The East German Novel of Socialist Construction

Laboring Affect
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-64014-140-7
Verlag: Camden House

Buch, Englisch, Band 3, 280 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 560 g

Reihe: Culture and Power in German-Speaking Europe, 1918-1989

Examines an important novelistic genre of the early German Democratic Republic for what it tells us about the country's aspirations to remake labor affectively and thus to build a socialist society.

In a series of socialist realist novels written in the early 1950s, East German authors sought to capture "the new feeling of work" under socialism, to portray the collective enthusiasm of building a new world out of the ruins of fascism and war. In the GDR, this construction literature received an ambiguous reception even at the time; in the West it was dismissed as propaganda; and it is now largely forgotten. Why revisit it now? Drawing on the theorization of living labor elaborated in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's work, particularly their monumental treatise History and Obstinacy, and on contemporary Marxist feminist accounts of social reproduction theory, this book argues that East German construction literature provides us with a set of case studies in the social reorganization of work and the emotions and infrastructures that attend to it, even as these novels attempt to contain these transformations through socialist realist aesthetic strategies. The much-bemoaned awkwardness of these novels, then, is perhaps not only to be found in their didacticism but in the limits of that didacticism, where they seek both to portray and to disavow the transformation of work and the working class in the GDR. This book confronts the question: what was socialist affective labor and what could it have been?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bivens, Hunter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Work, Affect, and Obstinacy
What is a Construction Novel?
Work and Narration
Ideology or Allegory? Chapter Overview
1: "The Poetry of the Future"? Periodizing the Construction Novel
Socialist Realism and the Public Sphere
Emulation and Form(alism)
The Construction Novel between Schematism and (Non)Conflict
2: "The Fire of Labor": Living Labor and Affect
What is the Political Economy of Labor Power?
Animal Spirits
Labor as Stimmung and Narrative
3: "The Dead Forces of Nature": Obstinate Infrastructure and the Socialist Gimmick
Making Infrastructure Socialist: Eduard Claudius, Menschen an unserer Seite
Worker Representation and Worker Subjects: Hans Marchwitza, Roheisen
Obstinate Infrastructure: Hans Lorbeer, Die Sieben ist eine gute Zahl
4: "In the Social Production of their Life.": Visions of Socialist Social Reproduction
What is a Socialist Haltung? Marianne Bruns, Glück fällt nicht vom Himmel
Re-Balancing Abjection: Elfriede Brüning, Regine Haberkorn
The Moral Occult of Socialism: J. C. Schwarz, Sie blieb nicht allein
Coda: Heike Geißler's Seasonal Associate and the Specter of Stakhanov
Selected Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Bivens, Hunter
HUNTER BIVENS is Associate Professor of Literature and German Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.