Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works

摘要

The literature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was aesthetically backward and politically conformist, neglecting, for example, to mention Soviet crimes against Germans in the final part of the war and the immediate postwar period. The desire to refute this kind of argument, to which he refers on a number of occasions, is the starting point of Niven's volume. In this he succeeds admirably, although he is fully aware of the aesthetic limitations of many works and of the role of censorship, which caused difficulties when authors wanted to refer to the events mentioned in his title, namely the flight of often terrified civilian populations before the advancing Soviet army and, as part of postwar policies, the expulsion of German populations from the Sudeten lands and the areas to the east of the new Oder-Neisse line frontier with Poland. The Soviet Union was of course the GDR's major ally but having Czechoslovakia and Poland as partners also made mentioning their role in expulsions problematic.