Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof (Dorotheenstadt Cemetery), Berlin-Mitte, © Stefanie Thomas, 2025
What remains – A Search for Literary Traces
Guided Tour
When Christa Wolf's novella What remains (Was bleibt) was published in 1990, a fierce debate broke out in the literary feuilleton about the role of literature and its most important representatives in the GDR. Almost 40 years later, many traces of and connections within this literary community can be found in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery.
This walk explores lives of writers from Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig to Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller, touching on outsiders like Wolfgang Hilbig and Thomas Brasch along the way, to conjure up the image of a failed society whose utopian dream reverberates in the literature it produced.