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. Writers such as Heiner Muller, Christa Wolf, Gunter Kunert, Volker Braun, Gunter de Bruyn, and Brigitte Reimann sought to fashion plays, stories, and novels adequate to enormous new factory complexes and experimental new towns, the large-scale demolition of Berlin's tenements and the reshaping of its ceremonial center, and the propagation of a pared-down modernist aesthetic in interior design.0.
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