Building socialism : architecture and urbanism in East German literature, 1955-1973 / Curtis Swope.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Swope, Curtis, author.

Series:

New directions in German studies ; Volume 19.

New directions in German studies ; vol. 19

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture and literature.

German literature--Germany (East)--History and criticism.

German literature.

Socialism and literature--Germany (East).

Socialism and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (257 pages) : illustrations, photographs.

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

"Building Socialism reveals how East German writers' engagement with the rapidly changing built environment from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s constitutes an untold story about the emergence of literary experimentation in the post-War period. It breaks new ground by exploring the centrality of architecture to a mid-century modernist literature in dialogue with multiple literary and left-wing theoretical traditions and in tune with international assessments of modernist architecture and urban planning. Design and construction were a central part of politics and everyday life in East Germany during this time as buildings old and new were asked to bear heavy ideological and social burdens. In their novels, stories, and plays, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Günter Kunert, Volker Braun, Günter de Bruyn, and Brigitte Reimann responded to enormous new factory complexes, experimental new towns, the demolition of Berlin's tenements, and the propagation of a pared-down modernist aesthetic in interior design. Writers' representation of the design, construction, and use of architecture formed part of a turn to modernist literary devices, including montage, metaphor, and shifting narrative perspectives. East Germany's literary architecture also represents a sophisticated theoretical reflection on the intractable problems of East Germany's socialist modernity, including the alliance between state socialism and technological modernization, competing commitments to working-class self-organization and the power of specialist planners and designers, and the attempt to create an alternative to fascism."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

I: Framing East Germany: Marxism, Architecture, and Literature Introduction. 1. Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture

II. Architecture, Theater, and the Early Years of the Scientific-Technological Revolution ; 2. Confronting the Construction Site: Heiner Müller from Operativity to Metaphor ; 3. Towards a Bourgeois Architecture: Helmut Baierl's Frau Flinz and the Space of the Class Enemy

III. Artchitecture and Modernity in the Prose of the 1960s ; 4. Time at Home: The Domestic Interior in Günter de Bruyn, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, and Gerhard Wolf ; 5. Literary Responses to East German Urbanism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9781501328145

150132814X

9781501328121

1501328123

9781501328138

1501328131

OCLC:

1007868347