This study, the first of its kind in English, sets out to analyse literature as a form of social communication by considering developments in literary theory and practice in the German Democratic Republic in the Honecker era. Attention focuses on the changes in the discourses of literary theory and literary practice in a semi-public sphere controlled by an increasingly ossified political discourse. Key developments in the 1970s, hailed by GDR theorists as the point of departure for a new kind of literary communication in society, are carefully examined. The study then contrasts these idealised views of literature as social communication with practice and theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. In clear trends in practice (and, to a lesser extent, in theory) communication was perceived as being increasingly problematic and conflictual. The development from this sense of destabilisation to the rupturing in communication between literature and society, between literature and political authority and in literature itself became more salient in the 1980s as its forms and themes radically challenged the mounting stagnation of the discourse of political power. These conflicts are illustrated and discussed with the aid of detailed analyses of key literary texts and previously unpublished interviews with leading theorists.