| The closed session of the party group of the Union of Soviet Writers’ German section in September 1936 set a beacon: over the course of four agonizingly long evenings, the discussions centered around crimes and guilt, lacking awareness, and the lessons that were to be learned from the Moscow show trial against the “Trotskyist bandits.” The documents from the years 1935 to 1941 which are published for the first time in the volume Tribunale als Trauma shed light on a dramatic event that did not just begin, but also did not end that fall. In the enclave of exiled authors, the omnipresent terror turns inward. At close quarters, people keep a close eye on one another as everyone struggles for political acceptance and one’s own survival.
The documents may be read as a chronicle of an inner disruption that, on the one hand, breaks up myths about the literary exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union and, on the other hand, explains the silence of its actors during the post-war period—including Johannes R. Becher, Willi Bredel, Georg Lukács, Herbert Wehner, and Friedrich Wolf.
These records from Moscow’s archives which are published for the first time open up a new perspective on the history of the German-speaking literary exile in the Soviet Union. Anne Hartmann is a Slavist and German philologist. After receiving her doctorate, she taught at colleges in Liège and Namur. Since 1988, she was a research fellow at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, most recently in the research project Nach Moskau. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil und im Kulturbetrieb der DDR. Reinhard Müller studied German philology and history in Munich, Regensburg, and Hamburg. From 1978 to 1989, he worked at the Thälmann memorial site in Hamburg. From 1991 to 2010, he was a research fellow at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung and from 2010 to 2012 at the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur. Patrick Eiden-Offe is a German philologist. He holds a Heisenberg position at the ZfL with the project Georg Lukács: An Intellectual Biography. |
