Max Walter Schulz

[1][4] He remained in the position for nearly twenty years, skilfully charting for the institute a sometimes challenging course between scholarly integrity and the shifting political expectations of party officialdom.

[5] In 1983, Schulz took a new job as editor in chief of the prestigious fortnightly literary journal, Sinn und Form, taking over from Paul Wiens.

His fictional writing is typical of East Germany's so-called "Bitterfeld Path literature", intended both to point the way to an independent "socialist national culture" and to satisfy the "growing artistic and aesthetic needs of the working population".

[7] By the end of the 1960s Schulz had established his credentials with readers as a novelist, with academics as a literary mentor and with the party, to the point at which his critical and "semi-official" pronouncements about the new generation of writers became important for the subsequent development of East German literature.

[1] Between 1967 and 1969 Schulz was a candidate for membership of the regional party leadership team ("Bezirksleitung") for Leipzig,[1] then serving for a further two years, till 1971, as a full member of it.