Reading country GDR

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The designation reading country stands for the claim and the perception of the GDR at the time of its existence to be a particularly reading-friendly society. In fact, in the 1970s, for example, book ownership in private households and library lending per capita could be interpreted as signs of a relatively high level of interest in reading material on the part of GDR citizens when compared with the Federal Republic of Germany . The range of content on offer of print products, which was limited by state control and censorship , was offset by generally affordable book prices and an emphasis on promoting reading and writing skills in school and everyday life. The media public in the GDR, which was strictly ideologically oriented in the sense of the SED , also generated an interest in writers' critical examination of the social reality of the GDR - sometimes presented in clauses and readable between the lines - also as a starting point for creating a counter-public .

Formation conditions in the "workers and farmers state"

As a result of the Second World War , Leipzig lost its status as the "undisputed capital of the book trade in the whole world". The publishers based there were already signaled during the short-term American occupation that they would only be able to evade “communist access” by following the withdrawing US forces into their West German occupation zone. On July 12, 1945, important publishers such as Brockhaus , Teubner , Thieme and Insel left the city with the American military convoy. After the Red Army took over Leipzig on July 2, 1945, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) issued SMAD Order No. 51 on September 25, 1945 on the “Re-establishment and Activity of Cultural Institutions”. In addition to the nationalization of existing publishers, new publishers were also founded; among them were the Aufbau-Verlag , the Henschelverlag and the Verlag Neues Leben .

Programmatic

The literature in the GDR was "a central and causative function in building and designing the beginning of socialism assigned." She was to create part of the strategy, socialist relations and the order of the " Education for socialist personality to realize".

Even before the GDR was founded, the Leipziger Börsenblatt published an article for the German book trade as an orientation basis for the people's book trade. The 15-point instruction, which remained authoritative until the end of the GDR, required, among other things, that

  • the folk bookseller worked tirelessly on himself as well as on his political and technical education for his cultural-political educational task;
  • the German people are influenced by the booksellers' thorough knowledge of literature in such a way "that war and fascism do not repeat themselves";
  • Bringing readers to books “about humanism and peace”;
  • the “heroism of work in a just social order” should be the main subject of the literature preferred by the booksellers;
  • the view of people is widened and their appreciation for literatures of other peoples is developed;
  • the “working people in town and country” acted as the main target groups. "If they do not come to the folk bookseller or not yet, then he goes to them in the factories and villages."

Finally, special emphasis was placed on the constant stocking of the bookshops with the “most important political writings”.

The “Creation of a new youth and children's literature” (KJL) was laid down in the “Law on the Participation of Young People in the Development of the German Democratic Republic and the Promotion of Young People in School and Work, in Sport and Recreation” of February 8, 1950 . This should be aligned with the lines of tradition of socialist literature. A debate that lasted around two decades broke out over the question of whether fairy tales should be regarded as suitable KJL under the new auspices. The long-term authoritative model for the GDR was the Soviet KJL with its theoretical thought leader Maxim Gorki and his formula of “great literature for the little ones”. The early KJL offers in large numbers included Nikolai Alexejewitsch Ostrowski's revolutionary novel How Steel Was Hardened and Arkady Petrovich Gaidar's Timur and his team . The fantastic children's and young people's literature, which was gradually incorporated, and which initially also fell back on Soviet models, was granted lower circulation and circulation. Among the international classics, Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Journey of Little Nils Holgersson with the Wild Geese was included early on ; Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland received permission to print in 1967, Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking only in 1975. Barries Peter Pan and Travers Mary Poppins , for example, were never published in the GDR .

Organizational framework

Johannes R. Becher, first Minister for Culture of the GDR, at the 1951 World Festival in East Berlin

In accordance with the principle of democratic centralism, the Ministry of Culture, with its head office for publishing and bookshops, was responsible for planning and controlling book production and for distributing the product range to bookshops and libraries . The main administration was responsible for the printing approval process , for the allocation of printing paper and the censorship of book products, in cooperation with the culture department of the Central Committee of the SED . Official banned book lists did not exist: "What was indexed today could possibly be accessible to everyone tomorrow and prohibited again the day after tomorrow."

The annual production of the GDR publishers consisted of more than 6000 titles with a total circulation of around 150 million books, so that the average circulation was almost 25,000 copies. With this, the GDR was the world leader in book production per capita, alongside the Soviet Union and Japan. For every GDR citizen there were eight to nine newly produced books per year. The Leipzig Commission and Wholesale Book Trade (LKG), nationalized in 1962, acted as the main distributor for book production .

Implementation tools

The Zentrale Druckerei- ,kaufs- und Revisionsgesellschaft mbH , later VOB Zentrag , was founded in Leipzig in October 1945. It was subordinate to the Central Committee of the SED and owned around 90 percent of the means of production in the printing works of the GDR. The "Week of the Book", scheduled for the first time from November 27 to December 3, 1949, became an annual literary propaganda event. In the folk book trade there was a sales force who "with their own resources and voluntary helpers extended their counter into the factories".

In May 1953, the Central Committee of the SED decided to “improve and strengthen the party’s own book trade”, which also had an impact on the popular book trade. Reading should become a concern for society as a whole. Parties, trade unions, youth associations and other organizations from the cultural association to small animal breeders were now required to promote reading in their own sphere of influence and to include books in awards. In the company libraries to be established and well-equipped, the working people should be provided with free reading offers. The book house in Leipzig, which is responsible for the mail order business, was given the task of intensifying its activities in the country under the motto: “The book house brings the book into the house.” Every desired book in the range should be delivered to the customer free of charge. Young people were not only used as harvest workers, but also to distribute books. In 1958, the FDJ carried out the “500,000 books in the country” campaign, in which 650,000 books were finally accounted for. The following year there was the “Days of the Book in the Country”. Matthias Biskupek says: “In the boozy years of the GDR ,” business captains also had to pick up books. Reading plant manager. Poetry-learning school principal. Colonel with suspense novel. These cadres were later relieved of this. "

The mail order business of the Leipzig bookshop was temporarily divided into eleven sections, including “The specialist book dispatch”, “The farmer's book” and “The small house library”, which was sold as a subscription in twelve monthly volumes, coupled with a free volume at the end of the year. The "buchclub 65", which is also based in the bookstore and based solely on mailing, was the first book club in the GDR founded in 1965, in the context of which "The Book of the Month" and "The Book of Youth" were also published. For now 50,000 members, over 1,000 titles were published by 1990.

Honecker's "Leseland"

Erich Honecker first used the term Leseland in the report of the SED Central Committee to the 10th SED Party Congress in 1981. He was quoted by Klaus Höpcke in a book published in 1982 ( Sample for Life. Literature in a Reading Country ), which said, among other things, that one could rightly speak of the GDR as a reading country. Publishers, bookshops and libraries would have done a lot “which will benefit the people's readiness to read.” The indicators used were the increase in book production by title and copy, the increase in holdings and the number of library loans and the increase in book purchases.

An “exceptionally dense” network of libraries offered all citizens of the GDR direct access to books. In surveys, 84 percent of the GDR population referred to their own experiences with libraries (62 percent of West Germans). They were used at least once a year by 46 percent (33 percent of West Germans). The interest in reading in the GDR was the second highest in the Eastern Bloc - right after the Soviet Union - and this was still maintained after German reunification : in 1992, 68 percent of East Germans said they picked up books at least once a week; in West Germany it was 46 percent. In the GDR, including the trade union and factory facilities, there were a total of around 32,000 libraries. Around three quarters of the children who were able to read took advantage of the offer and borrowed books. "The order in the libraries, which were called the trade union library, central library, city and district library or scientific general library depending on their importance, was the same from Adorf / Vogtland to Saßnitz / Rügen," said Matthias Biskupek .

The historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk refers to other aspects of the GDR as a reading country : “There were many books, but there weren't any more books.” Many book lovers have accumulated records of books and literary works that they once come into possession of or at least that they do wanted to read once. There was also a specific “reading culture”, namely to read between the lines: “This popular sport was very simple: Sentences, messages, thoughts - everything that was written down and said publicly - are placed in context with what was not said but meant and a political message had already been found. "

Ulbricht's replacement

The basic course setting for objectives and the organization of the reading offer in the GDR fall during Walter Ulbricht's period of activity in the party and state until 1971. The explicit renunciation of formal aspects of modern art, which was carried out in the formalism dispute in 1951, was justified by the fact that art “its humanistic and democratic Character “loses where the question of form takes on an independent meaning. Stephan Hermlin summed this up as follows: "The formalism is the picturesque, musical, literary expression of imperialist cannibalism, it is the aesthetic accompaniment to the American twilight of the gods." The socialist realism developed in the Soviet Union became the decisive art strategy for the GDR . The preferred subject here was socialist production - in the case of literature with an exemplary hero who could serve the readers as a figure of identification.

At the fifth party congress of the SED in July 1958, Ulbricht - who had previously urged artists to feel at home in the production facilities - issued the slogan, "The separation between art and life, the alienation between artist and people" to overcome. The working class already ruling in the state and in the economy must now “storm the heights of culture and take possession of them.” On the one hand, professional authors could hardly be won over to be involved in practical operational work for longer. However, after the slogan "Grab your pen, mate!" Was issued on Bitterfelder Weg in 1959, hundreds of circles of writing workers were created , which were later joined by employees, teachers and students. As a collective, they produced texts with a focus on their own interests.

Biskupek comments on writers' readings in GDR companies: “The writer colleague was referred to the brigade reading. But it was PRAYED and CONTRACTLY OBLIGED: The reading had been ARRANGED for the colleagues at work. The thing was often pleasant for the writer, for he received such easy money. It was not unpleasant for the working people, because reading time was working time. ”For Biskupek, writers' congresses were“ balancing mechanisms ”. “Goethe, Heine and Brecht lines were considered unsuspicious because they were classically secured slogans against censorship and isolation from the world. The aesthetic spirit as a fighting spirit. The political writing as a novel, the poem as an enigmatic headline. "

For professional writers who, in addition to the desired examples of structural and arrival literature in the spirit of socialism in the 1960s, also dealt with questions of individual identity finding, human self-realization and non-conforming ways of life in a critical turn against the conditions prevailing in the GDR - such as Günter Kunert , Christa Wolf and Günter de Bruyn - the beginning of the Honecker era after the fall of Ulbricht in 1971 promised programmatically new opportunities for development. At the 4th ZK plenum in December 1971, Honecker declared: “If one starts from the firm position of socialism, in my opinion there can be no taboos in the field of art and literature. That concerns both the questions of the content as well as the style - in short: the questions of what is called the artistic mastery. ”However, it remained open to whom the said“ fixed position of socialism ”would be granted.

Trend-setting case of Biermann

Wolf Biermann on December 1, 1989 in Leipzig

Not only Wolf Biermann , who, like Günter Kunert, had already been sharply criticized at the 11th plenum of the SED Central Committee in December 1965 and was strictly banned from appearing in the GDR, apparently did not fall under the intended taboo removal. That did not apply to Reiner Kunze either; and Volker Braun , Stefan Heym , Rainer Kirsch and Heiner Müller were banned from printing and performing during that supposedly liberal phase.

After Biermann's GDR citizenship was revoked on November 17, 1976, making his return to the GDR impossible, numerous writers and artists protested openly, as well as expressions of solidarity from other parts of the GDR population. The Biermann expatriation proved to be a turning point for the cultural and political development of the GDR. As a result, the state applied a “precisely calculated set of sanctions”: from arrest and house arrest to exclusion from organizations, the imposition of party penalties and a ban on publication, to quick exit permits (but only for inconvenient intellectuals). The resulting exodus of writers, which continued uninterrupted in the 1980s and totaled over 100 cases, affected not only older authors such as Erich Loest , Sarah Kirsch and Jurek Becker , but also younger ones such as Monika Maron , Wolfgang Hilbig and Thomas Brasch - " an irreparable loss of substance, ”said Wolfgang Emmerich .

The “humanist legacy” in focus

In the course of the years, various departments of what was regarded as humanistic heritage were increasingly promoted as reading material and included in the educational canon in the GDR, with works by Goethe and Schiller in the foreground at the national level . In the course of the friendship between the peoples already evoked by Stalin, especially with the Soviet Union, Russian literature was given a lot of consideration, which was shown in “outstanding complete editions” by Pushkin , Lermontov , Turgenev and Tolstoy , among others .

The appreciation of the GDR superiors for German romantics such as Novalis and Hölderlin was somewhat more reserved . Heinrich von Kleist, on the other hand, was not claimed for the humanist legacy until the 1970s. After all, according to Stefan Wolle , Honecker's relaxation exercises led to the fact that modern authors such as Joyce , Musil and Proust , who were considered difficult , were transferred from “bourgeois decadence” to the humanist legacy. Finally, Karl May, long classified as “racist”, and Franz Kafka , who had fallen out of favor after the Prague Spring, were given permission to print again. In 1982, according to Wolle, a small volume with writings by Sigmund Freud appeared for the first time in a hidden place .

Problem accumulation and inventory handling

Like other areas of the economy and society in the GDR in the 1980s, the book trade and the range of reading materials came under pressure from the state financial and foreign exchange crisis . In addition to the ideological restrictions, which continued to exclude certain critical voices and western print products, there were increasing deficiencies in satisfying the demand for books from the range. With German reunification, the state- owned book trade stocks were almost completely devalued due to a lack of demand.

Sought-after rarities

With an average circulation of around 23,000 copies, the GDR produced fewer titles in the 1980s, but more book copies per capita than the Federal Republic of Germany. In line with this, the book inventory in GDR households was relatively high, with an average of 180 books per family. The increase in book ownership by GDR citizens between 1973 and 1985 was accompanied by the fact that more popular scientific literature or non-fiction books than fiction (about 6: 4) were bought in addition to the books already available. The GDR reading research found that television had not succeeded in displacing books, but that since the mid-1970s, a certain television saturation had led to a rethinking of reading.

It was not only the critical GDR authors who had emigrated or who were driven to publish their books in the West; Even for some of those who stayed, like Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym or Christoph Hein , the Federal Republic was still the place where they could publish their latest works first or at all during the GDR era. Precisely what was withheld for reasons of unpleasant criticism of the social reality of the GDR, but also other print products that could hardly be procured in an everyday way were often particularly sought-after. In spite of the very large circulation, almost all titles that were considered interesting and legible at all found ample buyers. But the raisins, writes Wolle, “were basically only under the counter” or in a system of secret compartments in the back of the bookstores. Among the preferred authors (apart from Heinz G. Konsalik ) there were initially clear differences in East and West beyond German reunification. Familiar writers such as Erwin Strittmatter and Christa Wolf remained particularly popular in the new federal states . In the 2010s, however, there was an increasing convergence of reading interests on both sides.

Anyone looking for rarities during the GDR era could try their luck in antiquarian bookshops, which, however, were mostly state-run or subject to corresponding requirements and controls. The Leipzig book market, which has been held in front of the town hall since 1978, and the annual Rostock book bazaar opened up further possibilities. Because in the 1980s it had become common to equip these events with books that were hardly available in normal operation.

Defect management in the book industry

Occasional problems with meeting demand for certain book titles had existed as early as the 1960s; however, in the 1980s the problem worsened. Now, administratively, a distinction was made between “abridged” and “unabridged” book buyers. For example, there was no reduction in the party institutions of the SED or in the book and magazine sales of the National People's Army , but in the people's book trade. Publishers had the opportunity to block parts of the circulation, for example to keep them available for export or to be able to equip book bazaars and similar special events with books. The main victims were the customers and the workers in the folk bookshops; because further parts of the already tight print runs were withdrawn from normal business. “So it happened especially between 1987 and 1989 that the folk book trade as a shortened purchaser [...] came away empty-handed even with higher editions. But if such blockages were not needed and suddenly resolved - after they had triggered corresponding storage problems at the Leipzig Commission and Wholesale Book Trade (LKG) - it could again happen that books appeared in the bookstore after the staff had been telling customers for weeks had that they were out of stock. "

The LKG, which bore the sole risk for the storage, sale and delivery of the book stocks produced by the publishers, obviously ran into serious problems with its stocks in 1987: New books could only be stored outdoors; And even the procurement of tarpaulins for a makeshift cover was, as Borner and Härtner complain, already a feat at that time. "And that in Leseland - shaking heads among those not involved, amazement among those actually responsible."

Reading country in dissolution

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the borders, book production and book trade in the GDR were practically done in one fell swoop. Even before the introduction of the D-Mark , only the western supply determined the demand in the GDR. The GDR publishing house production disappeared from the shelves of the bookstores into the cellars. Despite extensive remissions to the LKG, there were still many risky old stocks in the people's bookshops. In the first half of 1990, around 70 million GDR marks were written off - around 40 percent of all holdings that have been written off since the founding of the Central Administration in 1954.

With the introduction of the D-Mark in the GDR on July 1, 1990, all of the major West German publishers finally pushed their way onto the East German market, especially with their excess stock of old titles, in order to open up additional sales channels among the East Germans, who are known to be strong readers. In contrast to the rest of the economic changeover, after the intervention of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Treuhandanstalt revised its original plan to sell the East German branches only in return for extremely high security deposits, and changed the guidelines in the spring of 1991 in such a way that almost two thirds of the old bookstores could get into the hands of booksellers from the former GDR. The remaining third came into West German care.

By 2008, reading behavior between East and West Germans had already largely equalized, and indeed at a declining level. Weekly book readings were only surveyed for 42 percent of East Germans, compared to 43 percent for West Germans.

literature

  • Heinz Börner , Bernd Härtner: In the reading country. The history of the folk book trade. Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-360-02134-2 .
  • Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, ISBN 978-3-8389-0029-2 .
  • Siegfried Lokatis , Ingrid Sonntag (Ed.): Secret readers in the GDR. Control and dissemination of illicit literature. Links, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86153-494-5 .
  • Caroline Roeder: Fantastic in Leseland. The development of fantastic children's literature in the GDR (including the Soviet occupation zone). Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-631-54605-5 .

Web links

See also

Remarks

  1. ↑ “Where else in the world”, ask Börner and Härtner, “did book truck services [...] deliver every book ordered from Leipzig via Königsberg to Memel in East Prussia, Bozen in Tyrol, Wroclaw in Silesia, Saarbrücken in the west or Flensburg within 48 hours in the North? Leipzig was the location of book and music publishers, assortment and mail order bookstores, antiquarian bookshops, well-functioning bar assortments as well as commission agents with decades of warehousing, printing companies, mechanical engineering companies for the graphic trade, and had exemplary bookselling facilities such as ordering and parcel exchange. "(Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 29 f.)
  2. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, pp. 15–18.
  3. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 515.
  4. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 40 f.
  5. ↑ Roeder 2006, p. 100 f. and 109.
  6. ↑ Roeder 2006, p. 116 f. and 300.
  7. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 516.
  8. ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk : The 101 most important questions - GDR. Re no. 63 Was the GDR a "reading country"? Munich 2009, p. 97.
  9. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 517.
  10. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 233.
  11. ↑ “Every year around May, the German democratic republic publishers sent their authors out to the German democratic republic. But this action was called WEEK OF THE BOOK. It lasted several weeks. Librarians and leaders of the Kulturbund were in motion during these times. They apologized when too few, too young, too old, too unquestioning, too intrusive listeners had come to the author's readings. ”( Book in the basket. Pictures from the reading country. With fifteen explanations of pictures and eighteen resolutions by Matthias Biskupek . Berlin 1992, P. 16)
  12. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 44 f. and 220. "Sales exhibitions in companies and institutions were now part of the normal work program of almost every people's bookstore." (Ibid., p. 46)
  13. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, pp. 52–54 and 69.
  14. ↑ Book in the basket. Pictures from the reading country. With fifteen explanations of pictures and eighteen resolutions from Matthias Biskupek. Berlin 1992, p. 22.
  15. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 105 f.
  16. ↑ Quoted from Michael Opitz, Michael Hoffmann (Ed.): Metzler Lexikon DDR-Literatur. Article Leseland by Helmut Peitsch , Stuttgart 2009, p. 189.
  17. ↑ Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, p. 202 f. and 204.
  18. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 517.
  19. ↑ Book in the basket. Pictures from the reading country. With fifteen explanations of pictures and eighteen resolutions from Matthias Biskupek. Berlin 1992, p. 42.
  20. ↑ Many writers, Kowalczuk notes, said they would have suffered under these circumstances because their works were sometimes mistakenly understood as political statements. (Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: The 101 most important questions - GDR. Re No. 63 Was the GDR a "reading country"? Munich 2009, p. 97)
  21. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Emmerich : Die Literatur der DDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 527.
  22. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 528.
  23. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Emmerich : Die Literatur der DDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 530.
  24. ↑ Book in the basket. Pictures from the reading country. With fifteen explanations of pictures and eighteen resolutions from Matthias Biskupek. Berlin 1992, pp. 9 and 69.
  25. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Emmerich : Die Literatur der DDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 558.
  26. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, pp. 551 and 558 f.
  27. ^ Wolfgang Emmerich : The literature of the GDR. In: Wolfgang Beutin and others: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Eighth, updated and expanded edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2013, p. 560 f.
  28. ↑ Stefan Wolle : The ideal world of dictatorship. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1971–1989. Munich 1999, pp. 237-240.
  29. ↑ Stefan Wolle : The ideal world of dictatorship. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1971–1989. Munich 1999, p. 240 f. With regard to the precautions taken when disseminating such evidence of the humanistic heritage, Wolle notes: “Even recognized world literature mostly supplemented extensive forewords and afterwords in the GDR editions, along with profitable statements about the author's life and work and the historical background of the plot, ideological assessments which occasionally sounded like final assessments of the extended high school. "(Ibid., p. 237)
  30. ↑ Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, p. 196 f.
  31. ^ Michael Opitz, Michael Hoffmann (ed.): Metzler Lexikon DDR literature. Article Leseland by Helmut Peitsch , Stuttgart 2009, p. 190.
  32. ↑ Stefan Wolle : The ideal world of dictatorship. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1971–1989. Munich 1999, p. 233. “This is where the difference begins,” says Biskupek: “There were books that were on the shelves like long-lived cookies. And there were books whose possession was like a title of nobility. ”( Book in a basket. Pictures from the reading country. With fifteen explanations of pictures and eighteen resolutions by Matthias Biskupek. Berlin 1992, p. 36)
  33. ↑ Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, p. 204 f.
  34. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 146.
  35. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 156 f.
  36. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 160.
  37. ↑ Börner, Härtner 2012, p. 189 f.
  38. ↑ Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, p. 200 f.
  39. ↑ Christoph Links : Reading country GDR. Conditions, backgrounds, changes. In: Thomas Großbölting (Ed.): Friedensstaat, Leseland, Sportnation? GDR legends put to the test. Federal Agency for Civic Education (publication series, volume 1029). Bonn 2010, p. 204.