Reading and collecting Science Fiction Books in the GDR – A personal view

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I was born in 1969 and grew up in the GDR until its end in 1989. The seventies and eighties were a nicer time in this country than it had been in the time before. Some things were missed; we couldn’t travel to capitalist countries (with the exception of if you were over 55/60 or to special events for family members). The economy wasn’t very powerful but most people lived well, there was no unemployment, and you couldn’t fall deeper than to a certain social level.

Reading books was very important here and the government supported it with lots of money for libraries and schools. Of course, not for all kinds of literature. At school we read books by authors from the Soviet Union, like Scholochow, Tolstoi or Gaidar, and writers from the GDR. Aside from that, of course, classics like Goethe, Heine and Shakespeare. Our education was funded and solid–tests in the nineties showed its advantage over those of many other countries. And if you have only two TV channels to watch (GDR 1 and GDR 2) plus a few more from the western part of Germany FRG (officially not allowed but not suppressed any longer then) it is understandable that people read a lot.

I started reading very early and went by bicycle to the library each week. Soon I concentrated on Science Fiction and from 1980, I started to collect it. Science Fiction wasn’t called that in the GDR at the beginning. First, books were published by the Soviet Military Administration shortly after the end of World War Two. They were cheap paperbacks with stories by mostly Russian writers, for instance Beljajew and his The Tenth Planet . With the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the socialist part of Germany in 1949, the first GDR-SF-book soon followed. It was The Golden Bowl – A short novel about nuclear power and space ships, by Ludwig Turek. This and others in the following time dealt with some main themes. One was a kind of production novel: some (GDR or Soviet) engineers do an epoch-making invention, spies from capitalist countries (US or FRG) try to steal it but are arrested by the police after a hard fight. Or the revolution export: astronauts (here they were called cosmonauts) from a mostly communist earth travel to a far away planet and find a feudalist or capitalist society. They help the working class to overcome their circumstances (of course with some victims) and everybody is happy. That sounds simplistic and stupid but some writers (like Eberhardt del’ Antonio) packed all this in exciting action and so these books are readable still today.

Then topics spread: aliens visiting earth (no invasions, all problems were only misunderstandings; there was the thesis: if a society is progressive enough to space-travel, they have to be communist), interpersonal problems in extreme situations, and some authors started to use satire and irony. And further, some writers like Heiner Rank or Johanna and Günter Braun wrote very cleverly about problems in our own country under the veil of SF. If these would have been novels happening in present time, they never would have passed the censorship but they were published as being SF. Even the high-literature-authors sometimes used the instruments of SF for their own purposes, like Christa Wolf.

Another part of published SF was those of other socialist countries, mainly the Soviet Union. And that was it! We had the Strugazkijs, Ivan Jefremow, Kir Bulytschow, and these are highlights that show what this kind of literature can reach at its best. Else there were new editions of classic authors like H. G. Wells, Alexej Tolstoi and many others. With H. P. Lovecraft, Stefan Grabinski and others even some horror was published, but no modern splatter or anything like that; we had a very low crime rate and supernatural things were not in accord with our materialistic view of the world. And there was nearly no fantasy (with the exception of children’s literature), especially no sword and sorcery.

The last part was very small; it contained books by capitalist authors like Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury. Our currency, the Mark, was not freely convertible into the Deutsche Mark of the FRG or the US-Dollars, so everything that needed foreign exchanges was in low number and hard to get. We called such books under the counterbecause they were not displayed in the bookshops–you had to know a bookseller to get a copy.

Oh yes, about the name. In the beginning the genre was calledscientific-fantastic or utopian; in the fifties sometimes they were even sold as detective stories . But in the early eighties everything became less accurate and we said SF, too.

The books in the GDR were made very carefully. Paper was expensive and so every story was read by editors and subject specialists again and again; they worked with the author to improve the result. Often they were nicely illustrated. SF was loved by the people and nearly every book sold within hours. Some had editions of some hundred thousands, today Germany publishers are happy if they can sell some thousands.

Then, after the revolution that started in Leipzig in 1989 (I had the luck to take part and see this historic event) the great mystery happened. The SF-readers vanished. Thousands of readers didn’t like the new kind with space operas, BEMs and soldiers in space. Today, even large SF-publishers like Heyne are in their biggest crisis ever. Tie-in novels like Star Trek or Star Wars don’t sell that much now; years ago they were the big business and helped to bring out other non-bestselling titles. Fantasy and children books sell well because of the success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. A few small presses try to survive with that, but they don’t become rich at it.

GDR-Science Fiction became soon a great area for book collectors. It is a closed territory and with the publishing of a (nearly) complete bibliography by Hans-Peter Neumann (more than 1000 pages!) everybody can see what books he still is missing. The prices went up and some titles are extremely rare, especially for books printed in other socialist countries but in the German language (if one has for instance Aderca’s Underwater Cities, hold it or send it to me. ;-); it is worth as much as Sauron’s ring). The only problem is they used cheap paper that started browning before the books even were sold. I have the luck to live near Leipzig, where a company named Zentrum für Bestandserhalt is specialised in a kind of book therapy that takes all acid out of the paper. It isn’t very cheap but I have more joy when I look at my books.

A last few words about the SF-fandom. Every organization outside the government’s influence was unwanted. So in the seventies, the Stanislaw Lem-Club in Dresden was dissolved. Later things became easier and for instance in Leipzig the Circle of Friends of SF was founded, of which I’ve been a member since 1990. We often have authors from all over the world as our guests, so from the USA: Thomas M. Disch, George R. R. Martin, Tim Powers, Michael Bishop, Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress and many more, and from the UK, Russia and other countries, too. We published some books, the best known isLightyear 7, a final book in a series and a kind of conclusion to the GDR-SF. We collaberated with editor Erik Simon on the Kurd Lasswitz Award for that (a kind of German Nebula).

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Anti-War Book Collecting

From a bookseller’s viewpoint, “military books” are usually lumped together as a subset of the history section. But this popular genre has many sub-categories. Among military buffs are those who read biographies of the great leaders; others whose interest is the minutiae of a particular war or even a specific battle; some with an abiding interest in the theory and principles of warfare; a significant number for whom the weapons and equipment of warfare (or of a particular war) holds a fascination; espionage buffs; and a few whose reading tends toward the underlying political and diplomatic issues.

Some may disagree, but I’d put Catch-22, Gardens of Stone, and most of Tim O’Brien’s novels into the anti-war category. Going After Cacciato, O’Brien’s first novel, demonstrates the mental dissolution felt by many Vietnam combatants, just as Catch-22 chronicles the breakdown of its principal character, Yossarian. But Cacciato lacks Joseph Heller’s black humor. O’Brien’s characters—in this and his other novels—are mad as hatters, but dead serious.

In Erich Kuby’s 1962 novel, The Sitzkrieg of Private Stefan, the title character is a bookseller, drafted into the German army in the second World War. Stefan’s obstinate refusal to be assimilated into what Kuby calls the “gray, corporate world of military existence” provides amusement, but ends in tragedy.

The First World War seems to have been the most fertile ground for anti-war fiction. (This should be no surprise, as the post-war years were the golden age of American writing.)

Kenneth Reed, writing in 1974, produced Mennonite Soldier, an intriguing tale of two brothers who part politically in the most dramatic possible way during the First World War. One goes to prison as a conscientious objector, even as his brother enlists as an infantryman. Though he inadvertently becomes a war hero, the second brother finds himself shunned by his family as a result. As the dustjacket blurb indicates, this war was a watershed event in the lives of most American Anabaptists.

      He had no arms and no legs. He threw back his head and started to yell from fright. But he only started because he had no mouth to yell with. He was so surprised at not yelling when he tried that he began to work his jaws like a man who has found something interesting and wants to test it. He was so sure the idea of no mouth was a dream that he could investigate it calmly. He tried to work his jaws and he had no jaws. He tried to run his tongue around the inside of his teeth and over the roof of his mouth as if he were chasing a raspberry seed. But he didn’t have any tongue and he hadn’t any teeth. There was no roof to his mouth and there was no mouth. He tried to swallow but he couldn’t because he had no palate and there weren’t any muscles left to swallow with. He began to smother and pant. It was as if someone had pushed a mattress over his face and was holding it there. He was breathing hard and fast now but he wasn’t really breathing because there wasn’t any air passing through his nose. He didn’t have a nose. He could feel his chest rise and fall and quiver but not a breath of air was passing through the place where his nose used to be. He got a wild panicky eagerness to die to kill himself. He tried to calm his breathing to stop breathing entirely so he would suffocate. He could feel the muscles at the bottom of his throat close tight against the air but the breathing in his chest kept right on. There wasn’t any air in his throat to be stopped. His lungs were sucking it in somewhere below his throat. He knew now that he was surely dying but he was curious. He didn’t want to die until he had found out everything. If a man has no nose and no mouth and no palate and no tongue why it stands to reason he might be shy a few other parts as well. But that was nonsense because a man in that shape would be dead. You couldn’t lose that much of yourself and still keep on living. Yet if you knew you had lost them and were thinking about it why then you must be alive because dead men don’t think. Dead men aren’t curious and he was sick with curiosity so he must not be dead yet He began to reach out with the nerves of his face. He began to strain to feel the nothingness that was there. Where his mouth and nose had been there must now be nothing but a hole covered with bandages. He was trying to find out how far up that hole went. He was trying to feel the edges of the hole. He was grasping with the nerves and pores of his face to follow the borders of that hole and see how far up they extended. It was like staring into complete darkness with your eyes popping out of your head. It was a process of feeling with his skin of exploring with something that couldn’t move where his mind told it to. The nerves and muscles of his face were crawling like snakes toward his forehead. The hole began at the base of his throat just below where his jaw should be and went upward in a widening circle. He could feel his skin creeping around the rim of the circle. The hole was getting bigger and bigger. It widened out almost to the base of his ears if he had any and then narrowed again. It ended somewhere above the top of what used to be his nose. The hole went too high to have any eyes in it. He was blind. It was funny how calm he was.

Trumbo, along with other members of the so-called Hollywood Ten, was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947 as an “unfriendly” witness during its investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood. The others–producers, writers, and directors–included Ring Lardner, Jr. All refused to say whether or not they were Communists, all served prison sentences for contempt, and were blacklisted in the film industry.

Johnny was published in 1939, shortly after the start of World War II in Europe, and was clearly intended as a pacifist polemic. The book was re-released in 1970 as an anti-Vietnam war polemic, with a new introduction, in which Trumbo wrote:

Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.*** Let us use this same arithmetic for World War I; 9,000,000 dead young men equal 1,350,000,000 pounds of bone and flesh, 27,900,000 pounds of brain matter, 11,250,000 gallons of blood, 414,000,000 years of life that will never be lived, and 22,500,000 children who will never be born. The dry if imposing figure “9,000,000 dead” seems a little less statistical when we view it from this perspective.

In 1971, a movie based upon the novel was released, with Trumbo as the screenwriter. The following year, he wrote the screenplay for F.T.A. [“fuck the army,” for the uninitiated]. This execrable quasi-documentary starred Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Peter Boyle (among others) as themselves, in a series of street-theatre sketches performed outside military bases in the Pacific Rim. A reviewer in the Internet Movie Database sums up the film tersely: “I would rather watch Congress perform ‘Oh, Calcutta’ WITH the nude scenes than sit through this mess again.”

Trumbo was primarily a screenwriter. His credits include Kitty Foyle, a controversial Christopher Morley novel of the late 1930s, which included an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion. Others are A Bill of Divorcement; Spartacus; Exodus; the movie adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Roman Holiday; and finally, a television adaptation of Theodora Kroeber’s documentary Ishi in Two Worlds.

Roman Holiday earned Trumbo a posthumous Oscar, forty years after its release, and in 1975 he had received an Oscar for The Brave One, another work from the era when he was officially blacklisted in Hollywood, and forced to work under a variety of pseudonyms. (Rather than make up names out of whole cloth, Trumbo managed to convince a few of his non-blacklisted colleagues to lend their own names to his screenplays. Thus the original Oscar for Roman Holiday was awarded to Ian McLellan Hunter.) So, while many anti-war novelists have been one-book wonders, or have written mere variations on the same story, Trumbo wrote copiously, and from any number of political viewpoints. Whether or not you would consider his costume epics to be pro-military films, his anti-war politics did not appear to have colored Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell.

Alas, there is no comprehensive biography of Dalton Trumbo, so we’re left to our own conclusions about his personal politics. At least unofficially, he admitted to membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A., years after his grilling in the HUAC hearings.

Curiously, little if any anti-war fiction has dealt with post-Vietnam warfare, despite the fact that U.S. citizens have been bitterly divided on the justification for the Persian Gulf wars, the war in the Falklands, the ongoing Arab-Israeli and Irish-British conflicts, to name only the most obvious examples. I cannot but wonder whether this stems from lack of artistic inspiration, or fear of reprisals.

Or perhaps there is simply nothing remaining to be said. Trumbo’s Johnny concludes with what must be the most poignant possible statement against warfare:

We are men of peace we are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace if you take away our work if you try to range us one against the other we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us we will use them to defend our very lives and the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now we have seen it and we know it. Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one not ten not ten thousand not a million not ten millions not a hundred millions but a billion two billions of us all the people of the world we will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquility in security in decency in peace. You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.

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On Collecting (and selling) Books on Bullfighting

The collecting of books on bullfighting is surprisingly organized. While not as popular as it was during the 1950’s and 60’s, whatever the field lacks in numbers of collectors it makes up in their aficion (love of the activity, nearly to madness). There are collecting clubs in Spain, Mexico, France, Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States (see, Taurine Bibliophiles of America, my home club, easily found through Google) and probably more throughout the world that I have yet to discover.

Bullfighting itself has, of course been around since Ur or before and is found today in different forms in Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and to a lesser extent in some other Latin American countries, as well as such relatively unknown areas as Korea. “Bloodless” bullfighting (with Velcro where the only blood shed is that of the toreros) may be viewed in California and Arizona and Portuguese style, where the bull is not killed, may be found in California as well.

Some of the fictional highlights of an English language collection should probably include: Frank Harris, Montes the Matador and Other Stories, Grant Richards, 1900; Vicente Blasco Ibanez, Blood and Sand, Simpkin Marshall, 1913; Henry de Montherlant, The Bullfighters, Jonathan Cape, 1928; Luis Spota,The Wounds of Hunger, Houghton Mifflin, 1957; and of course Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta (The Sun also Rises in the US), Jonathan Cape, 1927. A non-fiction collection should certainly contain Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, Jonathan Cape, 1932; Vincent J.R, Kehoe, Aficionado!, Hastings House 1960; Kenneth Tynan, Bull Fever, Longmans Green, 1955; Barnaby Conrad, Death of a Matador, Michael Joseph, 1952 and my own favorite by Conrad (and his as well), How to Fight a Bull, Doubleday, 1968; Robert Daley, The Swords of Spain, Dial, 1960; and Angus McNab, The Bulls of Iberia, Heinemann, 1957.

Any area of collectible material seems to be dominated by fads and momentary hot items. In bullfighting it is usually the rapid rise of a star. El Juli is a present example. The death of a prominent figure may increase demand. John Fulton is a sad example of that. Year in and year out certain areas seem to retain popularity, usually the unusual or odd subject. Examples are U.S. or British bullfighters, women, African or Asian bullfighters. What I think of as crossover subjects also seem to hold interest, bullfighting in the Old West or anthropological studies of a taurine interest would be two examples, or the bullfight in fine art.

I can’t really recommend the field for investment purposes, but then I don’t believe in collectibles of any kind as investment. The prices have remained the same or, more usually, dropped over the past 15 years. As an area filled with great writing, great art and photography, and still discoverable obscure or unknown items, it has other rewards. For those fanaticos I do highly recommend the area. For those interested in mere monetary gain, I would suggest collecting certificates of deposit instead.

Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson

lynn@pacifier

For books on Latin America & the Caribbean

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