Irreconcilable Differences: The Troubled Founding of the Leipzig Institute for Literature

This essay presents the first detailed examination of the troubled founding phase of the Leipzig Literature Institute in the early 1950s. While existing accounts ascribe a decisive role to the direct intervention of such high-profile figures as Walther Ulbricht, Johannes R. Becher and Alfred Kurella, the archival evidence emphasises instead the essential contribution made by low-ranking cultural functionaries in what was a contradictory and highly conflicted process, from the earliest proposals for the Institute in 1950 to its opening in 1955 and beyond. Ultimately three factors explain the failure of the Institute to establish itself successfully as a literary institution: the immensely unstable cultural and political climate of the early GDR; the absence of a single, charismatic individual able to define and advocate the core ethos of the institute; and, most importantly, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions underlying an institution that sought to reconcile literary creativity with educational and ideological instruction