From Einheit to Die Weltbühne: Kuckhoff’s Journal Articles on Resistance

Abstract

Greta Kuckhoff began writing articles during 1946. Over the next two years she published on topics that will now be familiar as a part of her antifascist work: the role of women, the role of the writer and the representation of anti-Nazi resistance. Many short, autobiographical texts were published in newspapers, including Berliner Zeitung and Tägliche Rundschau. At the same time, she began writing more extended articles for a variety of journals. This chapter begins with a brief investigation of these early writings. I examine Kuckhoff’s attempts to get individual portraits of her former resistance colleagues into print, and some of the difficulties she had in doing so. I then consider the publication of these articles more than two decades later in Die Weltbühne. Using elements of the typological approach to journal analysis suggested by Stephen Parker and Matthew Philpotts, I explore the significance of this medium for representing antifascism.¹ I show how literary historical analyses of Kuckhoff’s individual articles, and their placement within a single issue of a journal, highlight narratives which cannot simply be recuperated into dominant SED rhetoric. I suggest the significance of these narratives within the material practices of the journal as a whole, with a particular focus on the editorship of Hermann Budzislawski. While issues of reception are often difficult to judge for journal articles, evidence of reader responses to Kuckhoff’s texts are read here in relation to the target audience of the journal.