Education and Conversion: The Road to the New Man in the Totalitarian Bildungsroman

Abstract

Until today the problem of totalitarian literature and art has been looked at almost exclusively from a political point of view. The main focus of interest has been on the mechanisms of ‘Gleichschaltung’, the forcing into line during the 1930s. In Germany, for instance, it was initiated by the ‘Reichskulturkammergesetz’ of September 1933 and, in the Soviet Union, by the Central Committee’s resolution of 1932 which dissolved existing artists’ associations and replaced them by centralised organisations. Consequently, the controlling function of literary criticism and censorship as well as the repression of deviant authors and movements have been considered the most important aspects for scholarly examination. There are, however, hardly any comparative studies of concrete examples, and those which do exist are mainly concerned with art (rather than literature) since parallels between National Socialist works and the Socialist Realism of the Stalin period seem patently obvious there.¹