UC Berkeley

My project, "Editing the Socialist Canon: Forming Identity through Censorship in Poland and the GDR under Stalin" considers censorship as a kind of canon formation by exclusion that weeded out the unacceptable works rather than promoting the desirable. By attempting universal control of printed material, the censors implied that anything published was not only acceptable, but in some manner actually Socialist. After the Second World War, literary culture was not a secondary matter to be monitored in case it might become a refuge of sedition. Rather, it was constitutive of the new Socialist state identities that the parties were attempting to form. Within this framework, I consider the Polish and East German cases, which sat at opposite ends of the spectrum of both severity and acknowledgement of censorship. My study aims to determine the extent of and limits on variation that the system allowed between states, as well as deeper patterns of negotiation within them. While the constant pressure of the Soviet Union certainly imposed some uniformity on these constructions, each state worked within the context of its own tradition and responded to its own insecurities. Critically, though, whatever its aspirations, the system was never homogenous. Individual censors perceived matters of tradition and threat differently, and indeed, brought their own understandings and misunderstandings of Marxist orthodoxy to their work, creating a result that was far more chaotic than an outside view would suggest. To illustrate these wider themes, I will discuss the publication of classic and contemporary novels from both inside and outside Poland and the GDR. In the negotiations between orthodox and popular literature, it becomes possible to understand something of the line between didactic theory and practical exigency as they began to shape each other. The first half of my dissertation considers the meaning and effect of the actual structure of the offices, with chapters devoted to their institutional functioning, to the intellectual formation of the elites who created them, and to the training and supervision of the everyday censors. The second half looks into the margins of the censor's work, where the limits of the permissible and of the censor's power met. It considers the categories of genre, traditional literature, books from foreign countries, and those by contemporary authors at home.