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?
By:
Hunter Bivens (Contributor)
Imprint: Camden House Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781640141407
ISBN 10: 1640141405
Series: Culture and Power in German-Speaking Europe, 1918-1989
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 20 January 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
HUNTER BIVENS is Associate Professor of Literature and German Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
