Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Dennis Tate -- Preface / Dennis Tate -- - 1 - Educated for Auschwitz? Childhood, War and Soviet Captivity 1922-49 / Dennis Tate -- - 2 - Spokesman for the New Germany 1950-58 / Dennis Tate -- - 3 - Freelance Author, GDR Loyalist: Destructive Contradictions 1958-68 / Dennis Tate -- - 4 - At the Forefront of Cultural Change 1968-76 / Dennis Tate -- - 5 - The Voice in the Wilderness 1977-1984 / Dennis Tate -- Conclusion The Struggle for Recognition 1984-94 / Dennis Tate -- Appendix A Checklist of Fühmann's Prose Works / Dennis Tate -- Bibliography / Dennis Tate -- Index / Dennis Tate.

This is the first full-length study of the life and works of Franz Fühmann (1922-1984) to be published in English. It provides a complete reassessment of his importance as a prose-writer, informed by the extensive corpus of Fühmann's writing which has only appeared posthumously or is now accessible in the archives of the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. Dennis Tate argues that, from the middle 1950s onwards, Fühmann's prose writing is both stylistically innovative and committed to the authentic representation of his experience, thereby challenging the conventional wisdom that little writing of international significance could be produced in the ideological context of the GDR until Honecker introduced his `no taboos' cultural policy in 1971. Fühmann's widely praised later texts (ranging from the autobiographical Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens and Vor Feuerschlünden to mythical and satirical short stories such as `Marsyas' and `Drei nackte Männer') can now be seen as the culmination of an impressive creative development rather than as the result of a late conversion to literary truthfulness. The volume will be of interest to students and teachers of post-1945 German literature as well as to general readers aware of the vitality of Central European culture throughout the period of East-West ideological division.

English

Description based on print version record.