This article is an analysis of the novel Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1973) in the light of its intertextuality with Goethe's, Defoe's and Salinger's texts. It has been suggested that Plenzdorf's novel creates a stylistic and ideological world, which is instigating for the literary paradigms of the Socialist Realism of the 70s in East Germany. Twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, this created world in the novel seems to be up-to-date or even paradigmatic for the current representation of German Democratic Republic cultural memory in literature and film. The article then relies on an analysis of intertextuality and intermediality as a method to approach processes of transformation. The different processes inherent to the novel and its pretexts have been reported.
German literature; German Democratic Republic; processes of transformation; intertextuality; intermediality