Building Socialism

Though Swopes book is not the first study of literature and architecture in the GDR, it is the most thoroughly researched and far reaching published to date and breaks new ground on the topic of built space in the GDR. Summing Up: Highly recommended. * CHOICE * A stimulating, lucid, and well-researched study that makes for a crucial and timely contribution to the Marxist discourse on built spaceespecially the research of the various authors personal librariesthe architectural heritage of the GDR in the cultural imaginary, and the still often underappreciated quality of the literary and theatrical works of the East German state. * Modern Language Review * How do writers imagine buildings and their interior design? How do politics shape architectural debates and how do those make poetry and prose? In answer to these kinds of questions, Curtis Swope offers intriguing close readings of the GDRs literary imagination of architecture based on rich sources with an international scope. This book will shape the study of the GDRI was unable to put it down until I had read the last page. * Barbara Mennel, Associate Professor of German Studies and Cinema Studies, University of Florida, USA * Thanks to Curtis Swope's thoughtful research into previously unexplored territories, this book for the first time illuminates the architectural spaces that frame socialist approaches to modernity and East German literaturethus extending a spatial trajectory in modern literature that reaches back to Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy. * Helen Fehervary, Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, USA *

Curtis Swope is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

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 Mller from Operativity to Metaphor 3. Towards a Bourgeois Architecture: Helmut Baierls 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 Gnter de Bruyn, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, and Gerhard Wolf 5. Literary Responses to East German Urbanism Conclusion Bibliography Index