In Anna Seghers' Erzählung Das Duell from 1968, Professor Winkelfried wants to assert his pedagogical convictions against the lecturer Karl Bötcher during a physics examination of the worker-student Helwig. Both men studied together during the Nazi regime, though the regime-conforming Winkelfried was able to pursue a career as a professor. Bötcher was imprisoned in a concentration camp as a communist and could only teach as a teacher after 1945. The duel between Bötcher and Winkelfried concerns the question of whether a worker can meet the demands of a university and take on management roles in the enterprises of the new society.
In Im Duell bei Müller from 1987, the works director Bötcher meets Helwig, who has in the meantime become his deputy at VEB Oktober and challenges him during the workers' uprising of 17 June 1953. Written as Bötcher's inner monologue, his memories of the conflicts in the early years of the GDR are dramatically heightened.