Six months after the founding of the GDR, 20-year-old poet Edeltraud Eckert was sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp in May 1950 for possessing leaflets with the terse wording "For freedom and democracy". Her arrest is symbolic of the fate of countless artists whose works and lives in the GDR were characterized by censorship and repression.
To mark the 35th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution, the Institute for German and International Party Law and Party Research (PRUF), together with the Chair of Public Law, Art and Cultural Law at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, invites you to a reading of repressed literature in the GDR with actors from Theaterfabrik Düsseldorf.
The reading brings biographies of affected artists and selected texts from the archive of suppressed literature in the GDR out of the shadows and into the light, inviting people to reflect together on the big questions of freedom and democracy. The PRUF will be accompanied by the exhibition "Leseland DDR" by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship. The exhibition is a contribution to the cultural history of the SED dictatorship and at the same time a stimulus to explore the history of the GDR in the mirror of its literature.
Further information on the 35th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution can be found at www.FriedlicheRevolution89.de.
