Reiner Kunze

By stripping singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship in November 1976, the GDR had so provoked its critical intellectuals that they were prompted to make reluctant and unexpected declarations of solidarity with him, which caused an uproar. Concerned out of all proportion about its image, and afraid of Biermann's spectacular heretical talent for exposé, the State had preferred the even greater self-inflicted damage to its standing in the world.

In the same year 1976 the Kunze case was also 'resolved'. The Lovely Years had been published in Frankfurt by Fischer, which cost the author his membership of the writers' association, and made him an enemy of the state. The following year he was allowed to move to West Germany. The authorities presumably wanted to straighten things out, but every measure taken against him and those like him proved to be grist to the mill of the 'class enemy', and only gave the incriminated literature greater fame and honour.

About fifty short prose texts, concise and expressive like good snapshots, were what formed the critical mass which led to the explosion. Kunze was a miner's son from the Erz mountains, and until this point had been in favour with the authorities - but for a long time there had been hidden tensions between the State and the lyricist. In these concentrated prose works, however, which of course were not really snapshots or flat reproductions of significant experiences, but descriptions of structures, working models of GDR reality and its methods of enforced socialisation disguised as everyday stories, Kunze was actually calling to account the society which first attempted to devalue young people such as himself to the status of tools and, when this failed, labelled them criminals and turned them out of the country.