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Abstract
3n 1979, NATO announced its decision to deploy American intermediate-range nuclear missiles throughout Western Europe. From then until 1987, when the historic Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty provided for the withdrawal of these weapons as well as those deployed by the Soviets in Eastern Europe, the issue of nuclear weapons preoccupied many Europeans, particularly Germans. Beginning in 1980, fear of nuclear war, with the two Germanies as potential battlefield, mobilized the largest peace movement that the Federal Republic had witnessed since the fifties, occasioned a massive increase in peace propaganda in East Germany, and brought to public notice that country's first unofficial peace movement.
Throughout most of the eighties, writers in both German states opposed missile deployment. This study examines their aims and achievements in this effort and investigates the implications of political engagement for the aesthetic production of selected authors. Analysis of press reports, writers' speeches, interviews, essays and literary texts yielded the following results: INF deployment motivated writers of all political persuasions to take up a variety of peace-oriented pursuits. In the early eighties, West and East German writers also met for the first time in over thirty years to discuss how they could help promote nuclear disarmament. Their ongoing public engagement encouraged unofficial peace forces in East Germany, kept the issue of nuclear weapons deployment topical in West Germany when many were preoccupied with economic problems, and helped create a political climate receptive to Gorbachev's disarmament proposals. The same is true of agitational literature of the early eighties that aimed at increasing support for the peace movements and literature in the mid-eighties that explored reasons for the existence of the weapons and for German acceptance of them and recommended a change of outlook. Calls for a new consciousness (by authors such as Gunter Grass and Christa Wolf) were often accompanied and encouraged by literary experimentation, while writers of agitational literature (including Wolf Biermann, Walter Jens, Stefan Heym, and Eberhard Panitz) employed forms and motifs common to earlier political literature.
