In April of 1959, a conference took place in the East German industrial town of Bitterfeld under the slogan “Greif zur Feder, Kumpel! Die sozialistische Nationalkultur braucht dich!” (Grab that quill, buddy! The socialist national culture needs you!), initiating the Movement of Writing Workers (BSA) and what would be known as the Bitterfeld Way. As perhaps the first historian writing in English to address it in any depth, William J. Waltz approaches this cultural policy, unique in the eastern bloc, in his well-researched study Of Writers and Workers. Waltz traces the debates that lead the adoption and decline of the program, the grassroots pressures that shaped it, as well as the lasting influences of the Bitterfeld Path and its Circles of Writing Workers (ZSA) on the literature of the German Democratic Republic.

For Waltz, the BSA provided both a support and an outlet for the “highly contested” East German cultural field (7). The Bitterfeld Path aimed at overcoming the division of labor between art and work through a compensatory extension of literary communication: not only sending writers into the production sites of the Republic, but also encouraging workers themselves to take up writing in ZSAs, which were supported by government agencies, trade unions, and an impressive array of publications, including the journal Ich Schreibe (I Write). At its most utopian, the Bitterfeld Path would realize the goals of what Peter Bürger described as the historical avant-garde: “composing operative, socially engaged literature from within the means of production, writing workers were to provide the link to unify base and superstructure, physical and mental labor, life and art, and to eliminate the distinctions between professional and amateur writers (28).” By the mid-1960s, such revolutionary horizons had been curtailed, and the BSA persisted into the 1980s largely as “a means of contributing to personal development through artistic engagement (13).” Shorn of their utopian burden, the ZSAs nevertheless remained a unique and important institution in East German everyday life, where, in the words of Ursula Dauderstädt, editor of Ich schreibe, “through art, one can learn to observe others, acquire sensitivity and openness to other people (54).”

Against the common critical dismissal of the Bitterfeld Way as an imposition of Soviet cultural policies on the GDR, Waltz makes clear that the BSA was a “uniquely East German cultural movement that claimed its heritage in German literary traditions and provided a social and cultural framework for their reception in the GDR (10).” The Soviets were in fact deeply skeptical, recalling what they understood by the early 1960s as their own misadventures with cultural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, initial hopes from the cultural functionaries of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) were high, with Otto Gotsche praising the BSA as the “cadre of a future socialist national literature and a new generation of authors (41).” And yet, according to Waltz, “…the BSA created neither a new generation of proletarian writers nor a new socialist literature reflecting the means of industrial and agricultural production (12).” It did, however, provide a space for sociality, the exchange of ideas, and self-cultivation within the often-constrained public sphere of the GDR. Borrowing a phrase from Rüdiger Bernhardt, leader of the ZSA at the Leuna chemical works, Waltz describes the ZSAs as “socialist literary salons 161),” serving, as had their bourgeois predecessors, as “centers of social communication” (160) and examples of the regime's practices of “repressive tolerance” (164).

Waltz's book does an excellent job tracing the various agendas that shaped the BSA, locating the major discursive keys of the movement in the legacies of the pre-war German workers’ parties. Whereas the Communist Party (KPD) before 1933 had seen art as a weapon in the class war, the Social Democrats had seen culture more as a tool for proletarian self-education and cultivation. That controversy persisted, Waltz argues, into the GDR as a struggle over cultural terrain between the vision of class conscious “kulturelle Massenarbeit” (cultural mass work) promoted by the trade unions and the practice of organizing “meaningful free-time activities” practiced by the Ministry of Culture, which gradually won out during the course of the 1960s (95). A major strength of this book is also Waltz's analysis of specific ZSAs and their projects; rather than lumping all of this material together as “the Bitterfeld Path,” as much of the scholarship does, Waltz demonstrates the many different paths that ZSAs could take, and thus the possibilities and limits of amateur writing in the GDR. If there is a missed opportunity here, it would be to relate the work of the BSA more substantially to the established literary historiography of the GDR, although Waltz does provide many opportunities to do so. This is, however, more of a suggestion than a criticism, and this volume addresses an important lacuna in the literary history of Germany, the GDR, and socialist world literature.