East German writers fall into three groups: those who have emigrated to the West, those who live in the East but publish in the West, and those who live and publish in the East and represent East German society to the rest of the world. Hermann Kant belongs to the third group. At least since he became president of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Writers' Association in 1978, Kant has been regarded as the writer who comes closest to representing an official East German view of literature. But Kant is not merely a "literary politician." In the West as well as in the East he is a popular writer who has done much to bring East German literature out of its dogmatism and provincialism and raise it to an international level. Kant's literary reputation rests mainly on three novels which reflect stages in the sociopolitical development of the German...