In his autobiography, Walter Janka, who died in 1995, records the following exchange during his interrogation by the infamous Erich Mielke (Minister of State Security in the gdr) after his arrest in 1956 on charges of endangering state security while head of the Aufbau Publishing house. ‘Mielke:“Don’t talk rubbish! You wanted the counter-revolution, like the Hungarians. Petöfi Circle there, Aufbau here! Do you deny it?” Janka: “Would you mind stepping back a little? I don’t like people spitting in my face”.’[1]

Carsten Wurm’s history of Aufbau in its early days is in some ways a mini-literary history of the first twenty years of a German state which no longer exists, and it culminates with a fireworks display in 1956, annus mirabilis and horribilis with its arrests and repression, thus providing the background to the above scene.[2] It records much else besides, with considerable authority and detail, for its author has for the last twelve years been Aufbau’s chief archivist.

Aufbau was founded in August 1945 in the period before the setting up of a separate Soviet-controlled administration in April 1946, a period sometimes referred to as the Azdakzeit—after Azdak, the judge in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle whose rulings ushered in ‘a brief Golden Age when there was almost justice’. This is perhaps romantic ‘ostalgia’, but compared with what followed, especially after early in 1947 when the separate zones of Germany were formalized, these months, during which Aufbau quickly grew to become the biggest literary publisher in Germany—challenged later by S. Fischer in Munich and Rowohlt in Hamburg—can be seen as a liberal period when, for instance, the Soviet military administration’s chief cultural officer reined in his own censors for being too harsh.

One of the early important associates of Aufbau was Johannes R. Becher, sometimes cruelly called the William McGonagall of German Expressionism. Becher, a middle-class German communist who had spent years in emigration in Moscow, had seen more senior German communists killed there in the purges than were lost in Hitler’s camps; he had learnt very little Russian, longed to step once more upon German soil, and looked forward to the revival of literary publishing as it had been before 1933. Instead, he became a prime mover in a policy of cultural reconciliation and renewal which sought to include non-Nazi writers who had stayed in Germany—like Gerhart Hauptmann and Hans Fallada—as well as the politically more acceptable exiles like the communist playwright, Friedrich Wolf (unhappy at the inclusion of non-exiles), Willi Bredel, Theodor Plivier, Heinrich Mann and others. In this earliest period, Aufbau often resorted to creating books—essays by Lukács, for example—by reprinting articles from International Literatur, the Comintern’s literary journal, as well as reprinting classics from pre-Nazi editions to which new introductions were added.

In Zurich in 1947, Brecht noted in his Journals ‘with a shudder’ that, not having had a revolution of its own, Germany ‘will now have to assimilate the Russian one’. And in the period that followed, from 1947, Aufbau duly issued its share of translations from Russian, including major editions of nineteenth-century classics but also such old chestnuts as Makarenko’s Road to life and hagiographies of Lysenko and Pavlov.

The first head of Aufbau was Kurt Wilhelm, a non-communist who had worked in German publishing and had resistance credentials. He resigned in Spring 1947 under political pressure and was replaced by Erich Wendt, a communist typesetter who had been in emigration in Moscow, including two years in prison and deportation to Siberia. Although stubbornly sympathetic to Soviet policies, Wendt was forced to take account of the great appetite among the East German public for exile literature from the West—Lion Feuchtwanger, Bodo Uhse, Anna Seghers and others. He also inherited from Wilhelm one of the most culturally sophisticated and interesting figures in Aufbau’s history, the former art historian and New York-émigré, Max Schroeder, one of several senior editors who stayed with the company through the worst years and did what they could to preserve its literary reputation.

By 1952, when Aufbau’s catalogue included pamphlets which reprinted articles from the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, Wendt complained that it was becoming more a scientific publishing house than a literary one. He left, opening the way for the appointment of the impressive Walter Janka who combined Party loyalty with an outsize sense of his own political and moral rectitude and, as a worker—he was another typesetter—an absolute determination to beat ‘middle-class’ West German publishers at their own game.

Bartering mink coats for books

One would have thought that even someone like Janka could do little at a time of strict government control, when print-runs were set centrally according to ideological merit, not potential demand. In fact, in his astute hands, the literary programme flourished, culminating in a twelve-volume Thomas Mann edition, edited by Hans Mayer, and presented to Mann on his eightieth birthday just before he died. The obstacles that had to be overcome in publishing West German authors in the East, with its valueless currency, involved anything from offering Eisenach-made bmws to Russian mink coats—the latter gratefully accepted by the whole Thomas Mann family. At one stage, it looked as though books printed in the East for S. Fischer Verlag, in lieu of cash payment for Thomas Mann rights, would have to be submitted to the East German censor before being smuggled across the Swiss border because such trade was unacceptable to the West. Janka’s ability to woo, in particular, Thomas Mann, to outmanoeuvre the legendary Gottfried Bermann Fischer and, when necessary, to bully his own cultural bureaucrats, seemed somewhat incredible in his autobiography; they are amplified in Carsten Wurm’s account, and become even more impressive.

Alongside Janka in the early 1950s was another figure—nearly as phenomenal—that is, Wolfgang Harich, a philosophy specialist who took Ernst Bloch and Lukács as his mentors, and who almost singlehandedly established philosophy publishing of quality in East Germany, working particularly on Herder. He was also a literary editor, producing a six-volume edition of Heine.

Throughout the 1950s, East Germany lived up to its self-proclaimed reputation as a Leserland—land of readers. Consumption of serious literature was higher than in the West, especially of the classics. However, the search for indigenous authors was less successful, despite writing-schools, literary prizes and other temptations. Aufbau mostly left this area to other East German publishers, but its own house authors—Franz Fühmann, Günter Kunert and Heiner Müller—sold badly.
Literary censorship was at its harshest in East Germany in 1952, culminating in the rejection of Hanns Eisler’s opera libretto Johann Faustus, a work which requires much learning to read as well as to censor. Such learning was not lacking with well-read editors around like Alexander Abusch—eager to curry favour as a West-émigré, then coming under suspicion—the rigidly orthodox communist ‘Deutsche Klassik’ expert, Wilhelm Girnus, and Alfred Kurella, the Moscow survivor (some said at the expense of his more popular brother, Heinz, executed in the purges). Faced with such judges, even the voluble Eisler, pupil of Schoenberg, friend of Brecht and of Thomas Mann, was stunned into silence and never composed a note of his score. His friend Max Schroeder was also savaged into temporary submission. That year went from bad to worse. Janka himself was threatened when his comrade and friend from the important Mexican emigration, Paul Merker, was arrested and scandalously accused of being an imperialist spy and Zionist agent. The admirably cussed Janka did what he could, and gave Merker proof-reading jobs while he was under arrest. Among other works suppressed at this time was Ludwig Renn’s Der spanische Krieg, already in proof. The problem was its mention of heroic deeds during the Spanish Civil War by German communists who had since been denounced. Here Janka, himself a Civil War veteran with scores to settle, played a less admirable role.

The consequences of the 17 June 1953 uprising in Berlin were, surprisingly, positive on the cultural front. The government realized that things could not go on in the old way. The intellectuals were by and large not implicated and censorship grew less fierce. It was in this atmosphere that Janka returned to an idea he had first suggested to Ulbricht in 1951—the founding of a branch of Aufbau in Hamburg, probably chosen because it was the stamping-ground of Ernst Rowohlt, unique among West German publishers in encouraging the idea that his list should be marketed in the eastern Leserland, and quite conscious of what a commercial killing he might make. In fact, it was for this reason that Ulbricht eventually vetoed the whole plan so carefully negotiated by Janka: the spectre of West German companies claiming the right to open branches in the East was too much.
When considering the astonishing and crucial years of 1955 and in particular 1956, a new name of honour deserves a place beside those of Janka, Harich, Schroeder and the influential Hans Mayer—that of Günter Caspar, a senior editor who had been a prisoner-of-war in the usa and Britain where his passion for literarure had developed in camp libraries. Caspar stood beside Janka and Schroeder in every difficulty and replaced the latter when he retired with cancer in August 1956.

Disputes with Lukács

Surprisingly, the fermentation that took place at Aufbau in 1956 had begun with criticisms of Lukács—who had also been attacked in avant-garde circles in Budapest—at a meeting at the Aufbau offices in May 1955. Lukács was immediately put on the defensive when an editor raised the subject of Dostoyevsky—a passion of Lukács’s ‘decadent’ youth—and became even more upset at the mention of another of his rejected heroes, Wilhelm Dilthey. Unrolling his own version of ‘the Great Tradition’, culminating in Fontane and Thomas Mann, and denying there was anything worth reading in between—especially ‘decadent’ symbolism—Lukács trotted out a quotation, without context, from the nineteenth-century Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen: ‘Down with Superfluous Refinement!’ This did not go down well with the Aufbau editors. He was asked why he hadn’t mentioned Hermann Broch, Musil or Kafka in his book on German literature in the imperial age, and broke off the discussion altogether after denouncing Brecht’s early work as ‘very dangerous’ when answering another awkward question. Nevertheless, if Lukács was against the avant-garde, he was equally against Soviet-style socialist realism. He had even mentioned Sartre and Camus when he spoke of too crude a use of the concept of decadence, and his Meaning of Contemporary Realism was therefore taken on enthusiastically by the Aufbau editors. It was a version of this book which lay in proof on Janka’s desk when he was arrested in his office in December 1956 accused, among other things, of conspiring to bring Lukács—who had by then become a leading light of the more liberal Hungarian communist intellectuals in Budapest—to play a similar role in Berlin.[3]

What had happened? In short, the influential Party intellectuals centred on Aufbau were setting their own cultural agenda. This was typified by Hans Mayer who published a censored radio-talk in the Aufbau-owned weekly Sonntag calling for the urgent recognition of Kafka, Proust and Joyce. Aufbau was developing plans to rediscover ‘late bourgeois’ German literature, to publish non-socialist foreign literature and cut down on orthodox German writers, as well as to negotiate rights to publish contemporary West German writers. This meant more Hermann Hesse—whose publication even Brecht encouraged—Werfel, Roth, Hofmannsthal and, of course, Kafka. Among contemporaries, the call was for Hemingway, Sartre and Moravia (recommended by Lukács). Among foreign classics were Conrad (Nostromo and Heart of Darkness), Hardy (Jude the Obscure, edited by Schroeder) and Haldor Laxness, a favourite of Janka’s who repaid the compliment by taking up the cudgels for him after his arrest and imprisonment. In addition, Caspar and Mayer were planning an edition of Proust which the latter was eager to introduce.

In addition to this declaration of virtual cultural independence, came the consequences of the ‘revelations’ of the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress, which in the East were hardly revealed to anyone, combined with Ulbricht’s resistance to criticism, let alone change. To their lasting credit, the leading Aufbau editors—Janka, Harich, Gustav Just and Heinz Zöger (editors of journals owned by the firm)—met and allegedly conspired against the country’s anachronistic leaders in the company of the recently-released leader-in-waiting, Paul Merker. The hapless Becher, then Minister of Culture, who had looked on approvingly but passively at recent developments, caved in to power as he always had. Janka, Just and Zöger were all arrested—Harich was already under arrest—while Becher, who had already confessed in a suppressed book to participating in the purge of German communists in Moscow, remained mute and free. Becher and Klaus Gysi, another obsequious middle-class communist who had been associated with Aufbau from the beginning, now presided over the dénouement. However, in terms of books published, nothing could be the same again: the toothpaste was out of the tube. Thanks to Caspar and to a certain extent Gysi, some of the projects conceived during la folle année were subsequently published and Aufbau’s programme never retreated to that of the early 1950s

Wurm’s rich work of cultural history is at the same time a record of intellectual and political courage in a German state that risks obliteration from historical consciousness. It records noble intentions and some noble characters in a very hostile world. Some of that hostility was self-induced and understandable; East Germany was, after all, a state led by men and women to whom evil had been done, not only under fascism, but under the rule of their own Soviet ‘comrades’, and ‘those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’.

This book shows what a comparative triumph it was to produce, under such circumstances, the many respected editions, always well designed and often bound in genuine cloth, for which Aufbau will always be remembered.

Notes

1. Walter Janka, Spuren eines Lebens, Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1991, p. 321.
2. Carsten Wurm, Der Frühe Aufbau-Verlag, 1945–1961, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996.
3. According to Janka, the respected novelist Anna Seghers came to him in a state of panic two days after Soviet troops had marched into Budapest that October. She was convinced that the elderly Lukács’s life was in danger from the expected ‘counter-revolutionary’ reaction, and had persuaded Becher that someone must go and rescue him. Becher’s ministerial car was available. Would he, Janka, undertake the task? Dubious, but eager to help a leading Aufbau author, Janka agreed; soon after, he was told by Becher that Ulbricht had ruled out the operation. A few weeks later, Janka was arrested. Janka, Spuren eines Lebens, pp. 264–70.

[New Left Review, series 1, no. 231, September–October 1998, pp. 146–51. ]