East German culture has been ignored for too long. Until we embrace it, our country will remain dangerously divided | Carolin Würfel

When I went to school in the 1990s, GDR literature wasn’t taught or read. It was treated as something shameful. I didn’t dare to pick up a book by an East German writer, even though many of them were in our library at home in Leipzig. Looking back, I believe the reason was the public perception of the old socialist republic. It scared me off.

When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, it marked the beginning of the end of East German art and literature. Everything that had shaped our cultural history was thought away, spoken away and…