Associate Professor Alison Lewis

Alison Lewis (FAHA) is a Reader at the University of Melbourne. She is currently Head of the Department of German, Russian and Swedish Studies, and Deputy Head of the School of Languages. She has published widely in the fields of German literature, unification studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. She is the author of two monographs on the feminist writer of fantastic fiction Irmtraud Morgner (Subverting Patriarchy 1995) and on secret police surveillance in the East German literary underground (Die Kunst des Verrats (2003) as well as numerous journal articles on a wide range of writers (Heinrich von Kleist, Martin Walser, Monika Maron, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Wolf, Birgit Vanderbeke, Ingo Schramm, Michael Kumpfmüller and Brigitte Burmeister) as well as a broad range of themes (memory and politics, gender and the body, trauma, autobiography, German intellectuals and the Stasi). She is currently working on a monograph on the “difficult marriage” of German unification in love narratives in post-unification fiction.

German Reunification and the Postwar Alliance between German Politics and Culture

In 1990 a number of German intellectuals called for a radical break with postwar cultural traditions. For too long literature, including theatre, had been evaluated in political rather than aesthetic terms. According to Ulrich Greiner, it was time to put an end to “Gesinnungsästhetik,” that peculiar German postwar aesthetic which purportedly privileged political opinion over literary value. This paper will provide an overview of the history of the postwar alliance between culture and politics in West and East Germany prior to reunification. The cultures of East and West Germany are typically characterized in terms of their difference, a difference which is generally attributed to the opposing political ideologies of each of the German nation-states. While the modes of cultural production operating in each Germany were diametrically opposed, there were a surprising number of convergences between the two literary cultures, which were most apparent within the theatre. The second half of this paper will introduce the key debates of the post-unification period that have played a formative role in the redrawing of the cultural landscape and the repositioning of drama and dramatic performance within it. In conclusion it will attempt to provide some tentative answers to the broad question of what has happened to the nexus between politics and culture since 1990. Have Greiner’s predictions held true for literature in a unified Germany or has theatre merely become one of the last few bastions of German culture in which political interventions are tolerated? Have the last 16 years seen a shift not only in our understanding of culture but in our notion of politics? Have the grand gestures and totalizing projects of Brecht and Müller, the “macropolitics” of world systems, possibly been replaced by politics of a different kind, say, by the micro-politics of identity politics?

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