Working group literature and poetry Jena
The Jena Literature and Poetry Working Group was an association of young writers in the GDR in the 1970s and, alongside the Jena Young Community, one of the city's most important centers of youth culture .
Foundation and work
The working group was founded in autumn 1973 by young writers in Lutz Rathenow's apartment in Jena . It was the time of a somewhat liberalized cultural policy after the 8th party congress of the SED . The FDJ assigned the group a room in the Kulturhaus Jena-Neulobeda, a new slab housing estate in the south of the city. Lutz Rathenow became the official director. The founding members included Udo Scheer , Siegfried Reiprich , Bernd Markowski and Wolfgang Hinkeldey. You worked closely with Jürgen Fuchs . Some poems were printed in the anthology Open Windows .
Decomposition by the State Security
However, the state security opened the operational procedure "Pegasus" and had the group spied on. After a scandal at the Central Poets Seminar in Schwerin in August 1974 - Berd Markowski had sung a children's song by the banned songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann , the friends had refused to distance himself from him - the working group was massively hindered by MfS and cultural officials, members were excluded and practically paralyzed . Lutz Rathenow resigned in early summer, the circle was de facto forbidden.
The Stasi took the "enemy persons" under control. All of them were later victims of repression such as decomposition , imprisonment and expatriation from the GDR. In 1975 Jürgen Fuchs was forcibly de-registered, and in March 1976 the philosophy student Reiprich was also dismissed from Jena University.
literature
- Udo Scheer: Vision and Reality. The opposition in Jena in the seventies and eighties . Christoph Links Verlag, 2nd edition, Berlin 2002, ISBN 978-3861531869
- Siegfried Reiprich: The dialogue that was prevented. My political de-registration. A documentation . Robert Havemann-Gesellschaft eV, Berlin 1996, ISBN 978-3980492027
- Ehrhart Neubert , Thomas Auerbach von Böhlau: It can be different. Opposition and resistance in Thuringia 1945–1989 . Böhlau Verlag, 2005, ISBN 978-3412088040
- Ehrhart Neubert: History of the Opposition in the GDR 1949–1989 , Federal Agency for Civic Education , Series of publications Bd. 346, 2nd edition, Berlin 1998, order no. 1,346
- Hinkeldey, Auerbach, Markowski, DDR-Konkret , Olle and Wolter, Berlin 1977