The Leipzig Institute for German Literature Norwich, Iowa, Leipzig – what do these three places have in common? Each is a pioneer in the teaching of creative writing. Josef Haslinger, currently director of the Leipzig Institute for German Literature, takes us on a fascinating journey through its history and explores the challenges of the present. When you delve into the history of the Leipzig Institute for German Literature, you find yourself precipitated into an arena of major political dimensions. It is as though world history, in its course through Germany, created a little offshoot in Leipzig and it is only now that history has moved on, and left us in peace for a while, that it can properly grow and flourish. Both sides in the Cold War played their part in its emergence: this institute would not exist if the Maxim Gorky Institute for Literature had not been founded in Moscow in 1933. And long would it have lain on the rubbish tip of history if not for the fact that, a few years later, on the other side of the ocean in Iowa, the Writers' Workshop had not been set up. Created in 1955, the first Leipzig Institute for Literature was based on the Moscow model, on lines approved by the GDR government. The founding director was Alfred Kurella, an ambivalent Communist functionary who revealed little of his personal history to the students of the day (among them Erich Loest, Ralph Giordano and Fred Wander) but did intimate that in 1919 he had met Lenin in the flesh. Alfred Kurella had worked his way up into the high ranks of the Communist Youth International, of which he was co-founder, and had become a Soviet citizen. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and secretary to Georgi Dimitrov, the man accused by the Nazis of being an accomplice to the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and who in 1946 was appointed the First Minister President of Bulgaria. During the Second World War Kurella was active in the Soviet Union in a variety of propaganda functions. Afterwards he withdrew to Caucasia to pursue his work as a writer and editor. From 1948 he tried to return to Germany but in spite of an official request from the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) only succeeded in doing so in 1954. He relinquished his position as director of the Institute in 1957 to become, successively, Head of the Cultural Commission of the Politburo and then, a year later, a parliamentary member of the People’s Chamber. With its head a life-long, impassioned champion of ‘Socialist Realism’, the Institute had strongly political beginnings. Its main teaching activities consisted of seminars on poetry, prose and drama. In addition an abundance of further courses was offered in the fields of world literature, aesthetics, cultural studies, stylistics, literary criticism, and the history of art and music, with the aim of broadening the writers’ horizons. So that these horizons didn't grow too wide, however, the study of Marxism and Leninism offered at all colleges and universities in the GDR was also obligatory at the Institute. Also compulsory were the annual work experience placements in Regis, the VEB (People’s Own) coalmine. But this enforced contact between the writers and the miners did not always produce the intended results. On the contrary, it provided some less than welcome insights into the true realities of the workers’ social conditions. In 1948 the Institute was granted university status and a year later it was renamed after the deceased first Minister of Culture in the GDR, the writer Johannes R. Becher. Ironically, however, Becher himself had actually been opposed to the founding of the Institute. He was not convinced that literary writing can be taught. The then powers-that-be set the Institute certain ideological and political tasks. One of the consequences of this was that some of the students (among them Helga M. Novak, Gert Neumann and Andreas Reimann) were ex-matriculated for political reasons. Nor was the priming of writers for social realism always followed without protest. In fact, within the newly renamed institute there was a core literary discipline which didn’t really differ so much from that being pursued in American universities and then later at the University of East Anglia. In the East one spoke of schöpferische Seminare (‘Creative Seminars’), in the West of ‘Creative Writing Workshops’. The work, however, was basically the same. Participants in a seminar discussed literary texts they had written themselves. Everything depended on the exacting nature of the reading, the quality of the discussion and the openness of the participants. And teachers who approached literature free of ideological blinkers did exist in the GDR. This meant that the central figure of the Institute wasn't necessarily the current director. In the first one and a half decades of the Institute’s existence this figure was, by all accounts, the poet Georg Maurer, who took the poetry seminars between 1955 and 1970 and who influenced a whole generation of younger GDR poets. Thus, beneath the cloak of a state institution, there reigned for long stretches an atmosphere of relative openness, one which produced a considerable number of writers, some internationally recognised, whom it would be hard to classify as ‘social realists’ at all – writers such as Heinz Czechowski, Kurt Drawart, Adolf Endler, Sarah Kirsch, Rainer Kirsch, Barbara Köhler, Angela Krauß, Katja Lange-Müller and Klaus Schlesinger. With the collapse of the GDR the first Leipzig Institute for Literature was dissolved by the Free State of Saxony in accordance with a resolution dated 21 December 1990, on the grounds that the syllabus did not correspond to the demands of a liberal society, and the institute was taken over and occupied by some of its students. A prominent group untainted by any associations with the SED or its agents – Erich Loest, Hans-Joachim Schädlich and Jurek Becker, along with literary studies students Hans Mayer and Walter Jens, and others – worked tirelessly and at last successfully to ensure the re-establishment of the institute. Crucial to its success in its newly revived form was the fact that the focus was no longer restricted to the example of the Maxim Gorki Institute in Moscow but, on the contrary, looked west. It was, in fact, to be expressly modelled on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the institutes that had followed in its wake. They were the examples that shaped the decision to settle the Deutsche Literaturinstitut Leipzig (DLL) under one and the same roof as the University of Leipzig. In 1995, under the direction of its founding director Bernd Jentzch, the teaching programme began. Since 1999 professors at the Institute take it in turns to act as Managing Directors. Alongside the permanent staff, who ensure a continuity in the teaching programme, there is an equally important group of visiting guest professors. Their names read like a Who’s Who in contemporary German-language literature. From the start the Institute has met with approval both from established writers and those who are still beginners. Nowadays over 600 people apply for a place each year, and around twenty are chosen. Since the year 2000, books published by writers who have studied at the DLL have appeared on the lists of major publishers as a matter of course. As a consequence a debate that was already raging in the USA in the 1960s has now reached the German-speaking countries too. What was referred to then as ‘MA Creative Writing Literature’ is equally unflatteringly labelled ‘Institute Prose’ by the arts sections of German newspapers. There is talk of works which ‘are crafted with virtuosity but with scanty content’, works which hide their lack of experience of social life behind well-oiled literary technique. Criticism of this sort is pinned up on the Institution’s notice board, taken seriously and discussed in the seminars. That writing technique on its own does not equate to good literature can be readily admitted, but I don't believe that this is a problem specific to the Institute for German Literature. It could be viewed as a more general problem of western contemporary literature which has a tendency to reproduce itself. Institutes like those in Iowa, Leipzig and East Anglia can be the very places where awareness is drawn to it and something can be done to counteract it. Certainly the path cannot lead back to annual work placements in coalmines or whatever has taken their place. We ought to be wary about prescribing what authors write about. But perhaps we should turn a more watchful eye to the situation in which not only our students but almost all young Westerners find themselves. Their childhoods have per se a different quality to those of young people, less fortunately placed, who have known starvation or the inside of prisons. Literature may always be the self-expression of the author, but glibly formulated self-expression isn't interesting in and of itself. And therefore it cannot all be about helping young writers to write what they write about as well as they can; we also have to ponder strategies which shift the gaze from the personal biography to what is outside. The very fact that literature speaks to others means that it cannot be blind to the lot of others. Literature is also always an exploration of the conditions of our own or someone else’s life. A sense of this should be awakened. So, not less but rather more education is called for. In the current development of general reform at the University of Leipzig we have decided to transform our former three-year diploma into a three-year bachelor of arts degree, and to offer in addition a two-year masters programme. The BA will, like the existing diploma, place its emphasis on a large number of aesthetic and intellectual approaches to literature and will give the students the opportunity to experiment in a variety of genres. The future BA students will be required to write predominantly in the shorter forms (poems, short stories, scenes, short films etc), these being the easiest to work on in the workshop seminars. In contrast, the masters programme will provide guidance for extensive projects (novels, plays, screenplays and so on) and deal with major themes. The masters seminars will have only a few participants, thereby encouraging an even more intensive study. May 2006 will see the first applications for these two new courses. As now, a blind eye may be turned to the usual prerequisite of the Abitur (school-leaving exams) in cases of particular literary talent. So, after a varied, and sometimes dramatic, past, the Leipzig Institute has achieved its fiftieth anniversary. It looks forward to a further fifty years of equal or even greater achievement in a similarly changing world. Translated by Rebecca Morrison Josef Haslinger, Austrian born, is a Professor of Literary Aesthetics, and both a bestselling novelist and essayist. For fourteen years he was co-editor of the Viennese literary magazine Wespennest (‘Wasps’ Nest’). He has taught in Kassel and at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck, as well as at Oberlin College and the Bowling Green State University in Ohio and the University of Iowa. He has been a leading member of various literary organisations and an active participant in many literary events, in Austria and elsewhere. One of the writers studying under Josef Haslinger at the DLL at the moment is Susanne Heinrich. Her book In den Farben der Nacht is reviewed in the Autumn issue 2005.