Abstract
I had the ‘privilege’ of living the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from May 1950 until November 1989, so almost from its beginning on 7 October 1949 until its end. On this journey of 40 years, Sartre accompanied me for more than 30 of them. I remember one of the first encounters: the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) in Rosa Luxemburg Square, the popular theater built before the Nazi era with the money collected by the Berlin workers, presented Sartre’s play Nekrassov in 1958. This story of an impostor, a supposed Soviet dissident, of whom the anti-communist press took advantage, was perfectly compatible with the prevailing ideology in the GDR in 1958. Its anti-anti-communist message was welcome. The play was published in East Germany in 1955, a year before Rowohlt published it in West Germany. This was one of the few examples, but not the only one, where Sartre was published first in the East. I do not remember what fascinated the Kant High School student in Berlin-Rummelsburg that I was then: Sartre’s play, Fritz Wisten’s staging, Roman Weyl’s set, Alexander Hegardt’s performance in the leading role, or that of Franz Kutschera as chief editor...?
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Notes
- 1.
Gesine Bey has extensively researched and comprehensively presented this meeting (see Bey 2000).
- 2.
As to the relationship between Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, and Sartre, they showed mutual respect to each other. A few weeks before his death in 1956, Brecht proposed to appoint Sartre as a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Arts of the GDR (see Wroblewsky 1983). As to Georg Lukács’s criticism of Sartre, see his books Existentialismus oder Marxismus (Existentialism or Marxism, 1951) and The Destruction of Reason (1954). On Bloch’s polemic against Sartre and in particular his role in the conference “The Problem of Freedom in the Light of Scientific Socialism”, organized in 1955 by the Section Philosophy of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, to whose head Bloch had been appointed, see Wroblewsky (2003).
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von Wroblewsky, V. (2020). Sartre in Germany—Even in the East. In: Betschart, A., Werner, J. (eds) Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38482-1_10
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