Günter de Bruyn merits particular attention as the East German author (of the generation associated with the German Democratic Republic for the whole forty years of its existence, from 1949 to 1989) who enjoyed the greatest success in post-unification Germany. While most of his contemporaries struggled to overcome the legacy of their involvement with the GDR, de Bruyn’s work of the post-1989 transitional period was consistently well received both by the cultural establishment and the reading public. He rapidly gained a reputation as a fair-minded author enjoying equal respect on both sides of the old East-West divide, a “gesamtdeutsche Konsensfigur” as one reviewer put it. Only when he published a second volume of his autobiography,
Vierzig Jahre(
Forty Years) in 1996, focused on…
2035 words
Citation: Tate, Dennis. "Günter de Bruyn". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 January 2004; last revised 29 October 2020. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5432, accessed 23 November 2024.]
