This new assessment of the literary development of Irmtraud Morgner 19331990 liberates her from a critical straitjacket that has seen her early and middleperiod works as essentially constrained and thwarted by state prescriptions. The author demonstrates that Morgner always had an organically evolving literary programme of her own. He uncovers a writer with a vision of ideology and democracy as humanised intimate and personal. Morgners diaries are called upon to demonstrate how she rechannelled into her later work material that had been banned by the censor. Morgner emerges as a figure whose work is deeply pertinent to our twentyfirstcentury preoccupations be they in the West or East. The author advances powerful arguments for the value of six of her novels as key illustrations of her trust in the individuals capacity to give meaning to life without recourse to established ideological structures.