Literary protocols. Genesis and socio-political value of a literary genre in the German Democratic Republic

This article aims to examine the genesis, characteristics and models of the so-called protocol literature, a narrative genre that was very popular in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. On the basis of an excursus of the most representative works of the genre, the analysis investigates the peculiar overlapping of the private dimension and the public function of the protocols, highlighting the connection with the historical situation in which they were born. In particular, the article focuses on their socio-political value and their position in the literary history of the time, in relation to German and international contemporary literary instances, in order to reconstruct the trends that influenced them and to investigate the reasons for their wide success.