This dissertation examines the development of the female literary subject in the work of two generations of women writers of the GDR, represented by Christa Wolf (1929), Brigitte Reimann (1931--1973), Helga Konigsdorf (1936) and Helga Schubert (1941). The objectives are twofold: first, to assess the influence of two opposing discursive frameworks of subjectivity, the socialist and the psychoanalytic, on the works of these writers, and second, to examine the effects of an ideological disjuncture of two generations on their literary production. / The first generation to embark on a literary career in the GDR, with great aspirations for the socialist project, is represented by Wolf and Reimann. A shift in political parameters meant that the following generation of writers, including Konigsdorf and Schubert, was faced with a pre-determined ideological structure, unsatisfactory to them. Accordingly, a diachronic investigation of the literary subject is pursued, and reveals the shift between these generations. As a result, rifts in time, in the subject, and rifts between the subject and its time are exposed. / In the 1960s, Wolf and Reimann rejected the literary female subject's role as an agent in the implementation of socialism. Crises in GDR social structures and crises of the psyche are shown to overlap and to result in divided subjects. The non-contemporaneity of Marxism begins to surface in the 1970s, and the rift in time affects the female subjects of Wolf and Reimann, which increasingly fragment Konigsdorf's and Schubert's short prose of the late 1970s reveals a rejection of the unified Marxist subject and the move toward a notion of the self informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the effects of the socio-political environment prove fatal to the individual subject in the works by both generations, and parallels are drawn to the National Socialist past. These links instigate a fundamental reevaluation of standards in language, power and cycles of history at the crossroads of life and death. The post-Wende period witnesses a shift away from problems of subjectivity in the texts of Konigsdorf and Schubert, while Wolf initially experiments with the postmodern, and most recently, surprisingly re-consolidates the female subject.

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