form in the mid-1970s following the coup dtat in Chile, it would be absurd to deny that much of the symbolic capital Sinn und Form accrued through Latin American writers was political. However, reducing the importance of Latin American literature to Cold War politics denies Casanovas assertion that the literary and intellectual map cannot be superimposed upon the political map (2004: 39). As an elite literary journal, Sinn und Form required significant literary as well as political capital from its contributors; it obtained both from writers such as Pablo Neruda, who was already consecrated within the world republic of letters. The journals relationship with Neruda was anomalous until the 1960s, when writers such as Asturias experienced a rapid elevation in status; until then, the journal had to expend its own symbolic capital to publish less consecrated authors. Matthew Philpotts and Stephen Parker point out that none of these exchanges of capital [between the journal and its contributors] is a straightforward, one-way process (2008 Ch.1: 36), but this does not mean that East German literature and Latin American literature were of equal standing within the world republic of letters. With the exception

10 of Neruda, who achieved a truly symbiotic relationship with Sinn und Form as early as the 1950s, Latin America was treated as a dominated, third-world literature well into Girnuss editorship. 1.4 A paradigmatic shift toward the socialist republic of letters The 1960s saw massive political changes on both sides of the Berlin Wall. These were reflected in changes in the relationship between the world republic of letters and its socialist counterpart. Sinn und Form, standing as it did at a crossroads between East and West, did not escape these changes unaffected. The construction of the Wall in August 1961 produced a situation in which, in the eyes of GDR cultural politicians, a gesamtdeutsch project like Sinn und Form was simply an anachronism (Parker 1992: 151). Huchel flatly refused to change the journals fundamental programme and was forced to resign, putting the journal in Bodo Uhses hands as of January 1963 (Ibid.: 133). Upon Uhses death only a year later, the Academy appointed Wilhelm Girnus, who served as editor-in-chief for the next seventeen years. Although the 1960s saw only handful of Latin American writers published, Girnus presided over the 1970s, during which there was a massive influx of Latin American literature into Sinn und Form. As with much of the journals complex history, the reasons for this influx are both literary and political. On a purely literary level, the Latin American boom took the world republic of letters by storm in the 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in Nobel Prizes for Miguel ngel Asturias in 1967 (Casanova 2004: 325) and Pablo Neruda in 1971 (Beckett 1981: 122) and resulting in long-term alterations to the regions status: if Latin America was an altogether marginal and remote literary space in the 1930s, lacking any international recognition, thirty years later virtually the opposite was true (Casanova 2004: 184-185). Correspondingly, there was a wholly unexpected increase in Latin American writers literary capital. On a political level, the extreme Cold War violence in Latin America caused a spike in interest in the GDR, especially after the 1973 coup in Chile that resulted, albeit indirectly, in Pablo Nerudas death under house arrest two weeks later (Beckett 1981: 127). Counterrevolutionary Latin American governments were identified with the Nazi regime; such formulations are significant in light of the foundational narrative of the GDR as an explicitly antifascist nation (Bathrick 1995: 17)

11 and resulted in increased political capital that rendered Latin American literature ever more consecrated and symbolically significant within the GDR. Considering these developments, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that by the early 1970s the relative positions of GDR literature and Latin American literature in the world republic of letters had reversed themselves. Not only had Latin America become one of the best recognized of the dominated spaces (Casanova 2004: 185), but the 1960s saw a significant period of repression in the GDR. East German literature was more marginalised than ever in a world republic of letters that privileged political autonomy. But by this time there had also been a significant re-orientation in the Eastern Bloc. In their forthcoming publication, Sinn und Form: Anatomy of a Cultural Journal, Philpotts and Parker argue that,
Sinn und Form set itself up from the 1970s onwards primarily as a forum for GDR intellectual exchange []. In turn, this [] altered the nature of mediation in the international field, where the focus shifted eastwards to the Soviet Bloc or, among western countries, to those with strong socialist traditions, such as France. (2008 Ch.2: 54-55)

France, or, indeed, Latin America. In other words, the GDR and Sinn und Form reoriented themselves toward a socialist republic of letters that had grown dramatically in scope and strength since 1949. Although the GDR was dominated and marginalised within the world republic of letters, its position within the socialist republic of letters was much stronger. Wladimir Stscherbinas 1967 essay, discussed briefly at the opening of this chapter, is useful in grasping the geography of this republic and understanding how and where it intersects with Casanovas own. Stscherbina does not attempt anything on the scale of Casanovas work, but his essay has three crucial implications. First, he notes the qualities promoted by the socialist republic of letters: it is eine revolutionre, eine humanistische Anschauung, die von der Kraft bewut handelnder und sich vereinigender Menschen ausgeht, erneute und erweiterte die Bedeutung der Literatur (5/1967: 1230). These values stand in opposition to a Western literature characterised by feelings of Einsamkeit and Hoffnungslosigkeit, such as had plagued literature in Russia before the revolution (5/1967: 1230). Secondly, in place of Casanovas Paris, Stscherbina offers Moscow, capital of the ersten Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Staat (5/1967: 1229), as the

12 supreme arbiter of political and literary taste. And, finally, in contrast to Casanovas privileging of the avant-garde, the privileged form of literature in the socialist republic of letters is socialist realism: Die Literatur des sozialistischen Realismus zeichnet sich durch das grte Neuerertum der Literatur der zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts aus, da sie den historischen Prozess der Entwicklung der Menschheit zum Sozialismus, die Psyche der neuen Menschen knstlerisch widerspiegelt (5/1967: 1238). If one takes this perspective, then East Germany is no longer a dominated literature, but a dominant one. The exchange between it and Latin American in Sinn und Form after the 1960s becomes far more mutual: the journal consecrated and inaugurated the writers it published into the socialist republic of letters at the same time as it accumulated symbolic capital creating, in point of fact, an international socialist canon. An examination of Latin American literature in Sinn und Form shows that the journal stood at a crossroads between East and West. For more than thirty years, Latin American literature acted as a bridge from East Berlin to Casanovas Paris, which could never be ignored altogether, and, simultaneously, to Stscherbinas Moscow by capitalising on international writers author-functions and circumventing the enforced parochialism of GDR cultural policy. The question of how this was achieved will be the subject of the subsequent chapters.