Yet, tough as it talked, the Honecker regime could not jail or expel
This tactic indeed divided East Berlin’s literary community, but it also stimulated a wave of applications from literary artists and other intellectuals to emigrate to the West. Believing that they would cause less harm abroad than at home, the regime allowed many of them to go. Among the émigrés were the writers Reiner Kunze, Jürgen Fuchs, and Sarah Kirsch, the dissident economist Rudolf Bahro, the actors Manfred Krug, Angelica Domröse, and Eva-Maria Hagen, and the producer Götz Friedrich.
Like its literary community, East Berlin’s theatrical world suffered severely from ham-handed governmental tutelage. Brecht himself had grown increasingly frustrated with the cultural bureaucrats’ interference with the Berliner Ensemble, which functioned as East Germany’s unofficial state theater. In the wake of the dramatist’s death in 1956 his company fell under the control of his widow, Helene Weigel, and a group of executors appointed by the Ministry of Culture; soon it degenerated into a theatrical mausoleum, mounting mummified productions of Brechtian dramas. (One cannot help but be reminded here of the Bayreuth Festival under Wagner’s widow, Cosima.) The Berliner Ensemble performed a few seminal dramas by contemporary writers other than Brecht, but many works critical of the GDR, including some by Heiner Müller, premiered in the West. Nothing more clearly illustrated the hollowness of Honecker’s “no taboos” promise than the fact that East Germany’s best dramatists were more likely to get their works performed in West Germany than at home.
In an effort to exploit proven cultural traditions and attract tourist revenue, Honecker’s government made an effort to revive Berlin’s legendary cabaret scene. Government-sponsored cabaret, however, had always been something of a contradiction in terms, as the Nazis had amply proven. The Distel Cabaret, founded in 1953 on orders of the SED, was allowed under Honecker to take a few satirical jabs at the party leadership, but no trenchant criticism was permitted. Attempts to reproduce the famed chorus line productions of the Weimar period proved even more of a farce. The East German dancers who waved their feathered boas at junketing East-bloc visitors were more reminiscent of their Nazi-era predecessors than of the
East Berlin’s film industry had enjoyed a brief bloom in the early 1970s when filmmakers like Heiner Carow experimented with satires aimed at the GDR’s ossified bureaucracy. His
Painters and art dealers took advantage of Honecker’s apparent relaxation of cultural restrictions in 1971 to open new galleries and to create a regional art market. In 1976 an art show entitled “Are Communists Allowed to Dream?” took place in the newly opened Palace of the Republic. The paintings represented in the exhibition, all preapproved by the Ministry of Culture, suggested that the answer to the title question was a qualified “yes,” and the surprisingly diverse collection gave evidence of a lively art scene, as lively, perhaps, as that in the West.
Honecker’s regime, as noted above, rebuilt Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus as a concert hall in hopes of putting East Berlin on the map as a world-class center of classical music. However, the orchestra that regularly performed there, the Berliner Symphonie, which had been founded in 1954, never achieved the international status of the older Berliner Philharmonic, headquartered in West Berlin. East Berlin’s Staatsoper on Unter den Linden did enjoy an international reputation, but it could not fully recover from the loss of so many of its best performers following the building of the Berlin Wall.
