The German Doris Lessing: A Mixed [B]Lessing

Abstract

Not one, but two Doris Lessings are alive and well in the German language. Political distinctions have determined the constitutions and development of an East and a West Germany since 1949, shortly before Lessing began publishing. Accordingly, teutonic discovery of her works was to take place in one language, but on two sides of the century’s largest political barrier. Readers in both the Federal Republic of Germany — the economic and strategic pride of NATO — and in the German Democratic Republic, the pillar of the Warsaw Pact, have a specific, if not entirely accurate, picture of Doris Lessing. These two pictures contradict each other as clearly as do East and West. And where Lessing’s publishing history in West Germany has been a long-fused time bomb that turned into one of the most unusual chapters in that country’s entire postwar literary history, her works in the East display instead a typical conformity to the GDR’s literary—political structure and speak almost paradigmatically for its evolution.

This essay is a revised, updated and enlarged version of ‘Lessing on the Continent: How Germany Finally Lost Its Heart’. The Doris Lessing Newsletter 10:1 (Spring 1986): 8–9, 13.