ABSTRACT
Strittmatter worked after war service as a baker, farmer, mayor and newspaper editor, before becoming a professional writer. In 1959 he became secretary of the GDR Writers’ Union. He was initially encouraged by Brecht, who directed his verse play Katzgraben, on the subject of land reform, in 1953 for the Berliner Ensemble. Strittmatter has developed distinctive GDR versions of two popular fictional genres, the Bauernroman and the Heimatroman, giving them a socialist tendency which they had before totally lacked. These include Ochsenkutscher (1950) and Tinko (1954), both set in Lower Lusatia where Strittmatter grew up, the first during the years of the Weimar Republic, the second in 1948-9 during the transition. The strong autobiographical element evident here is also present in Der Laden (1983), which portrays a village idyll untouched by progress towards the Third Reich. More interesting for the Western reader, however, are Strittmatter’s picaresque novels, which allow greater scope to a remarkably inventive if formally conventional narrative talent. In Ole Bienkopp (1963), which covers the years 1952 to 1956, the title-figure breaks with his aristocratic employers, travels the countryside selling beehives, marries, experiences the Second World War and returns home an advocate of land reform. Caught between reactionary farmers and party officials with no grasp of local conditions he eventually dies of exhaustion. Der Wundertäter, in three volumes (1957, 1973, 1980), traces a village boy’s growth and development from 1909 to 1943, when he deserts from the army in Greece, his activities after his return home in 1947 as journalist, chief clerk and party member, and his difficulties with the party bureaucracy during the 1950s. Just as Hermann Kant demonstrates how it is possible to be a member of the urban intelligentsia and a good communist, Strittmatter makes an official ideology palatable to the rural peasantry by combining nostalgia with an awareness of the need for change. Büdner und Meisterfaun (1990) is the re-published third part of Der Wundertäter.
