ABSTRACT
The socio-political and cultural environment that existed during the period of the GDR has been described in the previous chapters, as it is believed that setting the context is a necessary step in understanding any investigation of literature. The analysis in this chapter draws on Lefevere’s theory (see e.g. 1982a, 1982b, 1985a, 1985b or 1992) of patronage in cultural systems, a concept which defi nes one or more preferred poetics1 in alignment with the prevalent values and beliefs of a given society. Lefevere points to a broader notion of the ‘rewriting’ of literature,2 which encompasses not only the rewriting of the text by, for example, translators, but also the way in which a (national) literature becomes rewritten in a more fundamental way by the mechanisms which select and attribute ‘meaning’ to the literature that is to be made available in that society. What is then required, according to Lefevere, in order to understand the literature produced by a society, is an investigation of “how the interaction of writing and rewriting is ultimately responsible not just for the canonization of specifi c authors or specifi c works and the rejection of others but also for the evolution of a given literature, since rewritings are often designed precisely to push a given literature in a certain direction” (Lefevere 1985b:219).
