The Skin of the System: On Germany's Socialist Modernity
Benjamin Robinson
Abstract
This book objects to the idea that there is only one modernity—that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all? To approach this question, the book turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fühmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to soci ... More
This book objects to the idea that there is only one modernity—that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all? To approach this question, the book turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fühmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism. Fühmann's own serial loyalties to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin inform his existential meditations on change and difference. By placing Fühmann's politically alert and intensely personal literary inventions in the context of an inquiry into radical social rupture, the book wrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as anti-modern ideological follies.
Keywords:
modernity,
liberal capitalism,
socialism,
East Germany,
Franz Fühmann,
fascism,
Adolf Hitler,
Joseph Stalin
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780804762472 |
| Published to Stanford Scholarship Online: June 2013 |
DOI:10.11126/stanford/9780804762472.001.0001 |
