Marianne Lange

Marianne Lange , b. Bundsmann (born September 3, 1910 in Reichenberg , Northern Bohemia, † March 10, 2005 in Berlin ) was a leading cultural functionary of the SED .

Life

Marianne Lange grew up in Reichenberg and learned the trade of clerk. In 1931 she joined the KPD . She married the Berlin KPD functionary Ernst Lange and moved to Berlin. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, she headed the People's Education Office in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg as a district councilor and was a functionary of the Kulturbund . From 1950, Lange was a lecturer at the party college of the SED , later she was head of the chair for literature and cultural policy at the party college. In the mid-1950s she completed her doctorate on the poet Georg Weerth and completed her habilitation in Leipzig in 1962 with the thesis "The progressive bourgeois youth literature criticism of the youth book of the 19th century and its effects on the educational work of the working class". She made a name for herself as the editor of the works of Johannes R. Becher .

From 1963 to 1976 Marianne Lange was a member of the Central Committee of the SED. Marianne Lange died in Berlin in 2005 and was buried in the Karlshorster cemetery .

Services

Together with Alfred Kurella , Otto Gotsche and Alexander Abusch, Marianne Lange was one of the SED's leading cultural politicians. She always tried to align cultural policy with an orthodox Marxist-Leninist line. In 1966 she caused a sensation when she spoke at an SED culture conference of two German national cultures that had developed over the past 20 years, one West German and one (progressive) East German. She encountered unusually violent opposition from other cultural officials, such as Klaus Gysi , and also from writers such as Stephan Hermlin . In 1969 at the 10th meeting of the Central Committee of the SED she reprimanded “undesirable developments” and “vagueness” in poetry. There is "with some gifted poets" a "slide into subjectivism, the crooked view of problems". After the fall of the Wall in the GDR in 1989, she took a less dogmatic view of things in her publications.

Awards

• 1960 Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze, 1970 in silver and 1975 in gold
• 1964 Clara Zetkin Medal
• 1974 Order Banner of Labor Level I
• 1980 Gold Medal for the Patriotic Order of Merit

Works

• Georg Weerth, the first and most important poet of the German proletariat. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1957.
• The partisanship of today's writer. Central Board of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship and German Writers' Association, Berlin 1959. (= Contributions to Contemporary Literature, Issue 16) Keynote address by M. Lange.
• To the socialist cultural revolution. Documents 1957-1959. 2 volumes. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1960.
• Bourgeois and Marxist-Leninist image of man. A study. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1961.
• Art in Socialism. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1968.
• The generality of Lenin's program of the socialist cultural revolution. Dietz Verlag 1970.
• Culture in social life. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1973.
• On epic children's and youth literature in the FRG. The children's book publisher, Berlin 1980.
• Walter Janka and Johannes R. Becher. In: The world stage . Issue 52, December 19, 1989

literature

• Lange, Marianne . In: SBZ biography . 3rd edition, Bonn 1964, p. 205.
• Fritz J. Raddatz : Traditions and Tendencies. Materials on the literature of the GDR . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1972.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary notice in Neues Deutschland from April 9, 2005, p. 8.