Writers' Union of the German Democratic Republic

The Writers' Union of the German Democratic Republic enters the book’s account of the June 17 uprising through a single, sharply satirical image: its secretary arranges for leaflets to be distributed declaring that the people have forfeited the government’s confidence. The episode makes the organization a vehicle for exposing the distance between a governing bureaucracy and the workers it claims to represent.

Appearance in the poem

In the poem discussed by the book, the secretary of the Writers' Union has leaflets distributed along the Stalinallee after the uprising. Their message reverses the expected relation between government and governed: rather than the government having lost the people’s confidence, the people are said to have forfeited the government’s. The book presents this declaration as an expression of the Communist nomenklatura’s arrogance, not as a neutral account of the organization’s ordinary work.

Political context and irony

The book sets the poem beside Bertolt Brecht’s letter of solidarity with the East German Communist regime, published in Neues Deutschland. It characterizes the poem as the politically opportunistic counterpart to that public show of support: Brecht appears to profess allegiance to the regime while also signaling solidarity with the workers, leaving himself aligned with whichever side prevails. In this reading, the Writers' Union secretary’s leaflet condenses the regime’s contemptuous reversal of responsibility, while the poem itself is also criticized for its political positioning.

The book’s qualification

The discussion does not treat the poem’s final political implication as adequate. It argues that a revolutionary party may indeed have the duty to transform an inert, opportunistic crowd into a collective body conscious of a historical task, a process expressed through the deliberately provocative idea of dissolving one people and electing another. The secretary’s declaration therefore serves as more than a joke about bureaucratic conceit: it opens onto a dispute over who can speak in the name of the people, and whether political transformation can be distinguished from the state’s arrogant claim to judge them.