Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 9781501328114, 9781501328145, 9781501328138

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN GERMAN STUDIES

Vol. 19

Series Editor:

Imke Meyer

Editorial Board: Katherine Arens, Roswitha Burwick, Richard Eldridge, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Catriona MacLeod, Stephan Schindler, Heidi Schlipphacke, Ulrich Schönherr, James A. Schultz, Silke-Maria Weineck, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke, John Zilcosky.

Volumes in the series: Vol. 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf Vol. 2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard Malkmus Vol. 3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature by Thomas O. Beebee Vol. 4. Beyond Discontent: ‘Sublimation’ from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel Vol. 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke Vol. 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler Vol. 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon Vol. 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation by David Horton Vol. 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck Vol. 10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems by Luke Fischer Vol. 11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins Vol. 12. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World by Lorely French Vol. 13. Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State by Katherine Arens Vol. 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange edited by Tobias Döring and Ewan Fernie Vol. 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Vol. 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck Vol. 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O’Neil Vol. 18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone Vol. 19. Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 by Curtis Swope Vol. 20. Ghostwriting by Richard Gray

Building Socialism Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973

Curtis Swope

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Curtis Swope, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Swope, Curtis author. Title: Building socialism : architecture and urbanism in East German literature, 1955-1973 / Curtis Swope. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: New directions in German studies ; vol. 19 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014785 (print) | LCCN 2017030549 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501328121 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501328138 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501328114 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Socialism and literature--Germany (East) | Architecture and literature. | German literature--Germany (East)--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PT3706 (ebook) | LCC PT3706 .S86 2017 (print) | DDC 830.9/9431--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014785 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-5013-2811-4 ePub: 978-1-5013-2812-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2813-8

Series: New Directions in German Studies Cover design: Andrea Federle-Bucsi Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events, and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For Kathryn And for Patrick and Miranda

vi

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

PART I FRAMING EAST GERMANY: MARXISM, ARCHITECTURE, AND LITERATURE Introduction Space in Architecture, Architecture in Marxism East German Theories of the Built Environment A Literature of Construction

3 16 21 25

1 Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture Brecht and Modern Architecture Benjamin, Adorno, and the Neues Bauen Operative Writing and Modern Architecture Seghers’s Realism: The Ambiguous Status of Description

29 33 41 47 54

PART II ARCHITECTURE, THEATER, AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE SCIENTIFIC-TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION 2 Confronting the Construction Site: Heiner Müller from   Operativity to Metaphor Buildings Against Paper Compromised Operativity and Spatial Metaphorics The Prinzip Auschwitz, Metaphor, and East German Built Space Built Space and the Body in Der Bau Carceral Communism: Construction Site as Prison Traditional Urbanism and Construction Site as Playground

65 70 77 84 89 95 98

viii Contents 3 Towards a Bourgeois Architecture: Helmut Baierl’s Frau Flinz   and the Space of the Class Enemy Architecture According to Ulbricht Karl von Appen and the Making of Bourgeois Space Kultur im Heim Expropriation, Revolution, and Bureaucracy Science and the Socialist Future The Cult of Lenin and the Fading Dream

103 106 109 112 114 117 122

PART III ARCHITECTURE AND MODERNITY IN THE PROSE OF THE 1960s 4 Time at Home: The Domestic Interior in Günter de Bruyn,   Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, and   Gerhard Wolf Henselmann and the GDR Interior Prescriptions for a Socialist Wohnkultur The Crisis of Civilization at Home Nineteenth-Century Interiors and the “Vast Landscape of  History” Epilogue: Gerhard Wolf

131 137 141 153 168 177

5 Literary Responses to East German Urbanism The Literature of the Communist Company Town Fantasies of Urbanity in the Castrated City From Axial to Arabesque: Christa Wolf’s “Unter den Linden” On the Threshold of History Living with Prefab High-Rises

179 185 196 201 208 216

Conclusion

229

Bibliography 237 Index

249

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Double House at the Weißenhofsiedlung, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Stuttgart, 1927. Photo credit: Andreas Praefcke. 51 Figure 2: Anahuacalli Museum, Diego Rivera, Mexico City, 1947. Photo credit: Alejandro Linares Garcia.

59

Figure 3: Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1924. Photo credit: Bagradian.

60

Figure 4: HO Lebensmittel, Anonymous, 1951. Courtesy Deutsches Historisches Museum.

73

Figure 5: Karl von Appen, Neumann’s living room, 1961. Courtesy of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

107

Figure 6: Neumann’s interior after Flinzes’ invasion, 1961. Photo credit: Percy Paukschta. Courtesy Inge Steinert.

115

Figure 7: Kennen Sie dieses Haus? (Do you know this house?), Kultur im Heim, 1959. Courtesy Huss Media.

117

Figure 8: GDR beef cattle complex, from Architektur und Städtebau in der deutschen demokratischen Republik. Courtesy Seemann-Henschel Verlag.

119

Figure 9: Lenin’s Rat, unsere Tat (Lenin’s advice, our deed), 1969. Courtesy Deutsches Historisches Museum.

123

Figure 10: Drei Wohnräume aus dem Typ Hoyerswerda (Three living spaces of the Hoyerswerda type), Kultur im Heim, 1958. Courtesy Huss Media.

148

x  List of Illustrations Figure 11: Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik Ludwigshafen a/ Rhein (Baden Aniline and Soda Factory, Ludwigshafen on the Rhine), 1897. From Herman Overstolz, Paris World’s Fair 1900 (St. Louis, Missouri, 1897).

187

Figure 12: AS 1120 digger at the open-pit mine, Nochten, 1995. Photo credit: Torsten Heinze.

195

Figure 13: Berlin-Hauptstadt der DDR, Interhotel “Unter den Linden” (Berlin – Capital of the GDR, Interhotel, “Unter den Linden”), 1969. Courtesy Verlag Bild und Heimat.

205

Figure 14: Bautzener Allee, main street of Hoyerswerda, 1965. Courtesy Archiv Stadtmuseum Hoyerswerda.

219

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people for making it possible to write Building Socialism. Frank Trommler stands first on the list. Without his guidance, perspective, and wisdom, the project would have remained mired in immature readings and reductive thinking. His kindness and humor made improving my work a constant pleasure. I would also like to thank Simon Richter and Catriona MacLeod for their advice and encouragement. As I plowed through the specialist literature on East Germany and delved into little known texts, their enthusiasm gave me confidence that a more general readership would be interested in my work. I am also grateful to Kerry Wallach for many conversations about the joys and trials of being a junior colleague; to Adrian Daub for reassuring me that modernity and modernism were not scholarly dead ends and for giving me a roof over my head on my arrival in Berlin for a research trip; to Lisa Anderson, Vance Byrd, James Melvin, Ed Miller, and Mary Beth Wetli for their continued support and friendship. To all my generous colleagues in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department, especially Heather Sullivan and Nina Ekstein, I offer heartfelt thanks. Your unfailing goodwill and graciousness are sincerely appreciated. I would also like to thank Stacey Connolly, Benjamin Harris, Lisa Jasinski, Jason Johnson, Patrick Keating, Maria McWilliams, and Ana Romo for their support of my work; I am especially grateful to Michael Schreyach for conversations about Heidegger, Benjamin, Lenin, and punk rock. I feel fortunate to have you as a friend. To Carl Weber for regaling me with entertaining and enlightening stories about life at the Berliner Ensemble, I offer sincere thanks. Friedrich Dieckmann, who was willing to engage in extended correspondence about my work when I requested an image-reprint permission, gave helpful insights about how my project might be received in Germany. Günter Kunert was exceedingly generous in responding to a letter of mine inquiring about his views on architecture. I am likewise grateful to the DAAD for supporting my work (particularly to Elsa Kaden for supplying my first grant payment in cash before

xii Acknowledgments I had a bank account in Germany); the Akademie der Künste for the smooth and easy use of the archive; the staff of the Brigitte Reimann Literaturhaus for the freedom to browse Reimann’s personal library (and, amazingly, for bringing me coffee while I worked!); the staff of the Heiner Müller Archiv Transitraum for similar freedom; the Goethe Institut in Mexico City for the use of their library. Many colleagues in the field heard versions of my work and offered helpful comments. Helen Fehervary and John Urang are first among these. I am also grateful to Hunter Bivens, Sylvia Fischer, Seth Howes, Benjamin Robinson, Jamie Trnka, and Katie Trumpener for their advice and encouragement. To the entire editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially Imke Meyer and Haaris Naqvi, I offer many thanks. There are not words enough to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript. Such close attention and clarion incisiveness exceeded my wildest expectations. The book is immeasurably better because of your help and generosity. To Mom, Dad, Mandy, and Katie and I say thank you for loving me and for strengthening our relationships even though we live farther from each other than any of us would like. The same goes for all my beloved old friends—you know who you are. I thank Patrick and Miranda who, despite 2am diaper changes and last-minute bathroom breaks before heading out for the day, actually helped me speed up and refine my writing. You have shown me more than you can know about what it means to be a human being and what is most important in life. To Kathryn O’Rourke: thank you, danke, gracias. We have moments too many to recount here—from Berlin Volksparks to Philadelphia diners to Mexico City paseros to San Antonio ice houses—that have sustained me and made me who I am. I love you more than ever.

Part I Framing East Germany: Marxism, Architecture, and Literature

2

Introduction

In a 1968 talk, East Germany’s leading architect, Hermann Henselmann, gave an expansive definition of architecture: By the term “architecture,” I mean the spatial organization of people’s way of living. It is both a passive and active means of material and intellectual communication. As a component of intellectual-cultural communication it functions as a “sign” and medium of the intellectually and psychically conditioned substance of individuals and of the community of citizens.1 For Henselmann, who by the time of this quotation knew the writings of Marxist theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and of Modernist architect Walter Gropius, architecture stands in a close dialectical relationship with the human beings who make and use it.2 Architecture is not a bourgeois art that conveys clear meanings 1 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Hermann Henselmann, “Antwort auf eine Umfrage zum Thema Architektur und Forschung,” Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag: 1978), 135. The talk was at the Technische Universität Stuttgart. Henselmann’s definition came in response to a student question 2 The following volumes were in Henselmann’s personal library: Theodor Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1964); Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965). Henselmann cited Adorno by name in his 1970 essay, “Zur Prognose des Städtebaus und der Architektur” (Gedanken, Ideen, 143–5). Scholars have traditionally treated analogies between the Frankfurt School critique of modernity and similar critiques in GDR literature with caution. The most extended discussion in this respect is Andreas Huyssen, “Traces of Ernst Bloch: Reflections on Christa Wolf,” Responses to Christa Wolf, ed. Marlyn Sibley Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 233–47. In his The Powers of Speech, David Bathrick cites the work of Peter Uwe Hohendahl to show how the rise of the fairy tale in the late 1960s in East Germany, particularly in the case of Christa

4  Building Socialism through facades. Rather, in Henselmann’s Marxist and Modernist view, architecture bridges base and superstructure and transcends narrow disciplinary boundaries. In so doing, it reclaims its role as a fundamental means for meeting the material and emotional needs of human communities.3 The structures people build for work, play, and housing grow from and shape everyday life as much as language does. Architecture is for Henselmann not a discrete art form, but a built environment inseparable from the daily realities of human existence. Buildings shape and are shaped by the “substance” of individuals and communities; architecture has an intimate connection to everyday human existence across diverse cultures. Henselmann’s views on architecture stand in a long tradition among twentieth-century Marxist commentators and Modernist architects.4 Benjamin, who was familiar with the architecture of the Swiss Wolf, represented a “critical position close to the one developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Bathrick adds to Hohendahl’s argument the idea that disciplines other than literature were in some cases driven by similarly critical impulses. David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 188. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Theorie und Praxis des Erbens: Untersuchungen zum Problem der literarischen Tradition in der DDR,” Literatur der DDR in den Siebziger Jahren, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Patricia Herminghouse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 13–52. 3 In his classic study, Marxism and Modernism, Eugene Lunn is at pains to show the diversity of Modernism and Marxism and, accordingly, the diverse ways in which the writers associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Benjamin and Adorno, envision the relationship between the two historical phenomena. Lunn does say that two criteria, which apply to Henselmann’s architectural theory, are common to these diverse Marxisms and Modernisms: a willingness to work against inherited notions of art and institutions, such as the Enlightenment division of the arts, and an interest in the question of “consciousness” and culture as a vital part of the historical dialectic of society (5). Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism; an Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Henselmann’s view of architecture, in which buildings and the substance of individuals and communities form a dialectical unity, is Marxist and Modernist in the sense Lunn describes. In architectural-historical debates, the theorists Lunn writes about and whom Martin Jay sees as representatives of Western Marxism have often been seen as “modernists” whose ideas resonated with modern architects’ redefinition of their discipline in the 1920s. See Neil Leach’s Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1997). 4 Henselmann was also aware that the idea of architecture’s close connection to the fundamental necessities of everyday existence was an ancient idea in architectural theory. The architect had read the theories of Andrea Palladio and Michelangelo and was likely familiar with Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius given that his friend and fellow architect Hans Schmidt was. See Henselmann’s Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte and Schmidt’s Gestaltung und Umgestaltung der Stadt (Berlin: VEB

Introduction 5 Modernist Le Corbusier and Gropius and with architectural historian Siegfried Giedion’s writings on modern architecture, notes in his Arcades that “architecture was the earliest [of the arts] to historically outgrow the concepts of art, or, better said, it could least endure being viewed as ‘art’.”5 Accordingly, Benjamin finds in the built environment of Paris the revolutionary communicative potential that Henselmann ascribes to architecture in its nearness to everyday life. For the Modernist architect Richard Neutra, whose career began in Germany in the 1920s, continued in the United States in the 1930s, and culminated with recognition on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the notion of the “built environment” superseded traditional definitions of architecture and became the centerpiece of a theory about the use and experience of built space.6 So, for the Marxist Benjamin, the Modernist architect Neutra, and the East German architect Henselmann, buildings are not unchanging projections of architectural intent. Rather, they are characterized by mutual interaction with the human beings who make and use them and by their place in the ever-evolving physical, social, and psychic context in which they stand. What are the ramifications for novels, plays, and poems that represent the design, construction, and use of built space as part of the fabric of everyday life? To answer this question, Building Socialism analyses built space in the literature of East Germany’s Scientific Technological Revolution, from 1955 to 1973.7 From Heiner Müller’s production plays Verlag für Bauwesen, 1969). Even in the twentieth century, Marxist intellectuals and Modernist architects such as Gropius by no means had a monopoly on the idea of architecture as component of everyday life. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, writing in his Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) celebrated, “the distance that separates architecture from the other arts, the relative absence from the art of building of any true artistic autonomy, the fact that, for the most part, a builder has to fit his work into some pre-existing arrangement of unchangeable forms, being constrained at every point by influences which forbid him the luxury of a self-consciously ‘artistic’ aim. Architecture is simply one application of that sense of what ‘fits’ which governs every aspect of daily existence. One might say that, in proposing an aesthetics of architecture, the least one must be proposing is an aesthetics of everyday life” (17). Roger Scruton, An Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 5 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V, 1, 217. 6 Henselmann was also familiar with the writings of Neutra who was in the vanguard of architects at mid-century who began to see the architect’s role in terms of “built space” or the “built environment.” Neutra’s Survival through Design (1954) was in the East German architect’s personal library. On Neutra and the idea of “built space,” see Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 218–21. 7 For a basic account of the GDR’s embrace of scientific advancement as a component of socialist revolution, see Raymond Stokes, Constructing Socialism:

6  Building Socialism of the 1950s to the publication of Brigitte Reimann’s architect-novel, Franziska Linkerhand (1973), the built environment was a defining element in playwrights’ and novelists’ structural and linguistic choices and a literary platform for critiquing East Germany’s modern industrial society in an internationally attuned way. For writers as politically diverse as Müller, Helmut Baierl, Erik Neutsch, Karl-Heinz Jakobs, Brigitte Reimann, Günter de Bruyn, Christa Wolf, and Günter Kunert, the representation of buildings, streets, and interiors was never a static backdrop to human agency. Instead, it was imbued with an urgent temporality, for example of social revolution or the history of the working class, that impinged upon the temporality of dramatic action and narrative structure and became implicated in the choice between metaphoric and descriptive language.8 There are three main ways that built space is temporal in the literature treated in this study. First, it gives evidence of the movements of history, particularly of East Germany’s rush to industrial modernity. The second is that it is not merely a surface to be mined for semantic meanings but also a material object whose value is dependent on the process of its design and production. The third is that it exerts its effects after the moment of production through continual use and reuse by different communities of users. Architecture is for Benjamin, as for Henselmann, something whose production and use are inherent to its status as an object of aesthetic interest. Paul Eggert, in his Securing the Past, defines texts as meeting points of different forms of agency: “The document, whether handwritten or printed, is the textual site where the agents of textuality meet: author, copyist, editor, typesetter and reader. In the acts of writing, copying or reading, the work’s documentary and textual dimensions dynamically interrelate: they can be seen as a translation or performance of one another.”9 This applies well to architecture. Designers, builders, and users all have a hand in shaping the physical structure of buildings themselves and the way those structures come to be understood as part of everyday life. In his analysis Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 36–57. On the architectural dimensions of the Scientific-Technological Revolution, see Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 120–9. 8 Hunter Bivens has seen Brigitte Reimann’s affective response to the GDR’s new architecture as based on that architecture’s relationship to workingclass history. Hunter Bivens, “Neustadt: Affect and Architecture in Brigitte Reimann’s East German Novel, Franziska Linkerhand,” Germanic Review 83, no. 2 (2008): 139–66. 9 Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 234–5.

Introduction 7 of the use of architecture in Use Matters, Kenny Cupers asks how the “unknowable universe of everyday experience” of built space can “trickle back into the conception and production of architecture” and insists on the historical specificity of this process.10 The East German novels and plays treated in Building Socialism were conceived in part as Marxist analyses of built space meant to intervene in the perception and production of architecture—necessarily temporal processes. The temporality of built space—its production, use, and place in history—has an effect on literary structure because it makes architecture a platform for generating associations with people and places not immediately part of a building’s tangible reality. A building’s production process and use history depend on but transcend the visual forms of the physical structure. Temporalized built space thus creates gaps between the physical and the mental, between present, future, and past, and between the unfeeling object itself and the troubled flesh and blood of those confronted with it. These gaps, which address the fraught relationship of language and reality, lie at the heart of how the temporality of built space influences the linguistic and structural choices of literature. Building Socialism uncovers such gaps through close analysis of key passages supported by contextual information ranging from letters to archival material. Key passages include ekphrastic descriptions by characters or narrators of building interiors and exteriors; passages that mention specific tastes in or styles of architecture, or specific architects or designers; and textual moments in which making buildings, arranging home interiors, and using the built environment are explored in their sensory and emotional dimensions. Building Socialism is organized into three parts. The first part, consisting of the Introduction and Chapter 1, lays the theoretical groundwork for the interaction of architecture, literature, and modernity in twentieth-century socialist thought. This includes, in the introduction, the little studied nexus of Marxism and architectural theory and how Hermann Henselmann’s architectural theories brought Marxist and Modernist spatial thought into the GDR. Chapter 1 then treats the role of architecture in Bertolt Brecht’s journals and poetry, the Soviet writer Sergei Tret’iakov’s essays about Germany, Anna Seghers’s pre-war prose, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and Benjamin’s Arcades. Key concepts addressed include ones that recur in subsequent chapters: old neighborhoods as latently revolutionary; Modernist architecture as a static, anti-human imposition; the industrial city as a modern threat to human life; the improvised use of architecture. 10 Kenny Cupers, introduction to Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2.

8  Building Socialism The second part of this book, consisting of Chapters 2 and 3, analyses architecture and modernity in socialist theater at the start of the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Chapter 2 deals with Heiner Müller’s production plays Der Lohndrücker (The Scab, 1957) and Der Bau (The Construction Site, 1963–4). It does so using Müller’s own dual concept of architecture, drawn from archival material, which saw buildings as both expressions of modern power structures and potential platforms for revolutionary action. Chapter 3 examines the text and staging of Helmut Baierl’s Frau Flinz (1961). Baierl and the production team thought that architectural forms had fixed meanings: some, such as unadorned window frames, projected socialism’s alliance with modernity in East Germany, while others, such as baroque detailing, undermined it. The Flinz team’s limiting architectural vision is revealed through archival material that shows the influence of Walter Ulbricht himself on set design choices. Part III, by far the longest part of the book, examines the prose of the 1960s in two chapters. Chapter 4 addresses the representation of domestic space, while Chapter 5 focuses on urban environments. In Chapter 4, domestic space in Günter de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel (Buridans Ass, 1968), Christa Wolf’s Nachdenken über Christa T (Pondering Christa T., 1968), Irmtraud Morgner’s Haus am Rand der Stadt (1962), and Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand (1964/73) is placed in terms of Alexander Kluge’s theory of the novel of diversity, in which descriptions of home interiors functioned as destabilizing subplots. These writers’ architectural passages function as stand-alone theoretical ruminations that interrupt the forward movement of the action. Chapter 5 treats urban space in literature in connection to the Benjaminian notion of the urban montage and its afterlife in GDR architectural theory. De Bruyn, Reimann, Morgner, Wolf, in her short story “Unter den Linden” (1968), and Günter Kunert in his short prose on Berlin, developed increasingly patchwork prose structures to account for the historical ruptures in cities being reshaped by demolition and mass housing programs. While Building Socialism uses East German authors as theoretical test cases, it also develops a historical arc. The story of architecture in East German literature from the start of the Scientific-Technological Revolution to Reimann’s death in 1973 turned from a focus on production in socialist theater to a focus on visual forms and the use of space in socialist prose. For Heiner Müller, architecture was a platform for revolution and an undemocratic imposition that mirrored the duality of the modern project as expressed in East Germany’s industrial expansion of the late 1950s. That expansion combined the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry with the Modernist preoccupation with cost savings and the pace of production. Where Müller dealt with the revolutionary use of space, the construction site and work performed

Introduction 9 there remained paramount. However, Müller’s reflections on the use of space, while not central to his engagement with architecture, addressed the nexus of architecture and time in ways similar to the prose of the 1960s. Likewise, his passages about the effects of building efforts on workers’ bodies share with later prose about domesticity and urban space an acute awareness of historical rupture as a spatial matter. Baierl’s Frau Flinz represents a transition moment to some extent. On the one hand, Baierl was interested in spaces of agricultural production and the role of science in shaping them. On the other hand, he registered the formal details of lived interior space as signals of status within the intensifying effort to ally socialism with science. In the early 1960s, as the GDR’s demolition and mass housing programs were expanded, the problem of dwelling in modern houses and cities became more important than the problem of producing them. Prose became the favored venue for architectural reflection in this connection in part because Müller was censured at the 11th Plenary meeting of the Socialist Unity Party in 1965 and took his plays in a less architectural direction. Another reason, though, is that urban dislocation had long been the domain of novels, short stories, and non-fiction prose genres such as the thought-image. One thinks here of Fontane and Dickens, but also of Joyce, Kafka, and Kracauer.11 Günter de Bruyn, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, and Gerhard Wolf expanded the associative range of their prose in an effort to criticize government prescriptions for interior decoration and to reflect on the changing uses of domestic space. Those same authors, along with Günter Kunert, turned to more disjointed prose forms to register the experience of trauma in cities torn apart by renewal programs. In each of these cases, including for more conformist writers such as Baierl, the built environment was not simply one symptom among others of a modernity increasingly under critical attention, but was originary: reflection on architecture was a driver of reflection on the historical status of East Germany as a socialist state and of the literary experimentation pursued to represent it. Architecture’s role as a catalyst for rumination on modernity and a shaper of literary

11 Kracauer plays a surprisingly minimal role in Building Socialism, especially given the prominence of his work in the Spatial Turn. The reason for this is that theoretical questions about the modern city as a montage can be raised just as productively using the work of Walter Benjamin, with the added advantage that Benjamin’s work was read more widely in the GDR, including by Müller. Kracauer does factor in the analysis of de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel, which deals with the GDR’s bureaucratized culture. Kracauer’s Salared Masses, and its catalog of employers’ attempts to create workplace solidarity, speak to the banalities of bureaucratic existence as de Bruyn describes it in his novel.

10  Building Socialism structure united Wolf and Müller, Morgner and Baierl, de Bruyn and Kunert regardless of whether use or production was their focus.12 What emerges from this trajectory is a fresh sense of the importance of the East German 1960s as a proving ground for Modernist ideas and forms that would become standard in the literature and film of the 1970s and 1980s. David Bathrick has conceived of the difference between the 1960s and the 1980s in GDR culture as resting on the stillpresent utopian optimism of the former decade and the pessimistic finality of the latter decade, with its recourse to the deconstructive aesthetics of Surrealism and Dada in poetry and the visual arts.13 The implication of Bathrick’s argument is that the literature of the 1970s and 1980s, in foregoing such utopian hopes, furthered GDR literature’s cosmopolitanist status as an alternative public sphere attuned to Western culture, from pop music to Post-Structuralism. But the continuities between Seghers and Müller, and between Benjamin and Kunert, in their rendering of the encounter of built space and writing, shows that the 1960s constituted a vital extension of the pre-war Modernist project of combining political activism and experimental aesthetics. This project, despite its at times discernible utopianism, already contained the incisive rejection of modernity’s rationality as it exercised its power in highly irrational ways on subjects’ bodies. So, the 1960s, as the architectural preoccupation reveals, took seriously the problem of working both against and within institutional structures and pointed to the dialectic of resistivity and construction in a way much more relevant today than the deconstructive critique of modernity that Michael Schenkel has seen as the chief characteristic of East German critical culture in the 1970s and 1980s.14 Writers in the 1960s saw both their own subjectivity and the architecture around them 12 My analysis of built space in GDR literature reveals the extent to which the prose innovations of the 1960s should not be seen as separate from the aesthetic and political preoccupations of Müller’s early plays. Scholarship has not tended to treat Wolf and Müller as part of the same discourse on modernity, perhaps because of a lingering gendering of the two authors: Müller the masculinist rebel in the line of Brecht, and Wolf the neo-romantic prose experimentalist and ecology-minded nurturer. Where the two are brought into solid scholarly connection in a sustained way, as in Daniela Colombo’s Das Drama der Geschichte bei Heiner Müller und Christa Wolf (The Drama of History in Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf, 2009), later work tends to be the focus. My analysis shows that both authors sought to counter propagandistic representations of cities and that both pursued a sustained rumination on modern spaces as sites of oppression and agency. Daniela Colombo, Das Drama der Geschichte bei Heiner Müller und Christa Wolf (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2009). 13 Bathrick, The Powers of Speech, 126–7. 14 See Michael Schenkel, Fortschritts- und Modernitätskritik in der DDR-Literatur: Prosatexte der achtziger Jahre (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995).

Introduction 11 not just as symptoms of an evil modernity, but as instances of reality both complicit with and potentially resistive to power structures.15 In addition, the focus on built space makes Building Socialism a more specific investigation of the relationship between literature and everyday life than has been usual in GDR studies. Building Socialism deepens a line of inquiry into the GDR literature of the 1960s that started with Bernhard Greiner’s Literatur der Arbeitswelt (1974), Marc Silberman’s Literature of the Working World (1976), Peter Zimmermann’s Industrieliteratur der DDR (1984), and Irme Hanke’s Alltag und Politik (1987). Each of these studies probed the relationship between culture and everyday life to gauge the effects of politics on writers’ choices in style and content. But the understanding of what constituted “industry,” or “everyday life,” or the “working world,” often remained somewhat general. Hanke focused broadly on “modes of political behavior” and their relationships to character typologies.16 Silberman treated the politics of literature using categories like the “new” and the “old” in “socialist society,” while Greiner placed textual representation in relation to the catch-all category of “social reality.”17 Furthermore, these valuable studies focused, quite naturally given when they were published, on shifts in East German cultural politics. Scholarship since Bathrick and since Julia Hell’s groundbreaking Post-fascist Fantasies (1997) has had the luxury of forgoing such strict attention to official Party dictates.18 So, Building Socialism returns to the 1970s scholarly territory of literature and “social reality,” but mines a specific part of that reality in order to give a fresh explanation of the turn to Modernism in East German theater and prose.19 15 Susanne Liermann implies, but does not explicitly say, in her critique of Stefan Hermlin’s and Christa Wolf’s attempts to create a more personal kind of prose in the 1970s and 1980s, that the less rejectionist writing of the 1960s has been overlooked in favor of analyses of modes of critique in the GDR’s final two decades. Susanne Liermann, “Mit diesem Schweigen … beginnt Protest’—Die Duffusion von Egagement und Parteilichkeit in der späten DDR-Literatur,” in “Nach der Mauer der Abgrund”? (Wieder-)Annäherungen an die DDR-Literatur, ed. Norbert Otto Eke (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 197–212. 16 Irma Hanke, Alltag und Politik. Zur politischen Kultur einer unpolitischen Gesellschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 7. 17 Marc Silbermann, The Literature of the Working World (Berlin/Frankfurt: H. Lang, 1976), 19, 25–8, and Bernhard Greiner, Die Literatur der Arbeitswelt in der DDR (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1974), 8 18 Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 19 Given the rapid pace of construction and demolition during this period, issues of built space were central to the everyday experience of writers and all of the GDR’s citizens. From the title of the GDR’s national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen,” to the sloganeering about national “Aufbau,” a term used as flexibly

12  Building Socialism This specificity of interpretive focus is matched by specificity of approach to authorial intention. Building Socialism does not offer a general historical chronology of literary texts about socialist construction sites, such as Hoyerswerda in the late 1950s and Halle Neustadt in the late 1960s. Rather, highly specific and individual contexts, drawn from archival material and personal libraries, are developed for each writer. These contexts, dovetailed with close formal analysis, illuminate how the various authors saw the relationship between their writing and built space. Its deep authorial and textual focus means that Building Socialism pursues its arguments about East German literature with few references to the conventional terminology with which studies of that literature have tended to operate (the “Bitterfeld Way” in the wake of the Bitterfeld conference of 1959 at which writers were encouraged to visit the state’s factories, or the “Arrival Literature” of the same period in which the Berlin Wall is seen as a key factor in the East’s cultural consolidation). It should be stressed, though, that Building Socialism is not written against the conventional narratives of East German cultural history and is not intended unwarrantedly to downplay the importance of events such as 11th Plenary meeting of the Socialist Unity Party of 1965 at which Heiner Müller was officially censured and at which thirteen films were banned. Rather, the book offers a heretofore overlooked perspective on literary production by examining writers’ willingness to reflect on and represent built space as an aspect of experience as important as language itself. That perspective reveals too that East German literature of the 1960s must be seen as much in terms of modernity as in terms of as Henselmann’s inclusive and expansionist definitions of architecture would allow, the built environment, as much as the consciousness of the “new man,” was meant to showcase the achievements of the socialist system. Not surprisingly, historians remain interested in GDR material culture as a window onto its version of modernity. Likewise, urban and interior spaces have been essential to both Ostalgic and critical discourses about the GDR. Leander Haussmann’s hit film Sonnenallee (1999) is named for a piece of Berlin’s urban fabric, while the central conceit of Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin (2003) is the recreation of a GDR apartment interior. But as David Bathrick and others have shown, it was literature that played the most crucial role in East Germany as an Ersatzöffentlichkeit that could mediate between citizens’ experience of everyday life and a party apparatus whose propaganda often seemed far removed from that experience (this is Bathrick’s central contention in The Powers of Speech). Social historians such as Paul Betts, Katherine Pence, and David Crew have published extensively on the real and imagined role of designed objects in GDR everyday life. See Paul Betts, “Building Socialism at Home: The Case of East German Interiors,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1–34; Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew (New York: Berg, 2003).

Introduction 13 issues specific to East German socialism. Müller’s, Wolf’s, de Bruyn’s, Kunert’s, and Reimann’s fraught staging of the encounter between people and buildings constitutes a highly sophisticated reckoning with key modern issues. These include possibilities for agency against objectifying historical forces, modern cities and modern consumer culture as both confining and liberating, the role of architecture in state propaganda, and the relationship between everyday life and political revolution and between post-war modern space and the mechanized killing of the Holocaust. Thus, Building Socialism remains firmly within the framework of “modernity” that Wolfgang Emmerich has developed to understand the GDR literature of the 1960s, but deepens and specifies our understanding of that modernity by examining its intellectual-historical roots and its foundation in the experience of built space as a key component of everyday life.20 While GDR Studies has seen Modernist literatures such as Brecht’s leftist materialism and Kafka’s prose as influential in the GDR, the depth of modern theoretical context offered in Building Socialism breaks new ground. The book accordingly makes a bold claim for the international embeddedness and relevance of East German literature from 1955 to 1973. While scholarship on GDR literature has shown that writers there engaged ideas from abroad, the extent of the influence has not been fully recognized.21 Indeed, architecture served as a natural catalyst for international engagement: Reimann with the work of American urban theorists, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, and the highly spatial French novelist Georges Perec; Müller with the French architectural press; de Bruyn with the prose of ennui in metropolitan America; Wolf with the architectural visions of French and Italian cinema. But the East German authors were anything but derivative. In each case, architectural insights drawn from abroad helped shape a literature that uniquely wove together commitments to social reality and experimental structures that revealed the gap between the material and the mental, between present and past. In line with Henselmann’s, Benjamin’s, and Neutra’s flexible definitions of built space, East German literature dealt in a theoretically savvy way with the interaction of people and buildings in a time of rapid social change. As such, it stands not just 20 See Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschiche der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000). 21 For an account of the international legacy of the different exile groups, see Frank Trommler, “Die Kulturpolitik und die kulturelle Tradition des deutschen Sozialismus,” in Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR, ed. Peter Uwe and Patricia Herminghouse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976). Bathrick traces the reengagement with Weimar Avant Gardes in The Powers of Speech.

14  Building Socialism as a walled-in idiosyncrasy of real-existing socialism, but an important body of modern literature. It should be kept in mind, though, that East German writers also viewed the architectural problem in their country in terms of socialism. The interaction between the “socialist” and more broadly “modern” or international aspects of their thought varies by author. It also varies depending on how socialism is defined: in terms of East Germany as a real socialist state or in terms of Western Marxist theories of socialism. Where the latter definition governs, the modernity of East German architecture is seen critically as a capitalist inheritance that fosters alienation. Ernst Bloch, and like him Reimann and Wolf, wanted socialist cities to encourage contentment rather than alienation. For Bloch, this meant developing new forms of architectural ornamentation; for the two East German authors, it meant creating buildings and streets based on local context and human scale. Thus, for Reimann and Wolf, but also de Bruyn and Kunert, the critical focus on a broader modernity overlapped with their efforts to improve socialism—improvement for them meant bringing their experience of real socialism in East Germany closer to the Western Marxist theories they were influenced by.22 This approach meant that the authors indeed treated highly socialist-specific architectural topics even where their reflections extended beyond socialism. One example, analysed in Chapter 5, is Reimann’s positive assessment of Stalinist architecture. Its aggressive shaping of urban space left at least some room for the lively, traditional street life that Reimann thought could invigorate socialism. Her architectural analysis deals with the very socialist phenomenon of Stalinist planning, yet places that planning in light of the relationship between the modern city and forging of livable communities. Indeed, the basis for comparison of this literature with the capitalist West is missing in some cases. While much ink was spilt in England, Sweden, and France about the New Towns of the 1950s and 1960s, little of it did what, for instance, Heiner Müller’s production plays or Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine do—represent the working class building those cities. While Müller’s analyses of the construction site deal with a broader modernity, they nevertheless delve into sober details about the strength 22 This is indeed different from Franz Fühmann’s attempt, chronicled by Benjamin Robinson, to locate socialism in an unequivocal way in lived East German reality. According to Robinson, Fühmann eschewed the Western Marxist critique of modernity; the author instead accepted East Germany’s social relationships and spaces as evidence of a genuine, specifically socialist modernity. For Reimann and de Bruyn, the architectural evidence of similar forms and planning strategies in East and West precluded such a view. See Benjamin Robinson, The Skin of the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Introduction 15 of concrete and new systems for managing shift change. Such a close focus on production differentiated socialist literature from its capitalist counterpart. The works treated in Building Socialism represent, of course, a sample of East German literature from the period in question. Though the authors were chosen for different reasons, they do nevertheless constitute a body of work that could conceivably have included other authors. This is first and foremost the case because they are almost all from the younger generation of writers (the main exception being Eduard Claudius, treated in connection to Heiner Müller). Claudius’s Stalinist aesthetics acts as a stand-in for other older generation writers, such as Hans Marchwitza with his Roheisen (Raw Iron, 1955) and Anna Seghers with her Die Entscheidung (The Decision, 1959) and Das Vertrauen (Trust, 1968). The two GDR novels by Seghers are permeated with Seghers’s own sense of having to justify the urgent choosing of sides in the Cold War. Built space in the works becomes a backdrop to the Manichean choice between East and West that the novels dramatize. And in any case, Neutsch’s novel, though it certainly has aesthetic shortcomings, moves more resolutely away from lingering literary Stalinism than Seghers’s final two novels. In terms of theater, Müller and Baierl were chosen, instead, for example, of Peter Hacks and the early Volker Braun, because their work highlights the interplay of modernity, architecture, and literature in East Germany in the most intensive way. Braun’s Die Kipper, not treated in the book, might well be made to fit into Building Socialism’s argument. But Braun’s prose and poetry from the mid-1960s and his essays from the early 1970s, which are treated in my project, illustrate particularly close attention to the relationship between architecture and language, something that Die Kipper, with its painfully close adherence to Brecht, does not do in the same way. Neutsch and Reimann are obvious fits for Chapters 4 and 5 because of their attention to specifically architectural issues. Kunert, whose work dealt closely with cities and relied on spatial metaphor, is a similarly clear fit.23 Chapters 4 and 5 do, though, 23 In a letter to me, Kunert indicated that cities and urban theory were of great importance for him in the 1950s and 1960s. He interviewed Henselmann for Die Weltbühne in the late 1950s; by the mid-1960s, he knew the highly citycentric, experimental films of Federico Fellini and was familiar with the new architecture in Italy. He likewise wrote that he read Alexander Mitscherlich’s Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte during this time. His interest, of course, centered on Berlin and his profound sadness about the destruction wrought in the city by war and by post-war redevelopment. Kunert wrote that his source then and now in this connection was his own personal experience and Wolf Jobst Siedler’s, Elisabeth Niggemeyer’s, and Gina Angreß’s photo essay, Die gemordete Stadt (Berlin: Herbig, 1964).

16  Building Socialism deal with a lot of works—particularly those of Wolf, Morgner, and de Bruyn—that were not concerned with architecture in quite such a concentrated way. These texts are in some ways the most important because they reveal the extent to which architecture was on the table as a central issue even for those not predisposed to be interested in it—that architecture had the structural ramifications revealed in my analysis further underscores the role of the architecture–modernity nexus in East Germany. As with the chapters on theater, works that might fit in have been left out. Chief among these are Werner Bräunig’s stories from the Gewöhnliche Leute collection (Ordinary People, 1969).24 The local spatial contexts of Bräunig’s short stories likewise can be accounted for in my analyses of Wolf, de Bruyn, and Reimann.25

Space in Architecture, Architecture in Marxism

How does architectural theory relate to the “space” that scholars have theorized and written about since the “spatial turn” of the 1990s? Perhaps surprisingly, traditional architectural theory prefigures some of our current ideas about space and power. In his Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement and Modernity (2013), John Lyon traces how nineteenth-century realists turned from representation of identificatory place to preoccupation with “space” as a site through which modern power structures alienate individual subjects. Lyon ruminates in his conclusion on the status of the various theorists, from Henri Lefebvre to Edward Soja to Michel Foucault, whose ideas have been at the center of cultural studies’ spatialization. Lyon differentiates between Foucault’s view that space is a manifestation of social and political power that acts on and traps the subject from Soja’s and Lefebvre’s view, which leaves room for space as a site of agency. He lauds the more flexible concept

24 Wolf Biermann’s lyrics from the early 1960s through the early 1970s represent a virtual catalog of Berlin spaces and situations and could also have been included in Building Socialism. But the particular problem of Berlin as a modern city is posed in a more acute and potent way in Kunert. 25 GDR cinema does not quite fit into the main argument of Building Socialism. The best GDR films of the 1960s use themes and techniques from Italian Neo-Realism, Post-Neo-Realism, and the French New Wave to take GDR cinema away from Stalinist orthodoxy. But they do not, as does GDR literature of the time, forge a new kind of experimental realism through sustained engagement with architecture. Thus, the story of East German films is primarily one about the reception of international models and not about a fascination with architecture and modernity as internationally relevant vehicles of aesthetic experimentation. Berlin, Ecke Schönhauser (1957) quotes the films of Rossellini; the films of 1965 stand under the influence of Fellini and Antonioni. The story of such reception and its mutation in East Germany is a crucial one, but it is not quite the same story that governs the authors treated in Building Socialism.

Introduction 17 of these latter two thinkers as a theoretical template more appropriate to space as represented in literature.26 The binary of built space as a manifestation of power versus built space as a platform for agency undergirds architectural theories about how and why humans build.27 Indeed, the temporality that is key to Lefebvre’s concept of spatial agency and is central to built space as represented by GDR authors has long been ascribed to the architectural impulse in human society.28 The Roman architect Vitruvius’s account of the origins of architecture takes the meeting of essential bodily needs, such as that of protection from rain and cold, as its starting point. For him, buildings develop from current needs but also serve as sites from which human needs are reassessed. Thus, construction and living are ever-evolving dialectical processes that take place over time. Vitruvius asserts that fires caused by thunderstorms initiated the first “gathering of men” as people “observ[ed] that they were very comfortable standing before the warm fire”; these gathered groups in turn developed language, “indicating by name things in common use” during assemblies around the fire.29 The groups then began to construct shelters for protection from rain and wind; the shelters in turn fostered the further development of mutually sustaining community ties. For Vitruvius, architecture is not just an expression of power, but also an occasion for the development of new impulses for further creative activity. Similarly, Leon Battista Alberti, in a mythological account of the origin of architecture in his On the Art of Building (1452), written in large part in response to Vitruvius, saw the use of primitive shelters as a driving force in the movements of history. If for Vitruvius the need for community created the need for architecture, in Alberti, the formation 26 John Lyon, Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 219–22. 27 In taking this longer-trajectory historical view of the relationship between people and the built environment, Building Socialism joins in the simultaneous affirmation and critique of the “spatial turn” that Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel call for in the introduction to their Spatial Turns. My arguments build precisely on the “limits of theoretical approaches imported from the social sciences” by showing, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, how literary authors’ increasingly sociological approaches to the city in the 1960s were an endeavor that still very much played out at the humanistic level of literary production. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel, “Introduction,” Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 10. 28 See Kristen Simonsen, “Bodies, Sensations, Space, and Time: The Contribution of Henri Lefebvre,” Geografiska Annaler 87, no. 1 (2005): 1–14. 29 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960), 38

18  Building Socialism of community follows on the building of structures for protection from the elements. For the Florentine, humans had not yet become truly social at the time of the building of the first lean-tos; it was the lean-tos themselves that “drew and kept men together.”30 While there is ample room in the theories of Vitruvius and Alberti to understand architecture in its social dimensions, these dimensions are not best understood as one-to-one expressions of power structures. Rather, understanding architecture involves an engagement with design and reception, not as second-order “superstructure,” but themselves as basic elements of reproduction. As Michael Trebitsch has pointed out in an assessment of the second volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, seeing perception and reception, often denigrated as forces of consumption, as forms of production was key to the French thinker’s reassessment of Marxism in the post-war period.31 Architecture was a constant point of engagement for Lefebvre and was part of the formulation in the late 1960s of his influential concept of the production of space. Architecture was a natural fit for him precisely because of the qualities that antiquity and the Renaissance were already ascribing to its use and consumption. In light of such affinities, it is crucial to bear in mind that Lefebvre, along with Foucault and other theorists frequently cited in debates about “space,” are Marxists; architecture’s relationship to theories of space must therefore be dealt with in light of the interaction of architecture and Marxism. Unfortunately, there is no study in English of either Marxist architectural thought as a distinct phenomenon or of the interaction between the conceptual frameworks of architectural theory and Marxism. Chapter 1 of Building Socialism attempts partially to fill the first of these gaps by analysing the role of architecture in four strands of Marxist thought in the twentieth century that are paradigmatic for East German writers: that of the Frankfurt School of Western Marxists, Bertolt Brecht’s short stories and Arbeitsjournale, the operative writing of Sergei Tret’iakov, and Anna Seghers’s novels of the early to mid-1930s.32 As for the interaction of Marxist and architectural concepts, a short reflection is offered here. To sum that reflection up: diverse Marxisms and architectural theory overlap in their emphasis on utility and temporality: Western Marxists share architectural theory’s 30 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 3. 31 Michael Trebitsch, Preface, Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2 (New York: Verso, 2002), xxiv. 32 Such terms are obviously problematic in their broadness, but Martin Jay’s distinction between Soviet Marxism and a “Western Marxism” focused on early Marx’s concepts of alienation and the commodity fetish remains a useful framework. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 1–20.

Introduction 19 focus on aesthetics, while the Marx of Das Kapital is less interested in visual experience as a potentially revolutionary act. Indeed, early, explicitly socialist writings on architecture tend, as Ernst Plojhar has noted in his sturdy, if slightly limiting study of Marxism and architecture, to neglect the aesthetic dimension of buildings altogether.33 Though Plojhar offers no citations on this score, it might be inferred from the paucity of references to architecture in Das Kapital, in Engels’s treatment of working-class housing in Zur Wohnungsfrage (On the Question of Dwelling, 1872), and even in the writings of the nineteenth-century socialist designer William Morris, that Marxism tended not to treat architecture as a special domain, but rather as a built reflection of the political economy that produced it. For architectural theory, though, individual visual experience of the world of objects was crucial. By that experience is meant not the kind of modern, scopophilic visuality explored by German Romantics Joseph Eichendorff and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Expressionist filmmakers such as Fritz Lang. Rather, architectural theory has tended to view the arrangement of visual forms as being able to satisfy the sense of sight in a purely corporeal way usually associated with the sense of touch.34 Despite differences in the assessment of architecture’s visual dimensions, Marxism and architectural theory both treat architecture as temporal. Even the Marxist model that sees architecture as a reflection of political economy implies that understanding of economic processes is indispensable for understanding a building’s place in the forward progress of history. In the Western Marxist tradition, which emphasizes the overcoming of alienation, time also has a role in built space. Heiner Müller, who knew the work of Adorno and Benjamin, saw sculpture’s and architecture’s nearness to everyday life as a model for his own writing. He found photos and paintings “pedestrian” and saw in literature and architecture “something like an effacement of images.”35 Indeed, he called for sculpture to be placed site-specifically into landscapes such that it becomes “walk-on-able [begehbar]” (Werke, 33 Ernst Plojhar, Von der Notwendigkeit der Architektur (Vienna: Promedia, 2001), 13–14. 34 While Brecht was never keen to recognize visual experience as an essential need, the playwright’s complaints about the “petit-bourgeois” quality of ornamental architectural forms and Ernst Bloch’s similar lambasting of nineteenth-century historicist facades in their specifically visual dimensions indicate interest in sight as a raw, bodily phenomenon. See also Ernst Bloch, “Die Bebauung des Hohlraums,” in Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert: eine kritische Anthologie, ed. Aḱos Moravánszky (Wien: Springer, 2003), 517–18. Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 93. 35 Heiner Müller, Werke, Gespräche II, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 360.

20  Building Socialism Gespräche II, 360). It is architecture’s dependence on the use of its spaces over time that made it such a flashpoint for East German writers’ literary exploration of the built environment around them. Accordingly, a key point of connection between Marxism and architectural theory is between the Marxist concept of use value and the architectural concept of utilitas. In his explanation of the commodity in the first chapter of the first section of Das Kapital, Marx elucidates use value by taking clothing as his example: “The use value of a skirt, a canvas screen, etc., in short the individual commodities, are points of connection between two elements: natural material and labor.”36 Use value is the product of labor performed to satisfy a particular need and useful objects are meant to “mediate human life” in the “exchange of material between human beings and nature” (24). For Marx, use value lies in the intention of usefulness (“purposeful, productive activity”) in design and production. But it also lies in the process of use (the “wearing” of the clothing as Marx describes it) and in the object itself. An article of clothing, as Marx wryly points out, is not concerned with whether it is worn by the tailor or by his customers: it contains latent use value even when unworn. Marx develops here a framework for a tripartite understanding of objecthood, consisting of the physically present object itself, the intentions behind and relationships of its production, and its use by empirically understood users. That tripartite definition is echoed in Henselmann’s, Benjamin’s, and Neutra’s understanding of architecture which undergird the representation of built space in East German literature. Alienation and fetishism, central concepts in Western Marxism, are not obviously architectural. Western Marxist theories, though, do hint at how the terms might be connected to built space. Marx defines the fetish in Das Kapital as a reflection of the social character of labor back onto an object whose physical form in no inherent way calls for the meanings applied to it.37 This definition closely resembles the definition of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which, as evident in Müller’s personal library, the playwright received via a reading of Herbert Marcuse’s early essays.38 In the Manuscripts, 36 Karl Marx, Das Kapital I (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1969), 25. Daniel Purdy has explored the relationship between architecture and fashion as meeting points of the necessary and voluntary. See his On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 22–5. 37 Marx, Das Kapital, 52. 38 Müller, likely from his father, had several volumes of Die Gesellschaft. Internationales Revue für Sozialismus und Politik. These include volume 9 (1932), which contains Marcuse’s article, “Neue Quellen zur Grundlegung des historischen Materialismus,” a piece celebrating the newly unearthed Manuscripts as central to understanding Marx’s thought. The edition in Müller’s

Introduction 21 Marx asserts that alienation involves the “devaluation of the human world” and the “increase in value of the world of things,” resulting in “servitude to the object.”39 Both of these terms deal with how objects are mediated through consciousness and brought into fraught connections with things external to them. The terms of that mediation and those connections form the crux of how Western and unorthodox Marxists have understood buildings. For Foucault, architecture is always “laden with qualities” and “haunted by fantasies” connected to the emergence and maintenance of modernity’s disciplinary structures.40 In the East German works under examination in Building Socialism, built space similarly mediates between consciousness and the fabric of everyday life. It is thus that a building’s past and future can become key elements in the turn to more experimental linguistic choices: estrangement from buildings and reflection of labor back onto them are processes through which writing can temporalize architecture. That temporalization has ramifications for the temporal structure of literary works.

East German Theories of the Built Environment

Perhaps surprisingly, East German architectural theory was shaped by the flexible notion of built space among modern architects and Western Marxists. In East Germany, as in other European countries and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, debates on the theory and practice of architecture increasingly addressed social problems and philosophical questions related to architecture as an essential component of everyday life.41 This shift away from architecture as a discrete, façade-focused discipline represented a continuing and deepening of the Bauhaus’s early 1920s calls for a breaking down of traditional disciplinary boundaries among the arts and for seeing design in relation to the systemic social, political, and intellectual problems that accompanied the rise of industrial modernity.42 In the post-war period, architecture as a façade- based bearer of historical meanings gave way to a focus on the more broadly understood “built environment” or “world of objects.” These shifts were received in the GDR via their three main standard bearers internationally, all of whom were read by Henselmann and

39 40 41 42

library has extensive underlining and marginalia. See Jay, Marxism and Totality, 84, 101–2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. T. B. Bottomore, in Marx’s Concept of Man, ed. Erich Fromm (New York: Ungar, 1961), 87–196, 95. Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Epistemology and Method. Essential Works, Vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994), 177. William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1996), 445–9. Ibid., 185–90.

22  Building Socialism Reimann in the mid-1960s: the architect and theorist Richard Neutra, the architectural critic Reyner Banham, and Bauhaus co-founder Walter Gropius. Neutra’s designs were built and his theories published across the industrialized world and on both sides of the Iron Curtain, while Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which explored precisely that dissolution of architecture into a more broadly conceived spatial design, Raumgestaltung, found resonance from California to Moscow as the critique of orthodox Modernism gained favor in the early 1960s.43 While Neutra and Banham both used the terms “built environment” and “space” in their writings, Gropius favored in his writings from the 1940s an expanded concept of the planner and designer whose concern must be “the civilized life of man in all its major aspects.”44 In these theories, all objects which human beings make for themselves in order to meet their physical and intellectual needs become the province of design, while design itself is carried back to its elemental and universalized roots. In making this leap back, architects attempted to find a new tradition that could establish a new sense of place and new, more favorable conditions for human survival and contentment in an age characterized by mass movements and new technologies of production and communication.45 43 Banham in fact sees the Bauhaus’s education program, particularly its famous Vorkurs, as the point of initiation for the expansion of architecture beyond its academic disciplinarity and into the broader realm of “space.” Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 278. For Neutra, as Sylvia Lavin has shown, attentiveness to interior spaces as “environments” was the centerpiece of Neutra’s mid-century attempts to develop a more authentic Modernism. See her Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 6. 44 Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Collier, 1962), 144. 45 Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 159–64. Modernist architects’ attempts to combat what they saw as the nineteenth-century’s distortion of the discipline began as early as the pre- World War I Werkbund. The early manifestoes of the Bauhaus, Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, and the introduction to Adolf Behne’s Der moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building, 1926) all saw as related a clear-eyed focus on the changed nature of society and politics in the industrial age and a return to architecture’s originary task of arranging built space so as to further human survival. What was needed for survival, though, were no longer the lean-tos of Vitruvius or the primitive huts of Laugier but designed environments that promoted health by allowing for maximum air and light, minimized costs by using industrialized construction methods, and met psychological needs by eliminating the visual clutter characteristic of Victorian design. Banham sees the Werkbund’s attempted fusion of art, craft, and industry as a first move in this direction (Theory and Design, 70–1). Banham was in Henselmann’s personal library in a West German edition: Die Revolution der Architektur: Theorie und

Introduction 23 In Henselmann’s theories, the Modernist resistance to nineteenthcentury architecture and the Marxist resistance to non-dialectical understandings of buildings are united in a way that is reflected in East German literature.46 Like his friend Heiner Müller, Henselmann worked in ways both compromised and resistive; he was simultaneously East Germany’s most prominent architect, yet was persecuted for his Modernism in the time around 1950 and chafed as he saw his increasingly nuanced design ideas in the 1960s thwarted by highranking non-specialist bureaucrats.47 The depth and originality of his architectural-theoretical contributions were without match in the East. This was in large measure because of his interest in Western Marxist thought and literature. In fact, Henselman saw not himself, but rather his friend Bertolt Brecht as East Germany’s foremost urban theorist. In “Brecht und die Stadt,” a 1973 article in Die Weltbühne, Henselmann said the following of the playwright: “In the transition from capitalism to communism, city planning won a new dimension within the field of the socialist revolution, a dimension which, as far as I know, Brecht, more than any other artist, grasped early on in the concrete implementation of its changes.”48 For Henselmann, Brecht’s keen understanding of the modern city extended back at least to his 1928 opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in the final, apocalyptic scene of which the architect sees a critique of the capitalist city’s self-destruction that anticipated fire bombing and the American city’s suburbanization, a “cancerous overgrowth of settlement areas.”49 Gestaltung im Ersten Maschinenzeitalter (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964). Curtis sees Gropius as being at the heart of this reach back to earlier traditions (Modern Architecture, 193–9). 46 Henselmann’s efforts to shift GDR discourse toward a focus on “built environment” are treated in further detail in Chapter 4. Henselmann’s arrival at a more positive view of nineteenth-century architecture will be treated in Chapter 5. In the 1950s, he, along with Gropius and Neutra, saw nineteenthcentury historicist architecture as overly focused on façade surfaces. This was, of course, a reductive view of the achievements of nineteenth-century architects. See Arthur Drexler’s introduction to The Architecture of the École de Beaux Arts (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977). 47 Andreas Schätzke, Zwischen Bauhaus und Stalinallee: Architekturdiskussion im östlichen Deutschland 1945–1955 (Wiesbaden: Vieweg and Tuebner, 1991), 38–43 and Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity, 148–64. The architect thus occupied a compromised and critical position similar to that which David Bathrick, in The Powers of Speech, has shown was occupied by leading GDR writers starting in the 1960s. 48 Hermann Henselmann, “Brecht und die Stadt,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag: 1978), 158. 49 Ibid., 159.

24  Building Socialism This sense of architecture as an elemental, temporal relationship between humans and objects entered East German debate via Henselmann’s reading of Gropius, Neutra, and Corbusier starting in the mid-1950s. These architects became a vehicle through which Henselmann sought to do away with the stodgy disciplinarity which Stalinism had taken from Haussmanian models.50 Because East German design bureaucrats consistently used West Germany, the United States, Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries as points of comparison in debates about design, a certain degree of internationalism was built into architectural thinking there.51 But this internationalism became more Modernist in spirit as Henselmann and Bruno Flierl, editor at the East German journal Deutsche Architektur in the early 1960s, revived the reputations of Gropius and Corbusier and began in their architectural writings to advocate greater appreciation of local contexts and greater engagement with intellectual problems specific to the post-war period. In a pre-Stalinist essay of 1946, “Can Architects Help?,” Henselmann mentions Gropius and the 1920s Berlin planner Martin Wagner as models for a revision of the architect’s role in the post-war context. “Baukunst,” according to Henselmann, must be cast aside in favor of an approach that sees architects partnering with engineers to give form to “the things that surround us,” to express and “organize” the “organic processes” of human habitation through environmental design.52 Henselmann, as would the historian Banham in 1960 and as had his Bauhaus forebears, criticized approaches based on the nineteenthcentury desire to hide industrialization’s effects behind “ivy-clad walls” and ornamental “over-individualization.”53 For Henselmann, production according to need and processes of use was central. This Modernism was cast aside in the late 1940s and early 1950s as architectural theory and practice were firmly Stalinized in the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) and GDR.54 But in Henselmann’s first major 50 Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity, 20–6. Henselmann started focusing on the social and aesthetic ramifications of creating “built environments” for the East as an “advanced industrial society” nearly a decade before these terms, peppered throughout Gropius’s and Neutra’s writings from the 1950s, became dogma in the GDR. Frank Werner described the officialization and banal propagation of the environmental idea: “Gebaute Kultur—Aspekte der Architektur und des Städtebaus in der DDR,” Kultur und Kunst in der DDR seit 1970 (Wetzlar: Anabas Verlag, 1977), 277–92. 51 See Greg Castillo, “East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Design Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie,” Kritika 9, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 747–68. 52 Hermann Henselman, “Können die Architekten Helfen,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 64, 66. 53 Ibid., 64. 54 See Schätzke, Zwischen Bauhaus und Stalinallee.

Introduction 25 post-Stalin writings, he tentatively began to reintroduce the temporal notion of “built space” into GDR architectural debate. In a 1955 essay, “Neue Wege in der Architektur,” he asserted that architecture’s task must be to achieve a “creative synthesis” in which “the spatial idea, the plasticity of a building’s structure … and the power of artistic expression” stand in an ever-evolving relationship to each other as a temporal “process.”55 Furthermore, the temporal understanding of the built environment is something that Henselmann sees at work in Brecht’s reflections on the city before and during his time in the GDR. According to the architect, Brecht, like the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, conceived of his “model of the world” in terms of a “city of the future”; his “inner intellectual universe” was “not to be separated from the urban.”56 Even more, [Brecht] envisioned connecting the buildings of the People’s Own Companies, no longer capitalist property, and the buildings of the city centers with words that could tell of the genesis and future of the structures, their users and their builders, all as a possible task of the Akademie der Künste that could be solved together with architects.57 These lines are programmatic for the way de Bruyn, Wolf, Reimann, Kunert, and Müller wrote about architecture in a state that placed intensive value on the symbolic and material role of buildings. Brecht’s idea, cited by Henselmann, relies on seeing socialist structures as growing from socialist production processes and taking on new guises as history marches into a future with new users.

A Literature of Construction

The first chapter of Building Socialism reveals the interaction between built space and textual approach in different genres of pre-World War II socialist writing that were received in the East Germany. The chapter opens with Brecht who subsumes architecture into a rumination on inherited paradigms of space each with potential political value. The architecture of capitalism, as revealed in early short stories, is grotesque in that new buildings coexist with old ones in a privative and chaotic way. Diary entries from late in life, by contrast, reveal that 55 Hermann Henselmann, “Neue Wege in der Architektur,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 88. 56 Henselmann, “Brecht und die Stadt,” 159. 57 Ibid., 159.

26  Building Socialism Brecht longs to envision communist cities as partaking in the long tradition of picturesque space: a visual variety that nevertheless reflects planned working-class agency. The second section of the chapter treats Adorno’s and Bloch’s critiques of an architectural functionalism that, for them, sought to express utility by removing historicist ornament from facades, a move Adorno sees as a stylistic manifestation of culture industry. Benjamin, also discussed in this section of the chapter, sees buildings’ utility as consisting not in the consideration of future users by the designer, but in the use of the building. Sergei Tret’iakov, playwright and journalist in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, established the operative model of writing about architecture, treated in the next section, in which writers participate in the social milieus they seek to represent. Under this model, architecture, as an intervention in everyday life, leads to literary flexibility: Tret’iakov mixed satire, reportage, and narrative to reveal buildings as sites of revolutionary activity and emblems of socialist (and at times capitalist) modernity. Anna Seghers’s realism avoided describing architecture and urban space in ekphrastic ways, a technique which downplayed architecture’s status as art and subordinated written buildings to storytelling. Built space for Seghers was always connected to highly specific historical and social contexts as elucidated through characters with specific working-class subjectivities. Chapter 2 reveals how Heiner Müller’s early plays, Der Lohndrücker (The Scab, 1957) and Der Bau (The Construction Site, 1963–4) were conceived as interventions in the representation of new factories and construction sites. The evidence of performance photographs and the puzzling set of architecturally relevant material in the Müller archive and in his personal library help buttress the claim that these plays evince a double-edged view of architecture as both revolutionary and repressive. In pursuing this duality, Müller made a transition from an “operative” focus on the empirical reality of built space in Der Lohndrücker, to metaphors of the construction site that were adequate to the less immediately material reality of built space as it exists in time in Der Bau. In the latter play, Müller’s metaphors explored how modern architecture could exact a disciplinary effect on the bodies of those whose lives it shaped and contained. Müller’s later conversations along with the play’s influence on Günter Kunert’s “Betonformen” (Concrete Forms, 1968) reveal that Müller’s two-sided view of architecture anticipates his preoccupation in the 1990s with what he called the Prinzip Auschwitz: the idea that the central task of the post-war period was to create an alternative to fascism but that the intellectual framework from which fascism emerged was the only one available. Chapter 3 explores how playwright Helmut Baierl represented buildings in ways that assigned specific political values to particular

Introduction 27 architectural forms. Crucial to his and his crew’s efforts was an attempt to develop a historiography of space limited to the German Democratic Republic; by hewing close to a specifically GDR-based canon of writings on architecture, including speeches by Walter Ulbricht, he, and the team for the 1961 production at the Berliner Ensemble, intended to limit the historiographical horizons of architectural discourse. Unstudied archival documents relating to the production of Baierl’s play, Frau Flinz, form an important body of evidence here. The historiographic construction of how the capitalist class enemy lived was part of a broader, self-conscious effort on the production team of Frau Flinz to limit the horizon of the thinkable by restricting their exploration of GDR built reality to that reality’s representation in official texts. Chapter 4 shows how Christa and Gerhard Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Günter de Bruyn, and Irmtraud Morgner opened possibilities of meaning for the objects and styles of home interiors. The connection of the home to natural life-cycles, government prescription for design, and domestic modernity became a vehicle for these authors’ experiments with language. They simultaneously established diverse intertextual connections to, among other writers and movements, German Romanticism and Emil Zola, and used the lenses of literary and architectural history to probe alternatives to the didactic rhetoric of official architectural propaganda. The chapter starts by showing how Alexander Kluge’s notion of the montaged novel of diversity provided a theoretical template for the authors whose works are treated. Across three subsequent thematic sections on the GDR’s prescriptive Wohnkultur (dwelling culture), the entry of new technologies into the space of the home, and the role of characteristic nineteenth-century spaces such as the tenement and the suburban villa, I trace how writers’ attempts to temporalize the built environment went hand in hand with increasing disruption of narrative continuity and increasing fragmentation in literary structure, culminating in Gerhard Wolf’s 1971 Beschreibung eines Zimmers (Description of a Room), in which he revives the genre of the thought-image in order to analyse the interior furnishings of Johannes Bobrowski’s home office. Chapter 5 traces Reimann’s, de Bruyn’s, Kunert’s, and Volker Braun’s revaluation of modern urbanism and the nineteenth-century city in connection to similar reflections internationally. These writers, in developing a critique of urbanistic symptoms of the GDR’s brand of modernity (demolition of old neighborhoods and the construction of mass housing settlements) also reckoned with the modern city as a product of Enlightenment rationalism. Yet these writers’ reflections never devolved into a simple critique of modernity. Rather, they expanded their representations of built space in literature to include shifting narrative perspectives, sublated ekphrasis, and different

28  Building Socialism registers of language that could account for different patterns in the use of urban space. The first section examines two key novels from the early 1960s, Karl-Heinz Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers (1961) and Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine (1963). Close analysis shows that these texts evinced an anxiety that the stark, functionalized vacuity of new socialist industrial cities resembled too closely the company towns of the capitalist past, such as Ernst Bloch’s Ludwigshafen, based upon which that philosopher, in part, developed his theory of Hohlraum. The second section traces Morgner’s and Braun’s longing to view GDR cities as vital urban spaces worthy of a Modernist literature. The next section offers a close reading of Christa Wolf’s stunning short story, “Unter den Linden,” as a Lokaltermin, an investigative on-site visit to the GDR’s most famous boulevard. Wolf’s inveterately digressive narration matches her twofold spatial purpose: to render a street too often seen two-dimensionally in picture postcards into a fourdimensional urban environment and to convert the avenue’s controlled axiality into an unpredictable arabesque. The fourth section shows how de Bruyn and Kunert saw as characteristic of post-war Berlin a special relationship between inherited urban environments and the traumatic history of working-class life in Germany. They stylized old streets, squares, and apartment blocks as witnesses to history and accorded those spaces a radical agency in the present that could be uncovered through fragmentary prose structures. These structures, increasingly resembling thought-images, use the buildings themselves as thresholds leading to a history whose irrevocable lost-ness corresponds dialectically to the urgent imperative that knowledge of it be sought in Berlin’s urban environment. The chapter closes with an analysis of how Reimann, Kunert, and Braun viewed the GDR’s Modernist housing complexes as overgrown architectural models and instant ruins. The authors implicitly asserted the value of literature as a vehicle for rediscovering a revolutionary present that transcends the dictatorial agency of designers and wards off the specter of future catastrophe by revealing buildings’ users, including writers, as agents of revolutionary progress.

One Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture

As indicated in the introduction, the Marxist literary and theoretical canon contains significant precedents for the treatment of architecture in East Germany. GDR writers’ engagement with apartments, facades, and city streets became a broader rumination on modernity and historical rupture and stemmed from an abiding interest in past ways of looking at architecture among Marxist writers. The works of the East German writers do not represent a simple repetition of past debates about key themes such as the tenement as a site of revolutionary activity, the Modernist apartment as an antiseptic space of commodity fetishism, or the large construction site as a locus of political value. But they must be read in light of longer-term political, social, and intellectual issues such as planning vs. improvisation, the loss of traditional ways of life, and the relationship of socialism to modernity—concepts that are a key link between East German literature and pre-war Marxist writers.1 This chapter traces five socialist, pre-East German models for writing about architecture that resurface in GDR authors’ depictions of built space. The first is that of Bertolt Brecht who was a staunch 1 Frank Trommler has traced the stakes of such connections in terms of the making of cultural policy in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s. Frank Trommler, “Die Kulturpolitik und die kulturelle Tradition des deutschen Sozialismus,” in Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR, ed. Peter Uwe and Patricia Herminghouse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 13–72. David Bathrick has read the turn to Modernism among GDR playwrights in the time after Brecht’s death as a “re-performance” of the avant-garde. This idea will be treated in greater detail below. See David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 109–29. Helen Fehervary has shown Heiner Müller’s often overlooked literary debts to Anna Seghers: Helen Fehervary, “Landscapes of an Auftrag,” New German Critique 73, special issue on Heiner Müller, ed. David Bathrick and Helen Fehervary (Winter 1998): 115–32.

30  Building Socialism critic of the Modernist buildings of the 1920s and who, like nearly all the figures treated in this chapter, did not write about architecture in a systematic or sustained way. In Brecht’s stories, poems, and journal entries over the course of his career, architecture implicitly becomes a vehicle for considering inherited paradigms of space; the grotesque, the classical, and the picturesque each has a different political value in his work. The temporality of the built environment for Brecht was derived from the relationship between buildings, the economic systems that produce them, and the historical-aesthetic framework they follow as a result. The second model is that of Theodor Adorno, rarely seen as a precursor to any cultural production in the GDR.2 For Adorno, the Modernist architectures of the 1920s, known then as the Neues Bauen, were “functionalist” in that they sought to express their use through the avoidance of historicist stylistic gestures. Adorno viewed this avoidance as an empty stylistic gesture and a manifestation of culture industry;3 he saw architecture first and foremost as a symptom of modernity. To criticize modern architecture was to criticize the form of modernity shaped by advanced capitalism.4 The third model, treated in a section alongside Adorno, is that of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin attended to the jarring urban physiognomies created by modern buildings in the Paris cityscape and developed a theory of the obsolete, ornamented architecture of the nineteenth century as a built expression of consumer capitalism and a potential site of revolutionary agency. The fourth model is found in the writings of Sergei Tret’iakov, a playwright and journalist in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s whose work 2 See the reference to Bathrick, The Powers of Speech, in note 2 in the introduction. 3 The most robust treatment of critical theory and architecture is Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Heynen traces the Frankfurt School critique of Modernist architecture as a symptom of a flawed modernity, but redeems, to some degree, architecture’s critical potential through close analysis of Modernist architectural discourses. Her work will be discussed in greater detail below. 4 This view of modern architecture gained substantial traction by the 1960s in West Germany, went on to become more standard in East German literature in the 1970s, and is still prevalent in German Studies. Adorno’s students in Frankfurt cemented the critical use of the term functionalism in the late 1960s. See Heide Berndt et al., Architektur als Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968). Recent examples of the use of the term “functionalism” as a catch-all for Modernist architecture can be found in Sabine Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Hake takes the terms from Adolf Behne’s Der Moderne Zweckbau of 1926 and applies it to different stands of 1920s Modernism. Klaus R. Scherpe and Mitch Cohen write of the “pure functionalism” of Corbusier. See Klaus R. Scherpe and Mitch Cohen, “Modern and Postmodern Transformations of the Metropolitan Narrative”, New German Critique 55 (Winter 1992): 71–85.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 31 was influential for Heiner Müller. Tret’iakov established the model of operative writing about architecture, which held that the writer must participate in any processes or social milieus he or she would seek to represent.5 For the operative writer, architecture is not a reflection of the conditions of its production but rather a site of revolutionary activity. Anna Seghers’s pre-war realism, the final model treated, downplayed architecture’s status as art and made buildings objects like any other to be read in terms of race, class, and cultural specificity.6 Yet the few passages in her work in which she dealt explicitly with modern architecture required recourse to an idealist model in which Seghers own subject position as a critical intellectual momentarily trumped her astoundingly consistent efforts to reveal working-class consciousness. At the close of each of the four chapter sections, those on Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, Tret’iakov, and Seghers, specific connections are made between their theoretical insights and textual approaches and those of East German writers. However, it is worth reflecting briefly here on how Building Socialism’s approach to the interaction of pre-1945 texts and GDR texts relates to current frameworks for that interaction. David Bathrick’s model, set forth in The Powers of Speech, is the most valuable scheme for relating Modernist East German literature, for him primarily theater, of the Scientific-Technological Revolution back to innovations in dramatic production in the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s. Bathrick focuses on Müller as part of a vanguard of writers who helped revive a 1920s agit-prop strategy of confronting theater audiences with contemporary problems in a dialectically open way. Bathrick shows the ways in which this agit-prop impulse clashed and dovetailed with the political needs of a Socialist Unity Party that realized it needed to create new strategies for engaging the public, but that was wary of Müller’s forthright empiricism.7 Written in 1995, Bathrick’s book could make use neither of the multi-volume edition of collected works by Müller that has been published since 2000 nor of Müller’s personal library, both of which reveal that the playwright’s relationship to audiences and the cultural dictates of the party in the late 1950s, though both exceedingly 5 Basic overviews of Tret’iakov’s work can be found in Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 159–78, and in Fritz Mierau, Erfindung und Korrektur: Tretjakows Ästhetik der Operativität (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976). 6 My arguments about Seghers’s architecture, and particularly my assumption of Seghers’s visual contextualism, come from Helen Fehervary’s assessments of the influence of Rembrandt on the visual tableaux of Seghers’s prose. Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 7 Bathrick, The Powers of Speech, 112–16.

32  Building Socialism important, do not comprise the entire story of how the East German literature of the 1950s and 1960s relates to pre-war literary achievements. From the authorial perspectives now available, to continue with the example of Müller, it becomes clear that the playwright was not just reviving Tret’iakov and Brecht in order to establish a new theater audience.8 Rather, he was dealing in a thematic and theoretical way with thorny and persistent problems of modernity that can be illuminated by tracing the afterlife of the pre-war perspectives under close analysis in this chapter. So, even as early as the 1960s, Müller and other writers used literature for theoretical rumination as much as for practical mediation. Built space, lodged in the movements of history and with meanings forged through use and production, was at the heart of this rumination. Hilde Heynen’s Architecture and Modernity, far and away the most complete treatment of the relationship between Modernist architecture and the critical theory of Adorno, Bloch, and Benjamin, develops intellectual-historical constellations within which the writing of East German built space also took place. Heynen uses Marshall Berman to define modernity: “Modernity is used (in this study) in reference to a condition of living imposed upon individuals by the socioeconomic process of modernization. The experience of modernity involves a rupture with tradition and has a profound impact on ways of life and daily habits.”9 Heynen’s analysis of Modernist architecture and of critical theory revolves around whether architecture can be as critical of modernity as the Frankfurt School thinkers were—or whether architecture is forever doomed to affirm the regimes under which it is produced. The central problem of how built space is resistive undergirds the treatment of architecture in East German literature during the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Heynen’s concept of the encounter of architecture and modernity thus provides an overarching conceptual link between the Weimar era and the post-war period that can add to and complement the frameworks that Bathrick has devised for linking the periods. The fraught dichotomy of complicity and critique that Heynen sees as 8

As will be shown in Chapter 2, Müller was already in the late 1950s thinking of Ovid’s work in a theoretically sophisticated way. His own theoretical interests were as important as cultural-political speeches by Ulbricht. It should be noted that my model for connecting pre-East German culture to East German culture does follow Bathrick’s tracing of the long trajectory of Nietzsche reception from the early twentieth century to the GDR of the 1980s. My aim is to show, though, that such trajectories, not of Nietzsche, but rather of a broader Modernist engagement with architecture, can also be traced in the GDR literature of the politically and culturally more restrictive 1950s and 1960s. 9 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 3.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 33 constitutive for the encounter of architecture and twentieth-century modernity can help explain similar bifurcations found in the written architecture of the authors in this chapter and subsequent ones. It is present in Brecht’s paradoxical vision of a communist picturesque that would unite planning and spontaneity in the design of the urban environment; in Benjamin’s two-sided view of the retrograde and revolutionary qualities of Second Empire buildings; in Tret’iakov’s willingness to critique Modernist houses as fetishistic architectural commodities and to see them as sites of political agency; in Seghers’s dual view of new buildings and urban spaces as embedded in workingclass contexts and as demanding the extra-referential attention of a critical intellectual.

Brecht and Modern Architecture

Brecht used inherited spatial paradigms to envision the relation of people to objects under capitalism and socialism. Despite Henselmann’s assertions (treated in the introduction), Brecht did not write extensively about architecture. But the few documents we have, from his and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s short story, “Nordseekrabben, oder die neue Bauhaus Wohnung” (North See Crabs, or the New Bauhaus Apartment, 1926) to journal entries about East German architecture, show that he saw built space as expressing political systems in terms of movements in the history of art. In his early writings on architecture, late capitalist modernity gives rise to grotesque spaces, which literature scholar John R. Clark, following Thomas Mann, sees as fundamentally antibourgeois, relying on a disharmonic departure from Enlightenment norms which, for Brecht, was enacted through use by the working class.10 In a 1938 poem about the Moscow Metro as a work of architecture, Brecht wishfully attempts to capture the harmonic process of the working-class building space for its own use. The result is a poem that imagines the unity of individual and collective in communism using a unified classical structure.11 Ultimately, at the end of his life, Brecht’s 10 John R. Clark, The Modern Satiric Grotesque and its Traditions (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 12–14. 11 This claim employs a traditional definintion of classicism in line with Hugh Honour’s account of the aims of the French neo-classical painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicisim (New York: Penguin, 1977). John Fizer has offered a stinging critique of the idea, propagated by authorities in the Soviet Union, that Socialist Realism was derived from classicism of the kind that Honour characterizes. Fizer bases his critique in part on the very different conceptions of mimesis found in French classicist theory of the seventeenth century and the “party-minded” mimesis that Soviet cultural functionaries wanted. He notes, however, that his analysis rests on the respective theoretical explications of classicism and Socialist

34  Building Socialism wish-image of communist architecture turned from the classical to the picturesque and its ability to stitch together the rationally planned and the contingently spontaneous. In his Arbeitsjournale, Brecht advocated for planned cities that would nevertheless make possible unplanned ways of looking at and experiencing the urban environment. Brecht’s short story “Nordseekrabben,” written early in 1926 together with Elisabeth Hauptmann and first printed in May of that same year in Münchner Neuste Nachrichten, launches a critique of what Brecht terms Bauhaus “functionalism.”12 The premise of the piece is a visit by two army friends, the first-person narrator and his friend Müller, to the newly modernized apartment of another friend of theirs, Kempert, who has had financial success since the war in a middle-management job at the AEG, a large electric company.13 Müller becomes increasingly uncomfortable in the orderly surroundings of the sleek apartment, drinks too much, and sends his host out to buy him a tin of North Sea crab meat. While alone, he rearranges the furniture into one corner of the living room which he strews with loose newspaper and partitions off from the rest of the apartment using a window covering he rips from its fixture. Müller then holds forth about the “cozy corner” he has created and makes explicit what the reader has already guessed: that the chaos of used space is more natural than the artificially created spatial harmony of the Modernist apartment. In light of Brecht’s reading of Erich Mendelsohn’s books on modern architecture and his likely familiarity with Adolf Behne’s Der moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building, 1926), and newspaper coverage of the Neues Bauen housing settlements of Berlin, the story can be read as an implicit theory of the modern architecture of the 1920s. The new architecture is “cold” and “hard,” signaling a chilly stasis that resists use and conceals the embeddedness of the architecture in global capital circulation. The new apartment is also associated Realism rather than on artworks produced under those theoretical systems, which, Fizer acknowledges, share considerable formal similarities. It is on the level of poetic form that I make the claim for the classicism of Brecht’s poetry about the Moscow Metro. John Fizer, “Some Observations on the Alleged Classicism of Socialist Realism,” Studies in Soviet Thought 15, no. 4 (December 1975): 327–37. 12 See commentary to “Nordseekrabben,” Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Prosa 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 13 Bertolt Brecht, “‘Nordseekrabben’ oder die moderne Bauhaus-Wohnung,” Werke, Prosa 4, 268–75. The connection between the AEG and architectural innovation goes back to Walther Rathenau’s enlisting of Peter Behrens to design first products and later buildings for the company. For Brecht, of course, this is an association of the Bauhaus, or the new architecture more generally, with a soft nineteenth-century liberalism and its coddling of big capital and the consumer culture from which it profited.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 35 with the commodified female body, which Benjamin saw as the greatest symptom of capitalism’s crimes: the wife of the host, Kemper, compares her dwelling to a well-fitting evening gown.14 It is also falsely cosmopolitan. The narrator describes the large windows as reminiscent of Cuban architectural styles while the straw window coverings and bamboo rods signal a rudimentary, consumerist familiarity with Asian culture.15 For Brecht and Hauptmann, the attempt of the apartment’s designers to create a spatially complete expression of the living of an efficient, consumerist modern life sacrifices real consideration of human need to an ideology of pre-determined “functionalism.” By ascribing to the new architecture these attributes, from false harmony to banal cosmopolitanism, Brecht and Hauptmann created a critique of it that resonated with the contemporaneous reflections of Siegfried Kracauer on travel and consumerism. But while Kracauer, in his Weimar-era essays, allowed the hollowness of modern spaces and social practices to emerge in a dry and laconic language, Brecht used the genre of the satire to point up the absurd unevenness of modern space.16 The grotesque quality of the story emerges in the jarring juxtapositions characteristic of that aesthetic as Clark has theorized it.17 By making recourse to this aesthetic practice, Brecht, in the story, sees the space of twentieth-century capitalist modernity, finding its apogee in the Modernist apartment of the white-collar worker, as a fashionable, planned, disciplined space, the disordering of which by those marginalized by that modernity becomes the seed of a revolutionary act. Under capitalist modernity, sanitization and the disciplining of everyday life leads to urban spaces and home interiors that are grotesque because of the uneven nature of economic distribution and access to the apparatus of culture. If with Rabelais’s undeniably grotesque Gargantua, the display of out-of-control human appetites was a comment on the hypocrisies of the ecclesiastical moral 14 Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 120–1. 15 This would appear to echo the NSDAP joke postcard of the Weißenhofsiedlung doctored to look as though inhabited by people from the Arab world. William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1982), 351–2. Brecht’s critique here probably has in mind something like the 1925 Paris Exposition d’Arts Decoratif which spawned an exoticizing aesthetics marketed to appeal to upper-middle-class tastes. 16 Janet Ward has traced several examples, including from the journal Querschnitt, of the satire of modern architecture during the Weimar era. Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 45–8. 17 See note 10.

36  Building Socialism order and a call for a more “natural” or balanced expression of human desire as part of the very modern management of human selfhood, Brecht’s “Nordseekrabben” converts the humanistic focus on the body into a spatial problem, in this case a challenge to balance the democratized space of Müller’s “cozy corner” with the planned harmony of the new apartment he rearranges.18 By contrast, Brecht’s 1938 poem about the Moscow subway, “Inbesitznahme der Moskauer Metro” (Taking Possession of the Moscow Metro), has a panegyric tone meant to glorify an infrastructure project whose meaning is determined by builders and users. Beyond remarking that the fine materials and high-quality workmanship reflect the standards of those working-class users, the strictest the world has ever seen according to Brecht, there is little about what the spaces actually look like.19 The focus instead is on the way labor is visible in the material itself: “Evermore / men and women pointed—unsure whether it was the right ones / to places where they had worked: the stonework / carried the traces of their hands.”20 The material defies commodification by revealing the collective, craft-like process through which it was realized. The work that produced it, though involving leadership and planning, was performed in the joy of collective spontaneity: “During this year / people had always seen young men and women / laughing, climbing out of the tunnels, their work suits / loamy, sweatsoaked, proudly exhibiting.”21 For Brecht, this kind of work obliterates capitalist property relationships: “Because the fabulous structure saw / what none of its predecessors in many cities and times / had ever seen: the construction workers as owners!”22 The Moscow Metro is the answer to the famous question of Brecht’s “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters” (Questions of a reading Worker): “Where, ever / were not those expelled from the structure / who had built it?” The poem clearly lacks the resistive dimension that was so important to Brecht’s politics and poetics. His poetics of realized socialist space 18 My reference to Rabelais here relies on Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélèn Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 19 This is telling, because, as Mike O’Mahoney has shown, the Metro itself was conceived not just as transit but as a delivery system for official visual culture. Mike O’Mahoney, “Archaeological Fantasies: Constructing History on the Moscow Metro,” Modern Languages Review 98, no. 1 (2003): 130–50. 20 Bertolt Brecht, “Inbesitznahme der Grossen Metro durch die Moskauer Arbeiterschaft am 27. April 1935,” Werke, Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 21 Ibid. 22 The rousing close to this climactic line would become the mantra of the SED as it propagated the Stalinallee as a monument to socialist pride in the early 1950s. Joachim Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Reimer, 2000), 44–5.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 37 is one of plenitude; contradictions are overcome leaving awe and wonder as the core emotional experiences. Workers’ bodies have inscribed themselves in the spaces they have built in an unresentful way, implying a psychological satisfaction at the individual level, a harmonically complete architectural vision at the spatial level, and a diction and syntax closer to the panegyric than anything else Brecht produced. Brecht seeks here a classical completeness opposed to the grotesqueness of uneven, fragmentary capitalist space, with its bodies in rebellion. Only the impersonal “one” and the condescending “we” of the poem disturb the image of communist plenitude, a world without contradictions in which the appropriation of space by the working class is an act of classical completion. Brecht’s classicism of course covered up the actual working conditions on the Metro, whose production was overseen by Kruschchev: shifts of up to 48 hours, a high rate of construction site death, and vicious show trials for the British engineers who helped design it and were suspected of espionage because of the knowledge they had gained about the layout of Moscow’s infrastructure.23 Brecht brought this wish-image of a dialectical architecture in which a productive working class created its own spaces with him to East Germany. In the spring of 1952, at Hermann Henselmann’s request, Brecht began to draft inscriptions that would be chiseled into the skyscraper on the Weberwiese, the centerpiece of East Berlin’s new grand boulevard. The various versions all emphasize the buildings’ victory over forces that would turn the noble task of housing workers into an opportunity for profit-taking. Eventually, the second stanza of Brecht’s “Friedenslied” would be the text of choice for the project. The tablet with the inscription was shortly thereafter transferred from the Weberwiese to Strausberger Platz, the Stalinallee’s main gateway for those driving, walking or biking from Alexanderplatz.24 The four lines in question are a neat capsule of the model of architectural production Brecht had constructed in the Moscow Metro poem nearly two decades earlier: “Peace in our land! / Peace in our city. / That it well house / those who built it!”25 The text’s conviction that the Stalinallee was replicating in Berlin the collective labor of the Moscow subway allowed 23 David Lloyd Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 64–71, and William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 94–5. 24 Bertolt Brecht, “Inschriften für das Hochhaus an der Weberwiese,” Werke, Schriften 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 202–3. Historical information comes from commentary. See also Jost Hermand, “Brecht und die bildenden Künste” and “Brecht und die bildende Kunste,” in Stile, Ismen, Etiketten. Zur Periodisierung der modernen Kunst (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1978), 164–83. 25 Brecht, Werke, Schriften 3, 202.

38  Building Socialism for his temporary reconciliation with the plastered-on ornamental forms he otherwise might have condemned as petit-bourgeois.26 His reaction in this instance is predictable based on his earlier reconciliation to the project of state socialism in the Soviet Union. Similarly, in a short piece called “Wovon unsere Architekten Kenntnis nehmen müssen” (Something from which our architects must draw knowledge) written shortly after the draft inscriptions in 1952, Brecht outlines this continued commitment more programmatically.27 Brecht is confident that the workers are aware that dedication to the task of rebuilding is the sine qua non of the GDR’s success as a legitimate state. He is convinced too that a new kind of architecture is needed. The Modernist forms of the West are “subservient to function”; their main purpose is bringing profit to private developers. The tenements of the early part of the century are inadequate, even if made more comfortable through renovation. Single family homes are petit-bourgeois and anti-urban and as such cannot contribute to the furthering of a genuinely socialist city culture.28 The “palaces” on the Stalinallee offer a fundamentally new building type from Brecht’s point of view, a typology that exists not in the forms themselves but in the nature of their production and the context of their use, which together form a classical unity. Near the end of his life, though, Brecht attempted to envision socialist space as a non-resistive, non-contradictory space in which there were nevertheless flexible ways for multiple subjectivities to emerge. His vehicle for this vision was the picturesque. He wanted city planning that could engender a spontaneity and variety of experience without devolving into the spatial chaos of capitalism. He sketched this notion of the socialist picturesque in a journal entry written in Warsaw in 1955: Refutable, the linear main concept [das lineare Grundkonzept] of our building. Harmony does not depend on regularity. Where are the courtyards, the crooked streets, the overlapping of the buildings, where is the contrast, the surprise of the view that suddenly opens up, the specificity of a block that imprints it on the memory and makes it inviting through the years. We are allowing our children to grow up in geometry, in stalls of units [Einheitsstallungen]. Chance (and the pressure, “coming from 26 See Hermand, “Brecht und die bildende Kunst.” 27 Brecht, Werke, Schriften 3, 203–4. 28 We can assume that Brecht has Los Angeles in mind when making this specific condemnation. In his journals during his exile in that city, he writes of the petit-bourgeois single family homes spread across miles of surface area as soul stifling by-products of the building industry’s drive to profit.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 39 outside,” to establish oneself even right here, to make the best out of an exigent situation, etc.) of the anarchical building of the past brought into being ugly and beautiful things. How can we make its beautiful things plannable?29 Brecht’s naive pose here is reminiscent of the Me-Ti material and delightfully heightens the paradox he presents in the idea of planned anarchy. Though works by Camillo Sitte, the late nineteenth-century Viennese city planner and advocate of medieval urbanism, do not appear in Brecht’s personal library or receive mention in his reviews, journals or letters, the similarity of this passage to parts of Sitte’s Der Städtebau nach seinen künsterlischen Grundsätzen (City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 1889) is striking enough to merit comparison. Sitte advocated for the creation of a “splendid and pictorial streetscape” which could “glorify [its] locality,” insisting that “such a purpose cannot be accomplished with the ruler or with our geometrically straight street lines.”30 He continues, “Sundry curves, twisted streets, and irregularities would have to be included artificially in the plan—an affected artlessness, unnatural spontaneities. But can accidents of history over the course of centuries be invented and constructed ex novo in the plan?”31 Despite the similarity to Brecht, more separates the Viennese planner and the playwright than links them. Sitte is nearly two generations older. He sees historic cities as “great works of art” in the most conservative sense of that term. His understanding of history is largely idealist. Nevertheless, Brecht appears to repeat several of Sitte’s key ideas: the importance of locality, specificity, and memorability of streetscapes; the reaction against strict geometries and standardized regularities; the paradoxical recognition that the solution to overly regular, geometric planning is to plan the appearance of spontaneity and organicism so that they can be felt at the experiential level of the city’s users. The two even share the idea that the alliance of the real estate market and the state led to boulevard style planning, which, despite its geometries, is revealed as anti-rationalist in its blindness toward genuine human need. Brecht suggests here a set of forms (curving streets, intimate courtyards, vistas that defy expectations) that generate experiences he 29 Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Journale 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 364. 30 Sitte’s work cited from Ákos Moravánszky, “Forced Spontaneities: Camillo Sitte and the Paradox of the Picturesque,” in Sitte, Hegemann, and the Metropolis: Modern Civic Art and International Exchanges, ed. Charles Bohl and Jean-François Lejeun (New York: Routledge, 2009), 109. Moravánszky uses Sitte to develop a broader theory of the picturesque aesthetic as based on the bifurcation and reconciliation of the exercise of power and the democratic experience of space. 31 Ibid., 109.

40  Building Socialism wants to see as particular to communist space. For Brecht that space is picturesque space, a blending of the rationalist capability for planning and the need to release the perpetual revolutionary energy of collective human subjectivities by engendering the experience of belonging and of emancipation. Brecht’s spatial models, in which the built environment becomes legible through implicit connections to the history of aesthetics, have a vital afterlife and undergo various transformations in East German literature. The caricatured grotesque of modern architecture in “Nordseekrabben,” which takes architecture’s use as a catalyst for working-class agency, recurs in Reimann’s Franzkiska Linkerhand, treated in Chapters 4 and 5, as the title character struggles against the over-determined, functional furniture of her Modernist apartment during the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Reimann’s critique, however, is not a populist jab at elite culture’s bourgeois Modernism, but is instead a plea from the cultural elite, of which Reimann was a part, against the bottom-line technocracy of East German planning regimes. The neo-classicism of Brecht’s Moscow Metro poem and his inscriptions for the Stalinallee had a quite direct influence, of course, on the propagandistic paeans to Stalinist architecture published in the early 1950s.32 Heiner Müller, in a singular achievement in his mid-1950s poetry and, especially, in his production plays reversed Brecht’s harmonizing trope of the working class building its own house. In Müller, workers’ construction of space for themselves is increasingly revealed as a form of self-imprisonment connected to the larger failures of working-class revolution in the twentieth century and the rise of Lenin’s technophilic version of socialism.33 The notion that the ideal communist city will be picturesque, with centralized planning yielding spontaneous and diverse spaces, undergirds the traces of utopian hope that recur in Reimann’s often bleak novel and drives Volker Braun’s engagement with architectural metaphor in connection to systems theory. Both of these authors are treated in Chapter 5 along with Günter Kunert, whose Berlin thought-images of the late 1960s and early 1970s speculate about technophilic prefabricated buildings becoming an organic part of everyday life through their use over time—a dialectically developing picturesque, the agent 32 One such example is the poetry volume, featuring Paul Wiens, among others, Begeistert von Berlin (Berlin: Aufbau, 1952), which was reviewed very critically by Heiner Müller in 1953. See Heiner Müller, Werke 8, Schriften, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 20–3. 33 This idea will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter and is supported by Devin Fore’s research on Müller’s conception of labor during the New Economic System. Devin Fore, “Between Athlos and Arbeit: Myth, Labor, and Cement,” New German Critique 37, no. 2 (2010): 125–52.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 41 of which is the social collective of spatial users rather than architects or planners.34

Benjamin, Adorno, and the Neues Bauen

Adorno’s and Benjamin’s work did not influence most younger GDR writers in the 1950s and 1960s. But they and Müller, Reimann, Braun, Wolf, and de Bruyn comprise part of the same historical phenomenon in that their work responds to the material and social changes of modernity by formulating theories about the status of those changes in relation to ideology and subject formation.35 Though the objection could be raised that the Frankfurt School critiques were designed specifically in response to a modernity shaped by capital, they can still apply to conditions in a nominally socialist state inasmuch as that state pursues a technological modernity in line with norms in the capitalist world.36 For Benjamin, architecture had two roles. The first is found in the differences between the “physiognomies” of buildings produced at different times and the montaged quality of the urban streetscape. For Benjamin, the 1920s city was both a manifestation of a flawed modernity and a model for the montaging of experience that could lie at the heart of an activist art such as Surrealism. The second role of architecture for Benjamin lies in the ambiguous nature of nineteenth-century structures from the tenement apartment to the arcades and train stations of Paris. 34 Kunert’s late 1960s fantasies of organic forms of dwelling in Plattenbau reached something of a fulfillment in the post-Wende years as Modernist GDR highrises were themselves increasingly slated for demolition. GDR scholar Simone Hain participated along with a group of artists in an art project based on the occupation of just such a to-be-demolished high-rise. Hain even wrote about the social and emotional dimensions of Plattenbau as an organic form of habitation. Simone Hain, “Das utopische Potenzial der Platte,” in dostoprimetschatjeltost (Berlin: Junius, 2003), 79–87. 35 In Chapter 2, I address Müller’s claim that he read Benjamin’s work as early as 1947. 36 It is beyond the scope of this book to assess the extent to which forms of exchange which Marx would see as capitalist persisted under real existing socialism. John Urang has indicated that something “rather like a consumer culture” developed in East Germany. John Urang, Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 61. Benjamin Robinson concludes his rumination on the relationship between socialism and modernity in Franz Fühmann’s work by asserting that Fühmann’s longing to experience the systemiticity of socialism in everyday life ultimately went unmet. Benjamin Robinson, The Skin of the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 259–63. Heiner Müller’s view that the SED in the 1960s ceded too much ground to structures inherited from capitalism will be analysed in Chapter 2.

42  Building Socialism These buildings, with their applied ornament and pretention to high artistic value, are at once symptoms of the “dream state” of subjects divorced from history by consumer capitalism and potential sites of political agency that can critique the modernizing present. For Adorno, Modernist architecture, usually referred to as Bauhaus architecture or functionalist architecture, was a symptom of twentiethcentury modernity, a mass medium among other mass media meant to objectify people according to the instrumentalist logic of capitalist modernity. He saw houses by leading architects like Walter Gropius and le Corbusier as having architectural faces as empty and superficial as late capitalist labor was alienated. Though Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) is a late work, it is used in this chapter as a stand-in for his architectural thought throughout his career because it represents the culmination of his consideration of art and modernity—and because it contains the most acute articulation of the negative dialectic in relation to architectural problems. For Benjamin, the experience of looking at the city and making texts adequate to it was a central preoccupation.37 In “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire” (Second Empire Paris in Baudelaire) of 1938, Benjamin treats buildings’ physiognomies as part of a diverse urban milieu to be read by the flaneur. He locates in Balzac the type of the “physiognomical” writer whose “preference for unhemmed expression” took social types and cityscapes as visually legible, an assumption of legibility shared with the mid-nineteenth-century flaneur. The flaneur in turn becomes a “detective” who can perform valuable labor in the seemingly useless task of visually marking the jarring differences in the modernizing cityscape: “When the flaneur in that way becomes a detective against his will, it fits him socially very well. It legitimates his idle walking. His indolence is only a seeming one.”38 In Benjamin’s own Arcades project, the act of urban detection 37 He was consistently interested in Modernist architecture and urbanism. On Benjamin’s changing assessment of Corbusier see Detlef Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (New York: Continuum, 2006), 225–39. In the late 1920s, Benjamin was enthusiastic about Corbusier. He saw the Swiss architect as reducing the production of architecture to the solving of engineering problems, but celebrated the casting of bourgeois constraints of taste as potentially revolutionary. Whereas Bloch saw the “disappearing privacy” embodied by the large glass windows of Modernist buildings as a manifestation of capitalism as “a prison,” the late 1920s Benjamin praised the way Corbusier’s villas blurred the distinction between interior and exterior. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 220. 38 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I, 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 543.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 43 explores the diverse physiognomies of urban life and interior space in a time in which nineteenth-century design models have given way to the pared-down Modernism of the Neues Bauen. Though Benjamin was, as Susan Buck-Morss has shown, profoundly uncomfortable with idealist ideologies of physiognomy and the “detective” gaze of the flaneur, a remnant of this is nevertheless present in his own approach to the city in the 1930s.39 For Benjamin, urban fabric creates a montage of symptomatic manifestations of modernity that together give insight into history’s movements. It is this view of the city as an agglomeration of visual impressions that connects Benjamin’s Arcades to the found objects of the Surrealists.40 In the Arcades, nineteenth-century structures were seemingly ephemeral expressions of fashion, but could become political: [For the dreaming collective consciousness], much is, of course, internal that, for the individual is external: architectures, fashions, even the weather are, to the inside of the collective, what sense perception, the feeling of being sick or healthy are to the inside of the individual … [These things] stand in the cycle of the eternally same until the collective empowers itself in politics and history is made from them.41 Architecture is understood here as part of a hodge-podge of ephemera that reveal modernity’s stagnant circularity and its potential antidote in the form of collective agency. Nineteenth-century architecture for Benjamin thus represents false consciousness even as it can be a catalyst for restoring possibilities for political action. He goes on to write that this dialectic is particularly acute in nineteenth-century architectural ornament meant to signal the status of buildings as art. Responding in the Arcades to critic and historian Siegfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, bauen in Eisenbeton (Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Reinforced Concrete, 1928), Benjamin sees ornamentality as ideological: Attempt to make progress starting with Giedion’s thesis. He says: “Construction in the nineteenth century played the role of the subconscious.” Wouldn’t it better read: the role of bodily 39 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 306, 343–6, and Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension, 113–14. 40 Buck-Morss, Dialectics, 23, 67–73, 164. 41 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V, 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 492.

44  Building Socialism processes around which then the “artistic” architectures lay themselves like dreams around the formwork of the physiological process?42 Architectural ornament in the nineteenth century is the dreamlike cocoon wrapped around the body of the physical structure itself. While Giedion and other early, often valorizing historians of Modernist architecture see in the great iron train stations and exhibition halls a precursor of the Bauhaus, Benjamin sees the great skeletal iron structures of the nineteenth century as looking grotesquely ancient next to post-World War I Modernist buildings: It is very strange that the structures in which the expert recognizes the predecessors of the current way of building act on the mind that is attuned, if not architectonically schooled, in no way as predecessors, but rather particularly old-fashioned and dreamy.43 For Benjamin, the nineteenth century was certainly nascently technophile, but cloaked its structural innovations in ornaments born of “narcotic historicism” and “the need for masks.” But ornament has revolutionary potential. Its “narcotic” quality is for Benjamin a “signal of true historical existence … which the Surrealists were the first to take up. Deciphering this signal: the following analysis has to do with this.”44 The effort to decipher the built space of the nineteenth century is a constitutive aspect of Benjamin’s project, and the recovery of meanings buried within tenement apartments, exhibition halls, and, of course, arcades, are a key to the reemergence of historical agency that is the crux of his concept of revolution. His view of the city works against the erasure of a past that contains alternatives to the present. It is thus not surprising that an architectural metaphor sustains one of the most vividly political passages of the Arcades. For Benjamin, a seemingly obsolete nineteenth-century object gains … a higher level of currency than in the moment of its existing … How it takes shape as higher currency is accomplished by the image as that and in which it is understood. And this dialectical breaking-through and making-present of past contexts is the truth test of current action. That is: it ignites the blasting agent … that lies in that which is past. 42 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V, 1, 494. 43 Ibid., 493. 44 Ibid.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 45 To approach the past in this manner means treating it not, as heretofore, in a historical way, but rather in a political way, using political categories.45 The image through which we understand old architecture becomes a measuring stick of political action in the present. As Benjamin read Giedion and watched the obsolescence of nineteenth-century Parisian structures, he intuited that analysis of these older neighborhoods could demolish the ideologies producing the technocratic architectures of the present. Thus, the architectural “fashions” of the nineteenth century, mask-like and narcotic, can also be mobilized to critique the forces of the present that believe themselves to have superseded such historicism. Benjamin’s dialectical assessment of nineteenth-century architecture resonates with the approach that several of the writers treated in this project take. In the case of Günter Kunert, treated in Chapters 2 and 5, we know that Benjamin’s influence was direct.46 Kunert turns Benjamin’s dialectic of architectural past and present onto East Germany’s prefabricated buildings shortly after their construction, as he imagines in his Berlin thought images of the late 1960s and early 1970s how future generations will establish emotional relationships with these structures. For Heiner Müller, the Marxist and Benjaminian idea that the present is pregnant with its contrary drives the idea, present in his production plays, that modern architecture can, in addition to its disciplinary effects, become a staging ground for revolutionary action. In Brigitte Reimann and Günter de Bruyn, treated in Chapters 4 and 5, Benjamin’s reservation of a political role for disappearing architectures resurfaces as tenement apartment buildings are cast as potential sites of working-class agency. Theodor Adorno’s conception of Modernist architecture also had echoes in East Germany. Adorno’s post-war writing, including his speech “Funktionalismus heute” (Functionalism Today) of 1965 and his Ästhetische Theorie, represents a culmination of his thought about Modernist buildings as a symptom of a modernity poisoned by its own rationalism. In his Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno classifies modern architecture as a new form of technology and a manipulative mass medium. In making this classification, he relies on the names of important architects and architectural movements as stand-ins for the modern instrumentalization of architecture. For Adorno, it is 45 Ibid., 495. 46 On Kunert and Benjamin, see Ulrich Ott, “Der andere Planet,” in Amerika ist anders. Studien zum Amerika-Bild in deutschen Reiseberichten des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991), 374–98.

46  Building Socialism acceptable for “Zweckgebilde,” objects, such as bridges, designed to fulfill a very specific purpose, to be “functional in themselves.”47 But the Bauhaus, Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier are all, for Adorno, guilty of asserting “the beauty of the autonomous, technological artwork,” an ideological construct which Adorno sees as objectifying human beings, but concealing that objectification through aesthetic effects.48 It thus turns the function of the artwork into “a function for something else,” namely the ideology of instrumental modernity which makes buildings “superfluous, ornamental as a function unto themselves.”49 Though we should never make recourse to appeals to “humanity,” we should, according to Adorno, recognize what is lost through Loos’s, Corbusier’s, and the Bauhaus’s supposed “functionalism”: “Sabotaged in the process is a moment of functionality itself, the necessity rising up from beneath that directs itself to what and toward the goal of what the partial moments want.”50 And further, “Most deeply jeopardized is [through Loos, Gropius, and Corbusier] that balance of tensions that the matter of fact [sachlich] art work borrows for itself from the functional arts.”51 Whereas the Modernist designers believed themselves to be injecting humanity into an engineered world by borrowing forms from truly “functional” objects to create art, they were in fact, for Adorno, jeopardizing the potentially productive balance of tensions in functional objects such as bridges in order to make consumable art objects.52 47 Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 7: Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 96. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 97. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Similarly, for Bloch, the emptiness of modern architecture’s formal gestures was a functionalized component of late capitalism’s mechanistic “style of thought,” which covers up the traces of its inherent chaos. Gropius and Corbusier, according to this line of thinking, were in fact focused on function. But they did not do the real labor of shaping and imagining truly new spaces in line with authentic human needs and instead created useless facade compositions that are “reifications of geometric construction.” The idea of architectural functionality, for Bloch as for Adorno, thus undermines genuine use value, subordinating it to systems of exchange. Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 223. German Studies has followed Bloch, Adorno, and Brecht in using the term “functionalism” to denote pared-down, Modernist architectures from Adolf Loos to GDR Plattenbau and the alienating economic systems that accompany them. The term descended in part from Brecht’s and the Frankfurt School’s critical assessments of the Bauhaus. Adorno’s “Funktionalismus heute” follows Bloch’s writing on Modernist architecture by exploiting a dialectical understanding of functionalism in which focus on purpose yields the poverty of formalism. Such polemics, along with Alexander Mitscherlich’s 1965 Die Unwirtlichkeit

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 47 In the East German context, several of Adorno’s ideas about architecture take on new life, though not likely through any direct influence. In Reimann’s Frankziska, treated in Chapters 4 and 5, Modernist architectures become symptoms of the technocratic regimes that produced them, forming an implicit indictment of the SED’s path to a modernity that is reductive in its approach to human dwellings. Similarly, in Christa Wolf’s “Unter den Linden,” new hotels and cafes are registered as unfamiliar intrusions into the streetscape designed to project East German modernity abroad in a problematic way. In Heiner Müller’s production plays, treated in the next chapter, the uncanny modernity of East Germany’s large industrial complexes threatens and disciplines the bodies of those who build them.

Operative Writing and Modern Architecture

Sergei Tret’iakov, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, wrote about Soviet architecture in an “operative” way. Tret’iakov had started as a documentary rationalist who believed in the power of the photographic image to reveal the objective reality of socialist progress. He unserer Städte, a vituperative castigation of Modernist city planning, and the 1968 volume Architektur als Ideologie, authored by a team of sociologists and psychologists including Heide Berndt and Klaus Horn, who studied with Adorno in Frankfurt, and Alfred Lorenzer who worked as a psychoanalyst with Mitscherlich, solidified Modernist architecture’s bad reputation among Germanists, for whom the Frankfurt School’s resistance to capitalist modernity’s systems of exchange in their cultural ramifications became a model for the kind of critical scholarship that revolutionized the discipline in the 1970s. Most studies since then see the Neues Bauen negatively. For instance, in their introduction to a New German Critique special issue on cities from 1992, Klaus Scherpe and Mitch Cohen bemoan the “pure functionalism” of the Bauhaus and the “naive utopianism” of Le Corbusier’s “functional city” (78, 72). However, Stanford Anderson, an architectural historian, in his essay “The Fiction of Function,” flatly rejected the notion of functionalism used by detractors of Modernist architecture, asserting first and foremost the paucity of the term as a visual descriptor.   Anderson contended not only that “few modernists even had functionalist intentions” but also that “any serious examination of the buildings [of Gropius and Corbusier] will reveal that none of them, whatever the surrounding rhetoric, can be explained functionally” (“Fiction of Function,” 20). These buildings are not, for Anderson, symbols of the political and economic system that produced them. Rather, they tell stories through space and its use that are valuable “fictions” about purpose and the living of everyday life. Though Anderson risks valorizing the Neues Bauen out of proportion to its achievements, he is right to point out that the intentions of Modernists such as Gropius and Corbusier were much more diverse in their intellectual heritage and social dimensions than Bloch or Adorno would be willing to admit. Stanford Anderson, “The Fiction of Function,” Assemblage 2 (February 1987): 18–31.

48  Building Socialism developed his theory of operativity during his time at a collective farm in the Caucasus around 1930. In attempting to represent life on the collectives for Moscow journals, Tret’iakov concluded that his own participation in life there was the only way to deliver a realistic and party-minded yet experimental picture of revolutionary economic and social change. For the operative writer, the act of writing did not grow from observation. Instead, it emerged from the subsumation of the author into the collective whose life and spaces were to be conveyed to readers.53 For operative writers, architecture was a site for exploring the use of space and countering technophile photography that glorified the hyper-modern appearance of new buildings. On the one hand, the operative model saw architecture as an object like any other, part of the working class’s ongoing organization of the means of production. Yet, the self-reflexive subjectivism which Tret’iakov’s embedded literary journalism left room for meant that formal experimentation still had a place. In 1931, Tret’iakov went on tour in Austria and Germany lecturing on the radical practice of “operativity” as a way to blur the line between mental and physical labor.54 The forms of the new art, in Tret’iakov’s view, should not result from a static, undialectical representation of reality, but rather from a materialist account of production that considered people’s motivations.55 It is resolutely empirical in that it insists on a knowable reality, but treats the social dimensions of that reality as a temporal process that impinges on the status of buildings. In the early to mid-1930s Brecht translated several of Tret’iakov’s works, while Walter Benjamin heard his lectures and used his ideas in his “Author as Producer” essay. Tret’iakov himself worked closely with John Heartfield to create exhibits of that artist’s work. The result of his experiences in this effort from 1932 to 1935 were recorded in his Menschen eines Scheiterhaufens (People on the Pyre), a group of montage-like portraits of leading German-speaking leftist artists and writers from Bertolt Brecht to Gregor Gog to Friedrich Wolf, which appeared in 1936.56 Architecture played an important role in these portraits. In Menschen eines Scheiterhaufens, as in his late 53 Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 161–3, 165–7, 170. 54 Tret’iakov’s tour was one of the major literary sensations of the year in Germany. Gottfried Benn devoted much of a 1931 summary of new literary developments in Germany to Tret’iakov. Gottfried Benn, “Die Neue literarische Saison,” Die Weltbühne 37 (1931): 403–8; reprinted in Russen in Berlin. Eine kulturelle Begegnung, ed. Fritz Mierau (Berlin: Quadriga, 1988), 552–61. 55 Ibid., 161–3. 56 Fritz Mierau, Erfindung und Korrektur. Tretjakows Ästhetik der Operativität (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976), 29–34, 41–2, 143.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 49 1920s plays, Tret’iakov asserted that writers and artists should be “monteurs of the everyday” and agitated for a total reorganization of the arts in coordination with revolutionary institutions from sport clubs to workers’ unions. The notion of the “montage” of everyday life, as Devin Fore has suggested, treated people and buildings as raw material whose diversity and contradiction needed to be matched by artworks themselves.57 Accordingly, Tret’iakov, like the Surrealists with their urban montages, was fascinated during his time in Germany by what he saw as the nearness of art and life in socialist neighborhoods.58 Such spaces included new buildings, whose visual vocabulary Tret’iakov criticized, but which were also imagined as platforms for a revolutionary agency that would construct communism. In terms of literary approach, Tret’iakov’s “building of life” through space entailed a rejection of simplistic metaphors. Tret’iakov found melodramatic depictions of heroic factory construction ineffective because they failed to participate adequately in the on-the-ground reality of such building projects. Though he acknowledged his and Socialist Realist writers’ shared goal of creating new forms of culture, he deplored the tendency of much Soviet prose to overemphasize grand metaphors for socialist achievement.59 According to Mierau, Tret’iakov had come by 1930 to see the shifting of his own artistic approach from the merely documentary to the operative as part of “the final casting off of the fetters of old socialism metaphors.”60 Thus, for Tret’iakov, representing new architecture through metaphor was a highly anti-participatory, and thus regressive, literary endeavor. In Menschen eines Scheiterhaufens, architecture is always tied to its use by German revolutionaries and to the advancement of revolutionary consciousness. Tret’iakov’s portrait of the anarcho-socialist Gregor Gog starts with the juxtaposition of Gog’s 1929 conference of the homeless in Stuttgart and the Modernist showpiece Weißenhofsiedlung in the same city (see Figure 1): Stuttgart is full of houses whose transparent floors are belted by curved panes; concrete bands transform the tower of a building into a gigantic voltaic [battery] pile. On a particular piece of land, as big as several residential districts, stands a “collection of houses.” Here, the construction fantasy of the best architects of Europe was allowed to run riot. The houses were built for an exhibition, but remained standing afterward: the white concrete 57 Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 145–55. 58 Mierau, Erfindung, 58, 101, 147–8. 59 Ibid., 59. 60 Ibid., 120.

50  Building Socialism box of Corbusier, a kind of meteorological control cabin on metal legs high above the ground. The one wall of the house is constituted by a continuous double-window, nestled into braces between the panes. In Stuttgart, jokes are already going around about how cold the inhabitants of this stilt-house of the epoch of electricity and aluminum must have it in winter. One house was built by Bruno Taut. A genuine druse in the middle of crystals grown into each other. The wall orange, blue, gray, and brown as though it were not a house but rather a toy for gigantic children.61 Tret’iakov defines modern architecture here as fetishistic in its embrace of scientific modernity. The houses are also seen as architectural fantasies rather than buildings in which to live and are undialectical in their reliance on one architect’s design. Created for display at an exhibition rather than to solve a concrete dilemma, they are more like full-scale architectural models than roofs over their dwellers’ heads. Modern architecture, for Tret’iakov as for Brecht, appears as a bourgeois relic that overvalues fashionability and science and undervalues the real act of human dwelling. However, Tret’iakov is more open-ended in his critique than Brecht. In his portrait of Friedrich Wolf, the socialist doctor-turned-writer, Tret’iakov sees redemption for Modernist architecture in its use. Wolf’s Modernism, including his affirmation of architectural Modernism, is acceptable because it is dialectically linked to his tactical agitation for improved health care for the proletariat. Thus, it is with a lighter sense of humor that Tret’iakov describes Wolf’s Modernist house: “The house—a white cube. Fragment of a sanatorium. And a street name of aluminum, lightness, and air—Zeppelin Street. It resembles the chalkwhite streets of Yalta or Sebastapol.”62 Here the aluminum is not merely Futurist or experimental because the materials and spaces are in dialectical tension with the artist’s contributions to revolution. Furthermore, Wolf’s house is compared to a sanatorium and the cities mentioned are Black Sea health resorts; these connections allow Tret’iakov to reveal the Modernist architectural milieu in which the German playwright positions himself as an integral part of his medical activism: “Wolf is a doctor who thinks about health cities and sports schools. He wants to 61 Sergei Tret’iakov, “Der König der Vagabunden,” in Erfindung und Korrektur: Tretjakows Ästhetik der Operativität, ed. Fritz Mierau (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1976), 247–8. 62 Segei Tret’iakov, “Menschen eines Scheiterhaufens: Friedrich Wolf,” in Sergei Tretjakow: Lyrik, Dramatik, Prosa, ed. Fritz Mierau (Frankfurt am Main: Röderberg, 1972), 380.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 51

Figure 1  Double House at the Weißenhofsiedlung, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Stuttgart, 1927. get all people more air, sun, and water. He is proud of air-bath centers and gymnastics schools in whose construction he participated.”63 Wolf does not merely observe new spaces (the “sports schools” and “health cities”) but also participates in their building, lending to their construction his expert knowledge as a doctor. From this perspective, it is clear why, in the text, Wolf’s house resembles a sanatorium rather than the trumped up architectural models to which Tret’iakov likens the Weißenhofsiedlung. The pared down forms of Wolf’s house grow from first-hand experience of the material struggle to improve workers’ health rather than being imposed top-down as an artist-architect’s aesthetic interpretation of the spirit of the machine age. We can read Tret’iakov’s literary architecture as a vehicle through which he exacted a critique of Stalinist technocracy using an associational flexibility that could make buildings that looked alike mean different things depending on their use. The rise of institutional Stalinism in the Soviet Union had made the cultural climate there hostile to Tret’iakov’s critical dialectics as well as to the radical architecture of Moshei Ginzburg, Konstantin Melnikov, and others.64 In a text written 63 Ibid., 386–7. 64 Victor Buchi, An Archaeology of Socialism (New York: Berg, 1999), 63–6.

52  Building Socialism shortly before his journey to Germany, Tret’iakov complains about spineless technocrats who are unable to make decisions without first consulting plans and norms.65 In the same essay, Tret’iakov asserts that by engaging with architecture, operative writers can help combat such technocratic tendencies: People who participate in construction gather tremendous experience, but this experience lies in the best case in the form of report notes with the authorities. Not yet described are Moscow and hundreds of other cities. Not yet described are our factories, day cares, state-owned farmsteads, sanatoriums, collective farms, deer-breeding sites, tundras, and tractor factories.66 For Tret’iakov, writers’ operative participation in the building and writing of revolutionary architecture, of city planning, of sanatoriums, of kindergartens and of factories, is a dialectical counterweight to the positivist bureaucratic culture of memo-writing. Going a step beyond Brecht, Tret’iakov had come to see that, while white walls, aluminum window frames, and Corbusian pilotis were not inherently revolutionary based on form alone, neither were they inherently retrograde. Forms, be they pared down or decorative, had to be seen in terms of revolutionary action rather than positivist prescriptions. From this vantage, Tret’iakov, though there is no specific evidence of this, was beginning to sense that cultural Stalinism in its critique of formalism was itself formalist.67 By assuming ornament based on national tradition to have inherently positive value, Stalinists committed themselves to a certain kind of form as projecting revolutionary spirit.68 So Tret’iakov’s task in the end was reintroducing the vigor of stateless German socialism into state-dominated Soviet communism. This was a suspicion of state power, at least as wielded by Stalin, which would cost Tret’iakov his life during the purges of the late 1930s. Though Brecht had his doubts about Stalin early on, he did not gain Tret’iakov’s dual spatial perspective until late in his life. He bequeathed the paradoxes and contradictions of this perspective to writers in the GDR who would struggle with the same dissatisfaction with Stalinism and technophile positivism.69 Tret’iakov’s method of operativity and its 65 Sergei Tret’iakov, “Fortsetzung folgt,” in Lyrik, Dramatik, Prosa, ed. Fritz Mierau (Frankfurt am Main: Röderburg, 1972), 208–9. 66 Ibid., 212. 67 Curtis, Modern Architecture, 358–9. 68 Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (New York: Berg, 1999), 65–6. 69 Yet Tret’iakov himself in his literary method revealed a lingering formalist

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 53 empirical, use-centered view of architecture had a chequered afterlife in the GDR. Heiner Müller saw himself as an operative writer in the mold of Tret’iakov in the mid-1950s and his early play Der Lohndrücker reflects operativity’s insistence on the empirical reality of buildings’ use. Archival documents reveal that during this time, he saw the East German literary sphere as characterized by a conflict between Tret’iakovian experimentality and Socialist Realist traditionalism.70 But as Evgeny Dobrenko has shown, early 1930s Stalinist cultural functionaries in the Soviet Union, far from rejecting operativity in their concept of Socialist Realism, borrowed heavily from it. Dobrenko has traced how the Young Guard, of which Mayakovsky and Tret’iakov were members, had been merged into the Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in the mid-1920s. It was from RAPP that many of the impulses, such as operativity, for overcoming the gap between intellectuals and proletarians came in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The RAPPists recruited hundreds of thousands of correspondents in cities and villages across the Soviet Union to report back on the progress of socialism’s advance in their area. In turn, RAPP sent members out to those areas to train reporters and file reports themselves.71 These reporters, Tret’iakov included, aided in Socialist Realism’s side visible in his willingness to make recourse to long-used literary devices like analogy and irony. These literary gestures, though, went hand in hand with Tret’iakov’s self-identification as a participatory member of the working class enacting its revolution at the level of daily life. But Tret’iakov’s set designs reveal too that he was not immune to architectural and design fashion. Among the astounding and fresh fields Devin Fore opened with his Realism after Modernism was the wealth of archival material on the productions of Tret’iakov’s 1927 play, I want a baby. Fore deftly traces the nuanced way in which the set design was intended to convey a dissolution of traditional subjectivity in favor of a representation of the actor-character as body on the revolutionary stage. Fore’s characterization can be supplemented, however, using the tools of visual analysis. The set design draws on the language of Tatlin’s 1922 monument to Lenin even as its stark geometries recall the Constructivist compostions of the late 1910s. Given that the set design is nearly a decade after this visual revolution, it is worth asking the extent to which Modernist forms had become politically vogue in the Soviet Union by the late 1920s—themselves an architecturally associational evocation of the most radical days of revolutionary progress. 70 Heiner Müller, “DDR-Literatur,” Heiner-Müller-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, File 4548. 71 Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the Soviet Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 191–3. Dobrenko can help add to Bathrick’s argument about the status of RAPP and associated techniques in the 1950s GDR. The appropriation of radical operativity was not unique to the post-war period, but in fact had a precedent in the Soviet Union.

54  Building Socialism indoctrination of new writers by participating in the re-education programs RAPP increasingly was devising.72 With its massive call for writing “shockworkers” of socialism in 1930 and 1931, RAPP created a wide base of support for its re-education programs just in time for the group’s dissolution into the controlled and centralized Union of Soviet Writers in 1932 under Stalin’s cadres.73 It was in this reduced form that Tret’iakov’s “operativity” was tamed by Socialist Realism’s statist project.74 This kind of taming would be the model for the SED’s call in 1951 for more literature on socialist production and for the first Bitterfeld conference of 1959.75 Müller’s Der Lohndrücker, against Stalinized operativity in the GDR, used an empirical approach to the built environment to counter the culture of Stalinist propaganda. By the time of Der Bau, Müller had given up on such empiricism and had turned instead to counter-metaphorics to register the negative effects of new built spaces on laborers’ bodies and psyches. There are, in addition, thematic similarities between Tret’iakov’s written architecture and that of GDR writers. The notion of built architecture as an overgrown model or plan would resurface in Brigitte Reimann’s Frankziska Linkerhand as an increasingly metaphoric critique of modern architecture at the height of the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Key for Tret’iakov is that he recognized at Weißenhof a brand of architectural model-making that he had to some extent already seen in the Soviet Union. The idea that such spaces can be redeemed through use also resurfaces in Reimann and in Günter Kunert’s Berlin thought-images of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which he ruminates on how future generations of users will perceive the structures. This dynamic of criticizing modernity and seeking a dialectical antidote to it is a driving force in the increasing structural fragmentation of Reimann’s and Kunert’s work.

Seghers’s Realism: The Ambiguous Status of Description

In his June 1927 review of Fyodor Gladkov’s instantly canonized novel Cement, Walter Benjamin complained that the factory Gladkov portrays 72 On Rapp and Socialist Realism, see Dobrenko, xv–xvii, 178. Dobrenko’s elegant argument outlines the attempt and ultimate success of Stalinists to limit the literary sphere entirely to Soviet experience as distinct from revolutionary or pre-revolutionary experience between 1900 and 1932. This process involved a remaking of aesthetic categories such as creativity, to which self-censorship and external censorship were seen as integral. The limitation of horizons was a foundational part of the creative act. 73 Ibid., 225–6. 74 Ibid., 226. 75 Marc D. Silberman, Literature of the Working World: A Study of the Industrial Novel in East Germany (Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang, 1976), 43–4.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 55 in the novel itself seemed a mere background, an external question for main characters grappling with the new society.76 Gladkov was, at least in Benjamin’s eyes, unable to integrate architectural description and concrete social change. Anna Seghers is the opposite of Gladkov: she makes architecture contingent on the class subjectivity of its users and subsumes it into narrative.77 Seghers’s implicit theory of architecture is that the contexts of class and place are determinant for the meanings of architectural space. This aligns her with the anti-formalists of twentiethcentury Marxism. She and they both thought that aesthetic innovation was not inherently a catalyst for revolutionary action. Yet architectural form is nevertheless important for Seghers. In the famous “WerkstattBesuch” text of 1932, in which Seghers puts herself in dialogue with a Chinese colleague writing about May Day celebrations in her country, the nature of Seghers’s focus on architectural detail is made clear. The interlocutor is working on a description of the working-class milieu in her country and Seghers intervenes: S.: Stop! Point! We have to make that sharper, the alley and the room. L.: Wait a minute. But that’s quite unimportant. The most important thing is the preparation [for the event]. What is being done. Whether the room was this way or that in which we were by chance sitting [is not important]. S.: You don’t have it right. Our descriptions should strengthen the reader in his co-celebration of the First of May—he will only be thus strengthened if he perceives while reading that the First of May is a world day of celebration, celebrated by everyone and by everyone differently. In Shanghai, a different action happens than in Berlin, and Yangshuo looks different than Wedding. What does it look like then this Yangshuo. L.: Yangshuo: willow banks. There lie the textile factories of Shanghai, Chinese and foreign! The textile proletariat lives there. S.: How does it live? In tenements? L.: Oh where. In long, narrow streets, in individual wooden huts, barracks in which they installed single, weak light bulbs. S.: Now we can see more sharply. Usually, one tells more vividly 76 Walter Benjamin, “Review of Gladkov’s Cement,” Die literarische Welt (June 1927), in Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 61–3. 77 See note 6 in this chapter. Fehervary casts Seghers’s depictions of the workingclass milieu in terms of Rembrandt’s depiction of Dutch peasants. My interpretation focuses on Seghers’s writing of architectural objects in terms of her implicit theory of those objects as cultural documents.

56  Building Socialism than one writes. If one connects in telling to things that happened and things have been heard, one connects while writing easily to other written things instead of to visible reality.78 Buildings are, for Seghers, cultural documents that house human activity and give its class component an understandable face. Designed forms are not privileged over informal ones and all of reality is equally subject to materialist analysis. Thus, she notes that “there is nothing in the home of the Chinese comrade that it not worth knowing.”79 Architecture is not art any more or less than other parts of reality, and architectural description is best rendered in an everyday, spoken prose that sees buildings in terms of lived working-class experience. Description of objects, for Seghers, is then a component of her broader effort to create stories that reveal the material exigencies and emotional dimensions of class struggle from the proletarian perspective. A passage further down in the “Werkstatt” piece gives evidence of how Seghers conceived of the politics of description: [S.:] You see also based on these shoes [of the Chinese comrade] that there is no such thing as “external” description. Elements of theses shoes: sewn up on the instep, splitting open at the toe, peeling soles—and—because an object often becomes sharper when you, instead of describing the thing itself thoroughly, portray its relationship to other objects—tall-shaft boots, rubber shoes, calf-leather, self-confident shoes splash ostentatiously by them in the puddles. L.: You talk about shoes like a detective. S.: Yes, one can also learn from mystery novels. Finding traces on objects, traces of a circumstance!80 Seghers advocates here for an avoidance of description as an idealist endeavor. She recommends instead that buildings be placed into contextual relationships with the world around them. Literary architecture should examine what a building is like and what its effects on viewers are: space and its use by the working class are inseparable. Seghers’s interlocutor points out that this mode of writing is like that of the detective novel in which surfaces are visual evidence that attest to the motivations that lie beneath them. Design of space as an idealist intellectual act is devalued; description of home 78 Anna Seghers, “Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt,” in Über Kunst und Wirklichkeit. II. Erlebnis und Gestaltung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1971), 12. 79 Ibid., 17. 80 Ibid., 15.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 57 interiors should help ensure that characters are “eating, sleeping, smelling creature[s]. [They] won’t take part in a paper demonstration for the newspaper, but will walk along in flesh and blood, walk next to the reader.”81 For Seghers, architecture is subsumed into storytelling; it becomes a quotidian art governed, as architectural theorist Roger Scruton puts it, by “the sense of what fits in everyday life.”82 Seghers was more interested in lived revolutionary consciousness than she was in critiques of modern bourgeois life. She writes little on the new architecture of any of the times or places in which she lived. When she represents new buildings, she does so only obliquely. The second book of Die Rettung (1937), a novel about a Silesian miner’s turn to communism in a time in which fascism was broadening its reach, contains her most direct reckoning with the Modernist architecture that her Frankfurt School contemporaries saw as functionalist. The corporate headquarters of the mining company, which the novel’s main working-class characters visit with trepidation in a passage early in the work, is described in terms of the characters’ subjectivities. Seghers, as usual, tries studiously to avoid an “external” description that could give a picture of the building outside of the emotional and social situations of the people represented in the novel: The headquarters of the Montan on Ludwigsplatz looked white and new. On the stairway in front of the main gate, not just Janusch looked like a dwarf. The former headquarters on Hindenburgplatz, that was now just for management for the Matthias mine, looked trust-inducing compared to this building. They made their presence known [at the door]. They were let in. Bentsch took his hat off. Just then, he felt as he had when he, as a soldier in a foreign city, entered a cathedral for the first time. Here too, half of the wall was made of glass, but the glass surface was empty. His three companions seemed to find nothing special about this stairway whose walls were ash gray and whose steps were the red of fire. Never had Bentch seen such a stair rail; on this black, mirror-smooth wood, no hand had likely ever sought support.83 Much of this passage is in keeping with Seghers’s willingness to subsume architecture into her story. The specific visual details of the structure seem secondary in importance to its impact on the miner Bentsch: the structure fails to solicit his “trust”; though “empty,” its 81 Ibid. 82 See note 4 in the Introduction. 83 Anna Seghers, Die Rettung (West Berlin: Luchterhand, 1965), 60.

58  Building Socialism glass windows recall for him those of a cathedral. But the building is new around the time in which the novel is set (around 1930); it is white with extensive glazing, contains polished wood, and has as its main colors red, gray and black, the signature colors of Bauhaus graphic design. These details indicate that the building is an example of international style Modernism—an extra-textual reference that threatens the internality of the description. The reference to Bauhaus color schemes and the echoing of Blochian and Lukascian language for characterizing Modernist architectures ultimately bring this passage closer to the “external” critique of Modernist architecture typical among socialist intellectuals at the time. However briefly, Seghers allows her idealist engagement with the surface phenomena of modernity to become visible. In a speech to German writers in 1947 upon her return from exile in Mexico, Seghers revisited the architecture of her time and again placed modern architecture not just in terms of working-class consciousness. Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli, a hulking stone museum in the southern part of Mexico City designed in 1945 and built in 1946 and 1947 to display the socialist painter’s collection of pre-Colombian art, evokes politically important associations (see Figure 2): In Pedregal, the name for a greened-over volcanic valley by Mexico City, Rivera is building a house of black, white, and gray lava stone working together with a hand-full of workers in a close harmony of craft and art, a harmony that, in past centuries, allowed the efforts of Italian artists to come to fruition. The house, in which even the window supports and the shelves for the pre-Cortesian collections are fashioned of black igneous stone, appears as a cathedral of Satan. It lies in the strong sunlight not angelic, like a castle in the air, but rather peculiarly dark, like the fortress of Vulcan or of Satan, but inviting rather than gloomy. The building material works against fresco. For that reason, Rivera placed on the ceilings of the same igneous stone, a mosaic with the locally prevailing ornaments, with snakes and plants and above all with skulls. Because death plays a great role in the imagination of this people. It has nothing to do with the death of the bible, or with the death, that in Europe stands threatening in our own, ancient folk tales. It is much older still, an immortal death as it was animate in the Aztec, pre-Cortesian time in Mexico.84 84 Anna Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit: Mexikanische Fresken,” in Woher sie kommen, wohin sie gehen: Essays aus vier Jahrzehnten, ed. Manfred Behn (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980), 102.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 59

Figure 2  Anahuacalli Museum, Diego Rivera, Mexico City, 1947.

Seghers lauds the building’s connections to craft tradition, the earthbounded-ness of its materials, its shunning of the spare and skeletal lightness of international style Modernism, and its ornamentation typical of its place of origin. Evoking Satan and Vulcan rather than the angelic heights of a castle in the air, the building is a kind of negative of the corporate headquarters represented in Die Rettung, a light, empty, anti-human cathedral of capitalism. Rivera’s Anahuacalli evokes religion, but is dark, heavy, rooted, and culturally specific. In its telling of stories about death, it appears for Seghers to be truly affirmative of the revolutionary possibility of a more humane world beyond capitalism’s unacknowledged cult of death. The forms of the Anahuacalli resemble that of a group of buildings constructed in Germany between 1914 and 1924 that scholars retroactively labeled Expressionist. These include, most famously, the Goetheanum by Rudolf Steiner and the Einstein Tower in Potsdam by Erich Mendelsohn (see Figure 3). Typically Expressionist are the Anahuacalli’s physiognomical facade composition, its cave-like massing, and its eschewing of ornamentation typical of nineteenthcentury historicism.85 Seghers implicitly advocates here for an ornamented architecture that is regionally specific and built outside 85 This formal definition of Expressionist architecture comes from Wolfang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus, 3rd edn (Ostfildern: Hatje Canz, 1998).

60  Building Socialism

Figure 3  Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1924. of ordinary architectural economies and whose use serves a higher function than the merely economic. These characteristics resemble Bloch’s idealist attempts, also suffused by a refusal to relinquish aspects of the Expressionist project, to work ex negativo from alienated capitalist situations to design the outlines of a utopian future. Seghers’s engagement with this Modernist building reveals the extent to which, by the late 1940s, she saw value in the Expressionist confrontation with capitalist modernity, something that distinguishes her thinking from that of her friend and mentor, Lukacs. Again, the level at which Rivera’s eccentric work of modern architecture must be understood is not solely the consciousness of the proletariat, but rather the history of the arts in Germany starting in the early part of the twentieth century. Modern architecture, for Seghers, thus stands poised between its role as a symptom of modernity and its status as part of everyday life. This view of architecture extended to Seghers’s representation of urban space. The street was for Seghers both a tangible location with specific forms and a social institution. In describing the potential for working-class self-organization toward the beginning of Die Rettung, Seghers makes use of a fundamentally social understanding of the street: “Suddenly the whole street looked more like a demonstration than like the typical arrival of the first shift.”86 Here, the street consists 86 Seghers, Die Rettung, 63.

Socialist Writers and Modern Architecture 61 of the people in the street and their social practices as much as of the bricks and mortar of the physical city. Yet, Seghers also used descriptions of the physical fabric of the street as a vehicle for making visible the changes wrought by modern technology, planning, and market economies. Urban change at the fringes of the mining town in Die Rettung is an important descriptive component of the novel’s early sections: The few streets beyond Hindenburgplatz were, among themselves, and even in their individual sections as different as whole cities usually are. Matthias Recklich Street was like Finglinger Street, a kind of village street. Only the corner house after Blumenthal Street was five stories. All the houses in Blumenthal Street were five or six stories, uniform, and gloomy. The sides on the interior courts, where the balconies swarmed with people, stood above the roofs of Humboldt Street. These had been laid out after the War, orange colored row houses, arranged toward the sunny side. Gumper Street ended completely after a few house numbers and became like a country road. Only this country road was cut off after just 200 meters by a brick wall; a couple of brick buildings that belonged to the Matthiasgrube [mining company] lay behind. An extension of the coal dump reached all the way to the street and overran the little garden colonies that had been planted there. Seen from Hindenburgplatz, the mine shaft tower seemed to jut out from the hill crest. The distance between its tip and the sky seemed negligible.87 The passage is an almost filmic evocation of working-class life in tenement neighborhoods that comes less from the art of Rembrandt and more from conventional depictions of working-class life in the film and literature of the interwar period. The image of people thronging the balconies at the rear sides of the houses on Blumenthaler Strasse recalls the tenement neighborhood of the main characters in Piel Jutzi’s Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (1928). This filmic dimension enhances the sense that each street here takes on a representative type within a mini-typology of urban spaces at the city periphery (improvised dwellings, post-World War I tenements, country roads soon to be developed). This typology reveals a picture of a marginal, industrial neighborhood born of environmental destruction and neglectful of the needs of its inhabitants—a city built for business rather than people. Again, the engagement with new architecture leads Seghers to an engagement with the modern as an idea, rather than as a reality 87 Ibid., 32–3.

62  Building Socialism exclusively as perceived by working-class subjects. The effect is to establish for the reader a definite division between the narrator’s raw description and characters’ perception which, unusally for Seghers, seems secondary. Analysing changing urban space requires Seghers to step back from the raw representation of working-class consciousness to the level of authorial commentary, in this case on the nature of the modern city and its relation to capitalist economies. In the GDR, the tension in Seghers’s work between the subversion of architecture to working-class subjectivity and the idealist critique of the symbolic dimensions of architectural forms has its strongest afterlife in the work of Christa Wolf. For Wolf, though, it is not working-class subjectivity that drives storytelling, as it had in Seghers’s work, but rather the subjectivity of intellectuals in a nominally working-class state. In Nachdenken über Christa T., the tension between the glass architecture of modernity and the heavy, stone architecture of primitivist Expressionism resurface in a context in which Wolf is radically reconsidering the relationship between socialism and science. The associational avoidance of ekphrasis remains from Seghers, but the architectural idealism latent in her work is used to make theoretical claims about the relationship between working-class control of the means of production, instrumental rationalism, and the formation of self. In Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand, the street as a fundamentally social entity is at work, but is given new political elan through the author’s engagement with international discourses on urbanism in the 1960s and by the systematic demolition by city planners in the GDR of the proletarian milieu in which Seghers’s greatest works are set. Not only were all but official demonstrations curbed in the GDR, but spontaneous street life itself came under threat. For Reimann, the mass mobilization of working-class agency that Seghers’s saw as the potential power of the “street” has become instead an officialized ritual in need of correction through populist counter-agency in the form of vital, diverse street culture. Seghers’s stinging critiques of capitalist urbanism resurface in a similarly reversed way in Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine and Karl-Heinz Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers. Seghers lamented the subverting of urban space to the needs of production under capitalism through grim images of industrial space’s negative effect on everyday life. Neutsch and Jakobs by contrast portray the horror of living near socialist industrial complexes only to soften the impact of their raw descriptions through stories that mitigate against the bleakness of industrial cityscapes. The social universes they develop in their novels thus read as strategies for managing the anxiety, legible in the descriptive passages, that cities built to serve socialist industries too closely resemble those built to serve capitalism.

Part II Architecture, Theater, and the Early Years of the Scientific-Technological Revolution

64

Two Confronting the Construction Site: Heiner Müller from Operativity to Metaphor

In a conversation with East German literature scholar Robert Weimann in 1989, Heiner Müller addressed the effect of computer technology on art, human self-conception, and revolutionary political agendas. He expressed the worry that computers will totally destroy and supplant the human in all its forms; for Müller, new video technology makes possible exact visual representations of reality, the effect of which is felt in viewers’ bodies: “you have to buckle-up [while watching], or you’ll end up dead or break all your bones. Total illusion—and that is the actual preparation for computerization. And you can only work against it through [the] fusion of theater and reality, I think.”1 This fusion, for the playwright, consists in eliminating the division between audience and stage and destroying theater as a specialist field. He goes on to say that the other field of production in which this destruction of the boundary between representation and reality is contained is architecture. Yet readings of two of Müller’s early plays, Der Lohndrücker (1956/7) and Der Bau (1963/4), reveal, in addition to the redemptive view of architecture as a revolutionary art, the view that buildings form part of the same technological regime as computers, able to penetrate and supplant the human. In Müller’s conception of architecture, buildings can be either something invasive, an imposition on human beings, or part of a productive dialectical relationship with them. This dual view of architecture and revolution is not surprising. Architectural theoreticians have ascribed to buildings an absolutism of intent, resting on the unavoidable fact that architecture occupies space, and a freedom, singular among the arts in post-Enlightenment 1 Heiner Müller, Werke 11, Die Gespräche 2, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 473.

66  Building Socialism Europe, from any pretense to an artistic autonomy. For philosopher Roger Scuton, “[architecture] takes up space: either it crushes out of existence what has gone before, or else it attempts to blend and harmonize. Architecture, as Ruskin emphasized, is the most political of the arts, in that it imposes a vision of man and his aims independently of any personal agreement on the part of those who live within it.”2 However, architecture is also “primarily a vernacular art: it exists first and foremost as a process of arrangement in which every normal man may participate, and indeed does participate, to the extent that he builds, decorates or arranges his rooms.”3 In built space’s quotidian nature lies an egalitarian creative potential; on the other hand, its solidity offers a willfully static resistance to dialectical flexibility. For Hermann Henselmann, whose work was treated in the introduction, and for Müller, this dualism takes on political urgency in its connection to socialist revolution and the paradoxes of modernity. In his 1962 essay, “Schöpferische Probleme der Architektur” (Creative Problems of Architecture), the architect reacted with dismay to the banality of Berlin’s newest apartment buildings. He called for architects to pursue a design strategy that would bring “mutability and durability into a dialectical unity with one another.”4 Henselmann sees the dual quality of built space, its undeniable imposition on the social realm and its “mutability” as a useful piece of everyday life, as something positive. In typewritten notes dated to the 1960–5 period of Müller’s career and available in his archive, the playwright expressed this dialectic more negatively. In so doing, he focused on specific shortcomings of city building in the GDR and the broader problem of modern planning apparatuses: “City planning reflects lack (atrophy) of historical consciousness. Present is only mastered by mastering the future, mastering of the future assumes mastery of the past[,] Brecht: today goes fed by yesterday into tomorrow.”5 In trying to shape future spaces, architecture is caught in a paradox: its intrusive aspect appears as a static disregard for the past, but the past remains crucial to any future political value that users of built space might create. Müller’s subsequent note in the same archival document does not indicate this paradox to be either entirely limiting or entirely productive: “Political task of architecture: contribution to the remediation of the lack that it 2

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 15. 3 Ibid. 4 Hermann Henselmann, “Schöpferische Probleme der Architektur,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 117. 5 Akademie der Künste, Heiner-Müller-Archiv, File 5125.

Confronting the Construction Site 67 reflects.”6 The two plays treated in this chapter address the extent to which GDR architecture, as a modern architecture, in its production and use both articulates and helps remediate its own rejection of the past and its own willful modernity. Are Müller’s factories, to use Henselmann’s terms, merely “durable” expressions of power structures, or are they interventions in history upon which an adaptable humanity can take revolutionary action? In Der Lohndrücker, architecture lives up to its resistive potential as a platform for political action. The play is Müller’s version of the legendary story of Hans Garbe’s 1949 rebuilding of a faulty circular blast furnace at the Siemens-Plania in Berlin and of the ire of his co-workers at the wage-suppressing pace of his labor. In offices, on the factory floor, and at the state-run Handelsorganisation (HO) canteen, the working-class characters debate the problems of rebuilding. These scenes reveal that the state’s new buildings gain political value through the process of their production and the conditions of their use, rather than through the proclamations of the Stalinist press and the fantasies of Stalinist poster designers. The literary vehicle for this resistance is the precise, materialist language of the workers, born of Müller’s mid-1950s empiricism and an operativity drawn from Tret’iakov’s writings about construction sites. Yet there are hints, particularly in the set designs for the play, that Müller is already moving toward seeing new East German buildings not just in their relationship to the Second World phenomenon of Stalinist culture, but to the project of modernity more broadly. This entailed, for the playwright, a move away from a Tret’iakovian focus on “reality” and toward a Modernist metaphorics that could adequately capture the scale of East Germany’s vast construction sites as interventions in history. Scholars have noted that Müller’s successive drafts of Der Bau became increasingly metaphoric over the course of 1964 as the play strayed further from the plot outline set forth in Erik Neutsch’s novel, Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, 1963), upon which it was based.7 This turn to metaphor in Müller’s writing in fact began earlier. His play Die Korrektur (The Correction, 1958) underwent official censure after a double-performance with Der Lohndrücker in 1958. The playwright responded with an essay published in Neue deutsche Literatur that reveals that he was already considering the modernity of the socialist Großbaustelle (large construction site) and its effects on subjectivity in a metaphoric way that went beyond the empirical operativity of 6 Ibid. 7 See Helen Fehervary, “Heiner Müllers Brigadenstücke,” as reprinted in Mit den Toten reden: Fragen an Heiner Müller, ed. Jost Hermand and Helen Fehervary (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1999), 1–38.

68  Building Socialism Lohndrücker. For Müller, the central question of Der Bau was the extent to which newly created material spaces, as authoritarian impositions, were painfully fashioning new subjectivities even as they perpetrated new forms of cruelty on the bodies of those laboring to build them. The play’s metaphors were the vehicle for making this process visible. In thus linking metaphor to a modernity made by human beings but acting back on them in unpredictable ways, the play anticipates by fifteen years Müller’s first direct theorization of metaphor in his essay “Fatzer + Keuner,” in which he asserted that, “fear of the metaphor is fear of the autonomous dynamics of the material world.”8 Human beings were making a built environment that affected them negatively. Dissociative and dissonant metaphor was the anxious response to the loss of control of the products of labor. But it was not just any product that required such dissonance. The enormous construction site of the lignite processing facility Schwarze Pumpe, which Müller visited in 1956, sparked a concentrated rumination in Der Bau on GDR built space in relation to the strictures imposed by modernity.9 Two central metaphors govern this rumination in the play: that of bodies pursued and destroyed by building parts, such as cooling towers, and by building materials, such as concrete and stone, and that of the incarcerated body. Müller delivers these metaphors in brutal terms and connects East Germany’s building industry to wartime industrial production in the Third Reich. Such connections mean that the metaphors of the construction site in Der Bau prefigure the understanding of the Holocaust that Müller would develop in interviews in the 1980s and to which he gave the name Prinzip Auschwitz. He defined the Prinzip Auschwitz as the spatial “selection” by power structures of bodies to be cordoned off and denigrated and those to be promoted as healthy. He saw the central task of post-war society as forging an “alternative” to Auschwitz. He worried, though, that this task was impossible: technology and rationality were the only tools available in the search for alternatives, but they were tainted because they had been complicit in the Holocaust in the first place.10 In its simultaneous necessity and impossibility, the Auschwitz principle is governed by a paradox analogous to that which Müller had seen in GDR architecture 8 Heiner Müller, Werke 8, Schriften, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 225. 9 Der Bau is not set at Schwarze Pumpe. It is set rather, as was Neutsch’s novel, at a fictionalized version of the petro-chemical city at Leuna near Halle-Neustadt. Schwarze Pumpe was the industrial site that Müller visited in preparation for his production plays. 10 Müller offered this definition in a 1990 conversation with Alexander Kluge, to be treated in greater detail in a later section of this chapter. Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 641.

Confronting the Construction Site 69 in the early 1960s, as seen in the archival document above. As will be shown, the metaphoric destruction and imprisonment of bodies on the large-scale production site in East Germany forms, for Müller, part of a spectrum of modern instances of a Prinzip Auschwitz that is locatable beyond the specific context of the Third Reich; he would later assert that Kafka and Dostoyesvky both recognized and wrote about that principle and that, in a characteristically irreverent and pointed formulation from the 1980s, it is enacted by players of violent video games. Further evidence for Der Bau’s anticipation of the Prinzip Auschwitz is found in the play’s influence on Günter Kunert’s “Betonformen” (Concrete Forms, 1968), a thought image about the Buchenwald concentration camp. Kunert was likely to have been aware of Der Bau given its publication in Sinn und Form in 1965 and his and Müller’s mutual regard. In “Betonformen,” Kunert used Müller’s metaphor of concrete to capture the horror of the Holocaust itself and the political urgency of the post-war reckoning with the Nazi crimes. While Der Bau appears at first glance to be about construction processes rather than traumatic history, Kunert’s transferring of Müller’s metaphors to a work explicitly about the Shoah shows that he intuited the historical stakes of a play that seemed to be about socialist construction. These arguments are traced in this chapter through six sections. The first shows how the factory in Der Lohdrücker became a site of revolutionary action meant to counter bloated Stalinist representations of industrial space. It also indicates the aspects of the play that hint that Müller is moving toward a broader focus on modernity. The second section explores the playwright’s full transition to that broader focus and his attendant turn to metaphor. That transition was driven on the one hand by operativity’s taming by GDR Stalinists. But key texts in Müller’s personal library, including pre-war socialist F. C. Weiskopf’s writings on the new Soviet towns and early essays by Herbert Marcuse, also reveal that the playwright was viewing architecture and modernity through an expansive historical lens. In section three, justification is offered for connecting Der Bau to the Prinzip Auschwitz by analysing Kunert’s “Betonformen” and Müller’s later conversations, in which he saw the death camps as the central event of modernity. Section four treats the play’s metaphors of bodies mutilated by buildings, while section five traces the metaphor of workers imprisoned on the construction site. The chapter closes with a brief epilogue. The materials Müller used in writing Der Bau and his connection to Henselmann show that, while Der Bau largely represents modern built space as authoritarian, Müller nevertheless retained traces of the dialectical notion, most often associated with Henri Lefebvre, that the grim spaces of modernity could yield their emancipatory opposite.

70  Building Socialism

Buildings Against Paper

In a 1953 review of a volume of highly architectural poems by GDR poets, Müller criticized the banal Stalinist lyrics for being like still-life paintings whose objects are “romantically registered.” Such merely “registered” objects, according to Müller, are presented as part of a reified present rather than as part of the dialectical motions of history as driven by scientifically-minded human beings.11 Better would be representing the building process “in chemically pure form” in a way that is “without images, plastic, clear und clarifying.”12 Müller relies here on an idiosyncratic mixture of the early Lukacsian focus on combatting reification and an enthusiasm for a scientific socialism reconcilable with Enlightenment notions of progress. This pitting of a hard-edged science focused on a clarion notion of the “real” against “reifying” impulses governed Müller’s conception of built space through 1956, the year in which he started writing Der Lohndrücker and in which he first visited one of the GDR’s large new construction sites. As mentioned, the play is Müller’s version of the Hans Garbe story, with the Garbe figure carrying the name Balke. It focuses not, as previous versions of the story had, on the heroic repair of the Berlin Siemens-Plania’s broken-down circular furnace but rather on the disputes between workers and among workers and engineers that ultimately produce a tenuous coalition committed to the rebuilding effort. In fifteen short scenes, all of which take place on the factory’s floor or in its offices and canteen, workers from the Old Communist to the former Nazi munitions-plant laborer debate their material interests and their status within the changing economic and social world of the Soviet zone of occupation and the young GDR. Readings of the play have emphasized Müller’s willingness to represent dialectical processes from within the constraints of imperfect political systems and have taken stock of the unsentimental quality of the play as a dialectical analysis.13 They have also noted how the contrast between official rhetoric and the on-the-ground reality of lived experience in the GDR was a central political point of the play.14 While Der Lohndrücker was not set at the Schwarze Pumpe, Jonathan Kalb has read the play as a response to the officially touted open letter 11 Müller, Werke 8, Schriften, 23–4. 12 Ibid., 21, 25. 13 The two standard readings of the play in this connection are Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Sozialistisches Drama nach Brecht. Drei Modelle: Peter Hacks—Heiner Müller—Hartmut Lange (Darmstadt: Lucherhand, 1974) and Fehervary, “Heiner Müllers Brigadenstücke.” 14 David Bathrick, “Agitproptheater in der DDR: Auseinandersetzung mit einer Tradition,” in Dramatik der DDR, ed. Ulrich Profitlich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 128–49, 113.

Confronting the Construction Site 71 from workers at the People’s Brown Coal Factory there demanding literature more relevant to their daily lives.15 Kalb sees Mayakovsky as a historical precedent for Müller’s work during this phase of his career, but Tret’iakov’s “operative” writing is a more apt point of comparison when it comes to the language Müller developed to capture the hard material realities of life in the factory. Like Tret’iakov in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, Müller depended on a side-by-side engagement with laborers responding to a given set of demands being placed on them through new forms of economic planning most readily experienced in building projects. Müller announces this focus on empirical tangibility at the start of the play. The opening scene features a young man studying a poster that reads “SED—Partei des Aufbaus.” After inspecting the image, he tears it off the wall and throws it to the ground; three laborers step on it as they walk by.16 The curtain closes and rises again on Scene Two, set at the HO canteen near the factory where the Garbe-figure, Balke, works. The plain, bare-bones interior space, as conceived for the 1958 production of the play for which rehearsal photographs are available, is adorned with slogans and posters, this time exhorting employees vaguely: “Forward to new successes.” Rather than celebrate their achievements, however, the workers, using boxes as improvised chairs, sit around their rough table and complain about high prices for staple goods.17 The practical use of the space links it to a vital working-class subjectivity that counteracts its Stalinist dematerialization through the images plastered on its walls; as such, this key built space becomes an empirical test case for reinvigorating socialist revolution as a dynamic process rather than a reified set of symbols. The fact that the scene is set in the HO canteen is crucial. From at least the time of the first Five-Year Plan, the HO had been integrated into the foundational spatial metaphors of the GDR. A poster printed in Dresden in 1951, redacted by the HO and financed under its budget, attests to this (see Figure 4). The image shows in the foreground the rough outline of a bricklayer building a wall. In the background are four figures: a man and woman, presumably a couple, and a mother and daughter. They stand on a street whose perspective is angled dynamically across the surface of the image and defined by two rectangular, glowing yellow windows looking out to a vaguely defined cityscape. Above the windows is the label of the “HO Lebensmittel” 15 Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60–1. 16 Heiner Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 29–30. 17 Ibid., 30–4.

72  Building Socialism store, while printed in white on the bricklayer’s wall is the emblem of the Five-Year Plan and the slogan, “This Sales Point is a New Building Stone in the Fulfillment of the People’s Economic Plan of 1951.”18 In the poster’s political imaginary the state-run retail shop is a metaphoric brick in the wall of socialist progress. The “house of socialism,” a metaphor trumpeted in propaganda campaigns and dissected in some of the scholarship on the GDR, is in the process of construction here and the HO is subsumed under its static symbolic power.19 These were the kinds of posters Müller and his collaborators in the production of Der Lohndrücker would have seen on the walls of their local business districts. Müller’s play offers an alternative image of the HO as one worker even rips a poster down to use the back of it for calculating his bill to the clerk. The poster whose original intent was to construct a Stalinist myth is reduced in this scene to its use value as recycled material in a situation of economic necessity. As in Seghers’s work, interior spaces are removed from the abstract realm of propaganda campaigns and put into the context of the working class and its needs. The result, from an architectural perspective, is that use over time gains the upper hand as a way for creating the meaning of new kinds of spaces. The idea that officially produced language about architecture can be destructive to real, lived built space is prefigured in architect and city planner Werner Hegemann’s Das Steinerne Berlin (Berlin in Stone), a sprawling 1930 polemic against modern urbanism in Berlin and a book that Müller had in his personal library.20 For Hegemann, the bloated 18 “HO Lebensmittel. Diese Verkaufsstelle ist ein neuer Baustein zur Erfüllung des Volkswirtschaftsplanes 1951,” Plakate der SBZ/DDR, Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Berlin: The Museum, 1999). 19 See Maria Brosig, “Das ‘Haus des Sozialismus’: Ästhetische Stellungnahmen im Literarischen Feld der DDR anhand von Architektur und Städtebau,” in Literarisches Feld DDR: Bedingungen und Formen literarischer Produktion in der DDR, ed. Ute Wölfel (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005), 75–88. 20 Benjamin had reviewed the volume favorably in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 260–5. We do not know when Müller acquired the book. He knew Hegemann’s work at the latest by 1976, the year in which he wrote Das Leben Gundlings, a satire of cybernetics, which is in part based on Hegemann’s Fridericus, a 1924 satire of Frederick the Great, a figure whom the architect viewed as a symbol of authoritarian, bureaucratic rule and its tendency toward self-serving corruption and inefficient bungling. It is quite possible that the playwright’s copy of Das Steinerne Berlin was his father’s. See Heiner Müller, Werke 9, Eine Autobiographie, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 210–12. See also Werner Hegemann, Fridericus: oder das Königsopfer (Hellerau: Hegner, 1924). In a letter to me, Kunert claimed to have read the book in the 1950s.

Confronting the Construction Site 73

Figure 4  HO Lebensmittel, Anonymous, 1951.

74  Building Socialism language of bureaucracy is a powerful force in shaping the material world, especially where it neglects the human consequences of the arrangements it helps make: Berlin is choking in the stone coffin into which it has been forced and which it helped build itself. The following pictures and pages of text depict this coffin as well as the forces that built it and those that hopefully will destroy it; but [the pictures and text] also depict the superior power of bureaucratic inefficiency and the almost forced indifference of the victims, choking in tenements and paragraphs, of this bureaucracy that threatens to prevent the remaking of Berlin, after it perhaps already has annihilated the capacity for this remaking.21 Much distinguishes Müller’s thinking from Hegemann’s. Foremost is that the bureaucracies they refer to—Berlin’s inspection offices and planning apparatus for the architect, and the Stalinist propaganda machine for the playwright—have radically different historical origins. Yet as witnesses to misguided architectural and infrastructural planning in twentieth-century Germany, the two figures share a critical intention. Hegemann’s citizens of Berlin are choking on “paragraphs” of legal copy that enable the construction of poorly built apartment buildings. In Der Lohndrücker, workers have to literally beat back and step on the posters that surround them and make themselves at home in the imperfect built spaces that surround them through a process of use that reinvigorates the language of socialist revolution.22 In Müller’s play, the Stalinist media’s superficial representation of architectural problems is manipulative and sardonic. A reporter for an official newspaper interviews the engineer Kant as attempts are made by the worker Lerka to repair the oven quickly despite the lack of dry building stones. Workers and engineer alike speak in a straightforward language; their experience of the factory has instilled in them an ad 21 Werner Hegemann, Das Steinerne Berlin Geschichte der grössten Mietkasernenstadt der Welt (Berlin: Kiepenhauer, 1930), 18. 22 In an undated (though likely from the late 1950s) self-commentary on his earliest, fragmentary dramatic work, Müller notes his own nihilistic interest in the late 1940s in Berlin’s ruinscapes and his willingness to dismiss “paper,” a metaphorical stand-in for the drive to plan urban space. By the late 1950s, as the comparison to Hegemann and the passages from Lohndrücker reveal, “paper,” while still a stand-in for central planning, had become a locus of reflection on the conflict between ideology and reality. The fragmentary work was first published in the collected works under the editorially bestowed title [Wohnung Frank] [1947. VEB. Direktor]. Werke 3, Die Stucke 1, 451–60. The self-reflection on the piece is quoted in the editorial commentary of the collected works, 553.

Confronting the Construction Site 75 hoc pragmatism that permeates their speech. Kant’s grim summary of the situation is an example: “We’re short on furnaces because of the bombings. We can pack it in when one breaks down. The material is not good for much.”23 This description, born of Müller’s operative empiricism, uses no extra words and is neither technical nor theoretical; yet it accurately, and not without an austere elegance, refers to a historical cataclysm, outlines a pressing material problem, and indicates the fate of the factory employees should they fail to address that problem. This is a materialist language that grows out of the process of the construction task at hand. The workers ask a visiting newspaper reporter whether he knows what a circular blast furnace is and his answer is in stark contrast to their own language: “rote: A furnace with firing chambers arranged in the form of a ring, ordered successively and serving as pre-heating, drying, firing, and cooling chambers for the continual firing of cement, limestone, bricks, etc.”24 The reporter has memorized the dictionary definition of the part of the factory to be rebuilt. In the German, his answer is riddled with extended adjective constructions, long participial phrases, and a segmenting of multiple compound words alien to everyday speech; his knowledge of the built environment of the factory is static, predetermined, and divorced from the material reality of the construction project. Müller shows here how building efforts based on fixed norms foreclose on the mutability of the relationships of production. The reporter’s positivism involves a translation of material conditions into a theoretical jargon that does not grow from the process of production. The reporter thus translates the engineer Kant’s pithy “the material is not good for much” as “objective difficulties.” In this case the theoretical language he appropriates is that of Lukács, who was then falling out of favor in the GDR because of his involvement in the uprising in Hungary in 1956, but whose literary doctrines from the 1930s were still the foundation for Ulbricht’s preferred brand of Socialist Realism. Müller had particular discomfort with Lukács’s insistence that the “objective” world be filtered through a subjective perspective that resembled nineteenth-century bourgeois realism in its formal approach. The playwright’s own understanding of GDR literary history as he saw it in the 1960s envisioned a mid-1950s struggle between Lukácsian and Tret’iakovian aesthetics.25 The scene with the 23 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 39. 24 Ibid. 25 Heiner Müller, “DDR-Literatur,” Heiner-Müller-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, File 4548. While Dobrenko’s arguments about Soviet literature, treated in Chapter 1, have shown that this was not as direct a dichotomy as it might at

76  Building Socialism reporter shows the specific links between the GDR’s media monopoly (with its power-projecting metaphoric language) to Lukácsian theory as Müller saw it. Built space as an operative staging ground for working-class revolution in the play was thus a key component of Müller’s rejection of Socialist Realism. There are hints in the play, though, that Müller’s literary agenda goes beyond combatting Stalinism into the realm of reflecting on modernity. For the 1958 performance of the play, Müller, director Günter Schwarzlose, and set designer Harald Reichert chose to bring out the division between intellectual and manual labor on the construction site through set design choices. Rehearsal pictures of the Leipzig staging in question show that the construction workers in their factory canteen gather around rustic wooden tables and sit in heavy, weather-beaten wooden chairs.26 By contrast, managers and engineers write on thin, black table surfaces supported, as with the chairs on which they sit, by sleek tubular steel frames reminiscent of Marcel Breuer’s iconic designs. The sphere of the manual laborers is characterized by the sense of spatial improvisation, mirrored in the charged negotiations that take place in the HO. The old, well-worn wooden chairs become emblems of the potential for worker self-organization; analogously, the tubular steel of the managers’ offices becomes an emblem of the threat of bureaucratic positivism. The signaling of manual and intellectual roles through furniture resonates with Brecht’s suspicion not just of Stalinism, but of the positivist, technophilic socialism he came to regard with suspicion after his tutelage under Karl Korsch in 1926. The set designs also point to Müller’s more fundamental preoccupation with modernity as a process of spatial division. The playwright pointed out, in looking back at Lohndrücker in 1987 as he was helping prepare a theatrical production of it, that the play was meant more as a modern scientific case study than as a tendentious political statement: “This is the misunderstanding about a piece like LOHNDRÜCKER, that people always see politics and ideology where it’s really just about the behavior of experimental animals who must act under particular conditions that they themselves have not determined and can only vary in a conditional and relative way.”27 The material conditions of construction in the play along with the gap between first appear, given the operative aspects of Tret’iakov’s aesthetics that were appropriated into official Socialist Realist ideologies, the anti-Tret’iakov bent of GDR cultural policy made it appear that way to Müller. On the taboo against Tret’iakov see David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 90–1. 26 Heiner-Müller-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, File 7999. 27 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 231.

Confronting the Construction Site 77 intellectual and manual labor that the furniture in the 1958 production symbolizes reveal that Müller was already considering the restrictive aspects of modern built space in a broader way. In the same 1987 conversation, Müller, referring to the title under which Johannes R. Becher’s diary of the year 1950 was published, links the space of the factory in Der Lohndrücker to a classically Modernist, Beckett-esque scenario: Something expected or feared is absent. You can’t say “utopia” anymore, but something … the other. The other is absent. “Such great hope in another way.” You show one thing but then comes the hole, the emptiness, a pause and something is absent. The other is absent. That would be the point at which the question is put to the audience.28 The construction site has, for Müller, taken the place of the workingclass neighborhood in Benjamin’s Surrealism essay: its existence and the resistance to it point, however problematically, to other ways in which life might be led. It is at its core a highly-managed space that is at the same time a waiting room in which boredom can become a productive indicator of the possibility of revolution.

Compromised Operativity and Spatial Metaphorics

One factor that likely pushed Müller, starting in the late 1950s, away from an operative focus on the empirical reality of the construction site was that operative methods had been co-opted by Stalinists. Eduard Claudius was the primary example of this; his 1951 novel, Menschen an unserer Seite (People on Our Side), became the definitive literary treatment of Garbe’s herculean repair of a blast furnace at the Lichtenberg Siemens-Plania in 1949.29 Claudius’s narrative engaged with the infrastructural and architectural problems at the heart of the Garbe saga as the author himself became the center of an extensive literary debate that sprang up after the novel’s publication. He was not a hefty dialectical materialist thinker but his works did confront problems of social change, revolution, and the role of planning and leadership in the early GDR. In addition, prior to Müller’s trips to the Schwarze Pumpe plant, where he would gather material for his 28 Ibid., 234. The internal quotation refers to Johannes R. Becher, Auf andere Art so große Hoffnung. Tagebuch 1950 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1951). 29 Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: AufbauTaschenbuch, 2000), 1379. Müller respected Claudius as a writer with a strong left-wing pedigree and good intentions. The playwright dubiously claimed he never read Claudius’s novel. Müller, Werke 9, Eine Autobiographie, 99, 111.

78  Building Socialism production plays, Claudius was practicing an operative model of writing that grew from his working-class background. He did manual labor on the construction sites of the Stalinallee and did frequent readings to working-class audiences.30 In Claudius’s novel, though, new socialist spaces such as factories and kindergartens tended to become stand-ins for socialist achievements meant to “convert” non-believers to the project of socialism.31 Menschen an unserer Seite made Claudius a star, and in the early 1950s, reviews of his work and biographical blurbs in newspapers made much of his proletarian heritage as a mason. Thus the headline for an advance announcement of his first play, Die Söhne Garibaldis (The Sons of Garibaldi), would read “From Construction Worker to Playwright” and would emphasize the importance of Claudius’s time as a manual laborer to his literary process.32 Claudius indeed focused on issues of the built environment, and not just in his Menschen. In a brief, propagandistic piece for Die Neue Zeit, “Dem kleinen Mann sein Monte Carlo” (To the Little Man his Monte Carlo, 1954), Claudius laments the amount of money spent in West Germany on building and operating casinos and suggests the construction of athletic facilities as a healthier alternative.33 Claudius’s recommendation dovetailed with official construction agendas: the Ministry of Building had in fact made major investments in public sports facilities in the early 1950s including Berlin’s massive Stadium of World Youth. But the banality of Claudis’s call for more space for sports belies the tensions between the stadium’s sleek, Modernist form and its Stalinist uses. Its architect, Selman Selmanagic, was a Bauhaus graduate influenced by the innovative designs of Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine. White concrete with expansive factory windows and sleek, unornamented, geometric forms characterized the stadium’s grandstand, café, locker rooms and timer’s tower.34 In addition to providing space for competitive sports, the stadium was also to become a chief showplace for 30 “Dichterlesungen,” Der Morgen, May 13, 1952. Available in AdK, Berlin, EduardClaudius-Archiv, SV-ZA 819. 31 In this sense, Claudius’s Stalinist spaces occupy an analogous function to that which Julia Hell ascribes to narratives of fatherhood in communist literature: “founding paternal narratives became a crucial component of the Communists’ state-driven project of hegemonic formation.” Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27. 32 Die Neue Zeit, September 12, 1952. AdK, Berlin, Eduard-Claudius-Archiv, SV-ZA 819. 33 Aufbau, Heft 9, 1954. Adk, Berlin, Eduard-Claudius-Archiv, SV-ZA 819. 34 Andreas Butter and Ulrich Hartung, Ostmoderne. Architektur in Berlin, 1945–1965 (Berlin: Deutscher Werkbund and Jovis Verlag, 2004), 43.

Confronting the Construction Site 79 coordinated, mass gymnastics events.35 Thus, pared-down, Modernist forms designed by an architectural exile who never spent time in the Soviet Union became a showpiece of authoritarian power. Under the method of Claudius’s compromised operativity, party-funded stadia were ipso facto “good” spaces regardless of how they looked. Accordingly, Claudius used binary spatial metaphors in Menschen an unserer Seite to represent how “new” socialist ways of life replace “old,” capitalist ones. A key part of the Garbe figure’s conversion to communism comes when he sees his child’s state kindergarten: “The big wash room was white washed, embarrassingly clean between the cupboards, on the floors, in all corners.”36 Aehre, as the Garbe persona is called in the novel, had heretofore assumed kindergartens to be little more than glorified orphanages: filthy, dank, and old. Never described in its formal detail, the interior is clean and white enough to convince the central character that new, socialist forms of everyday life are superior. Thus, the operative writer Claudius uses the state’s new architecture, which in some cases he himself helped to build, as a symbol of the inherent moral hygiene of the state-made revolution. Claudius’s journalistic efforts from the 1950s thus reenact the processes, described by Dobrenko, through which the radical potential of Tret’iakovian operativity was neutralized by Stalinist cadres in the early 1930s.37 Though Tret’iakov’s brand of operative writing was taboo in the GDR at this time, a review of Claudius’s propagandistic reportage of life in West Germany, Paradies ohne Seligkeit (Paradise without Bliss, 1954), lauds Claudius using Tret’iakov’s controversial term: “the new German literature [must] take a position—quick, current, operative.”38 Claudius’s work was later explicitly held up as a model for the GDR’s officialization and neutralization of participatory modes of literary production. A feature article in the Leipziger Börsenblatt in 1959, the year of the first Bitterfeld conference, connected Claudius’s Menschen an unserer Seite to the new program.39 His model 35 Ibid., 40–1. 36 Eduard Claudius, Menschen an unserer Seite (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1951), 306. 37 As seen in Chapter 1, Dobrenko sees the emergence of Stalinist Socialist Realism in the early 1930s as in part the result of an official co-opting of the operative approach pioneered by Tret’iakov. See Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the Soviet Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 38 Eberhard Richter, “Zwischen Nissenhütte und Texasbar,” Tägliche Rundschau, March 23, 1955, AdK, Berlin, Eduard-Claudius-Archiv, SV-ZA 819. On Tret’iakov as taboo, see above. 39 “Menschen an unserer Seite,” Leipziger Börsenblatt, June 27, 1959, AdK, Berlin, Eduard-Claudius-Archiv, SV-ZA 819.

80  Building Socialism of operativity, which turned buildings into simplistic metaphors for socialist achievement and fantasies of consciousness raising, was held up against the more materialist one Heiner Müller was developing in the late 1950s.40 While Claudius and Bitterfeld I pushed Müller away from operativity, the playwright’s commitment to reality also drove his turn to the seemingly more ethereal device of the metaphor. Numerous sociological texts in his personal library can shed light on how the playwright viewed the relationship between the real, material dimension of the new state’s built spaces to their existence as unstable temporal phenomena suited to metaphoric representation. Müller was particularly interested in the origins of sociology; he made numerous pencil marks in sociologist Thomas Achelis’s foundational 1908 book, Soziologie, in which one of the key assertions is that, within disparate cultures, objects and space in the material world tend to function as a set of surfaces as important for their ideational and symbolic aspects as for their material utility.41 Müller’s view of the GDR’s large construction sites from the late 1950s onward is colored by this multilayered view of what can constitute their reality. This view allowed the playwright to convert an operative focus on the social ramifications of new buildings into a metaphoric literary analysis of their modernity. In his 1958 self-criticism pertaining to the first version of Die Korrektur, Müller repeatedly defends the play by referring to the complete newness of the reality of the socialist Großbaustelle, which he sees as a radical historical intervention that is reshaping daily life.42 In language that prefigures his reflection on metaphor in the 1979 essay “Fatzer + Keuner” and his preoccupation in conversations with Alexander Kluge with the problem of “accelerating” modernity, Müller urges understanding for the way society has been changed by vast industrial construction sites: 40 Helen Fehervary has shown that Bitterfeld I represented to some degree a neutralization of the agitprop impulses of Müller and others. Fehervary, “Heiner Müllers Brigadenstücke,” 16. 41 Thomas Achelis, Soziologie (Leipzig: Göschen, 1908), 66–76. 42 Müller’s metaphors must be seen as an extension rather than rejection of Brechtian materialism. In his post-Wende conversations, Müller frequently cited Brecht’s notion that “petroleum works against the five-act structure” of dramas. Heiner Müller, Werke 10, Die Gespräche 1, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 670. The idea that material realities necessitate new literary forms is precisely what leads Müller’s radical engagement with the “real” of the Baustelle to the ethereal non-realism of metaphor. Michael Sheringham, in his study of literature and everyday life, cautions against seeing literary explorations of the mundanities of the everyday as necessarily realist. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Confronting the Construction Site 81 The majority of [critical] discussants had not extracted from the performance that the more intense struggles represented in KORREKTUR are not carried out, as in those in LOHNDRÜCKER, at the level of the reconstruction of a ruined economy, but rather on the higher platform of the building of socialism; that the flow of things has become more torrential [reißender], sweeping up [mitreißend] more and different people, that more is in flux than in 1949 (there were no Großbaustellen then …). People criticized the coupling of two plays, the first of which took place in a people’s own industrial company and the second of which took place on a Großbaustelle, where, under completely different (more difficult) conditions other (more difficult) people labor, in short: who represent something completely new. That Großbaustellen, compared to 1949, are something new more generally was not extracted from the performance.43 By the playwright’s third use of the word Großbaustelle, a sense of its dimension as a material manifestation and emblem of a new phase of modernity begins to emerge that prefigures the turn to metaphor in Der Bau. While it would be easy to dismiss a text written in such an odiously official context, Müller’s language about the “flow” of “things” and people being “pulled” along by them is very similar to the terms he would use to describe the relationship of metaphor and modernity in his later interviews. In a 1990 conversation with Alexander Kluge, the two discussed the modernity of the Elizabethan epoch in England which was characterized, according to Müller, by rapid shifts in the material world as a result of Europe’s nascent colonial endeavors. The playwright saw Shakespeare’s metaphors as an innovative vehicle for mimicking and defending against such shifts: KLUGE: Yes. And the metaphor thus is the indicator of a time that is moving faster than people can process experience? MÜLLER: Yes. Yes. I once formulated it like this: the metaphor is a screen against so many impressions that cannot be processed, like a tool for channelization [Bündelungsinstrument].44 In an interview one year earlier with Robert Weimann, Müller acknowledged that his preoccupation with the “acceleration” of modernity, which the conversation with Kluge reveals to be closely linked to metaphor, was what ultimately distinguished his early 43 Müller, “Zwischenbemerkung,” Werke 8, Schriften, 136–7. 44 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 647.

82  Building Socialism dramas from those of Brecht. In discussing the question of how new forms of existence replace old ones, the playwright made the following claim: And something else interests me there too, namely the category of acceleration. When I go ahead and compare my early texts with Brecht texts, where the nearness to Brecht is still very strong. But one difference had always been that [in my texts] vortexes tended to develop. There aren’t such linear movements. And this vortex is indeed an attempt to hold out under this acceleration and to represent it at the same time.45 Modernity as it sweeps up human beings into its threateningly breathless space-time requires a literature of vortexes that replicates and resists modernity in the same gesture. There are hints of this in the language Müller used to describe East Germany’s industrial construction sites in 1958; furthermore, the impulse to represent and resist modernity in the same gesture was also present, as seen in the introduction to this chapter, in Müller’s conception of architecture’s political task in the early 1960s. It is worth repeating the quotation from that archival document: “Political task of architecture: remediation of the lack that it reflects.”46 That this simultaneous remediation and reflection was, from a literary perspective for Müller, the domain of metaphor is demonstrated by a section of a 1992 conversation with Kluge in which Müller addressed the late-career insignificance of veristic documentation to his dramatic production. A vortex-like “centrifuge” of metaphor had become for him the key to addressing the deeper, temporal realities of modernity that go beyond the empirical focus that had still governed Der Lohndrücker: “Somehow [documentary material] all flows in there, but I can’t use it directly because [my theater is] fundamentally about the manufacturing of metaphors, and there, material reality is really just present as a speck of dust in the centrifuge of metaphors.”47 Der Bau was the original incarnation of this dramatic centrifuge of metaphor for the playwright. More prosaically perhaps, further evidence that Müller was, starting in the 1950s and early 1960s, already considering the realities of East German built space in terms of a broader history than just that of the GDR can be found in his personal library. The little-known German socialist writer F. C. Weiskopf wrote about his experiences in the Soviet 45 Ibid., 475. 46 See notes 5 and 6 above. 47 Heiner Müller, Werke 12, Die Gespräche 3, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 150.

Confronting the Construction Site 83 Union in his Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert (Transfer to the Twenty-First Century, 1932), which Müller had in his library in a Dietz edition of 1960, after his remarks on the Korrektur but before writing Der Bau.48 Weiskopf is keen in the work to see Soviet construction efforts in Moscow and Magnetogorsk not just in purely social and material terms, but also as wide-ranging cultural phenomena. The greenfield building sites at the edge of Moscow look to Weiskopf like “an exhibit that shows in one-to-one scale all the phases of building a house, a street, a city.”49 This museal quality of large-scale construction sites in the text begets an attendant culture as “all the people around it are struck with building-fever,” with policemen and bootblacks chatting about building materials and construction methods.50 The reshaping of the built space of everyday life here is an intervention in broader cultural patterns that stems from but transcends the material of the structures themselves. It is also possible that Müller’s preoccupation with the Großbaustelle was influenced by Willy Mann’s 1957 social history of Weimar-era Berlin, which was published in the GDR and the playwright’s personal edition of which contains many pencil marks. In Mann’s text, the working-class milieu of Berlin’s neighborhoods and the radical break from the past that the large construction sites of the 1920s represented are key themes. As in Müller’s Der Bau, the pace of work and the toll it takes on workers’ bodies are characteristic of the Großbau. Mann referred in his work of course not to East Germany’s construction sites, but to the gargantuan Klingenberg power plant built along the Spree across from Treptow in 1925–6: “The Klingenberg power plant that delivers us Berliners our electricity is just like the other large construction projects at this time, built at a slave-driver’s pace with the sweat and blood of our workers. That should never be forgotten.”51 Müller did not forget. A key part of Der Bau’s centrifuge of metaphors was laboring bodies metaphorically rendered into raw material for building. It should also be mentioned that Müller’s transition from empiricism to a metaphorical engagement with modernity and architecture, must be seen in the light of his own reception of Marxist theory. Devin Fore uses later Müller quotations to show that the playwright saw in East Germany’s New Economic System of the 1960s the marriage of socialism with a banal economic rationalism that was fundamentally 48 F. C. Weiskopf, Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Dietz, 1960). 49 Ibid., 95. 50 Ibid. 51 Willy Mann, Berlin zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 1957), 123.

84  Building Socialism capitalist.52 But Müller’s metaphorical reflection on the effects of modern built space on laboring human beings was not just a reaction to conditions in the GDR. It also had roots in Brecht’s and Karl Korsch’s rejection of the Second International and the ascendency of the Western Marxist tradition. Indeed, in a 1932 volume of Die Gesellschaft in his personal library, Müller left a bookmark at a review by Herbert Marcuse of a sociological text from the early 1930s. There, Marcuse comes to the conclusion that the sociological focus on “reality” can be politically productive, but that that reality must be seen as in flux, a historical process with material and ideological dimensions: “There is as such for Marx no ‘true reality’ and human freedom that would allow itself to be defined as a goal of emancipation a priori; even the most radical emancipation is always just emancipation and freedom in and at the concrete situation in which it occurs.”53 This “concrete situation” in turn “carries in itself the possibility and necessity of its transformation.”54 In other words, the Western Marxist idea that material realities contain latent possibilities for their otherness is to some extent what underpins Müller’s assertion that architecture must reflect and resist modernity at the same time. Indeed, architecture, according to one of the few complete Marxist theories of its nature, occupies just such a position as simultaneous reality and represention, at once a material with everyday use value and an object with representational and metaphorical qualities.55 Its reality, for Müller, is also representational because of its status as an assessment of history. Müller’s insights in this connection formed the foundation of his move from the empirical operativity of the Lohndrücker to the metaphors of modernity in Der Bau.

The Prinzip Auschwitz, Metaphor, and East German Built Space

For Müller, the central task of the post-war iteration of modernity was to create a society which would not lead to another Auschwitz. He ruefully concluded that the only intellectual tools available in this endeavor were humanism, reason, and argumentation, all of which had been complicit, according to the playwright, in the historical processes that resulted in the death camps. In a 1990 conversation with Kluge, he averred: 52 Devin Fore, “Between Athlos and Arbeit: Myth, Labor, and Cement,” New German Critique 37, no. 2 (2010): 110, 125–52, 135. 53 Herbert Marcuse, “Zur Kritik der Soziologie,” Die Gesellschaft. Internationales Revue für Sozialismus und Politik 8, no. 2 (1931): 270–80, 279. 54 Ibid., 280. 55 Ernst Plojhar, Die Notwendigkeit der Architektur (Vienna: Promedia, 2001), 66

Confronting the Construction Site 85 The problem of our civilization is to develop an alternative to Auschwitz and there isn’t one. There is no argument against Auschwitz. So when you take Auschwitz as the metaphor— yes, metaphor is a very barbaric word—rather as the reality of selection. And selection is the principle of politics globally. There still isn’t an alternative to Auschwitz. One can only vary, moderate, differentiate, whatever.56 Müller formulated the relationship between death camps and modernity yet more pithily in a conversation with Fritz Raddatz in 1990: “Auschwitz is the basic model of the technological society.”57 Müller, though he backtracks on his choice of the word “metaphor” in the first of these quotations, clearly acknowledges that he is resisting the death camps by using Auschwitz as a centrifugal “tool for channelization,” a cipher for the spatial selection that characterizes modernity. Thus, the Müller of the time around 1990 was trying to understand the death camps by using a strategy similar to that which the Müller of the late 1950s used to account for the modernity of East Germany’s large industrial construction sites. It is possible that Müller’s critical preoccupation with the principle of “selection” had roots in his reading of Tomaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, present in his personal library in a GDR edition.58 The work is a seventeenth-century utopian vision of a seven-walled city in which all citizens must work and groups of officials administer the division of labor according to individuals’ talents; ensure that goods and prizes are distributed equally; manage the breeding of the populace according to eugenically favorable matches; and run the so-called “theater of knowledge,” whose curtain is one the city’s fabulously painted walls and where children learn about the world visually. The authoritarian, scientific management of daily life and the spatial control of the populace through walls are key elements of Der Bau and of Müller’s Prinzip Auschwitz. The extent to which such ordered systems were, contrary of course to Campanella’s intentions in City of the Sun, deeply anti-human is a topic Müller addressed in a 1990 conversation with Fritz Raddatz:

56 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 641. 57 Ibid., 685. 58 We have long known that Müller developed an intense critique of modernity in the 1970s. Helen Fehervary has shown how this critique can be brought into connection to his readings of French theorists, including Foucault, during that time. See Helen Fehervary, “Enlightenment or Entanglement: History and Aesthetics in Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller,” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 8 (1976): 80–109.

86  Building Socialism The human being is the enemy of the machine, for every ordered system he is a disruptive element. He is disorderly, makes dirt and fails to function. Thus, he has to be done away with, and that is the work of capitalism—the structure of the machine. The logic of the machine corresponds to the reduction of the human being to a raw material, to the material plus the gold in his teeth. Auschwitz is the altar of capitalism. Rationalism as the only binding criterion reduces the human being to his value as material.59 By the late 1980s, Müller located modernity’s (and the Auschwitz principle’s) most intensive energies in the capitalist world; this was not the case in the early 1960s as Devin Fore has shown. Fore has revealed, as seen above, the extent to which Müller saw the GDR’s drive to industrialization at that time as an appropriation by the socialist world of capitalist techniques.60 Such modern techniques are rendered in Der Bau through the construction site’s centrifuge of metaphor. Modern spaces turn the bodies of laborers to stone and concrete just as the Holocaust treated Jews as raw material. Günter Kunert’s “Betonformen,” written just four years after Müller’s play, uses the relationship between human beings and built space at the Buchenwald concentration camp to reveal in a materialist and metaphoric way the functionalist mentalities behind the Holocaust.61 Written so close in time to Müller’s play and using a similar metaphorical strategy, “Betonformen” can be taken as evidence that the specter of the Third Reich lurked behind the East German construction site of Müller’s play. Kunert’s piece, an underappreciated thought image influenced by Benjamin, was first published by Aufbau in 1968 and saw West German publication in 1969 on the heels of Kunert’s presentation of it at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin that year. Kunert’s unflinching, biting, and moving representation of the Shoah’s sickest tortures is framed again and again in the text by references to the concrete walls, floors, and roofs of the buildings within which crimes against humanity were perpetrated. Kunert reveals an 59 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 670. 60 See note 52. 61 Also worth noting in this connection are comments by Müller in 1978 about Der Lohndrücker. Müller affirmed that the SED’s willingness to harness exploitative labor practices developed in the Weimar Republic and Nazi period was a central theme of the piece: “One of my friends … says that this piece shows quite far-reachingly how the markers of fascism could be used, turned, changed for the construction of socialism in this country. A remark that corresponds with a very interesting note in Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal where he said that the fascists disciplined the proletariat for the armaments industry and that this discipline now is of some value for other goals” (Werke 10, Gespräche 1, 756–7).

Confronting the Construction Site 87 interest in the fundamental quality of architectural problem solving and in the use of structures; it is one of the most effectively stomachturning aspects of his text that he delves into the highly modern architectural calculus that went into making buildings for the purpose of mass murder. He describes Buchenwald’s … crematorium, whose floor must of course be made of concrete in order to support the heavy double-chambered incinerator. The cellar beneath, also concrete: so that the wall hooks on which prisoners were made to hang themselves or be hanged would hold up.62 If Benjamin, in the readings of Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich in his Arcades treated in Chapter 1, had been concerned to recover utopian potential from the first probing, naïve uses of reinforced concrete in the nineteenth century, Kunert uses the banal process of selecting materials best suited to mechanized killing to expose in a new way the modern planning impulses instrumentalized by Nazi engineers. Müller, in the 1990 conversation with Raddatz just referred to, responded to his interlocutor’s suggestion that Auschwitz was based more on the irrational than the rational, by saying that the Holocaust and the Nazi war effort alike were based on “the strategy of total acceleration.”63 The “reality” of these events “was really economic and technological. It was about the testing out of technology, the introduction of technology into the world of everyday life, the technologization of life.”64 Recognizing the cold modernity of mass killing was thus key to both Kunert’s and Müller’s architectural thinking. In Der Bau, the modern energies harnessed by the Nazis reappear on the GDR building site. One character in the play points to the advantages raked in by a colleague who had diligently worked in Nazi-controlled factories and for whom the rise of GDR socialism meant simply exchanging “bombers for buildings.”65 The national-socialist militaryindustrial complex has been shed in favor of the socialist-national architectural-industrial complex. The “concrete” Kunert repeatedly makes reference to in “Betonformen” ends up taking on the two-sided, paradoxical quality that Müller saw at work in architecture and in the task of finding an alternative to Auschwitz. It is the material from which the buildings 62 Günter Kunert, “Betonformen,” in Kramen in Fächern. Geschichten, Parabeln, Merkmale. Betonformen. Ortsangaben (Berlin: Aufbau, 1968), 157–76, 159. 63 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 670. 64 Ibid. 65 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 343

88  Building Socialism for mass killing were made and the material of the most solemn and effective part of the GDR-era memorial complex at Buchenwald: halfmeter high, one-meter wide concrete capital letters, embedded in the earth, facing upward, and spelling the word “memento.” Kunert asserts that these letters “speak a similar language” to that of the concrete buildings of the camp itself and the seemingly random, and purposeless chunks of reinforced concrete strewing Buchenwald’s grounds. As in Müller’s later conversations and in Der Bau, as will be shown in the next section, “concrete” becomes a metaphor that reveals the way in which regimes treat human bodies as raw material. Of the Jews murdered at Buchenwald, Kunert writes: Condemned to death by their birth, earmarked to become raw material for the foundations of the Third Reich, their blood planned as an admixture of concrete as once the blood of a chosen sacrificial victim was mixed into the limestone of castles and fortresses. The foundations of the state structure planned for a thousand years were never finished or were pounded to ruins. And the ruins speak a language similar to that of the seven cast pieces [of the memento memorial].66 The Nazis’ concrete murderousness is for Kunert inescapably the beginning of a new historical era, symbolized and embodied by the material.67 He writes of … the epoch of concrete and the uncertainty connected to it, to which this difficult-to-destroy building material binds itself. Whether made into bunkers, or missile silos, whether housing blocks, hotels, highways, or whether in a threateningly peaceful, inseparable mixture, all of the above: contradiction exemplified.68 The contradiction that Kunert sees at work in “concrete” is analogous to that which Müller saw as characteristic of architecture and of the central task of the post-war period: to make a new society using 66 Kunert, “Betonformen,” 173. 67 It should be noted that Müller and Kunert chose concrete as a symbolic material in part because official architectural discussions in the Eastern Bloc made much of its utility. In 1954, Soviet authorities established the influential Institute for Concrete and Reinforced Concrete. Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Bauarbeiterschaft, Architektur und Wohnverhältnisse im sozialen Wandel (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1983), 113. It was not until 1960 that East Germany created an equivalent institution (the Institut für Stahlbeton). 68 Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, 163–4.

Confronting the Construction Site 89 materials inherited from the old, to remediate a lack that it reflects. It is thus that Kunert, referring to chunks of concrete seemingly randomly strewn around the site of the camp, asserts the need for stones to “fufill their biblical function of speaking when human beings are silent.”69 In other words, they must remediate the lack of historical consciousness that characterizes the post-war period. Yet, in an earlier passage of the text, Kunert had asserted that, though deeply temporally embedded, architectural objects tend to remain silent, much to humanity’s detriment. He grimly notes that the camp’s beech trees have, since the war, been made into “beds and tables that stand silent and dead in apartments whose owners fail to divine from whence they come: an ignorance that keeps their world in operation.”70 Der Bau, like “Betonformen,” was written against that ignorance.71

Built Space and the Body in Der Bau

Der Bau, loosely based on Neutsch’s Spur der Steine but with renamed characters, centers on a maverick brigade of construction workers led by the character of Barka. Across nine rapid-fire scenes that serve more as a montage of emotional reactions to life on the construction site than as markers of a linear plot, the Barka brigade ends up working, against the dictates of the general plan for the industrial site, with the young engineer Schlee and the new local party official Donat to complete the construction of a waterworks.72 The main foci of the final four scenes are the love affair between Schlee and Donat and its consequences for their work on the construction site and fallout from a structural collapse at the new waterworks. When Schlee becomes pregnant, she ultimately agrees to deny before prudish party officials that the child is Donat’s, thus allowing him to keep his job. Key points during the 69 Ibid., 175. 70 Ibid., 162. 71 Helen Fehervary has brought Müller’s and Seghers’s juxtaposition of living and dead bodies into connection with the German and Dutch traditions of landscape painting. Helen Fehervary, “‘Die gotische Linie’: Altdeutsche Landschaften und Physiognomien bei Seghers und Müller,” in Mit den Toten Reden: Fragen an Heiner Müller, ed. Jost Hermand and Helen Fehervary (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 113–35. 72 There is no direct evidence that Müller read Tret’iakov’s short essay “The Biography of the Thing” by the time of writing Der Bau, but the play’s formal dimensions seem almost directly developed from the key ideas in Tret’iakov’s 1929 piece: that “compositional structure” should resemble an assembly line that uses the thing being produced to reveal social pressures on human figures; that it is not about individual humans who “go through the building of things” but rather about things and the way they reshape humans. Sergei Tretjakow, “Biografie des Dings,” in Sergei Tretjakow. Gesichter der Avantgarde. Porträts, Essays, Briefe, ed. Fritz Mierau (Berlin: Aufbau, 1985), 102–6.

90  Building Socialism various debates in the play include the introduction of a three-shift system for the construction of the waterworks and the use of bakelite as a construction material. The dialogue of the workers is in a breathtaking iambic pentameter, while the engineers and party officials speak in an artificial, metaphor-laden prose. My readings concentrate on the second half of the play, where the metaphoric language becomes most intense as the relationship between Donat and Schlee takes root and the workers are subject to the rigors of new construction materials and techniques. In a scene entitled “Bakelite” toward the middle of the play, preparations are being made for modernization measures on the construction site. The engineer Hasselbein, a talented but whimsical dreamer with more interest in the theoretical than practical dimensions of his work, justifies to Donat and Schlee the need for experimental materials by asserting the rationalist embrace of the artificial over the natural as a key survival strategy for a weak humanity: “flesh, it grows and rots, we have a head, that is our chance: in a hundred years we will change bodies as today we change shirts, beyond decomposition through chemistry.”73 Hasselbein characterizes humanity as the product of “defective projection” and believes that the introduction of the new artificial building material is part of a historical process in which the body will be denigrated in the name of rationalism to humanity’s own benefit.74 Barka initially rejects the introduction of the new material, but ultimately acquiesces. At a topping out ceremony for the new water works three scenes later, though, he laconically registers the bodily sacrifice involved in the construction process: “humans ruin themselves for building.”75 Donat and Schlee register such ruination in the scene directly after the introduction of bakelite as a building material. However, it is not bakelite but concrete that threatens their bodies as they finish their lovemaking. Shift change approaches and Donat looks at Schlee: “Out of the mist, the cooling towers are already growing in your eyes, the concrete steps out of the shadows of your breasts once more into its right to our work until its next dissolution in a new night.”76 Donat had acceded to the modernization measures on the construction site, but in a brief private conversation with Schlee following the topping out ceremony, one scene after the one just quoted, he reacts to learning that she is pregnant by acknowledging the pressures of the modern construction site on the fundamental human process of reproduction. The party leader finds himself unable to take joy in the baby growing 73 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 364. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 374. 76 Ibid., 373.

Confronting the Construction Site 91 in Schlee’s womb and notes that “concrete wants concrete and flesh must be expunged.”77 He catches his cynicism and offers a brief apology after which Schlee forgives his initial coldness: “Soon we’ll be apologizing for the fact that we don’t run on wheels and because our flesh isn’t suitable as building material.”78 For Müller in the 1990 interview with Fritz Raddatz cited above, the first precondition for the Auschwitz principle is the disciplining of the body according to sets of norms: “Auschwitz as a symptom begins with the standardization [Vereinheitlichung] of the body, with the transformation of bodies into materiel.”79 In Müller’s play as in his later conversations, metaphor captures the way modernity exacts a toll on the body by instrumentalizing it in the name of a progress that is ultimately anything but. The temporality of the construction site is one instance of a modern temporality of division and selection that, for Müller, was an integral component of the Nazi crimes. For the good-willed workers Barka and Elmer, the self-perpetuating modernity of the construction site is captured in a metaphor that expresses and resists, to use the terms Müller employed to explain metaphor in the essay “Fatzer + Keuner,” the “fear of the autonomous movement of the material world.”80 At the topping out ceremony, an introspective Barka confesses his elemental fear of East Germany’s modern factories: “Are they after you too, Elmer, in the night, stoneupon-stone, wall-upon-wall, the People’s Own Companies you’ve built, that hunt you from construction site to construction site around the globe that turns itself, you have to keep its pace, when you stand still it rolls you into the void.”81 The breathless quality of the language here and the sense of built space as having an agency transcending that of its builders is precisely the kind of metaphorical “vortex” or “centrifuge” that Müller described in his later conversations. It is, of course, meant to capture and screen against the “flow” or “pull” of the Großbaustelle as Müller characterized it in his 1958 justification of Die Korrektur. In another passage from “Fatzer + Keuner,” the playwright saw this kind of pull in terms of what T. S. Eliot called the “pressure of experience”: “The pace of change in meanings constitutes the dictates of metaphor, which serves as a screen against the bombardment of images. ‘The pressure of experience drives language to poetry’ (Eliot).”82 Before Müller became preoccupied, in the 1970s, with post77 Ibid., 380. 78 Ibid., 380–1. 79 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 611. 80 See note 80. 81 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 374. 82 Müller, Werke 8, Schriften, 224–5.

92  Building Socialism modernity’s flood of images, he had already been developing a similar metaphorical response to the flood of stone and concrete in East Germany’s built spaces. The “experience” which drives the metaphors of Der Bau is the threatening nature of the socialist construction site as a part of the Auschwitz principle’s disciplinary modernity. There is evidence that Müller saw modernity’s process of disciplining the body as having roots in antiquity’s grappling with the effects of civilization. Such a reading is supported by Fore’s claim that mythology in Müller’s Cement (1972) itself functions as a form of technology.83 Evidence for the connection between modernity and antiquity is also found in Müller’s extensive discussion of Ovid with Alexander Kluge in the early 1990s. There, in a typically laconic and brutal formulation, Müller notes that the gods’ continual punishing of human beings by turning them into objects is a form of consolation to those who must live in a world in which the attempt to forge a civilization results in constantly recurring brutality.84 Kluge, citing the philosopher Klaus Heinrich, mentions Orpheus’s ability in Ovid’s work to turn stones into cities and trees into gardens, but then notes that the resulting authentic, non-alienated artworks are destroyed by civilization and the alienation of labor. Müller in response says, “Now there I can understand what Klaus Heinrich means, that Ovid understands the Metamorphoses as an attempt to constitute a civilization, to found it. But it never works. Metamorphosis is the consolation, when you become a stone, nothing more can happen to you.”85 The transformation of the human body by the gods is punishment for the human attempt to regulate historical processes that spin out of human control. In the Metamorphoses, a text to which Müller continually returned, the poet and singer Orpheus is pursued in book eleven by wild Maenads who try to stone him to death.86 With his song, however, the poet is able, temporarily, to protect or “screen” himself by making the stones dance. But he fails to sing a song about the plows in the fields, which means that the Maenads can successfully use them as murder weapons against him. The second to last scene of Der Bau is headed “Cyclogram or the Dance of Stones”; the “cyclogram” is the engineer Hasselbein’s plan for further revolutionizing the construction site, while the “dance of stones” is an obvious reference to the Roman poet. In the context of the scene, Hasselbein plays the role of Orpheus, waxing poetic about 83 See note 52. 84 Müller, Werke 12, Gespräche 3, 823. 85 Ibid., 825. 86 In his poem “Orpheus Plowed,” dated c. 1949, Müller recounts in one taut sentence the story of Orpheus as it appears in Ovid.

Confronting the Construction Site 93 his new methods as he chastises a painter who visits the construction site for rendering only what he sees. The engineer urges the painter instead to capture the temporality of the building site: “concrete flies through the air, steel plows the fields of the birds, the clouds are built upon, the wind is inhabitable.”87 But as in the Roman original, the engineer-poet’s song is not far-reaching enough. Three workers arrive on the scene immediately after his ode to new building technologies to announce a series of calamities on the construction site, including a pipe rupture at a cooling tower and cracking foundations. Hasselbein’s failure to make the stones dance is a self-reflective moment for Müller in which he registers his own doubt about whether the metaphors, the “instruments of channelization,” he develops in the play will have the protective effects that poetry momentarily provided for Orpheus. We certainly do not have the sense from Barka’s urgent, pained speech at the topping out ceremony in the scene before that he and Elmer can make dance the stones and factories that modernity casts at them. There is as little alternative to being killed by built space in Der Bau as there is to the Prinzip Auschwitz as it governs post-war politics and society. The worker Bastian recognizes this in the play’s final scene as he carries a weakened Schlee, whose pregnancy by this time is an open secret, off the construction site. He indicates that laboring to build the industrial complex is threatening the life of Schlee and the fetus inside her: “concrete doesn’t renew you when it kills you. Show me the building that is worth something that’s been born.”88 Indeed, at various points during the building process the play represents, metaphors are used to reveal that the construction site’s modernity in fact threatens to kill the workers. In the same loaded speech at the topping out ceremony, Barka explains, You Elmer, are the excavator and you are the foundation ground, the stone that you lift up falls onto you, the wall grows out of you, the Bau stands on your bones, they even pull the electricity out of you that they keep the country going with. It’s true, Elmer, flesh becomes concrete, people ruin themselves for the Bau, every topping-out ceremony a foretaste of your burial.89 One scene later, in his elegy to the future of the construction site, Hasselbein echoes Barka’s language about architecture and death. As past labor is swallowed up to construct the future, buildings must be 87 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 384. 88 Ibid., 391. Weiskopf referred to the “birth” of new buildings in Moscow in his Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert. Weiskopf, Umsteigen, 96. 89 Ibid., 374.

94  Building Socialism seen temporally: “The formwork is a tangle: final gothic, concrete sticks to its iron skeleton, takes its place between the teeth of time, with the dead masons as the underground power plant.”90 The idea of industrial society’s fundamental death-drive is one that appears in Müller’s later conversations in reference to the Holocaust, but is already at work in Der Bau as the laborers reflect on the completion of key components of the East German built environment. Müller here reveals GDR construction sites as an accumulation of dead labor, leading a doubleexistence as functioning buildings and mausoleums to the workers who make them. Müller had a persistent interest, shared with Kunert, but often more cynical, in architectures of death and memorialization.91 This interest is reflected in Hegemann’s Berlin in Stone, which evinces an iteration of the architectural dualism, that between built space as a restriction or as a staging ground for action, that underpins Müller’s conception of the modern built environment. Hegemann’s introduction casts the potential of Berlin’s urbanistic renewal using metaphor: “A snake whose skin becomes too tight, casts it off and makes itself a new, more spacious container. But its new clothing looks interchangeable with the old. Some larvae, by contrast, who, nearly suffocating, live in their cocoons as in a self-made coffin, are able to smash them and, formed anew, rise up to colorful life …”92 In a built environment that, as Müller saw it, was being constructed according to the set of intellectual and cultural norms that led to 90 Ibid., 385. 91 In later conversations, Müller saw interment as a signal of a dangerous political stasis. For instance, he saw Lenin’s mummification and interment in a mausoleum as “the end of the idea of world revolution,” preferring dialectical re-engagement with the dead rather than staid cultures of memorialization (Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 440). In the same conversation, Müller recounts a conversation on this topic with his friend Henselmann who offered a delightfully sarcastic proposal for flexible memorials: “the inflatable rubber memorial: so you can pump it up or deflate it depending on how the political winds are blowing—one glance toward the street and you know what the situation is” (ibid., 440). In the GDR, dialectical memorialization would suit the political expediencies of shifting discourses about communist icons. But in a broader and more serious way, Müller himself linked the malleability of cultures of death to the needed malleability of identity itself: “Identity is a fiction … if you are identical to yourself, you may as well have yourself entombed, you don’t exist anymore, you’re no longer in motion. To be identical is to be a memorial. What we need is future and not the eternity of the single moment. We have to dig up the dead, again and again. Because only from them can we create a relation to the future” (ibid., 613). From this perspective, Der Bau can be read as an attempt to dig up the dead of the construction site and reveal the process of their death dialectically as an effort to combat the reifying culture of banal architectural propaganda about socialist building efforts. 92 Hegemann, Berlin, 18.

Confronting the Construction Site 95 concentration camps, the workers on the socialist construction site were at risk of being less like the larva able to burst from its cocoon and more like the discarded skin of the snake of a fascism that still permeates the present.

Carceral Communism: Construction Site as Prison

The modernity of the construction site as it exacts its toll on the workers is also expressed through the metaphor of incarceration in the play. In the second scene, as Donat and Barka begin to form the alliance that will lead to an unplanned diversion of funds to the construction of the water works, a representative from the district SED office visits the construction site. Barka, in his first encounter with the official, draws a connection between the spatial imprisonment brought about by the freshly mortared Berlin Wall and the imprisonment he experiences on the construction site: “Congratulations on the security wall. You’ve won this round but it’s below the belt. If I had known I was building my own prison here I would have loaded every wall with dynamite.”93 The word “here” creates a slippage between the Berlin Wall and the walls of the new factory. The result is an equation of the experience of territorial imprisonment as designed by the state and the experience of imprisonment felt by laborers at the Großbaustelle. The reality of spatial selection and division, key to Müller’s Prinzip Auschwitz, appears here in its specifically East German guise as the authoritarian cordoning off of workers both territorially and by means of the construction-site-as-prison. Yet the metaphoric idea of building one’s own prison, as Barka has unwittingly done, was one that appeared in other works by Müller. In later conversations about Der Bau, he referred to a sketch for a play dating to the early 1950s for which the premise was that workers were made to live in shoddy houses of their own construction. The impulse represented in this premise constitutes a satirical reversal of the sentiments Brecht expressed in the Moscow Metro poem and in his suggestion, treated in Chapter 1, for an inscription for the Stalinallee: “that it well house those who built it.” Müller’s premise offers a similar reversal of the much propagated slogan in the GDR of “the people as architectural client [Bauherr].” As such, Müller recognizes that the socialist industrialization that Brecht, as seen in Chapter 1, referred to as “the great production,” has not relieved modernity of the paradoxes inherent to it. When writing of Barka’s self-imprisonment, Müller is considering not just the geo-politics of the Cold War or the authoritarianism of the SED, but also the alliance between socialism and modernity that has trapped the potentially revolutionary working 93 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 349.

96  Building Socialism class in a vicious circle in which its attempts to govern itself result in self-imprisonment.94 Barka’s self-made prison on the East German construction site thus functions according to one of the central tenets of the Prinzip Auschwitz: the seeming impossibility of finding an alternative. It should be mentioned that Müller’s metaphors of imprisonment from later in his career also combine a focus on what was specific to East Germany with a broader reflection on modernity. The difference is that he no longer locates that modernity in the GDR. In his autobio­ graphy of 1992, for instance, he says: The building of the Wall was an attempt to stop time, an emergency defense against the economic attack of the capitalist West, the Wall an image of the true situation in concrete. The Kafka text DAS STADTWAPPEN describes ‘real existing’ socialism best. No state can, for longer than a generation[,] pen up its populace against its will in a waiting room where you can see on a screen the trains go by that you’re not allowed to board.95 At issue in “Das Stadtwappen” is a city dedicated to building a Tower of Babel whose citizens become disillusioned with the project but must 94 Hints of the kind of imprisonment registered in Der Bau and in the scenario for a play just treated are also present in a 1949 poem by Müller entitled “Bericht vom Anfang” (Report of the Beginning). The poem’s first half uses the naïve tone that Brecht deployed in his ode to the Moscow Metro to render the triumphal entry of construction workers into apartment buildings they have built for themselves. Toward the close of the poem, though, the tone shifts. As the workers hesitantly take possession of their new houses they hear a voice in their head: “Always in front of them, though, was the voice / That spoke to them: it is insufficient! Remain / Not still! He who remains still falls! Onward! Thus / In the always-moving-onward following the voice / The difficult became simple / The unreachable was reached. / And about the alwaysmoving-forward they / Recognized: it was their own voice speaking to them” (Heiner Müller, Werke 1, Die Gedichte 13, ed. Frank Hörnigk [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998]). Evidence exists for connecting this early poem to Der Bau. The line “he who remains still falls” prefigures some of the language in Barka’s topping out speech: when chased by factories he feels as though standing still will result in his being cast “into the void.” In the 1949 poem, though, the selfdisciplining and the making of one’s own house render what in later works would be incarceration as fulfillment. However, without the two positive lines (about the “difficult” as “simple” and the “unreacheable” as “reached”), the poem would take on a darker aspect. The militaristic tone of the commands the workers give themselves reveal that they and their efforts at constructing a new house for themselves remain trapped within a paradigm of a hierarchical modernity that they have internalized. 95 Müller, Werke 9, Eine Autobiographie, 286.

Confronting the Construction Site 97 remain in the city and feign interest in it. By the close of the story, the factionalized citizenry devotes the bulk of its attention to bloody infighting.96 For Müller, real-existing socialism was an attempt to reserve a space separate from capitalist modernity and create a society that operates, literally, according to a different tempo. The result of the attempt to create such a space is a broad-based unrest that leads, after a generation, to a return of the modernity from which escape was initially sought. So, as in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” and in his “Bau,” the ability to break out of the prison-house of modernity into “other” kinds of spaces is withheld. The project of Germany’s socialist modernity is subject to the circular nature of the Prinzip Auschwitz. The difference in Müller’s Der Bau is that core elements of that modernity itself, its denigration and imprisonment of the body, were at work on the socialist Großbaustelle. From this perspective, the play and its architectural subject matter must be seen as integral to Müller’s initial preoccupation with the paradoxes of technological society. There is one more imprisonment metaphor in Der Bau that merits attention in connection to the paradox of forging an alternative to modernity. In the play’s first scene, Hasselbein has a brief private moment with Schlee in which he notes that Donat is the third party secretary on the site in a year. He explains the revolving door of party bureaucracy by lamenting that “the revolution is no longer a calling since it takes place in the economy, he who wants to get through the wall with his head must have the wall in his head, the plan for the people’s economy a homeric epic, people the gods in a race with their deadline under time’s foot.”97 The “wall” to which Hasselbein refers is in some measure the Berlin Wall. To internalize the spatial divide it enacts means recognizing that the party’s control of the economy is complete. But as seen in the Barka quotation above, the Wall and the construction site take on equivalent roles in the metaphorics of imprisonment. The solution Barka offers to being incarcerated on the construction site is to dynamite the walls. For him, the Großbaustelle, like the Wall, is a built space that restricts subjectivity and fashions subjects in its own image: this is a process to be resisted through force. Hasselbein’s solution is different. In order to break down the “walls” of modernity’s spatial restriction as created on the construction site, one must allow those walls to be internalized as part of one’s own self. At least at this one moment in Müller’s centrifuge of spatial metaphors, it appears that East Germany’s modern, architectural impositions can yield their emancipatory opposite. 96 Franz Kafka, “Das Stadtwappen,” Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente 2, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 318. 97 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 342–3.

98  Building Socialism

Traditional Urbanism and Construction Site as Playground

Hasselbein’s conception of the “wall” leaves open the possibility that there is hope in the carcerality of modernity’s built space. Müller’s reflection on issues specific to urban development from the 1960s through the 1980s reveal that it is possible that, even after his turn to critical metaphors, he shared to some degree in the left-wing romantic idea that architectures of restriction could become sites of political agency. In 1967, the playwright acquired a typescript of a speech given that year by his friend Hermann Henselmann at a conference of East Germany’s Chamber of Technology on the topic of street planning. The typescript, entitled “Städtebau und Kommunikation” (City Planning and Communication), asserted the importance of vibrant street culture to everyday life under socialism and exacted a stinging critique of Modernist architectural orthodoxy with its insistence on wide streets, separation of uses, and park-like housing estates.98 The architect draws explicitly on the insights of Alexander Mitscherlich’s widely read book, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Unmanageability of our Cities, 1965) and implicitly on Jane Jacobs’s urban populism in her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) to assert the value of the intimate forms of sociability present in dense urban neighborhoods.99 Unlike the West German psychologist and the U.S. urban theorist, Henselmann’s critique of Modernist architecture operates within a Marxist framework that by no means dismisses Modernist architecture. 98 Gabriele Wiesemann has seen this piece as a watershed in Henselmann’s thinking as he kept track of international trends in sociology and psychology that increasingly saw the mid-century Modernist city critically. Gabriele Wiesemann, “Die Hochschule für Landwirtschaft in Neubrandenburg: Eine neoexpressionistische Architekturphantasie von Hermann Henselmann,” in Sozialistisch behaust und bekunstet. Hochschulen und ihre Bauten in der DDR (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999), 138–9. The speech was later published in Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, but I quote from the typescript in the Müller archive. 99 Starting in the mid-1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, Mitscherlich wrote extensively on the psychological effects of modern planning on socialization patterns and mental well-being. “Unwirtlichkeit der Städte” was the most famous of his pieces and the most influential for Henselmann and his mentee Brigitte Reimann. Mitschlerlich started the material for the piece in 1955 when portions of it were published in psychology journals in the Federal Republic. The piece resonated with readers and was reprinted several times before Suhrkamp put out a widely distributed edition in 1965, two years before the Henselmann speech Müller took interest in. On Reimann, Henselmann, and Mitscherlich, see Eva Kaufmann, “Architektur, Literatur und Utopie,” in Architektur und Literatur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945: Beiträge zu einer wissenschaftlichen Konferenz in Neubrandenburg, 2003 (Neubrandenburg: Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg, 2005), 114.

Confronting the Construction Site 99 Rather, attention must be given to the way that architecture can result in new forms of social interaction in everyday life: “When we thus deeply analyze the critique that has been made of the city planning of recent decades, we do not arrive at a denial of the technological or economic, but rather at patterns of behavior and the forms of communication that develop from them.”100 For Henselmann, human society both produces built space and adapts itself in response to it. He goes on implicitly to hint that his talk is aimed not just at preserving old neighborhoods, but at helping those living in monotonous new ones realize a more “organic” relationship with their environment. This is about the social life of the people as they claim the space for themselves: The distinctiveness of a residential area, however, is not to be demonstrated in the foregrounded wish for formal differentiation; it must be developed from the distinctiveness and particularities of the city and the spatial translation of the differentiated dwelling and living claims of the people. For Henselmann, architecture gains value only in the process through which it is appropriated by actual users. The architect is not so much a designer of formal spaces as a facilitator of the social process of use as it develops organically over time. Though Müller, in his discussions of the Prinzip Auschwitz, tended to evince a dim view of the humanist impulse, he occasionally placed value in his late-career conversations on, to use Henselmann’s terms, the “claims of the people” to space. Speaking with writer and critic Fritz Raddatz in 1990, Müller conceived the imposition presented by the modern built environment as a painful wake-up call to political action: “[Industrialization] is a monstrous intervention because the machine obeys a different time than the human. Now it can only be about, in this machine park that is always growing faster and moving faster, creating a preserve for the human, for the biological tempo of the human being.”101 Five sentences later in the conversation, Müller characterizes the relationship of machine time to human time in terms of built space: “[The human being] can only hope, between the continually increasing number of machines, to find a place for itself. In the Federal Republic, there is already more surface area for cars, I mean streets, parking garages and the like, than space for living.”102 What Müller represents here as a great historical stand-off 100 Hermann Henselman, “Städtebau und Kommunikation,” Heiner-MüllerArchiv, Akademie der Künste, File 5925. 101 Müller, Werke 11, Gespräche 2, 669. 102 Müller, Werke 10, Gespräche 1, 486–90.

100  Building Socialism between technology and biology, left-wing romantic philosopher Henri Lefebvre saw in terms of the adaptability and tenacity of the human animal. Writing in his Introduction to Modernity (1957) about Modernist, auto-centric new towns in France, Lefebvre saw machine-age architecture as a precondition to revolution: Our task now is to construct everyday life, to produce it, consciously to create it … Here, in the new town, boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there’s butter, milk, flour, sugar.103 In Lefebvre’s rhapsodic formulation of the relationship between new architecture and social life, the monotonous housing projects of mid-century, by degrading human life and making it peripheral, re-empower it as humans learn to define themselves against the power structures that attempt to dictate their social existence. For the Müller of the time around the Wende, this humanist dialectic is no longer revolutionary, but is instead expressed as a rearguard action against the onmarch of industrial modernity in the urban landscape. Nevertheless, despite the apocalyptic urgency of the task Müller outlines, it would seem as though he does hold out the possibility for an “alternative to Auschwitz” in the spatial claims of the human. If the playwright, later in his career, complemented the focus on the vicious cycle of the Prinzip Auschwitz and its rejection of the notion of progress with a humanist vision for the reclamation of space for biological time, was there a similar complement at work in Der Bau? Müller indeed develops a metaphor for the construction site toward the end of the play that runs counter to those of bodily destruction and incarceration. After Donat learns that Schlee is pregnant, he expresses his hope that the laborers can make the “stones dance”: “In a couple of days, the construction site will be a carousel, the stone will dance, a year or longer we’ve shortened our lives for a dream that’s finally becoming concrete.”104 Schlee, in response to Donat’s suggestion that the importance of their labor dictates that they remain separate despite her pregnancy, echoes the young party secretary’s metaphor: Our child will be my child, I am we. Listen, son or daughter, I can still talk to you as with myself, you don’t hear me, Hans-still103 Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1995), 124. 104 Müller, Werke 3, Die Stücke 1, 380.

Confronting the Construction Site 101 not-a-person, Jan-without-a-hand, Headless-John, seven months younger than yourself, smaller than your thumb will be, but everything already revolves around you, the construction site your playground.105 The absorption by these figures of the “concrete” of the construction site, the terms of technological modernity, has the potential to result, through the use of future generations, in the conversion of that authoritarian space into a space for play.106 Buildings can “remediate the lack that they reflect” by inducing future communities of users to develop new forms of sociality that run counter to the power structures that created the spaces in the first place. By thus acknowledging the process of everyday use, Müller opens the door to a new kind of materialism that sees use value against the programming of the state’s new spaces as a key to the future progress of the revolution. If Müller had been in the vanguard of those who tried to reinstate alienation as a legitimate theoretical category for living under socialism, here he reasserts the notion that the everyday, collective improvising of life within alienating structures can offer a critique of planning. So, while many of the play’s metaphors are governed by the Auschwitz principle, these coexist with a left-wing romanticism that Müller never entirely shed. Seen in this light, Müller’s work in Der Bau sets the stage for the focus in the prose of the 1960s on the use of built space, to be considered in Chapters 4 and 5. That Müller was interested, even early in his career, in organic use of built space is indicated by his assertion in his autobiography that key impulses in his later work were derived from his experience in Berlin’s working-class districts in the early 1950s. He linked gritty urban experience to his own evaluation of the goals of real-existing socialism in the GDR and to his own literary production: The best source of information about the situation in Germany was always, for me, the pubs. You get to know a city from the inside, not touristically. Kneipe [pub] is the opposite of tourism. Anyway the pubs in Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and Lichtenberg. It was also part of policy in the GDR to exterminate these milieus. 105 Ibid., 381. 106 Archival evidence shows that the playwright was interested in the relationship between city planning, the arts, and children’s play at the time of writing Der Bau. On a page of typewritten notes pertaining to the play appear the phrases, likely chapter titles in an unidentified book or journal, “Bauplastik und Kinder” (Architectural Sculpture and Children) and “Spielräume und Kinder in der Stadt der Zukunft” (Play Spaces for Children in the City of the Future). HeinerMüller-Arciv, Akdemie der Künste, File 5125.

102  Building Socialism These pubs were gradually converted into cafes, controllable, no longer proletarian. Proletarian Berlin was disposed of through the construction measures [Baumaßnahmen] of the SED.107 Müller even saw engagement with modern urban environments as being at the heart of Brecht’s revolutionary dramatics. In the foreword to the edition of Brecht’s Fatzer that Müller edited, Müller asserts that the basis for the play was Brecht’s experience of Berlin as a site of revolutionary agency: [Fatzer] is a once-a-century text in terms of the linguistic quality, in terms of the density. This quality has to do with the shock of the big city. Brecht came to Berlin lived in a garret, a map of Berlin was hung on the wall. Brecht placed little flags where communist cells were being constituted, waiting for revolution.108 The question of whether the shock of modernity as experienced in built space, in Brecht’s case in metropolitan Berlin and in Müller’s case on the socialist Großbaustelle, could yield political agency was an important impulse in the experimental prose of Reimann, de Bruyn, Kunert, Wolf, and others to be treated in the final two chapters of this study.

107 Müller, Werke 9, Eine Autobiographie, 69. 108 Heiner Müller, foreword to Bertolt Brecht, Der Untergang des Egoisten Johann Fatzer, ed. Heiner Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 7.

Three Towards a Bourgeois Architecture: Helmut Baierl’s Frau Flinz and the Space of the Class Enemy

Helmut Baierl stands in stark contrast to Heiner Müller. For him and his team of directors and set designers for the 1961 performance of his Frau Flinz at the Berliner Ensemble, the physical appearance of a chair or window bay carries specific political meaning. In the play, set in 1949, Martha Flinz seeks to remain apolitical as she barters with local officials and landowners to secure food and shelter for her five sons. Weiler, a party bureaucrat, expropriates a room for her in the house of Neumann, the greedy owner of a furniture factory. Frau Flinz resists, though, by suggesting that a local factory Weiler had had converted to living space be converted back to production space under Neumann’s direction. After Weiler executes Frau Flinz’s plan, she ingratiates her sons to Neumann, securing them stable and well-paying employment at the new factory. Yet one by one, even as Neumann is run out of town for neglecting worker safety, Flinz’s sons leave her to seek the jobs, education, and upward mobility available to them in the farmers’ and workers’ state. Neumann, by contrast, heads west to Hannover, while Flinz ends up working on a collective farm. Weiler visits her when she falls ill and, in a long monologue, explains how the East German revolution is different from previous ones in that it relies on the two pillars of technological progress and education in the sciences. Frau Flinz declares in what amounts to a socialist conversion scene that, because the newspapers tell her that the state belongs to her, she will go to where the party line is made in order to influence it.1 The sugar1 One Western reviewer even noted this “conversion” aspect in the title of his review. See Wolfgang Schimming, “Die Bekehrung der Frau Flinz,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 10, 1961.

104  Building Socialism coated epilogue sees Frau Flinz enjoying her role as a guest delegate to a major party conference. The co-directors of the 1961 premiere of the play at the Berliner Ensemble, Manfred Wekwerth and Peter Palitzsch, helped envision the play’s living rooms, meeting halls, and factory gates. Indeed, their efforts, along with those of Baierl and set designer Karl von Appen, formed the centerpiece of a massive collective effort at the Ensemble in the lead-up to the play’s opening run in the summer of 1961. This effort is astoundingly well documented. Several thick folios of production notes detailing all phases of debate on the play’s set design, blocking, and script collect dust in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In addition, we have copies of the sources, including speeches by Walter Ulbricht, that Baierl, Wekwerth, and Palitzsch gathered for the reference of cast and crew in the making of Flinz. The play as initially produced sought to create a fixed formal code for what constituted bourgeois and socialist built space. The play vilified ornamental furniture from baroque to Jugendstil as inherently capitalist; the playwright, directors, and set designers affirmed a discourse on interior space in the GDR, led by the interior design magazine Kultur im Heim, that sought to graft specific political meanings to choices in decoration.2 3 This discourse as presented in Flinz was historiographical and nationalist: it drew on accounts of the GDR’s early years contained

2 Klaus Siebenhaar has noted the “comic-burlesque elements” common in agitprop dramas of various types during this time. What he sees as characteristic of a genre, namely of the Volksstück, I see as a political device designed to graft political coding onto objects and ways of everyday living. Klaus Siebenhaar, “‘Der freundliche Blick auf Widersprüche …’: Volkstücktradition und Realismus im DDR-Drama,” in Dramatik der DDR, ed. Ulrich Profitlich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 379. 3 Kultur im Heim, founded in 1956, was firmly in the grip of designers schooled in Bauhaus methods (including Selman Selmanagic) who saw cultural tides shifting their way with the advent of the Scientific-Technological Revolution and the recession of official Stalinist preferences for applied ornament in design. Eli Rubin has written on the role of plastics in GDR consumer culture in the 1960s and cites the continuing tradition of Bauhaus forms in the applied arts through the 1950s (propagated by teachers like Selmanagic) as one reason that new materials could take root. Selmanagic’s designs appeared often in Kultur im Heim. Rubin describes as well the magazine’s intense resonance in the GDR both as a symbol of conformism among prosperous young bureaucrats and as an object of scorn for dissenters. Rubin draws on personal interviews in constructing his argument. One interviewee who had furnished her apartment specifically in opposition to Kultur im Heim drew the attention of the Stasi. Eli Rubin, “The Order of Substitutes: Plastic Consumer Goods in the Volkswirtschaft and Everyday Domestic Life in the GDR,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David Crew (New York: Berg, 2003), 102, 107–10.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 105 in the source material mentioned above and on texts that spoke almost exclusively to the historical experience of those living in the Soviet zone of occupation and the GDR. As such, Frau Flinz performs a historiographical function similar to that which literature scholar Peter Zimmermann ascribes to GDR novelist Hermann Kant. Zimmermann, in a passage in his underappreciated study, Industrieliteratur der DDR (Industrial Literature of the GDR), termed Kant the “historiographer” of the “social intelligentsia, the managers and technicians of the scientific technological revolution, that grew up and were educated in the GDR.”4 Zimmermann shows how Kant’s novel Das Impressum (1972) ignores the social differences that characterized the GDR workplace into the 1970s and assumes that the classless society had already arrived. The Flinz archive, the play itself, the trajectory of Baierl’s and set designer Appen’s careers, and the comparison of the play to Kultur im Heim reveal that a self-consciously, GDR-specific historiography already informed representations of the built environment in the early 1960s. This historiographic view of capitalist and socialist space sought to restrict debate on the GDR built environment to the terms of official speeches and newspaper editorials. The Flinz team assumed a one-to-one correspondence between official pronouncements and reality itself; they used built space in the play to signal allegiance to the revolution as administered by party bureaucrats.5 The play ceded responsibility for the writing of history to Ulbricht’s inner circle and implied that the GDR’s scientific revolution, as planned by this inner circle, was the only legitimate producer of “socialist” built forms. The Flinz team’s limiting historiography of design sees East German space as the culmination of the alliance between modernity and socialism.

4

Peter Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR: Von Helden der Arbeit zum Planer und Leiter (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 199. 5 My argument largely fits within, but makes substantially more specific, David Bathrick’s notion of “affirmative culture.” For Bathrick, Socialist Realism relies on “prefabrication” of the realities to be conveyed through art; this “prefabrication” rests on “the inevitability of ‘socialist’ history and the infallibility of the science that will know it.” Bathrick uses cultural-political documents to reveal a radical distinction between “RAPPist” or “Proletkult” impulses and Socialist Realist ones and thereby de-emphasizes the mechanisms, sketched by Dobrenko and treated in Chapter 2, through which such impulses were in fact integrated into and present in artists’ work in East Germany. My account of the Flinz team’s efforts show that affirmative culture, while certainly prefabricated, in fact rested on networks of complicated and nuanced individual agencies rather than on cultural-political proclamations. David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 116–19.

106  Building Socialism The bureaucratic leaders of this revolution are envisioned in the play as arbiters of design and of how the new economy impinges on everyday life. As attested by the Flinz preparatory materials, by Appen’s writings and Wekwerth’s engagement with architectural tracts, by the monologues of party bureaucrats, and by the representation of Flinz’s collective farm in the play, the GDR’s new architecture had been as much the starting point for considerations about space in the play as the “evil” bourgeois interior that comprises Flinz’s most direct treatment of architecture. These arguments are traced through five sections and an epilogue. The first section analyses Appen’s rendering of Neumann’s interior in light of the Flinz preparatory material. In the next two sections, the rendering is contextualized respectively through an account of Appen’s career and through analysis of images and text from Kultur im Heim. The fourth section treats a production photograph of the same living room after the Flinzs’ occupation of it and shows the ways in which the Flinz family’s appropriation of the space was presented as a revolutionary act that foreshadowed the bureaucratic modernization of space that became official policy in the late 1950s. The fifth section deals with renderings by Appen of Frau Flinz’s collective farm at the end of the play and with Weiler’s speech about it to show how the Flinz team was considering the built form of the socialist “future” in addition to the forms of the bourgeois past. In an epilogue at the close of the chapter, the divergent paths of Baierl, who became increasingly pro-science through the 1960s, and Appen, who criticized the alignment of socialism and science in architectural terms, are traced in light of the status in East Germany of Lenin as a symbol of socialism’s embrace of modern industry.

Architecture According to Ulbricht

In Appen’s 1960 rendering of Neumann’s living room before the Flinz family takes possession of it, wall surfaces and furniture make reference to architecture of the late nineteenth century (see Figure 5). With its spindly, gold chandelier with arms curving ostentatiously out to funnelshaped candle-holders, the room evinces a garish splendor. The door and doorframe, at the rear of the room, are of dark, heavy hardwood, with sets of ionic pilasters flanking either side and supporting a lintel topped with a dentiled cornice. In the center of the room stand four green, upholstered chairs with thick, curving backs and armrests. A round-topped side table is squeezed between the two chairs on the left side. In the center foreground is a marble-topped, wooden-legged sewing table with iron foot pedal and gears. A bay window with leaded panes projects from the left rear of the room creating a space covered by a parquet floor on which stand a desk and chair. Stylistically, the

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 107

Figure 5  Karl von Appen, Neumann’s living room, 1961.

ensemble is jarring. The plush, unpatterned fabric of the chairs conveys a clubby solidity which is echoed in the neo-Renaissance doorway. The mannered cornice on the doorway, however, matches the more overtly tacky glitz of the chandelier and the pointy fussiness of the roof over the projecting bay. The room is a slightly grotesque evocation of the showy and oppressive home of a middle-tier capitalist. Though Appen, Wekwerth, and Baierl were all self-professed dialectical materialists, the production of Frau Flinz tended to affirm a consciousness-based view of socialist space in which architectural choices were a projection of political mentalities. Included in the production team’s source material were newspaper versions of speeches made in the immediate post-war period by Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, and other later high-ranking members of the GDR leadership. The object of particular scorn in these speeches are, unsurprisingly, rich capitalists such as Neumann. In a match too with Neumann’s retrograde tastes, these mid-1940s capitalists, who are tarred with different epithets, including “the old company bosses,” “the old rulers of Prussia-Germany,” “the upholders and beneficiaries of the capitalist system,” and “the declassed bourgeoisie,” are imagined to stand in

108  Building Socialism a continuous historical line with their Wilhelmine forebears.6 The emphasis on the “old” or “declassé” bourgeoisie represents a locating of the class enemy of the late 1940s in the historical past as “old” or “Prussian,” an obsolete relic to be overcome through revolution.7 More surprising than Ulbricht’s condemnation of Prussian capitalism is that Wekwerth asserted its continued validity in 1961: the co-director enthusiastically underlined the relevant passages in Ulbricht’s article, even writing “Neumann” in the margin next to Ulbricht’s vilification of “the old company bosses.” Thus, there is a direct line from Ulbricht’s initial speeches after his return to Germany from the Soviet Union and the conception of capitalism in Frau Flinz. Wekwerth, Baierl, Appen, and Palitzsch accordingly set out to design the space of a class enemy understood as a remnant of the fin de siecle bourgeoisie. Rehearsal notes show that there were debates about whether the steam from the steam-machine, which was meant to simulate the smoke of the factory next to Neumann’s house, obscured the ostentation of his furnishings.8 Similarly, notes to technical rehearsals from March 8 through March 10, 1961, reveal worries that Neumann’s house is not “saying” enough about him. Of particular concern was the main entrance: “The door looked too modern and not true enough to type [untypisiert].”9 In addition, the production crew recommended that Neumann’s “window bay [Erker]” be remade using “sumptuous wood in an ornamental execution” and that his bad taste be expressed “in a floor with a velour covering.”10 The Flinz team recommended a specific style for his chairs, “Jugendstil,” an art-historical period that Ulbricht thought the bourgeoisie of the post-war era was stuck in.11 Wekwerth and the Flinz team thus worked 6 The first quotation is from Walter Ulbricht, “Strategie und Taktik der SED,” Einheit, October 5, 1946; the second is from Max Seydewitz, “Über die materiellen Grundlagen des demokratischen Neuaufbaues,” Einheit, June 1, 1946; the final two are from Max Fechner, “Die Ergebnisse der Gemeindewahlen in der Ostzone,” Einheit, October 1946. These articles are available in the ManfredWekwerth-Archiv at the Akademie der Künste. 7 Prussia occupied an ambiguous place in the GDR imagination. In fact, it is not possible to trace one “image” of Prussia. For the editors of Kultur im Heim, it was decidedly backward looking. This was not necessarily the case for SED leaders who sought to tap into the Prussian legacy as a means of legitimating their own authoritarian measures. See Eberhard Kuhrt and Henning von Löwis, Griff nach der deutschen Geschichte: Erbeaneingung und Traditionspflege in der DDR (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schönigh, 1988). 8 “Punkte vom Durchlauf FRAU FLINZ am 25.3.1961,” AdK Berlin, Helmut-Baierl-Archiv. 9 “Notizen 8. 9. 10. März,” AdK Berlin, Helmut-Baierl-Archiv. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 109 to canonize Ulbricht’s own conception of the class enemy as out of date by sixty years.12 For the Flinz team, the textual sources of the official press and top politicians were sufficient for codifying the meanings of interior design.

Karl von Appen and the Making of Bourgeois Space

The trajectory of set designer Karl von Appen’s career, though, reveals that Neumann’s bourgeois interior was also part of a long history of socialist thought about what the houses of the rich look like. Appen became a communist agitator in the 1920s and was sent to a concentration camp during the Third Reich. In the young GDR, he quickly gained recognition as a set designer for major plays at the Berliner Ensemble, most notably of Brecht’s production of Erwin Strittmatter’s Katzgraben (1953).13 Appen understood himself as a Modernist participating in the perpetuation of Brechtian aesthetics in the East, and in that sense was by no means a conventional Socialist Realist.14 However, his richly detailed watercolors of figures and interior scenes for Katzgraben, like Flinz, treated the conflict between rich and poor in an agricultural setting and stood in sharp contrast to the dynamic flux of Caspar Neher’s evocative sketches from the 1920s and 1930s.15 Yet Brecht approved of the images. As Manfred Wekwerth later remembered, Brecht, however ironically, legitimated the pictures’ static, Socialist Realist conception of the new socialist “man” as envisioned by Appen: A fleeting, dissolute painting technique would have concealed the social meaning, the weight of these people and these processes. There were no images of them—Appen delivered [such images]; his way of imagining the figures precisely, indeed almost fixing them statically, made them memorable: their postures, faces, gestures. Appen, said Brecht playfully, let the working class grow a face, and one saw, it was a nice and friendly face.16 12 Jost Hermand has explored the revival of “Jugendstil” motifs among artists and social movements in the 1960s and shown the possibilities and limits of its vegetal forms as signifiers of resistance to technocracy (of the kind propagated by Kultur im Heim). See Jost Hermand, “Heimweh nach dem Jugendstil: Formen der ästhetischen Revolte in den sechsiger Jahren,” in Stile, Ismen Etiketten: Zur Periodisierung der modernen Kunst (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1978), 125–39. 13 Friedrich Dieckmann, Karl von Appens Bühnenbilder am Berliner Ensemble: Szenenbilder, Figurinen, Entwürfe und Szenenphotos zu achtzehn Aufführungen (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1968), 12–15. 14 Ibid., 15–19. 15 Ibid., 25–6. 16 Cited in Dieckmann, Karl von Appens Bühnenbilder, 25.

110  Building Socialism Katzgraben’s spaces were as predetermined as its visions of the working class’s friendly face. GDR theater scholar Friedrich Dieckmann (still an important public intellectual in Germay) traces a correspondence between characters’ furniture and their political commitments. This correspondence is strongest in the figure of the rich farmer. After describing the way an ornamented oven reflects the rich farmer’s “feudal ambitions,” Dieckmann concludes, “It was a stuffy, un-airedout room, from which no fresh thoughts could come. The window, draped with broad, netted curtains, was more a decorative object than an opening for light and air.”17 Appen has envisioned a room in which historicizing decoration and thick window coverings signaled their owner’s immutable attitude vis-à-vis the class struggle. Further evidence is available that Appen, in fact, viewed ornamented furniture in these terms. In his hatred for all aspects of bourgeois business owners’ lifestyles, Appen had already formulated a theoretical vision of the forms he hoped to vilify through theater. His “Die Dekoration und das Dekorative” (Decoration and the Decorative) appeared in 1952, even as the design world in East Germany was limited by the mandate of forging Stalinist national styles drawn from the forms of the nineteenth century. There he lambastes ornament in theater sets as a spatial device long since made obsolete: The decorative theater had its great, creative time in absolutist society, in which the princely need for representation gave it power and believability, societal along with spiritual elevation. This root is long since rotted, seeming-roots having taken its place; in bourgeois society, which, in its late era, took on the task of copying the baroque need for embellishment and finery, the decorative moment lost all freshness and naivite.18 This dim view of bourgeois taste in the late nineteenth century is like that of High Modernist architects in the Soviet Union and Western Europe of the 1920s who sought to stylize their own aesthetic innovations as a radical break from the past. In 1955, two years after Stalin’s death but before Khrushchev’s landmark de-Stalinization speech of 1956, Appen found the cultural climate safe for an outright defense of an anti-ornament Modernism in the visual arts. His “Bemerkungen eines Bühnenbildners” (Remarks of a Set Desinger) exacts a tactical critique of Modernism’s formalist 17 Ibid., 69. 18 Karl von Appen, “Die Dekoration und das Dekorative,” in Karl von Appens Bühnenbilder am Berliner Ensemble, ed. Friedrich Dieckmann (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1973), 37.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 111 excess but rejects dogmatic Socialist Realism.19 According to Appen, an aesthetic middle ground can be staked out by letting artists develop new forms that draw on the material conditions of reality; as that reality shifts, artists have license to find forms appropriate to it. Appen even praises Pablo Picasso, whom GDR cultural hawks would never quite accept. The Modernist master of course used unconventional forms in “Guernica” to render a real event whose brutality required the transcendence of realism. Appen acknowledges that the GDR of the 1950s is far removed from the Spanish Civil War, but signals that East German industrial rationalization requires formal innovation for which officials should provide leeway.20 In making such calls, Appen was ahead of the curve. His Modernist approach was to be foregrounded during de-Stalinization of the arts in the late 1950s.21 If Appen’s theory of theater design in the early 1950s looked irreconcilable with Stalinist traditionalism, the late 1950s saw the two converge in a tactical alliance that sought to destroy the bourgeois forms of the past and help shape a society based on scientific progress. Appen’s combination of Stalinist representationalism and Modernist disdain for ornament anticipated the Flinz team’s politics of space. In his “Die Aufgaben des Bühnenbildners bei der Entwicklung einer realistischen deutschen Theaterkunst” (The Tasks of the Set Designer in the Development of a Realist German Theater), an unpublished essay presumably from the early 1950s, Appen stresses the need for flexible decorative forms to represent the architectural world of the opera on stage.22 But he goes on to call for a set design that makes specific and critical allusions to the real world. Analysing a production of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, Appen notes, “The Olympia act [of the opera] is clearly a critique of Parisian society around 1860; at that time, one saw many cabinets that looked like winter gardens, supported by cast iron columns. Thus, we place the action in the typical environment for this practice.”23 Launching a critique of social conditions through the necessarily spatial craft of stage design mandates an engagement with the concrete spaces in 19 Karl von Appen, “Bemerkungen eines Bühnenbilders,” in Karl von Appens Bühnenbilder am Berliner Ensemble, ed. Friedrich Dieckmann (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1973), 41–2. 20 Ibid., 42. 21 Emily Pugh traces this trend in the GDR architectural world. Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 133–6. 22 Karl von Appen, “Die Aufgaben des Bühnenbilders bei der Entwicklung einer realistischen deutschen Theaterkunst,” undated typescript, AdK Berlin, Karl-von-Appen Archiv, Rep. 106, IV b1 Nr. 11. 23 Ibid.

112  Building Socialism which the set designer finds himself. Not enigmatic metaphor or bare bones sparseness are keys to artistic intervention in the political realm, but rather reference to the buildings and furniture in their historical context which in turn is understood in terms of the presentday class struggle. Thus, Appen assumes that the French composer shares his mid-twentieth-century distaste for the cast-iron columns of nineteenth-century winter gardens, operatic sets of which should feature “Venice’s pointy architecture, together with opulent curtains and marble columns” to make clear the critique of the heavy curtains and needlessly expensive materials of nineteenth-century historicist styles.24 Thus, even before Flinz, and precisely because of his avowed Modernism, Appen was developing a historiographical perspective on the relationship between space and imaginaries of its role in the East German revolutionary project that saw interior design forms as having fixed political values.

Kultur im Heim

Appen’s and Ulbricht’s view of historical styles was matched by the editorial line of Kultur im Heim, a leading interior design journal in East Germany. As such, the journal must also be seen as part of the context in which Neumann’s interior in Frau Flinz was designed. Kultur im Heim first appeared in 1956 as a special supplement to the journal Möbel und Wohnraum (Furniture and Living Space). Though its reformatory agenda was far reaching, involving nothing less than the eradication of “kitsch” and the advancement of a comfortably utilitarian concept of living space, its audience was relatively narrow.25 Its main readers were the wives of upwardly mobile bureaucrats of the so-called Hitler Youth generation, whose members were around thirty at this time.26 That women were the target audience is made clear by photographs of dutiful-looking housewives accompanying regular features such as “Technik im Haushalt” (Technology in the Home). The magazine’s relatively high-quality printing along with its coverage of design trends from Scandanavia indicated that these women were the wives of prosperous white collar workers who were imagined to have cosmopolitan tastes and aspirations. In addition, the ideologies of design presented in Kultur im Heim came from the Bauhaus trained designers Mart Stamm and Selman Selmanagic. They advocated for Modernist forms and against historicizing ones, and their diatribes were more 24 Ibid. 25 See Eli Rubin, “The Form of Socialism without Ornament: Consumption, Ideology, and the Fall and Rise of Modernist Design in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 2 (2006): 155–68. 26 Rubin, “The Order of Substitutes,” 98.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 113 in keeping with the rhetoric of 1920s Constructivists than with the Stalinists who still held cultural sway in the mid-1950s.27 Polemics against historical forms and in favor of “modern,” “practical,” or “ready-to-function” forms started in earnest during Kultur im Heim’s second year, 1957, and continued unabated through 1965. An article from 1958, “Der Zweck und die Form” (Purpose and Form), sketched a brief history of design which lauded the major architectural innovations of the first half of the twentieth century as a triumph over the historicizing impulses of the late nineteenth century.28 “Sensible” GDR designs and the aesthetic education of GDR citizens were stylized here as a victory of the working class and its interests. Modern forms are made to carry the weight of socialism while “historicizing” forms are derided as specifically capitalist. By the end of 1958, editor Alfred Schneider claimed credit for the decreased production in East Germany of decorative furniture with its “bad confection, bombast, or ‘privy counsellor’ style.”29 The pared-down Modernist designs recommended by Kultur im Heim represent, according to Schneider, the forms best suited to socialism’s political and economic development and to combatting kitschy ornamentation characteristic of “the dark tetrinity, Clerisy-Militarists-Monopolists-Nobility.”30 In the same issue of the journal, a piece on new kinds of lighting connects Deutsche Werkstätten Dresden’s designs for practical, built-in lighting to the history of that institution which extends back to the early (conservative) Modernists Bruno Paul and Heinrich Tessenow who had worked there. The article reserves particular scorn for ornate, neo-rococco, curving chandeliers which are derided not only as impractical and ugly but also disturbing. The piece stylizes them as historicist anachronisms with no place in a socialist state in which modernization and rationalization are imagined as raisons d’etat. Seen in this light, the curving chandelier Appen imagines for Neumann’s living room becomes a far more loaded object than the play’s seeming lightness would suggest. The furniture has negative agency in the class struggle as imagined in Kultur im Heim and in the play. But the desire for furniture that, according to Kultur im Heim, reflected “a bourgeois need for vain resplendence and trite swank” was also about the socialist future.31 In order for socialist tastes to develop properly, furniture needed to become “an occasion for education.”32 27 William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1982), 397. 28 Kultur im Heim 2 (1958): 14. 29 Ibid., 3. 30 Ibid. 31 Kultur im Heim 1 (1958): 3. 32 Ibid.

114  Building Socialism This intense didactic spirit was also at work in Appen’s set designs for Frau Flinz; the caricature of Neumann’s interior goes hand in hand with the ultimate triumph in the play of the GDR education system in creating a new and loyal bureaucracy. As such, caricature of the old becomes a first step on the path to socialist-style modernization. The historiography of “outdated” space in Kultur im Heim thus finds its echo in an implicit historiography of GDR progress through theatrical space in the initial run of Baierl’s play. The discourse in Kultur im Heim, in which the advocacy of technological progress goes along with a rejection of ornamental styles, means that Neumann’s ornamented living room similarly implies a legitimation of its pareddown Modernist opposite. The journal and the play targeted an imagined class of young, bureaucratic Modernists committed to acting on behalf of a modernizing state. This class is imagined to have overcome, perhaps with difficulty, the wrongheaded idea that they should have “lampshades in the form of grandma’s lace lingerie” and should aspire to live “as company directors used to live.”33 Their revolution is a bureaucratic implementation of the socialist politics and pared-down forms imagined as linked. Their idea of space ignored the left-wing critiques of the alliance of socialism and modernity seen in Müller’s work and in writers in Chapter 1.

Expropriation, Revolution, and Bureaucracy

When the Flinzes occupy Neumann’s living room, they seem to express a working-class agency like that of the workers in the factory in Müller’s Der Lohndrücker. Weiler, the local party leader, guides the process; he barges into Neumann’s house with the proper documents in hand demanding that the factory owner’s living room be converted temporarily into emergency housing for the Flinz family.34 While in Müller’s play such directives were meaningless paper without the popular support of committed working-class agents, in Flinz, Weiler is blithely able to disregard social reality with a pat historical comparison that likens his act of expropriation to the Russian Revolution: “It started no differently in the Winter Palace.”35 The bureaucrat relies for legitimacy on a historical comparison between East German bureaucracy and Bolshevik radicalism. Neumann’s living room, as the Flinz family remakes it, connects that bureaucracy to a working-class soundness of mind meant as a riposte to the factory owner’s opulence. Production photographs 33 Kultur im Heim 2 (1959): 12–13. 34 Helmut Baierl, Frau Flinz (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1961), 24. 35 Ibid., 25.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 115

Figure 6  Neumann’s interior after Flinzes’ invasion, 1961.

reveal that the room still has the chandelier and the same basic plan, but that the rest of the furniture has been removed (see Figure 6). In its place are several sturdy, unadorned wooden pieces including a table and chairs in the center of the room, one bed to the right and two bunk beds to the left. In the rear corner near the bay window, a sink has been installed, next to which, on the parquet floor, stands a water pitcher. A waist-height metal stove occupies the right side of the corner area. A finishing touch is a board with coat hooks nailed onto the left-hand pair of pilasters of the Renaissance-style doorway. Baierl’s stage direction indicates simply that the room for this scene should now be “furnished practically.”36 The Flinzes (though Frau Flinz has not yet been “converted” to communism) are, like Kultur im Heim, on the side of the “practical” while Neumann, the class enemy, remains mired in the showy decoration of the fin de siecle. As in the magazine, the appropriation of Neumann’s space by members of the working class functions as a first historical step toward the scientific advances of the late 1950s. The Flinz family’s politicized redecoration in fact has a direct precedent in Kultur im Heim. The title of a regular Kultur im Heim feature, “Kennen Sie dieses Haus?” (Do you know this house?), is 36 Ibid., 52.

116  Building Socialism likely the question that Baierl wanted Frau Flinz to ask herself upon entering Neumann’s villa.37 The “house” the reader is assumed to “know” in Kultur im Heim is a nineteenth-century stone building with crown moldings on the interior and historicizing applied ornament on the exterior (see Figure 7). The structure relies on a mixture of historical styles and resembles most closely the High Victorian Gothic of the 1870s and 1880s. The text of the article, assuming that such outmoded living quarters have been foisted upon the unwilling reader whose tastes are better, lambastes the house as the product of bourgeois showmanship and destructive individualism. The text assumes that the reader will want advice on how to make this house more “modern” and more “practical” and goes on to explain how best to simplify moldings, open the floor plan, and position modern furniture. In giving the reader tips on appropriating old spaces, “Kennen Sie dieses Haus?” assumes that those who redecorate inherited bourgeois spaces are creating socialism in their everyday lives.38 The use of a similar trope in Flinz, with the specifically working-class agency of the Flinz family at the heart of the spatial revolution, creates imagined links between the bureaucratic class attuned to Kultur im Heim’s strident Modernism and the more earthy, ad hoc changes undertaken by the “common sense” agricultural worker, Frau Flinz. The connection between Kultur im Heim and the play thus participates in a fantasy of

37 Kultur im Heim 2 (1959): 36–8. 38 The editors of Kultur im Heim and their backers at the Institute for Applied Arts believed themselves to be acting firmly on behalf of the state’s own interests. Just how much leaders in the upper echelon of the SED really believed in this revolution of taste is open to question. The writer of another regular feature, “’nen kleinen Mann im Ohr,” hints that even some higher-ups occasionally give in to their inner Kitsch-lover. In other words the period of overlap in which the aesthetic aims of Modernist writers and designers jibed with the economic needs of a state devoted to rationalizing industrial production was one that was still fraught with underlying tensions between Stalinist and Modernist approaches to the relationship between the forms of material living and the advance of revolution. It becomes apparent in pieces like “Kennen Sie dieses Haus?” that Bauhäusler like Selmanagic were committed to the idea that the state’s young bureaucracy should display its commitment to scientific socialism by buying practical furniture. Ulbricht, a more or less unreformed Stalinist, was more committed to garnering and securing loyalties which meant that young bureaucrats could decorate as they wished as long as they did well in their jobs. These tensions were never resolved in the GDR. Dissident writers in the 1970s, particularly Wolf Biermann, were suspect because of the individualized tastes their apartments revealed. In some respects, the Modernist dream of a rationalized conformity of taste as a measure of political values, propagated as strongly in Kultur im Heim as anywhere else, seeped into the public imagination, or at least into the ranks of the Stasi’s IM-legions.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 117

Figure 7  Kennen Sie dieses Haus? (Do you know this house?), Kultur im Heim, 1959. class unification in the GDR that saw socialist technocrats and workingclass consciousness as part of the same historical phenomenon.

Science and the Socialist Future

In a dialogue in Scene Six of Frau Flinz, Weiler and others debate whether to reconvert a recently converted apartment building back into a production facility for Neumann’s enterprise. A young comrade stands up and asserts the primacy of the younger generation of East Germans over the older one which had experienced the class struggles of the 1920s. Those grizzled old communists must learn about social change in the new state from their younger comrades who are the products of its fledgling education system.39 Those whose intellectual and social horizons are limited by the national context of the partycontrolled education system and by the experience of real-existing socialism are better equipped to guide that system. The speech is an affirmation of the GDR’s rising young bureaucracy and a selfaffirmation on the part of the Flinz team of their own historiographical mission dedicated to just such limitation of intellectual horizons. It is clear from the contexts in which Neumann’s interior must be understood, and from production material cited above, that the questions of historiographical limitation and class warfare were, in the Flinz team’s conception, deeply spatial. However, except for the Flinzes’ improvisatory reuse of Neumann’s interior, the play as finally produced offers no similarly concrete vision of what the GDR “future” will look like. Some on the production crew, though, did want just such a socialist future to be presented. Rehearsal notes show that calls were made for Flinz’s dwelling in the countryside at the end of the play to look specifically like the farmers’ collectives built in the 39 Baierl, Frau Flinz, 43–4.

118  Building Socialism GDR in the 1950s.40 Early in 1961, Appen even made a rendering of this space which ultimately was not used in the final production. The image shows a wide foreground defined by a curving rear partition and containing a naturalistic bus-stop sign post and a handmade bench with a milk can on its seat. A square gap in the curving partition reveals a street leading back to a newly built Maschinenausleihstation (MAS, Machine Lending Station), indicated by a sign over the door, with fueling station, office building, and multi-vehicle garage. Though Appen, Wekwerth, and Baierl all visited GDR agricultural sites in the 1950s, the image is less likely the result of Tret’iakovian operativity and more likely the result of copying of visual evidence contained in the Flinz source material.41 That evidence included a 1959 volume on architecture and planning in the GDR that contains a number of examples of rural architecture, including of the MTSs and LPGs, the successor organizations to the MASs, which were the organs through which the hard-line collectivization of agriculture from the mid-1950s onward was executed.42 Wekwerth read about these organizations in a newspaper article in the mid-1950s, which emphasized the need for them to become avenues for cultural “enlightenment” in addition to their role as outposts of economic change.43 Though none of the images of these collective farm facilities in the 1959 volume is an exact match for Appen’s sketch, they reveal enough to show that Appen was attempting to portray specific examples of the state’s new architecture. 40 See “Besprechung am Modell für FRAU FLINZ am 11.10.1960,” AdK Berlin, Helmut-Baierl-Archiv. 41 Wekwerth understood himself, not least because he worked at the Berliner Ensemble through the early 1980s, as a Brecht successor. Marc Silberman has seen Wekwerth as the best director of Brecht’s work in the GDR—I affirm this position and do not wish, through the critical analysis presented in this chapter, to detract from Wekwerth’s later career. Wekwerth’s interpretation of Galileo Galilei in a production at the Ensemble in 1978 offered “a moral dilemma: to what extent do the means justify the goal?” Silberman sees this question as a productive one that demands “the audience to consider what the limits of the possible are in their own context and thereby lend the play contemporary significance.” Yet he recognizes as well that Wekwerth’s attempt to establish current relevance relied too much on a link between “showing the historical in the everyday” and “historical consciousness as a cognitive means for perceiving change.” I would assert that it was the establishing of this link which was a driving force in the set designs of Frau Flinz. Marc Silberman, “Recent Brecht Reception in East Germany (GDR),” Theater Journal 1, no. 32 (March 1980): 97–9. 42 Architektur und Städtebau in der deutschen demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1959). 43 For more on the organization of agriculture in the GDR, see Arnd Bauerkämper, Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Munich: Olderbourgs Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005), 31–4.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 119

Figure 8  GDR beef cattle complex, from Architektur und Städtebau in der deutschen demokratischen Republik. One image of a collective cattle farm in particular has traces that mirror Appen’s rendering of the MAS (see Figure 8). While the arrangement of buildings to each other and of the ensemble to the image’s border is not like Appen’s image of the MAS, the arrangement of structures around a courtyard and their plain austerity combined with the historicizing gabled roof with chimneys provided a template of what new collective farms were supposed to look like. In drawing directly on compiled visual material in this way, Appen, like the other members of the production team, assumes that mature socialism has arrived and that the GDR as an independent nation-state with its own national narrative has been consolidated.44 The play is thus a historiographical allegory of how that process was brought to fruition. That allegory is reflected in turn in a monologue at the play’s close by the old communist and party official, Weiler. Weiler comes to Frau Flinz in the country while she is ill and describes his own reconciliation with the new kind of revolution underway in the GDR. He cannot understand how it has happened, but he is being made a legislator and must inform himself on the most burning issues of the day. To do this, he has gathered official pamphlets on various topics including “Hygiene 44 Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR, 206.

120  Building Socialism and the Polyclinic” and “Traditions of City Building.”45 Weiler has taken here the activist step of defining his own intellectual horizons and limiting his political thought and thus has circumscribed the nature of political action within the confines of the GDR’s state-driven scientific revolution as propagated in official media—particularly in its representation of the state’s new built environment. No longer does Weiler take the long perspective of viewing the GDR’s mid-century revolution through the lens of the revolution of 1919 or the workingclass struggles of the early 1930s. Rather, the GDR’s specific problems cast in terms of a specific national history, including a revolution in architecture and design, are imagined as the framework for political action appropriate to a socialist legislator. The image of socialism that Weiler’s brochures present defines the territory of what is thinkable.46 The play uses a caricature of the living room of an imagined class enemy to imply that the GDR’s scientific revolution as planned by the SED is the only possible producer of socialist space. Both Baierl’s career and the Flinz preparatory material show that the play’s spaces are as much about the scientific revolution as they are about the bourgeois class enemy. Baierl, who has been seen in the scholarship alternately as a chief heir to Brecht alongside Müller and Peter Hacks and as the worst sort of party hack, was not so much a cut-throat opportunist as a true believer.47 He spent time in the 1950s organizing and directing productions in workers’ theaters across the GDR, studying in the process Brecht’s dialectics if not his materialism.48 His early work includes a 1952 script published through the Zentralhaus für Laienkunst entitled Ein Wegweiser. Spiel in einem Aufzug (Signpost. A Play in One Act), which lambastes Western militarism and the condition, supposedly particular to the American zone of occupation, of highly visible advertisements for luxury goods affordable only to the few.49 In this, his conception of the 45 Baierl, Frau Flinz, 71. 46 Martin Sabrow has recently theorized that the “discursive field of GDR historiography” made an absolute claim to historical truth and located that historical truth on its side of the Cold War divide and in thus demarcating itself spatially, so attempted to create a separate mode of thinking. Martin Sabrow, “Dictatorship as Discourse: Cultural Perspectives on SED Legitimacy,” in Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR, ed. Konrad Jarausch (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 199–200. 47 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Sozialistisches Drama nach Brecht. Drei Modelle: Peter Hacks—Heiner Müller—Hartmut Lange (Darmstadt: Lucherhand, 1974). 48 David, Bathrick, “Agitproptheater in der DDR: Auseinandersetzung mit einer Tradition,” In Dramatik der DDR, ed. Ulrich Profitlich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 128–49. 49 Helmut Baierl, Ein Wegweiser. Spiel in einem Aufzug (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1952).

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 121 material world of Western capitalism resembles that of mainstream posters and of Claudius’s journalistic work from around the same time, as seen in Chapter 2. Baierl’s major breakthrough came with his play Die Feststellung (The Ascertainment, 1958) in which rhetoric and ideological persuasion, rather than material conditions, dictate changes in consciousness among the key figures.50 Thus ideological dialectics would continue to be a crucial aspect of Baierl’s theater through the 1960s and was the misbegotten intellectual offspring of the Brechtian Lehrstück’s emphasis on socialist consciousness and Baierl’s desire to legitimize East Germany’s economic and ideological course. Indeed, the fictionalized personal history of the character of Weiler as envisioned by the Flinz team, and most likely by Baierl, was imagined as a trajectory from working-class revolution to state-socialism driven by science.51 In keeping with the norms of Stanislavsky’s dramatic methods, the Flinz team compiled biographies of old communist agitators whose life stories were to provide a model for the figure of Weiler. This use of source material to develop a prefabricated image of a character’s subjectivity “off-stage” was characteristic of Soviet drama.52 The importance of the transition from revolution in the streets to propagation of science was emphasized in these model biographies. It is thus, again, that scientifically produced spaces, such as the hygiene clinics that Weiler reads about, lurk in the background of Frau Flinz’s “historical” spaces and pat monologues. Among the Flinz materials present in Wekwerth’s archive is a slim booklet entitled VEB Förderanlagenbau Köthen (People’s Own Company, Haulage Plant Köthen).53 The tract praises a new mining installation in Köthen using photos and statistics that emphasize the GDR’s rise from the ruins and the construction of facilities for heavy industry. Yet manufacturing is by no means the most thoroughly treated topic. Following a resounding endorsement of the Central Committee’s order for “modernization, mechanization, automatization,” are pictures of sparkling clean, sparely designed day-care centers, the practical furniture of a school reading room, and the similarly practical furniture of the apartments available through the Arbeiter-Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft at Köthen.54 The piece projects a vision of a socialist society full of happy socialist citizens that is based on the state’s ability to provide spare 50 Bathrick, “Agitproptheater in der DDR,” 135–6. 51 AdK Berlin, Wekwerth-Archiv, Rep 06 III 11. 52 See Jack Poggi, “The Stanislavsky System in Russia,” The Drama Review: TDR 17, no. 1 (March 1973): 124–33. 53 Available in the AdK zu Berlin, Manfred-Wekwerth-Archiv, Rep. 06 III 11.VEB Förderanlagenbau Köthen (Köthen: Aufbau-Druckerei, 1957). 54 VEB Förderanlagenbau Köthen.

122  Building Socialism but comfortable Modernist interiors for living, working, and recreating. This pre-formulated vision of the forms that are appropriate for socialist day-cares and schools is a far cry from Brecht’s early and late-life critiques of modern architecture and planning.

The Cult of Lenin and the Fading Dream

New prefabricated architecture became a point of pride for some East German authors, including Socialist Realists, and a lighting-rod of critique for others, even Modernists. Baierl was very much in the former group: he lauded the colonization of the everyday sphere in the GDR by the products of science and industry. The Berlin Wall, though by no means high-tech, was a key symbol of this colonization. Baierl resoundingly supported its construction. His play Die Dreizehten of 1962 is a smarmy justification of this repressive stretch of concrete.55 In his essay “Auf der Suche nach dem Helden” (On the Search for Heroes), of 1964, the playwright says that true heroes are those who make individual acts of workplace heroism unnecessary by inventing a “technological mechanism” that could have prevented in the first place the problem that required a heroic solution.56 Crucial to this is that the new kind of technocratic hero in question “recognize” the tenets of the socialist “classics,” first and foremost the works of Lenin.57 Technological solutions in factories as in other kinds of spaces cast new architecture as an instrument imagined to extend Lenin’s project of merging science and socialism. Posters such as one from 1970 produced in Berlin on orders from the Central Committee cast Lenin’s role in specifically architectural terms (see Figure 9). The words “Lenins Rat unsere Tat” (Lenin’s advice, our deed) fill the top of the image in red, with Berlin’s then-new TV tower piercing empty space between the words. While the silvery, bulbous observation deck is visible, the bottom three-quarters of the concrete support tower are obscured by a massive block of white, prefab apartments. In front of this building and below it in the left foreground is a triangular, red slab meant to evoke the Soviet Memorial in Treptow. The poster displays new architecture as the party’s most important “deed” and casts this “deed” as part of the carrying on of Lenin’s legacy. Architecture is here made the focal point of a cult of Lenin, in which new building methods are lauded

55 See Christoph Funke, “Über Helmut Baierl,” Helmut Baierl: Stücke (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1969), 238–9. 56 Helmut Baierl, “Auf der Suche nach dem Helden,” in Dramaturgie in der DDR, ed. Helmut Kreuzer (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 328–35, 328–9. 57 Ibid., 332–3.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 123

Figure 9  Lenin’s Rat, unsere Tat (Lenin’s advice, our deed), 1969.

124  Building Socialism as just the kind of technological progress and transformation of the everyday Lenin would have called for. Given the visual rhetoric used to cast the importance of the Soviet leader, it is not surprising, then, that Baierl would invoke Lenin in his affirmations of the technological colonization of built space. The playwright even composed later addenda to Frau Flinz in which references to Lenin are made. One scene, written and set in 1967, sees Frau Flinz holding up a brochure about Lenin and touting its virtues to the workers in the Verwaltungshaus der Produktions-Genossenschaft Wladimir Lenin (Administration House of the Production Collective Vladimir Lenin).58 She lectures on the importance of newly built farm complexes and at the climax of her speech, her sons pull up in cars whose noises are even indicated in the scene’s brief stage directions. Modern built space is grafted here to the cult of Lenin as a model of the bureaucratically administered, science-driven socialist revolution. The situation was more complex with Appen, who was a generation older than Baierl. He was certainly an “affirmative” thinker in many regards, as has been shown. And his emphasis on the need for designs that were realist and which assumed a relationship between design and socialist consciousness fit the SED program of modernization starting in the late 1950s. The needs of the GDR petro-chemical industry in the production of plastic furniture and of the building industry in the churning out of prefabricated apartment blocks dovetailed with Appen’s Modernist preference for cheaper-to-produce, stripped down forms.59 These were the years during which a neutralized version of the Tret’iakovian aesthetics Müller had revived had been codified and set in motion by the Bitterfelder Weg of 1959, impulses which Baierl shared given his experience with factory theater troupes.60 Yet it was also the nascent moment of an art that sought not to bridge the gap between manual and mental labor but rather emphasized the disconnect between them to reaffirm the status of the scientific revolution’s “Planners and Leaders.” This trend would in turn be codified in the second Bitterfeld conference of 1964.61 Baierl, Wekwerth, and Appen in 1960–1 were still working to establish just such a literature. This is why Baierl’s script casts the GDR education system, then undergoing ideological shifts, as the key to the success of the socialist economy.62 58 59 60 61 62

Helmut Baierl, “Der Jubilar,” AdK Berlin, Helmut-Baierl-Archiv, 2. See Rubin, “The Order of Substitutes.” Christoph Funke, “Über Helmut Baierl,” Helmut Baierl, 236. See Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR, 211–25. For detailed analysis of the GDR education system, see Michael C. Schneider, Bildung für neue Eliten: Die Gründung der Arbeiter und Bauern-Fakultät in der SBZ/ DDR (Dresden: Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung, 1997).

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 125 But Appen would begin criticizing the GDR’s hyper-rationalist design culture by 1964 only to sharpen his critiques later. The question for him as the 1960s progressed was in many ways that of the “old communists” featured in plays of the time: why is the working-class only peripheral to East Germany’s socialist revolution? A letter to Hans Bentzien in March of 1964, which contains a sketch of a neverto-be published piece called “Kritische Analyse der Situation des DDR-Theaters und der Malerei in den 60’er Jahren und Vorschläge zur Lösung der Probleme” (Critical Analysis of the Situation of GDR Theater and Painting in the 1960s and Suggestions for the Solution of the Problem), is Appen’s attempt to answer this question.63 Appen’s chief target here is what he calls the “still present bourgeois conceptions of art” in the GDR which favor forms that predate the great innovations of Reinhardt and Piscator. Appen saw nominal agreement between his and Bentzien’s desire for greater modernization of space. They also supported the Bitterfelder Weg of 1959 in which Appen saw “a big positive possibility” that was regrettably being stifled by state muzzling of the program’s participants.64 Appen concludes that official art critics are loading their own regressive views of aesthetics onto what should be progressive programs.65 Similar impulses are at work in Appen’s speech to the Bühnentechikertagung of October 1966 in Berlin, printed the next year in Theater der Zeit. A testament to the murky boundaries between cultural Stalinists, technocratic rationalists, and the competing camps of modernizers, the speech continues Appen’s support for rationalization and the links between art and economic change, but rejects some of the forms that that rationalization is taking in the GDR. Architectural terms are at the heart of his critique. First Appen asserts that art should engage with economic realities without becoming simply a “mandate of the industrial economy.”66 Art and industry are difficult to reconcile: The principle of serial, assembly-line, mass production, that is truly the economic reality of our epoch and the key to the material prosperity of our world, is not reconcilable to the principle of 63 Karl von Appen, “Kritische Analyse der Situation des DDR-Theaters und der malerei in den 60’er Jahren und Vorschläge zur Lösung der Probleme,” typescript, AdK Berlin, Karl-von-Appen-Archiv, Rep. 106, II. a. Nr. 6. 64 Ibid. 65 For greater detail on the role in the GDR of what Appen would have seen as regressive cultural policies, see Frank Trommler, “Die Kulturpolitik der DDR und die kulturelle Tradition des deutschen Sozialismus,” in Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR, ed. Peter Uwe and Patricia Herminghouse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 13–72. 66 Karl von Appen, “Zur Ökonomie des Theaters,” Theater der Zeit 1 (1967): 9.

126  Building Socialism artistic formation, which forms individuals and give a sense of the proprietary. Artistic production can get by with few means— but it can never get by with pre-fabricated components. Where it tries to do so, in Surrealism, in the new Pop Art and happenings, it does so necessarily in a destructive way and uses the forms of mass production for disassembly.67 Art cannot employ the same methods of mass production that the building industry, with its preference for “pre-fab” elements, advocates. Appen is at pains here to establish the idea that art has its own economy that, so he implies, involves more genuine revolutionary agency than the management of industry. While his critique of Surrealism makes him appear a dogmatic Socialist Realist, this was not his intention. In the letter to Bentzien cited above, Appen in fact advocated the teaching of Picasso and Braque at GDR academies so that their aesthetic innovations might be linked to socialist mentalities and practices. The real object of critique in the 1966 speech is not so much Surrealism or Pop Art as it is the subordination of art to the dictates of economic advancement. For Appen, art can and should include economic considerations, but it should do so, as Brecht suggested, by forming collectives that can negotiate solutions and whose very collectivity is the guarantor of the quality of socialist art. The alternative of not allowing such spontaneous and independent collectivity is bleak: “It would look quite different, replacing the demands of art’s economy with those of a quasi-industrial finishing mechanism that put the pre-fabricated solution in place of the self-made one.”68 Appen uses here the notion of prefabricated building parts as a metaphor for the preponderance of a theater with “pre-fabricated,” Socialist Realist solutions meant to fit the economic policy of the moment. Appen wants to keep out of theater the approach of a GDR architecture that was fast becoming a symbol of systemic problems both within and larger than East Germany. The idea of the “self-made solution” which Appen writes of is at the heart of his own commitment to dialectical materialism, the teaching of which to art students he believed was the only solution to the mounting problems of East German art’s prefabricated solutions.69 So, the historiographical method of the Flinz team in 1961 ultimately represents a new step in the GDR’s Socialist Realism, which increasingly was constructing literary “realities” based on textual imaginaries rather than representing the new state in terms of sociological study of 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 10. 69 See note 67.

Towards a Bourgeois Architecture 127 new cities and buildings. Heiner Müller on the other hand, prior to Der Bau, remained committed to a sociological approach in which “paper” meant nothing unless backed up by, in the words Karl von Appen would use in his 1966 speech, a “self-made solution.” When Müller did turn to “text”-based approaches to creating built space in literature, as in Der Bau, he drew on metaphor to explore the pitfalls and possibilities of the GDR’s modernization and the accompanying colonization of the everyday by technology. As such, Müller’s later play reflects on the processes through which political language is created and posits a postEnlightenment aesthetics alien to Baierl’s true belief in East Germany as socialism’s fulfillment. For Baierl, the party-minded envisioning of the built environment entailed the selection of specific material forms to represent status vis-à-vis the socialist project. It was thus that, for Baierl, the Berlin Wall could truly be seen as a bulwark against the fascist aggressors from the West while for Müller in Der Bau it became the construction workers’ self-made prison.

128

Part III Architecture and Modernity in the Prose of the 1960s

130

Four Time at Home: The Domestic Interior in Günter de Bruyn, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, and Gerhard Wolf

The 1960s were a time of radical change in East Germany’s built environment. Berlin’s center was rebuilt, new towns were planned to house industrial workers, and debates about home interiors intensified.1 The decade was also a time in which GDR prose writers began to cast off the shackles of Socialist Realism. Factors in this shift were numerous and have been well documented: writers’ disillusionment with social conditions in the GDR workplace as a result of their experiences on job sites in the wake of the Bitterfeld program of 1959; the 1963 Prague Kafka conference which broadened the influence of literary abstraction; the culturally consolidating effects of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent loosening of cultural-political restrictions in the early 1960s.2 1 On the symbolic significance of replanning Berlin’s center, see Peter Müller, Symbolsuche: Die Ostberliner Zentrumsplanung zwischen Repräsentation und Agitation (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2005). For a basic account of the scale and pace of construction at single industry towns such as Halle-Neustadt, see Joachim Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Reimer, 2000), 272–89. Greg Castillo has traced the embeddedness of home furnishings debates in the context of Cold War politics. See his “East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Design Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie,” Kritika 9, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 747–68. 2 Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Leizpig: Kiepenheuer, 1996), 176–214, and Helen Fehervary, “The Literature of the GDR,” in Cambridge History of German Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 413–21. Peter Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR: Vom Helden der Arbeit zum Planer und Leiter (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 111–12.

132  Building Socialism Less well understood is how the turn to more experimental literary strategies was connected to the crucial architectural issues of the time. Chapter 5 analyses this connection by considering passages about the urban environment in GDR prose in light of theories of the city as a montage of experiences. Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between literary experimentation and the representation of home interiors. Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann, Günter de Bruyn, Christa Wolf, and Gerhard Wolf analysed the tension between people and the domestic space in ways that were theoretically sophisticated and internationally relevant and which yielded an increasing degree of disjuncture and digression in their novels and stories. These writers’ depictions of home interiors functioned as episodic moments of social and ideological critique rather than as settings for or integrated components of unified narratives. In these architectural episodes, GDR dwellings were connected to propaganda images of domestic interiors, the effects of industrial modernity, and imagined uses of interior space. This temporalization involved uncovering the social and mental processes with which architectural elements stood, in these authors’ view as in Hermann Henselmann’s, in a dialectical relationship. The theoretical dimension of the passages is in part rooted in the authors’ increasingly sociological and psychological approach to built space; it is this recourse to a social-scientific frame, which literature shared with architecture during this time period, that tended to interrupt narrative trajectories. That frame gave passages about built space the quality of discrete, concentrated ruminations parallel to rather than intertwined with the narrative. Modern British Literature scholar Marina MacKay, in her analysis of setting, asserts that a description of built space always “collapses the boundaries between the realistic and the romantic.” A realist “concrete specificity” of detail becomes inseparable from a romantic feeling about the value of that detail in the narrative.3 Dickens’s cityscapes, according to MacKay, thus evince a naturalistic ugliness that is contained by an affective “sensibility,” conveyed through analogy, association, and metaphor, that positions that ugliness within the teleology of the narrative.4 In the case of the GDR prose writers, with the exception of Morgner’s Haus am Rand der Stadt, which mostly hews to the narrative embeddedness described by MacKay, the relationship of architectural detail to narrative is in line with a different, specifically German realist tradition. De Bruyn’s Buridans Esel, Wolf’s Nachdenken über Christa T., and Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand separate the theoretical treatment 3 Marina MacKay, Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 99. 4 Ibid., 109–10.

Time at Home 133 of the built environment from narrative teleology. In so doing, they move toward a more diverse, montage-like realism akin to that which filmmaker and theorist Alexander Kluge ascribes to the late work of German realist Theodor Fontane. Kluge shows how Fontane pioneered the genre of the Vielfältigkeitsroman, the novel of diversity. In that genre, the history and use of chairs or tables gives these objects an agency in the narrative that runs parallel to the agency of the human characters.5 Kluge sees the novel of diversity as “a … literary form that is not concerned with plot, which had been richly present in the other, earlier novels by [Fontane], but in its place spreads out reflection and unfurls the contexts of many plots.”6 The Vielfältigkeitsroman assembles passages about objects and passages in which the narrative is advanced into a montage that can critique social conditions. In Mornger, interior space reflects the narrative in the way McKay ascribes to Dickens; but in de Bruyn, Reimann, and Wolf, living rooms, bedrooms, home offices, and the objects in them represent “spread out reflections” that “unfurl” their own plots that do not necessarily overlap with the plots about human characters. Gerhard Wolf’s Beschreibung eines Zimmers (1971), with which this chapter closes, can be read as a culmination of this trend as montaged realism gives way to a totally non-narrative sequence of reflections. The rooms and objects in the then recently deceased Johannes Bobrowski’s home provide the foundation for a poignant sequence of thought-images that, as Gerhard Richter has characterized that genre, offer “secret avenues of insight” below surface realities.7 For Gerhard Wolf, the forms of space stand in a dialectical relationship with the invisible “secret avenues” of that space’s existence in time, which Wolf reveals using the agglomerative principle of the thoughtimage. East German prose of the 1960s thus moves from Dickensian social realism to the novel of diversity, in which the “unfurled” plots of objects loosen the narrative structure, and then to the thought-image, in which the loss of narrative registers the fracturing of spatial experience. 5 Alexander Kluge, “Das Politische als Intensität alltäglicher Gefühle: Theodor Fontane,” in Theodor Fontane, Heinrich von Kleist, und Anna Wilfe: Zur Grammatik der Zeit (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1987), 12. 6 Ibid., 12. 7 Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damage Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2. Richter acknowledges the apparent realism of the thought-image’s resolute focus on objects in lived experience and points to the philosophically realist dimension of Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s materialism. He asserts, though, that the thought-image’s seeming realism is a first step in the genre’s characteristic resistance to “self-evident modes of presentation” and its characteristically “self-conscious” engagement with the “inseparability of language” from our attempt to treat reality as “real” (Richter, 22, 26–7).

134  Building Socialism Kluge’s and MacKay’s assessments of literary space acknowledge the importance of social science to modern realist novels. Psychology and sociology were taboo in the GDR under Stalin and into the late 1950s. They quietly gained ground around 1960 in architectural circles as Henselmann and theorist Lothar Kühne began to see architecture less as a branch of the visual arts and more as a fundamental aspect of human community.8 While psychology was not sanctioned academic orthodoxy, architectural discourse in the GDR, as evident in Henselmann’s personal library and correspondence, had been significantly shaped by it.9 Thus, designs for and debates about GDR buildings were affected by the continuing trend within international Modernism (and growing critiques of it in the early 1960s) to assimilate insights from other disciplines, conceive of architecture’s role within the broader totality of society, and consider the physiological and psychic effects of environments and objects on individuals and groups.10 So, 8 Heinz Quitzsch, “Diskussionen zum Funktionalismus,” in Architektur und Städtebau im südlichen Ostseeraum von 1970 bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2007), 20–1. 9 Orthodoxy in GDR studies has contended that overt focus on the affective, psychological dimensions of experience central to the shift in architectural theory in the 1950s was taboo and thus limited. Closer inspection of GDR architectural theory and literary responses to house and apartment interiors during this time reveals that this was not the case. Implicitly psychological understandings of the effects of living with kitschy home furnishings were at the heart of many design polemics that appeared in Kultur im Heim (Culture in the Home) from its inception in 1957.   One example of the crude application of psychology in the magazine is the repeated implications made in its pages that the preference for ornament represents a psychologically rooted inability to overcome childhood impressions. One 1959 piece entitled “’nen kleinen Mann im Ohr” asserted that all modern subjects must constantly work to overcome their infantile inner kitsch-lover (Kultur im Heim 2 [1959]: 12–13). By early 1965, Hermann Henselmann had already read Neutra’s Survival through Design and was familiar with Adorno’s psychologically inflected Marxism and with the work of the West German socialist psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich. Present in Henselmann’s Nachlassbibliothek are the following volumes: Bloch, Wissen und Hoffen: Auszüge aus seinen Werken (Aufbau, 1955); Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Suhrkamp, 1964); Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965). Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965). 10 Emily Pugh dates the turn to the environmental idea in the GDR to the late 1960s and early 1970s and sees its most complete theorization in the work of architecture critic Lothar Kühne who articulated his notion, which Pugh cites, of the “spatial form of social life,” in a later treatise, Gegenstand und Raum (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1981). See Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Idenitity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 167–8. Pugh indicates that Henselmann was in the vanguard of the turn to the concept of the built environment in the GDR but does not explain the specific

Time at Home 135 it was not just the Kafka conference or the Wall that prepared the ground for a more experimental literature, but also the adoption of a framework akin to the experiential social theory of Western Marxism for understanding GDR built space. While literary theory and cultural politics in East Germany remained in the territory of a Stalinized version of Lukacs’s concept of realist narrative, the writers in this chapter examined the relationship between people and built space with a social-scientific gaze. That gaze tended to treat dwellers and their dwellings as experimentally isolated fragments of reality rather than as integrated parts of a unified social world. Writing about Viennese Modernist Arthur Schnitzler, Rolf Geißler has developed a framework for the interaction of literature and the experimental sciences that applies to GDR writers’ psychology and sociology of the built environment. For Geißler, the fragmented, isolated way in which the natural and social sciences view reality distinguishes classical-realist epistemologies from Modernist ones. Literature relying on the former epistemology maintains a unified view of social reality; but where the framework of the scientific experiment enters into a writer’s literary approach, it “destroys the unity of this [classical] life-world.”11 Science divides reality, effectively making knowledge of it into a fragmentary montage in which understandings of “each thing and everything must first be secured in [a] segmented way.”12 For Schnitzler, according to Geißler, this approach results in disjointed prose structures that reflect the way science slices reality into knowable parts and robs the experiential world of overarching meanings. In addition, Geißler sees Emile Zola, who was influential for GDR writers, as using scientific experiments as a model for representing reality in the novel. For Zola, treating characters as experimental subjects could help reveal insight about the place of the present in the movements of history.13 For GDR writers, critique of interior space was exacted through social-scientific approaches that registered the fragmentation of an everyday experience being reshaped by historical forces. Social science was part of the temporalization of space that allowed authors to integrate patterns of collective and individual use into their works. Architectural moments in these texts, relying on psychological and intellectual historical conditions (i.e. his reading of the Frankfurt School, his friendship with Brecht) that allowed him to be so. 11 Rolf Geißler, “Experiment und Erkenntnis: Überlegungen zum geistesgeschichtlichen Ort des schnitzlerschen Erzählens,” Modern Austrian Literature 19, no. 1 (1986): 1986: 52. 12 Ibid., 53. 13 On Reimann’s reading of Zola, see Dennis Tate, Shifting Perspectives: East German Autobiographical Narratives before and after the End of the GDR (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 84.

136  Building Socialism sociological views of reality, represented episodic intrusions into narratives impinged upon by a diverse tapestry of critiques. As is already implied in the use of scholarship on the English novel and on Viennese Modernism for understanding how East German literature encountered built space, that literature treated vital questions about everyday life in the modern world similar to those treated by important theorists in Germany before World War II and by leading writers internationally. In some cases, based on evidence in writers’ personal libraries and in statements about their own literary interests, direct influences can be traced that show the extent to which GDR literature arrived at analyses of enduring and international relevance. It is thus that Reimann’s work, over the course of this chapter, is connected to contemporaneous work of the French writer Georges Perec, whose 1964 novel, Things, made description of the domestic interior a central principle. The Reimann–Perec connection is justified by the fact that a 1967 East German edition of Things was in Reimann’s personal library. However, connections such as that made between the representation of death in de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel and Theodor Adorno’s reflections in his Minima Moralia on the increasing confinement of dying to specialized spaces rest on assumptions of a shared grappling with an industrial modernity affecting everyday life in overlapping ways in the first and second worlds in the post-war period. Such connections, in their psychological, sociological, and literary dimensions, are traced in this chapter through five sections. The first offers an account of Hermann Henselmann’s engagement with the psychology and sociology of built space through the Bauhaus, Neutra, and Alexander Mitscherlich and traces the psychological dimension of the party-driven debate on home interiors in the 1960s. The second section shows how psychological understandings of the home interior were at work in literary resistance to GDR-specific regimes of prescriptive Wohnkultur (dwelling culture) in the work of Mornger and Reimann. The next section shows how GDR writers, in a less acute, more playful form than thinkers such as Mitscherlich, Adorno, architectural theorist Lewis Mumford, and philosopher Günther Anders, registered the intrusion of objects associated with oppressive modern power structures, such as the television, into the home and the relocation of birth, illness, and death from the home into specialized spaces.14 The final section traces similar parallel moments in authors’ revaluation of domestic 14 In his Pentagon of Power, Mumford refers to the coordination of power by elites through technology as the “megamachine.” Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1970).

Time at Home 137 arrangements inherited from the nineteenth century. In carrying out this revaluation, authors turned to highly spatial nineteenth-century precedents in order to reveal that the emotional relationships between people and objects in these texts are pervaded by, to use a phrase from Bloch, the sense that “not all people are present in the same now.”15 The connections traced include Reimann to Emile Zola and de Bruyn to Fontane. Again, all these texts, in their literary psychologies and sociologies of space, are attentive to the different layers of historical time legible in the objects the authors represent. Morgner remained within a Dickensian model of narrative unity in representing these historical conflicts; de Bruyn, Wolf, and Reimann allowed episodic moments of social critique to emerge parallel to the narrative; and Gerhard Wolf, in his 1971 Beschreibung eines Zimmers, makes such parallelism into a central structural principle to reveal the embeddedness of his late friend Johannes Bobrowski’s home office in the history of central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.

Henselmann and the GDR Interior

The writings of Hermann Henselmann provide an important body of context that validates the assertion that psychology and sociology were finding their way into literary discourses on the built environment. Brigitte Reimann was friends with Henselmann for the entire time of the writing of Franziska,16 and in that case, very direct relationships between the architectural and literary spheres may be posited. In the case of the other authors, the fact of Henselmann’s reintroduction of social science into debates about architecture might be seen as a theoretical frame to literary engagement with the built environment. Most of Henselmann’s writing deals with urban planning, not surprising given that his main projects, from the Stalinallee to the Haus des Lehrers complex to the University at Leipzig, always had a strong urban planning component. But in his writings on urbanism, he also reflects more generally on the nature of human habitation and on patterns of domestic life under GDR socialism.17 That interior space was still at issue in his writings on urbanism is unsurprising given that Henselmann’s only formal training was at the Handwerker Schule in Berlin from 1923 to 1924, where he completed degrees in cabinet 15 Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 217. 16 Eva Kaufmann, “Architektur, Literatur und Utopie,” in Architektur und Literatur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945: Beiträge zu einer wissenschaftlichen Konferenz in Neubrandenburg, 2003, ed. Magrid Bircken and Heide Hampel (Neubrandenburg: Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg, 2005), 111–13. 17 Bruno Flierl, editor of Deutsche Architektur in the early 1960s, was a chief conduit of these ideas. More on the explicitly urbanistic aspects of his and Henselmann’s thought will be addressed in Chapter 5.

138  Building Socialism making and interior design.18 Furthermore, Henselmann’s writings on architecture stand, like the work of the authors treated in this chapter, closer to the Western Marxist critical tradition than many of the writings on domestic space in the GDR such as the regular columns in the design journal Kultur im Heim and two monograph-length treatments of interior design, Hans Lewitzsky’s Meine Wohnung (1959) and Hermann Exner’s Kunst und Gerät (1961).19 In his “Die Wandel des Raumbildes der deutschen Stadt im Lichte der Bedüfnisse der sozialistischen Gesellschaft” (The Transformation of the Spatial Image of the German City in Light of the Needs of Socialist Society), Henselmann does not yet use psychological terms, as he would after reading Mitscherlich and Neutra in the early 1960s; but he does offer an account of the experience of architecture and the arrangement of space in relation to the social “needs” of different societies since the Middle Ages. He tries to deepen the often reductivist Marxist-Leninist approach of seeing buildings as reflections of political economy by showing how “spatial rhythms” in the GDR’s cities must account for experience and meet “material human needs” in a classless way that “earns the sobriquet ‘socialist’.”20 For Henselmann, in a formulation 18 See Anders Aman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 19 Both Lewitzky and Exner remain beholden to a clumsy Marxist-Leninist conception of the dialectic of history and interiors that sees objects as pat reflections of political economy. Hermann Exner, Kunst und Gerät (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1961), and Hans Lewitzsky, Meine Wohnung (Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 1959). 20 Hermann Henselmann, “Die Wandel des Raumbildes im Lichte der Bedürfnisse der sozialistischen Gesellschaft,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 103. Again, Henselmann has not yet made the return here to a focus on the individual, emotional experience of built space as a key human need which it is architects’ role to help meet. He does argue in this essay, however, that home interiors must be adequate to the changes brought about by the advent of atomic energy, automation, and space travel, which in turn are giving rise to “new forms of connection-making among human beings” (103). Rhythmic, emotionally sensitive sequencing of three-dimensional space so as to account for the experience of buildings’ users in the fourth dimension of time had been at the heart of Siegfried Giedion’s account of twentieth-century Modernist architecture’s break from nineteenth-century academicism. See Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 5th edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 430–1. For Le Corbusier, the rhythm of the “architectural promenade” through urban and interior space was a key idea starting in the early 1920s and was based on the notion of how designers could account for users’ “unfolding views” of space over the course of their movement through it. See Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 127–30. For Henselmann too, the sequence of Raumbilder made

Time at Home 139 that well applies to the literary interiors analysed here, a Marxist theory of built space depends on the connection between man-made environments and prospects for an arrangement of the uses within them that can enable human survival to the greatest extent.21 This formulation is implicitly sociological, in that architects must attend to the social dimensions of users’ lives, and is temporal in that it views buildings in terms of human movements. Henselmann’s essays and speeches from the early 1960s reveal that he immersed himself in the work of his High Modernist mentors Gropius and Neutra, copies of whose writings he gave to Reimann starting in 1964.22 In his 1962 essay “Creative Problems of Architecture,” the architect worked to expand definitions of what can constitute the purpose of a building beyond the static “function-determined spatial relationships” that most engineers and architects limited themselves to as the GDR’s industrialized building programs gathered steam. Henselmann asks instead, “Don’t, above all, spaces also have biological, social, and societal functions in many kinds of relationships? Don’t structures also contain emotional, and thus psychological relationships in them?”23 Exactly this kind of thinking formed the basis of Gropius’s and Neutra’s work in the 1940s and 1950s. In “The Scope of Total Architecture,” Gropius draws a connection between poorly made built environments and the collective psychic illness he sees people in industrialized countries as suffering from; he claims that it is imperative that planners gain “knowledge of man through biology, sociology and psychology,” not just through a consideration of aesthetics as divorced from real needs.24 Neutra, possibly echoing Giedion, remains particularly focused on the biological, emphasizing

21

22 23

24

possible by a given space was of increasing importance. A 1963 Ulstein edition of Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and a 1965 Maier edition of Space, Time, and Architecture are in Henselmann’s personal library. Bruno Flierl has indicated that, even before the war, Henselmann was familiar with Corbusier’s work. See Bruno Flierl, introduction to Hermann Henselmann: Bauten, Ideen, Gedanken, Projekte (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 27. That capitalist cities are at root necropolises is an idea that extends in Marxist discourse at least back to Brecht’s Mahagonny. The non-Marxist anti-capitalist Mumford sees the growth of capitalist cities as converting the megalopolis into an unlivable “Pathopolis, the city of mental, moral, and bodily disorders, and finally terminates in Necropolis, the City of the Dead.” The potential of communist built environments for Henselmann is that they might be livable for all. Kaufmann, “Architektur, Literatur und Utopie,” 108–21, 111–15. Hermann Henselmann, “Schöpferische Probleme der Architektur,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 118. Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Collier, 1962), 144.

140  Building Socialism the effects of environmental factors on human nerve cells and physical health. He sums up his views as follows: Architecture can never be fully photographed. It is designed, physiological space-time that we experience through moving limbs, guiding nerves, endocrine glands, that are each moment activated and activating—all of this while we simply look at a building.25 The experience of buildings as “physiological space time” is crucial to Henselmann’s theory of architecture and undergirds the expanded concept of interior spatial arrangements and their perception in the novels analysed here. Whereas Neutra tries to quantify the different ways in which the human body experiences space, the writers accept and radicalize the differences in psychologically sophisticated prose works that turn spaces into the subplots that Kluge saw at work in Fontane’s late prose. Florian Urban and Emily Pugh have both traced top GDR architects’ turn to the disciplines of psychology and sociology to understand how users experienced the built environment. Pugh notes Henselman’s reading of Mitscherlich and shows how the architect’s collaboration with the sociologist Renate Schrickel in the late 1960s was integral to the architect’s embrace of “preserving and redeveloping older disctricts” as a way to architecturally “address the problems of ‘monotony’ and [lack of] social cohesion” associated with new, high-rise housing projects.26 Urban sees Bruno Flierl’s 1973 dissertation on architecture and industrial society as a key moment in GDR architectural history because of the way Flierl’s analysis “put[s] the focus on the agency of the individual city dweller” as a co-maker of the meanings of architecture over time.27 Urban notes that Flierl’s dissertation was suppressed as a result and refers to the architects and sociologists, including Henselmann, who studied the social milieu of Prenzlauer Berg in the mid-1960s as similarly “def[ying] state restrictions” to “secure niches of innovative research within East German academia.”28 But Henselmann was keen to trace his theoretical lineage to the work of his friend Brecht, who, before sociology had become acceptable in the GDR, envisioned interdisciplinary working groups devoted to the study of the built environment in relation to everyday life. 25 This is my translation of this passage from the GDR version of Neutra’s text. Richard Neutra, Gestaltete Umwelt (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1968), 9. 26 Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity, 189. 27 Florian Urban, Neo-Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 151. 28 Ibid., 147.

Time at Home 141 Henselmann, like the writers treated in this chapter, sees radical processes of change as characteristic of his own historical moment and asks that flexibility be “elevated to an architectonic principle” in the GDR. In response to the housing crisis of the early 1960s, the architect suggested that the excess of space created by wartime destruction and the profound provisionality of this time of rapid social change favored the building of “flexible structures first and foremost with relatively low costs, more or less designed improvisations … until we are materially and intellectually better positioned to understand what kinds of things should be built to last.”29 Ad hoc yet intentional arrangements of space and the intervention of architects as co-arrangers constitute the philosophical core of Henselmann’s Modernism. By emphasizing production and use as the core components of design philosophy, Henselmann comes to a highly sociological view of architecture and its temporal dimensions that finds resonance in the novels of Reimann, de Bruyn, Wolf, and to a lesser extent Morgner. At the intersection of spatiality and temporality in GDR interiors, authors found a vehicle for fragmentary compositions in which, as Henselmann put it in a biting 1967 critique of prefabricated standardization, “disorder becomes possible within order.”30 Brecht, as seen in Chapter 1, hoped that architects might create “the beauty of anarchical building … according to plan.” The digressions necessary in literary works to account for the temporal dimensions of interior space were not meant to jeopardize their status as wholes. Rather, their wholeness increasingly emerged through dissonant montages of moments in which the temporality of objects themselves interrupted narrative continuity.

Prescriptions for a Socialist Wohnkultur

Reimann, Morgner, and de Bruyn responded critically to banal propaganda photos of interior space by writing about the use of new apartments and about their place in history. Home design journals and manuals across the industrialized world addressed readers with a pedantically condescending tone in the 1950s and 1960s; but writers in East Germany perceived as unique to their national context the blending of a crassly limiting, technocratic materialism and a retrograde petit-bourgeois moralism. In Franziska Linkerhand and Haus am Rand der Stadt, this attitude, which perpetuates the worst of inherited mentalities and adopts the worst of new ones, is legible in the arrangements of domestic environments, particularly in the single-family 29 Henselmann, “Schöpferische Probleme der Architektur,” 118. 30 Hermann Henselmann, “Typen und Eintönigkeit,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 152.

142  Building Socialism home. GDR debate on the single-family dwelling was diverse. Writers and architects there shared in the classically socialist antipathy to privatism, which overlapped with an anti-Levittown sentiment among High Modernist architects including Henselmann. Complicating this was the emergence as early as the mid-1950s, as evident in propaganda posters, of the single family house as a form of class differentiation in the nominally classless socialist society.31 Morgner’s critique of such spaces remains embedded in the narrative logic in the way that MacKay ascribes to Dickens; for Reimann, the vitriol and theoretical sophistication of the critiques, particularly in light of her engagement with the writings of Neutra, have the effect of lifting the passages about Wohnkultur momentarily out of the forward movement of the story. Morgner’s Haus am Rand der Stadt tells the story of Kurt Meyer, nicknamed “Haus-Meyer” by his co-workers in the unnamed city where he, his wife, and his daughter Britt live. Meyer’s obsession with the single-family house he is building from scratch on the edge of the city fuels the novel’s many conflicts. His daughter’s relationship with a young party bureaucrat-in-training and colleague of her father, Jochen, is jeopardized by the father’s relentless commitment to his building project. Jochen and his mother, an appealing local party official and veteran anti-fascist resister, sharpen the tension between Britt and her parents and help her escape the limits of their confining lifestyle. Ultimately, the novel’s harmonizing conclusion is meant to show the extent to which the drive to individual self-realization can be reconciled to the dictates of everyday life as shaped by party bureaucrats. Morgner was keen to undo simplistic connections between the forms of one’s dwelling and one’s political commitments. The first time, early in the novel, that Britt visits the apartment of Jochen and his mother, she is astounded by what she finds. The building is an Altbau with “a stairwell, deep in the interior of the building, with old fashioned murals and colorful windows that reminded Britt of church windows, a neo-Baroque balustrade, well-used stone steps—a city adminitrator lived here?”32 Britt’s views are further challenged when she steps into the apartment itself: “Jochen had a very different home than what Britt had pictured. She had imagined a big, comfortable new apartment, a modern living room of ‘genuine wood,’ buffed to a high shine and with expansive club chairs, porcelain and crystal 31 John Urang has the seen the tension between class differentiation in the GDR’s nascent consumer culture and stated socialist goals as part of the “bottomless irony” of de Bruyn’s novel. John Griffith Urang, Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 108. 32 Irmtraud Morgner, Haus am Rand der Stadt (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 111.

Time at Home 143 behind glass—her ideal apartment.”33 The old furniture and scattered books she instead finds suggest rather that intellectual engagement is favored over engagement with the fashions of the day, regardless of their political coding. In fact, Jochen’s mother, Käthe Büsch, has credentials of socialist action so impeccable that the form of her apartment is insignificant by comparison. The evidence of intellectual pursuit suggests to Britt a mind and personality that are “original, interesting,” not prefabricated. Britt has been subject to the fixed meanings of interior space in the GDR as imagined by Kultur im Heim, Hans Lewitzsky, Hermann Exner, and, as seen in Chapter 3, Helmut Baierl. Ornament and bourgeois forms cannot, for her, express socialism adequately. Exner carried this kind of logic to its extreme in his Kunst und Gerät which appeared around the same time as Morgner’s novel. There, he explains that the ornamented apartments of the late nineteenth-century petit-bourgeois were designed as a neo-feudalist reaction against the “broadened perspective ” that “the system of scientific socialism” had given the working class.34 For Morgner, a reader of Seghers, such apartments had also housed the heroic communist agitators of Die Gefährten; with this political pedigree, they could certainly house an East German bureaucrat. Morgner thus repositions the status of the key interior space in a way that accords with her own view of working-class history but which also telegraphs to the reader the harmony, to be celebrated at the novel’s close, between Britt’s individualist aspirations and the SED party structure that Jochen’s mother represents. In Morgner’s novel, as in Reimann, the petit-bourgeois desire for a detached dwelling goes hand in hand with an allegiance to a statist socialism that Brecht and Korsch had seen as characteristic of the Second International. In Morgner’s anthropologically-inflected visual analysis of a family kitchen and living room, socialist work ethic manifests itself as a narrow-minded sentimentality that places limits on the individual development of young people. She detests her parents’ domestic environment, and after her romance with Jochen begins, the family dinner table becomes “a world that was limited by the range of light from a forty-watt bulb.”35 The cheap, minimal lighting of the space becomes an emblem of a willful inattention to possibilities for 33 Ibid., 112. 34 Exner, Kunst und Gerät, 54. 35 Morgner, Haus am Rand der Stadt, 53. Architectural critic Reyner Banham reserved particular scorn for the de-humanizing effects of exposed light-bulbs. See his Architecture and the Well-Tempered Environment, 2nd edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 208. From Pabst’s the Joyless Street to Murnau’s The Last Laugh, the single exposed lightbulb was used as a symbol of the oppressive culture of petit-bourgeois life in Berlin’s tenement apartments.

144  Building Socialism self-realization in favor of a bottom-line approach akin to the motto of the GDR’s newly industrialized building industry in the late 1950s: “Build better, faster, and cheaper.” Morgner points to the contrast between the teenage passion legible in Britt’s physiognomy and the, in a quite literal sense, prescriptive set of decorative elements in the family kitchen: Britt’s face, glowing and a bit embarrassed, did not fit into this kitchen, which had cross-stitched mottoes mounted on the wall all around: “Fulfill your duty happily,” “Blessed are the busy,” “A tomorrow without trouble,” and above all, “My kitchen, my pride.” Above the sofa hung two bulky picture frames and in them behind glass: “Our daddy is just the best” and “Our mommy is just the best.”36 Blind reverence for parents, the imperative to bring one’s desires into line with duty, and the pride of ownership are the kinds of core right-wing values that Müller had seen the GDR building industry as harnessing for the Aufbau. Here they become part of the environment of the home and act as an imposition on the psychology of a generation with no experience of that fascism or of efforts to resist it. On the one hand, Morgner uses the interaction of self and space to position herself on the side of Modernist design’s critiques of kitsch, which certainly would have targeted cross-stitch mottoes. On the other hand, she resists the combination of service to the technocratic needs of industry (Haus-Mayer’s brigade is exemplary) and dogmatic moralism that characterized much of the interior design rhetoric in the GDR. The fabric of everyday life here comes under a stinging social critique that reads built space in terms of the central historical dimension of the socialist revolution. That critique, which temporalizes the space by seeing it in light of the movements of history, is in consonance with the novel’s narrative trajectory: that of Britt’s self-realization and of her father’s ultimate recognition of its compatibility with party structures. Reimann’s novel, which remained unfinished at the author’s death, alternates between a third-person omniscient narration and narration by Franziska herself; the story follows the title character, a young woman and architect-in-training, who aspires to emulate her Bauhaustrained mentor at architecture school, Reger. Proceeding more or less chronologically, the novel traces Franziska’s life from her childhood in her parents’ bourgeois townhouse to her life in Neustadt (based on Hoyerswerda, a new city built starting in 1957), her intellectual conflict with the pedantic construction site director, Schafheutlin, and her 36 Ibid., 52

Time at Home 145 tortured romance with the critical journalist-cum-construction worker, Ben Trojanowicz (the addressee of the sections narrated by Franziska). Much of the novel’s second half chronicles the failures of the building efforts in Neustadt as evident in the social vacuity of everyday life there. The narrative is ultimately one of dissolution as Franziska turns her attention to the various failures and successes of individuals in Neustadt in relation to their cheaply built environment, to her own fears about her relationship to Ben, and to an intermingling of childhood memories with a recognition of the limitations placed on her own agency. Hunter Bivens has read the fragmentation of the second half of the novel as a product of the “indeterminacy” of the architectural and urban past in its effects on the modernizing present.37 That fragmentation also represents an intensification of the episodic quality of architectural description that “unfurls” the object-based subplots that Kluge sees as characteristic of the novel of diversity. For Reimann, in a scene relatively early in the novel, the standardized yet pseudo-individualized single-family house was a satirical emblem of a comfortable bureaucracy that tamed revolutionary energies and codified complacency. Franziska makes this political claim through a psychologically inflected visual analysis of the living room of her narrow-minded boss, Schafheutlin. Reimann begins her examination of his house from the outside, using the visual impression of the exterior to analyse, in a non-narrative moment, the historical position of the GDR’s upwardly mobile bureaucrats in the early 1960s: It was one of these standardized single-family houses that all look like they were baked in the same mould, according to prescriptions for hygiene, matter-of-fact looking, but under a cozy gabled roof.38 Reimann connects Modernist rhetoric about hygiene to the appearance and mood of a matter-of-factness and comfort, which her tone of chummy satire (“one of these”) casts as laughable yet ominous.39 As seen above, the single-family house itself had long been a target of the Modernist architects whom Reimann had read. Gropius detested the American suburban dwelling, which he saw as inappropriate for 37 Hunter Bivens, “Neustadt: Affect and Architecture in Brigitte Reiman’s East German Novel, Franziska Linkerhand,” Germanic Review 83, no. 2 (2008): 139–66. 38 Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1974), 280. 39 Deutsche Architecture regularly featured articles on new construction and hygiene at this time, but Reimann also had Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, which contains several passages about the importance of cleanliness, in her personal collection.

146  Building Socialism industrialized societies.40 GDR architects such as Henselmann added to this critique a gleefully propagandistic vitriol against the Levittown model, which placed speculators’ interests above dwellers’.41 For Reimann, though, descriptive language about the house becomes a vehicle for assessing the historical position of GDR bureaucracy between tradition (“gabled roof”) and Modernist vacuity (“matterof-fact”). The East German architectural bureaucracy seems to have preserved in its mode of dwelling the antiseptic banality of the modernizing present and a petit-bourgeois preference for traditional forms associated with fascism. The sociological reading of the house exterior contains an emotional pathos, but not one that finds resolution in a fixed narrative teleology. Thus, the critique of the historical position of bureaucratized GDR home life is one barbed theoretical assessment of everyday life among many in this critical novel of diversity. Reimann, in the same scene, also uses the psychology of home interiors to explore how prescribed forms of decoration threaten to supplant organic arrangements of objects. The home interior is again a site within which historical forces become visible. Once inside Schafheutlin’s house, Franziska finds a decorative scheme drawn straight from the pages of a magazine: The living room was appointed with new furniture and armchairs in four colors and looked like an illustration from Kultur im Heim; even the arrangement on the sideboard, birch branches in a rustic clay jar, and the Mexican peasants that belonged with it—Rivera as decoration, thanks a lot … the room was deaf and dumb. She could discover nary an object that betrayed an idiosyncrasy or preoccupation of its owner, and not a trace of the clutter that is usually collected and piously or superstitiously preserved.42 Kultur im Heim propagated a balanced Modernism that sought to purge the experimental flair of mid-century California design and retain the matter-of-fact visual language of Scandanavian furniture.43 The 40 Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture, 99. 41 See the architect’s Wir bauen an der neuen Stadt (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1960). For more on the particular “modernity” of the single-family house, see Harald Kegler, “Die ‘Moderne’ im Einfamilienhausbau der DDR: Das Beispiel der Siedlungen am Kornhaus in Dessau,” in Schönheit und Typenprojektierung. Der DDR-Städtebau im internationalen Kontext (Erkner bei Berlin: Leibniz-Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, 2005), 209–28. 42 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 282–3. 43 Paul Betts, “Building Socialism at Home: The Case of East German Interiors,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 105–11.

Time at Home 147 magazine offered highly specific primers on choosing, for instance, fabric patterns, but its writers tended to describe the emotional effects of the designs using vague words like “harmonious” and “comfortable.” Its central enemy was “kitsch” in all its forms, which expressed, according to the publication’s logic, compensatory, capitalist emotional attachments to ornament. The magazine itself thus operated psychologically, making the connection between forms and affective needs. Reimann, though, in this analysis of the psychological implications of her boss’s house, reinstates use of space as a central category. While for the editorial board of Kultur im Heim, meanings developed through use over time would qualify as superstitious, Franziska makes the anthropological assumption that human beings tend by habit to arrange, collect, and preserve objects over time that express the diverse stories that make up individuality. Conversely, approaches to home décor that seek an instant, cool perfection by adhering to the dictates of taste can empty spaces of vital social and political meanings: the Rivera-esque painting of Mexican peasants, derived from a revolutionary art, is converted to totem of status. Astoundingly, the profaning of Rivera’s revolutionary art by its inclusion in a banal environment is not just a product of Reimann’s own ironic invention; a two-page photo spread of model apartments in Hoyerswerda in a 1958 issue of Kultur im Heim show interiors with the specific elements Franziska finds in Schafheutlin’s house: in the top right corner of the spread is a photo of a living and dining room that has a sideboard upon which stands a ceramic jar filled with branches (see Figure 10). The photo of a living room in the lower left corner of the spread shows a painting on the rear of the right wall in which the characteristic white work clothes of Mexican peasants, rendered with Rivera’s soft curves, are discernable.44 Reimann’s notion of the use of objects over time also has a specifically architectural dimension that can be pointed up by analysing Schafheutlin’s house in connection to the theoretical writings of Neutra, which Reimann read. The architect, in his Survival Through Design, offers a conventionally Modernist critique of applied ornament. He asserts that the “magical” meanings that human cultures have long attributed to objects must be allowed to die out in an age in which biological science, which gives us new insights into the way human 44 Kultur im Heim 4 (1958): 5, and Kultur im Heim 2 (1959): 5. Reimann had a book on Rivera by GDR art historian Hans Secker in her library. She mentions a story by Bodo Uhse about Rivera in a 1963 letter to Henselmann. Hermann Henselmann and Brigitte Reimann, Mit Respekt und Vergnügen: Briefwechesel (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2001), 10–11.

148  Building Socialism

Figure 10  Drei Wohnräume aus dem Typ Hoyerswerda (Three living spaces of the Hoyerswerda type), Kultur im Heim, 1958.

beings see and feel the objects around them, can help designers restore to interiors the “true, elegant functionalism” of nature itself in which utility and meaning exist as a unity. Neutra thus concedes that architectural ornaments, as fetish objects and totems, fulfilled genuine emotional and psychological needs in pre-modern societies; but he objects strenuously to the continued application of ornament as divorced from necessary emotional functions. Ornamented interior arrangements, for Neutra in the 1950s, have become embedded in a culture of “distractions” that “exploits old habits” of looking and

Time at Home 149 feeling.45 This form of exploitation is for Neutra the definition of decoration. Though Neutra’s theories certainly seem to buttress Kultur im Heim’s rather than Reimann’s views, the novelist’s description of the Rivera painting shows how the GDR’s critics of kitsch indulge in a new form of ornament in which revolutionary forms are reduced to precisely the kinds of empty gestures and vain signifiers that Neutra pleads against. So, Reimann mobilizes the language of Neutra’s idiosyncratic but thoughtful Modernism, and its attentiveness to the science of visuality and human dwelling, to criticize the specific banalities of GDR design culture in the 1960s. Again, Reimann’s attentiveness to specific discourses about everyday built space in the GDR and the theoretical dimensions of her reflection pull the reader out of the narrative and into the realm of digressive historical reflection on the nature of modernity. Schafheutlin’s house becomes a vehicle for an episodic theoretical analysis that runs to some degree independent of the forward movement of the narrative. In Reimann’s novel, there are also regimes of taste worthy of critique that are not solely statist in their origin. In a side episode early in Franziska’s time in Neustadt, she makes fun of her friend Jazwauk, who lives with all the modern conveniences and Bauhausstyle furniture he manages to get his hands on: A happy person. If he ever, earlier, doubted himself, brooded about his own nature, daydreamed morbidly about his own greatness, that was long forgotten. Life itself had validated him. The world strewed joy into the hands of those who knew how to reach for it at the right time. He had an apartment in a building in the regional capital, a sports car with 500 horses under the hood, beige leather seats, a few reproductions of Braque.46 He moonlights as a private architect who is particularly renowned for the appeal of his architectural drawings which, as Franziska indicates, show buildings with “a breath of the everyday … enlivened by trees, streamlined cars, and perky, long-legged girls.” Purchased and designed objects here act as stand-ins for personality in a way not just specific to the GDR but resonant with the pitying, if not fully sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrators-cumvictims of consumer culture in Perec’s Things. The novel centers on Jerome and Sylvie, two market researchers who increasingly define their selfhood according to the objects they surround themselves 45 Neutra, Gestaltete Umwelt, 74. For comparison, see Theodor Adorno, “Résumé zur Kulturindustrie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 10–1, 337. 46 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 194.

150  Building Socialism with. Though never to the radical extent of Perec, whose Les Choses appeared in a GDR paperback edition in 1967 which Reimann owned, Reimann showed the way the things that surround people in their homes threatened to subsume them.47 In Reimann’s novel, the passages that reveal the agency of things in people’s lives, though, are temporal digressions that run parallel to a narrative trajectory that centers on human characters. By contrast, Perec’s quite unified novel is that of the total meshing of the two main characters, Jerome and Sylvie, with consumer objects that eradicate independent selfhood; Perec’s experimental reckoning with consumer objects is conceptually single-minded in that the things the two characters purchase entirely supplant personality. For Reimann, the GDR’s far less robust consumer culture as imprinted on the home does not yield a Modernist narrative of disintegration within consumerist spaces. Rather, fashionable home interiors provide occasion for brief digressive passages, such as the ones dealing with Jazwauk, in which self-construction and consumer choices are lampooned in a way that has little to do with the narrative trajectory, a fact that is underscored by Franziska’s recourse after the paragraph on her stylish friend to the eighteenth-century device of direct address: “And with that, enough of Jazwauk, reclining in his car seat cushions, gabbing, twinkling, and turning his head to profile.”48 In de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel, culture itself becomes consumable as books and bookshelves in a newly built apartment function as an expression of status within hierarchical bureaucracies and as symbols of cultivation. The novel tells the story of Karl Erp, a married, middleaged suburbanite and library bureaucrat, and his live-in affair with Fräulein Broder, a young, beautiful and aloof library intern who lives in a tenement on the edge of Berlin’s neglected Barn District. Most of the text is devoted to the blossoming of the love story and its slow, painful dissolution as Erp fails to adjust to daily life in Broder’s cramped, dirty, noisy, and outdated top-floor apartment. 47 Reimann’s edition was Georges Perec, Die Dinge (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1967). 48 It is worth noting that the same disciplines, “snippets of sociology, psychology, statistics” that the two French university drop-outs learn on the job after they have left their studies are the same ones that Neutra and Henselmann drew on as they sought to make architectural practice more interdisciplinary. Geroges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. David Bellos (Boston: Godine, 1990), 37. There is a degree to which Reimann’s time in Hoyerswerda and her novel can be read as a form, if not of market research, then of immersive public interest research akin to that which Jane Jacobs conducted for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. See Peter Laurence, “Jane Jacobs before Death and Life,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, no. 1 (March 2007): 5–15.

Time at Home 151 At the height of the affair, the couple makes its public debut at the apartment of Fred Mantek, a colleague senior to Erp at the library where they work. He and his wife, Ella, have had their share of marital troubles, but have weathered them by developing a pragmatic approach to couplehood that involves intellectual engagement and a fulfilling lifestyle as represented by their newly built apartment on the most-recently completed segment of Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee. Mantek, like Erp, has lost his revolutionary zeal for the socialist project. Unlike Erp, he is unconcerned about finding a romantic antidote to his middle-aged stability. Deep in conversation, Mantek, Erp, and their colleague Haßler take seats on a tasteful couch in front of well-arranged bookshelves. The narrator describes the scene: So they sat beneath books as though a television director had placed them there for the illustration of: cultured living! Arranged there, three men, drinking, smoking, discussing. The age difference between them was not great (Haßler was 50, Mantek 45, Erp 40) and (aside from Haßler’s bald head) hardly detectable; when one listened to them, though, Erp came across like a skittish teenager among grown ups.49 As a socialist, de Bruyn uses the television-ready backdrop of books and Erp’s contrasting neurotic immaturity to express concern about the weakening of radical agendas; but as a bibliophile and librarian, he is concerned that the rich, varied, and critical textual world of books is itself being objectified, turned into a visual signal of lifestyle and a consumable mark of social status. Like his main character, de Bruyn was trained in library science, and like Erp, de Bruyn’s early scholarly writing betrays utopian hopes about the development of a specifically socialist book culture. His 1957 dissertation on the practical dimensions of working in open stack libraries betrays a genuine interest in book culture as a non-consumable, collective phenomenon in which the public space of the lending library contains utopian traces: “In this form of lending, the reader gains a closer relationship to the book and to the library, which he, more than at the closed-stack pick-up desk, learns to see as his own.”50 For de Bruyn, collective ownership of culture in public space as it transcends mere objecthood is part of the “educational task of socialism.”51 In the scene at the Manteks, books have ceased to be part of this public exchange and 49 Günter de Bruyn, Buridans Esel (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1968), 176. 50 Günter de Bruyn, Über die Arbeit in Freihandbibliotheken (Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Bibliothekswesen, 1957), 6. 51 Ibid.

152  Building Socialism instead are reduced to visual elements in the interior environment of a comfortable bureaucrat. The scene evinces the kind of distanced sociological perspective on characters that de Bruyn was familiar with from his social-scientific work on the use of libraries. These made-forTV books thus represent a moment of social critique in the novel that transcends its narrative teleology and exists as a stand-alone comment on the status of GDR bureaucratic interiors vis-à-vis ideas about social revolution. Anxiety about the objectification of books was also central to the opening, entirely descriptive and unpeopled pages of Perec’s novel. In the apartment where the reader soon meets the main characters, the books that line the wall of the study are interspersed with periodicals “so as to break the continuity of the bindings.”52 Thus, their aesthetic arrangement would seem to carry as much weight as the ideas they contain; bookshelves demarcate the space of domestic comfort, which is based on the conceit that all that one consumes is only for onesself: “Sometimes it would seem to them that a whole life could be led harmoniously between these book-lined walls, amongst these objects so perfectly domesticated that they would have ended up believing these bright soft, simple and beautiful things had only ever been made for their sole use.”53 Perec, as the disastrous emptiness of his central figures is slowly revealed over the course of the narrative, manages both longingly and with revulsion to make it appear as though the total domesticity of consumable culture is a path to genuine human satisfaction. Even by the novel’s close, Perec refuses to complete the uncompromising Adornean foreclosure on any possibility for authentic pleasure in purchased objects. De Bruyn’s critique likewise eschews the pursuit of totality, retaining rather the spirit of Benjamin’s critiques of the bourgeois interior which, as Peter Schmiedgen has noted, read the commodified home “as a mask that covers a field of ‘dirty’ secrets.”54 Similarly, the scenes at the Manteks’ apartment, particularly with the reference to characters and objects in the home being placed by a “television director,” also echo Günther Anders’s biting indictment of television’s intensification of the “picture-book effect” as described in his The Obsolescence of the Human (1956): “Of course we can use television in order to take part in a religious service. What impresses or changes us just as strongly, whether we wish it or not, is the fact that we are precisely not taking part in it, but rather only consuming its 52 Perec, Things, 23. 53 Ibid., 25. 54 Peter Schmiedgen, “Interiority, Exteriority and Spatial Politics in Benjamin’s Cityscapes,” in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 150.

Time at Home 153 image.”55 Erp and Mantek and the books they find themselves in front of are, following Anders’s logic, converted into images of culture that lose critical potential. But for de Bruyn, as in many ways for Reimann, such moments of critique rarely become systematic or totalizing. Rather, the consuming of culture as registered in the home became one of the factors through which realist writers diversified their realism through episodes critical of the arrangement of physical space.

The Crisis of Civilization at Home

Their historical reflections became more acute and more international as GDR writers considered the advent of washing machines, televisions, and electric ovens in domestic life. These objects were increasingly seen as agents of a banal, oppressive, civilizatory modernity that threatened to replace human labor with machine labor and regulate basic life functions such as birth and death. Reimann, de Bruyn, and Wolf increasingly viewed the environment of the mid-century home as a battlefield of historical forces in which human agency was being reduced and as a prison through which remote power structures exacted discipline on an objectified populace. This view brought their work closer to that of various contemporaneous critics of modernity. Anders, who was well known by the Wolfs and Kunert, along with Lewis Mumford, who was read by Reimann and Henselmann, developed intensive critiques of the way technologies in the home evolved along with increasingly exploitative structures of power.56 Both Anders and Mumford were also keenly interested in how this exploitative modernity, having outgrown and overpowered so much of human agency, was becoming legible in the built environments inhabited by individuals and small groups and within which the bulk of everyday life was lived. Mumford’s examination of how institutional power structures were reorganizing neighborhood life entailed a reckoning with changing uses of the home interior. For Anders, the philosophical anthropologist, the home 55 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (München: Beck, 1956), 100. 56 De Bruyn has claimed that before 1965 he read nothing written in the GDR and was up to date with literary and philosophical developments in the West (Stille Post: Inoffizielle Schriftstellerkontakte zwischen West und Ost, ed. Roland Berbig (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2005), 44). Both Anders and Mumford have been read as tiresome, predictable critics of modernity who appealed to an anxious bourgeoisie but whose theories ignored other class perspectives. See Günter Ropohl, “Das Misstrauen in der Technikdebatte,” in Vertrauen—zwischen sozialem Kitt und der Senkung von Transaktionskosten, ed. Matthias Maring, (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing, 2010), 115. This is patently not the case for Mumford, who remained a reformist Modernist in the vein of Gropius and eschewed a banal, back-to-nature humanism.

154  Building Socialism interior was the most important site for investigating modernity in the mid-1950s precisely because that was where regimes of technology were focusing their efforts at domination. Again, what separates the GDR writers from these Westerners is a balance, which allowed them to articulate the contradictions legible in home interiors in an ambiguous, playful way that eschewed self-confident and vitriolic moralism. For the GDR writers, the critique of modernity came in self-reflective digressions from the narrative trajectory that brought their work closer to the Vielfältigkeitsroman that Kluge has seen Fontane as originating. For Reimann, the advent of the television in the home represented a degradation of public culture. Franziska, standing on a terrace in Neustadt, beholds the proliferation of television antennae on the city’s apartment buildings, which disturbs her as much as the bleakness of its streets (150).57 In a later passage, she tries to convince Schafheutlin that the architect’s task must go beyond the merely economic: We have become nameless and faceless, and, in that respect, we are like our buildings. Every house should be signed like a picture … but no, we sit at the side table, overlooked by the public that knows every hit-spewing beatnik and Lollo’s bust size and the suspenders of these TV clowns and knows nothing of the architects that build their houses.58 The brave new world of televised entertainment in the home becomes a poison that spoils a hoped-for immediacy in the relationship between builders and dwellers. Such despondent moments in the novel increasingly supplant the light, Voltarian critiques with which Franziska had introduced her brother whose tidy bedroom is compared to “a geometry textbook” (46). In the passages in the novel in which television is addressed, one feels more clearly the apocalyptic tone that Anders takes when he refers to individual viewers of television as “unpaid homeworkers for the manufacture of mass man” (101). The television is thus the activist object par excellence that acts back on its makers, robbing them of their creative will, and thus of their humanity. Its temporality is a decidedly destructive one and is a jumping off-point for the kind of object-based subplots that Kluge saw the novel of diversity as “unfurling.” Similarly, Lewis Mumford’s sharp critiques of “technics” as a force through which an oligarchic elite was systematically reducing 57 Though there were long wait times to receive a television in the GDR, by 1970 televisions were quite common items, with 73.6 televisions for every 100 households (Source: Statistisches Amt der DDR). 58 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 269–70.

Time at Home 155 possibilities for genuine human ecstasy by insisting on increasingly dominated domestic environments are palpable when Reimann refers to Neustadt’s apartments as “sleep chambers made of concrete.”59 Franziska tries to work against objects’ assault on human beings as she responds to the interior of her own apartment: [T]he pieces of furniture were bright and of a penetrating consciousness of function [Zweckbewußtsein]: a table, a chair on which one could sit, a closet in which one could hang clothes and a bed that exclusively served for sleeping, the reproduction of energies used up during the day, and did not allow anyone to jump around on the mattress, to cry in the pillow or to dream unchaste dreams.60 The attempt of the Neustadt apartment designs to account for a minimum of physiological need (“reproduction of engergies used up during the day”) is characterized not as harmonious or organic, but “penetrating.” Neutra had seen as one of his primary objectives the reduction of possiblities for overstimulation in living environments; to that end, he railed against objects whose ornamentation or scale made them “penetrating.”61 Reimann agrees that objects should not unduly impose themselves on users and viewers, but sees the Neutra-esque attempt to create interior schemes to meet needs scientifically as itself producing negative emotions. Mumford takes this a step further in the second volume of his The Myth of the Machine, entitled Pentagon of Power (1970), seeing the space capsule as a prototype of the authoritarian establishment’s model dwelling, through which the human body might be controlled by the technology wielding elite: “[The astronaut] is the archetypal proto-model of Post-Historic Man, whose existence from birth to death would be conditioned by the megamachine, and made to conform, as in a space capsule, to the minimal functional requirements by an equally minimal environment—all under remote control.”62 Reimann, in the characteristically balanced way of these 1960s novels, does offer more hope than Mumford for individuals to work against designed apartments as a technology of social control. Franziska’s response to a bed whose visual form would seem to solicit nothing other than sleep is to bring this activist furniture to heel: “She climbed onto her bed, this virtuous function-furniture that one 59 Ibid., 152. 60 Ibid., 157–8. 61 Neutra, Gestaltete Umwelt, 79. 62 Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, 180.

156  Building Socialism had to mistreat in order to bring to heel” (159). The idea of fighting back against man-made environments is one that Reimann may have taken up from Stanislaw Lem, a well-known Polish science fiction writer, a collection of whose short stories she acquired. Lem’s uproariously funny tale, “Waschmaschinentragödie” (Washing Machine Tragedy, 1968), displaced the Eastern Bloc’s technology fetishism onto an imagined New York in which companies competing to build the most beautiful washing machine end up making one that is smart enough to fill in gaps in the family conversation when the TV is not on. Ultimately, as the washing machines organize themselves into crime syndicates, human beings are forced likewise to organize “to confront the danger of a kitchen appliance invasion by making a secret contract as to the limitations on the delivery of replacement parts.”63 In a hilarious scene, which quite clearly reveals that the Soviet Bloc is meant rather than the capitalist world, limping, broken washing machines are seen lining up at department stores begging for replacement parts. But humanity still manages to place itself in jeopardy once more as a group of “cyberphiles” begins preaching, in an architectural metaphor that surely would have resonated with Reimann, that “humanity was made by its creator to fulfill the same function as construction scaffolding: to be an aid, a tool—a tool for developing perfect electronic brains.”64 If in the nineteenth century the machines that the “machine stormers” of the early labor movement sought to destroy were those owned by big capital in factories and warehouses, Reimann and Lem indicate that, in the post-war period, it is the modern objects in the domestic interior, from “function-conscious” chairs to beds not made for sex, that must be stormed and made more human through use over time.65 What differentiates Reimann from Lem is that, again, the idea of fighting against one’s environment is episodic rather than narrative and as such represents a reflective theoretical digression in a novel that is diverse in concept and structure. Christa Wolf reckons even more deeply than Reimann with changing relationships between self and objects in a world in which historical rupture and dissolution thwart attempts to create a lasting culture. Nachdenken über Christa T. is one of the most innovative novels of the post-war period and is a much more compact work than Reimann’s 63 Stanislaw Lem, “Waschmaschinentragödie,” in Test: Phantastische Erzählungen (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1968), 215. 64 Ibid., 218. 65 For the standard account of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor movement’s attempts to destroy machines in order to prevent job losses that come with mechanization, see Martin Henkel and Rolf Taubert Maschinenstürmer. Ein Kapitel aus der Sozialgeschichte des technischen Fortschritts (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1979).

Time at Home 157 Franziska Linkerhand. The plot is simply told: a first-person narrator relates episodes from the life of her deceased friend, the title character, from their time in school together in the early 1950s to the main character’s death of a terminal illness in the late 1960s. In an interpretation of Wolf’s (and the narrator’s) prologue, Therese Hörnigk has characterized the novel’s structure as follows: “As a narrative authority [Instanz] an authentic first-person self is introduced that feels itself responsible for the organization and montage of life traces left behind.”66 Hörnigk notes that Wolf’s narrator declares from the start that, as editors can splice film footage into non-chronological series of scenes, so too will Christa’s story be riven with leaps in time and compressions and expansions of the various scenes.67 The architectural episodes are not equally distributed across the novel. Rather, two of the book’s twenty brief chapters (Chapters 17 and 18) are devoted to a house that Christa, the main character of the novel, builds for herself as the terminal illness with which she suffers worsens. The house has generally not been read as an episode particularly distinct from the others that the narrator presents. Rather, for both Therese Hörnigk and Andreas Huyssen, Christa’s desire to build a space for herself is part of an expression of utopian longing that runs through the entire novel. Huyssen sees in Wolf’s reckoning with utopian desire the influence of Ernst Bloch; Hörnigk suggests the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann as a likely literary interlocutor.68 But what is the specific function of the architecturalization of that longing toward the end of the novel? Close analysis of the two chapters that deal with the house reveal that not just the idealist construct of utopia is at issue (though it certainly is), but also the fundamental materialist question about the relationship between objects and bodies that lies at the core of the expansive definition of architecture that Brecht and Henselmann had sought. The narrator of Nachdenken über Christa T., in a much-quoted passage, says that Christa’s house is “a kind of instrument which she wanted to use to connect herself more intimately with life, a place that belonged to her from the ground up because she brought it into being, and from whose foundation she could confront all that lay outside.”69 The house is meant, over time and through use, to establish an intimate connection with life itself 66 Therese Hörnigk, Christa Wolf (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989), 116–17. 67 Ibid. 68 See Andreas Huyssen, “Traces of Ernst Bloch: Reflections on Christa Wolf,” in Responses to Christa Wolf, ed. Marlyn Sibley Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 233–47, and Hörnigk, Christa Wolf, 116–17. 69 Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T., special edn (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), 148–9.

158  Building Socialism and to become a sovereign space, a sentiment that certainly echoes Bloch’s hope for an architecture that could induce and reflect a sense of contentment. But the way the house looks and feels, aside from the intentions Christa attaches to it, is also related to disparate trends within the history of Modernist architecture, with which Wolf is implicitly grappling in these scenes and which makes the chapters about the house at least in part a rumination on the nature of modern space. The narrator relates the house’s two key sensory dimensions in passages reminiscent of the sparseness with which Seghers represented the built environment, as seen in Chapter 1. Its first quality, described while Christa is still designing it, is an openness, transparency, and lightness associated both with the Expressionist glass-worship of the 1910s and the Neues Bauen’s maximization of interior light and views to nature through the careful placement of large ribbon windows. During an evening with friends at a beachside hotel near the lake where the house is to be built, Christa is enthusiastic about the use of glass: Facing the lake we need display-window glass, two enormous windows, [as] storms would easily destroy normal panes. From the kitchen I see the garden that I’m arranging and the western point of the lake. We cook with propane gas, Justus will exchange the empty containers in the city. A piece of the shore will be cleared of reeds, that will be our bathing spot. [The children] Anna and Lena will run around stark naked in summer.70 The Expressionist “glass worship” of the 1910s, which reached its apogee in the well-known works of Paul Scheerbart, had at its roots a polemic against “the horrors of the culture of brick [Backsteinkultur]” as a manifestion of pre-Modernist illiberality.71 Seghers, as shown in Chapter 1, associates glass with capitalism’s exploitative appropriation of religious sensibilities and with the false promises of its consumer culture. In this passage, though, the large glass panes take the capitalist invention of the display window and realize its non-commodified potential in the liberating interpenetration of inside and outside. The glass is a characteristic feature of Modernist architecture which, in this context, is akin to the raw joy of children playing naked in the summer, forming part of a vision of unanlienated forms of dwelling. In what seems a pat condemnation of Modernist utopian designs, however, Christa’s friends’ first visit to the house, still under

70 Ibid., 146. 71 Banham, Architecture and the Well-Tempered Environment, 126.

Time at Home 159 construction, sees them confronted with a seemingly very different structure from the one she had planned: There it stood, naked and raw, very lonely under the great, cloudfilled sky and smaller than it had been in our imagination. It seemed to us in need of support in its struggle against the large, agitated lake and the dark sky. We saw that it had bravely taken up its post, but also that nature had set itself against it—but we expended no words about this. We climbed across the raw board that lay there in place of a threshold into the interior and went slowly through the lower, still floor-board-less rooms and climbed up a provisional ladder to the first floor, to the children’s bedrooms.72 The house is austere in its provisionality, its rawness and nakedness no longer the celebratory accompaniments to play, but rather fragmentary sentinels against nature. Missing floorboards, the house remains ungrounded, providing no support to those who enter it; lacking a threshold, the house’s potential mediation of inside and outside seems instead an unceremonious failure to mark the significance of dwelling space with a dignified border. The group of friends sadly concludes that the house will never be finished. For Christa, however, the planning sketches of the house seem to matter less as she struggles with getting the stones in place that will constitute her dwelling. The narrator relates: She knew well that the raw house, wind whistling through it, was farther from its completion than the dream house on the sketches in the beachside hotel on that happy evening that lay there white and beautiful on the paper. But she had also learned that the real material is more defiant than paper and that one has to drive things imperturbably forward as long as they are still in a process of becoming. We saw that she for some time now no longer insisted on her sketches, but rather on these raw stones. We stood around the cold fireplace and held council about the appropriate border; we debated styles and types of stone and doubted in silence, as one doubts particularly strongly shortly before the end, whether we would ever eat a dish that had been prepared in the kitchen of this house.73 As the heavy, igneous stone of Diego Rivera’s inviting “cathedral of satan” in Mexico City, as seen in Chapter 1, had seemed to Seghers to 72 Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T., 155. 73 Ibid.

160  Building Socialism represent a more authentic relationship between life, death, and collectivity, so too do the “raw stones” of Christa’s house evince a devlish solidity that evokes authenticity and permanence even as it undercuts the attempt to “instrumentalize” them for the formation of an authentic space. The search for self-realization through the control of built space seems to fail as material realities assert themselves against human intention. But the house, complete with windows to the lake, is finished seven months later. It represents one of four key events in Christa’s life which are concentrated in the novel’s final three chapters. The two most fundamental of these are the birth of her child and Christa’s death shortly thereafter as her leukemia results in panmyelophthisis, a disease in which hemopoietic bone marrow cells enter the bloodstream. The other event is her starting of research for a new novel entitled Around the Lake, for which she interviews farmers in the villages near her new house and carries out research in local church archives. These four acts—birth, death, building, and writing—are core forms of making (“poiesis”) that are central to experience as Wolf formulates it. The first two involve a strong degree of the involuntary, while the latter two are used to fulfill necessities and draw their impetus from the first two. In the novel, the completion of the house is immediately followed by the beginning of work on research into the context of the area in which the house is located, the birth of Christa’s child, and her death. Seen as part of an interrelated quadrad of birth, death, language, and building, the house is connected to the literary production of locality, specificity, and context, the entry of human life into the world, and the return of a human body to the earth through death (the cemetery where Christa is buried overlooks the house). It is this interrelatedness of spatial and temporal experience that Wolf is trying to reinject not just into a tired GDR discourse on socialism, but into the modern project itself. The house represents not just a utopia of authentic subjectivity, but a reckoning with the contradictions of everyday life in the modern world. It is made of both heavy, monumental stone and light ethereal glass. Yet, through the forms of its production and use and through its connection to fundamental aspects of the life cycle, that stone is stripped of crass monumentality and a retrograde longing for tradition; it becomes instead a weighty yet context-sensitive testament to the reconciliation of flexibility and permanence. In a dialectical way, the glass remains transparent and light, indeed a visual prelude to communion with nature, losing the 1920s association of glass with the empty stylisticality that Adorno sees in the Modernist use of the material. Wolf’s architectural metaphorics makes built space into a projection of a truly revolutionary time in which non-exploitative forms of monumentality can emerge. It is the

Time at Home 161 final printed photograph to the negative of Schafheutlin’s house—its tradition grounded in the overcoming of alienation and its modernity embodied by the ethereal lightness of a glass that is truly democratic. And it is on this final point that we may reassess the relationship between Wolf and Bloch that Andreas Huyssen traced in a classic article. Huyssen showed that Wolf’s utopian longing in the novel represents a carrying over of Bloch’s “hope for Heimat” into a historical context specific to her own authorial subjectivity and to GDR socialism.74 Examining the specifically architectural sections of Bloch’s Principle of Hope in which the philosopher addressed the relationship between “geographical” homes and spatial and architectural ones can both add to Huyssen’s argument and perhaps uncover a new dimension of Wolf’s text: According to Hegel’s true and not merely idealistic definition, architecture sees as its task to work inorganic nature into such a shape that it becomes allied to the mind as an artistically valid outside world. The mind, in other words: the human subject, which is itself still in search of that which can be called allied to it, this phenomenon always develops in various societies different angles, arches, domes, towers of an earth concentrated towards man. The architectural utopia is thus the beginning and the end of a geographical utopia itself, of all this searching for precious stones in the druse of the earth, of the dreams of an earthly paradise. Great architecture sought to stand as a whole like a constructed Arcadia and more; and if it brought something lamentable, tragic mysteries with it, as in the Gothic period, then this was only in order to contribute it to the difficult harmony. The wealth was enormous, drawn from a few basic elements, the alternative was enormous between a pillared hall in Karnak and Sainte Chapelle in Paris, between our image of homeland in stone on the one hand, in strut frames and an influx of light on the other.75 In Bloch’s study of the relationship between architecture and utopia, the attempt at a Hegelian fusion of mind and material world results in an architectural dualism between the clarity of glass and crystalline forms on the one hand and the grounded weightiness of stone on the other. The architectural chauvinism in Henselmann’s assertion that all great future-oriented visions must be spatial and architectural is confirmed here as Bloch locates buildings at the “beginning and end” 74 Huyssen, “Traces of Ernst Bloch,” 243. 75 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 745.

162  Building Socialism of all utopian geography. There are two approaches to that geography that architecture can follow: allow for the landscape’s penetration of human dwelling space through the transparency of glass as a physical articulation of the longing for a dissolution of subjectivity into nature, or represent the claim to home in a monumental arrangement of stone. Bloch goes on to explain that this duality will be transfigured in the hoped-for future as glass gives way to “real openness” and stones become coeval with the human “tree of life”: The crystal is the framework, indeed the horizon of repose, but the ornamentation of the human tree of life is the only real content of this encompassing repose and clarity. The better world, which the grand architectural style expresses and depicts in an anticipatory fashion, thus consists very unmythically, as the real task vivis ex lapidibus, of the stones of life.76 The clear glass of Christa’s house, analogous to Bloch’s crystals, becomes the necessary form of a space in which all human activity (“the tree of life”), in this case the birth of Christa’s child, Christa’s final novel, and her death, emerge as the content which the glass exists in order to “frame.” In a final move for Bloch, however, the “better world” which architecture “depicts” is one of the “stones of life”—a world in which a materialist version of the Hegelian unification of mind and material (stone and life) emerges. However, the latin phrase vivis ex lapidus, a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Bloch had cited as early as his Geist der Utopie (1918), sees these “stones of life” not as finished or absolute, but as part of a “task” that requires that one “live from the stones.” The house thus not only operates in terms of GDR modernity, but also registers the penetration of mythical time into the present; such penetration would become characteristic of Wolf’s work starting with her Kassandra (1983), the Aisakos episode of which reveals the author’s knowledge of Ovid.77 In a section of the creation myth in the first part of Ovid’s novel, Pyrrha and Deucalion, the only humans left after a great flood, pray to Themis for guidance so that “the damage to our race can be repaired” (A. S. Kline translation, lines I.379–80). The oracular advice they receive is to “throw” the “bones of their great mother behind [them]” (I.398). The two soon figure out that the bones the oracle is referring to are “stones in the body of the earth,” which is itself their mother. Deucalion and 76 Ibid. 77 Thorsten Wilhelmy, Legitimitätsstragegien der Mythos-Rezeption: Thomas Mann, Christa Wolf, John Barth, Christoph Ransmayr, John Banville (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004), 188.

Time at Home 163 Pyrrha dutifully throw the stones only to find that they “soften” and slowly grow into human bodies. The birth of Christa’s child, Christa’s final book, and her death shortly after performing research for it follow directly on the completion of her house, a house of stone framed by glass. These events represent a concentration of the key components of biological existence as intertwined with the inorganic cultural forms, language and architecture, used to house that existence. The closing chapters of the novel, then, can be read as an enaction of the fundamental task set forth by Ovid of converting stones into life. While the idealist notion of home certainly plays an important role in this section of the novel, Wolf is also interested the elemental aspects of existence and the interrelation of the human body as material with the material world around it. Like Müller, Wolf aims as much to “dig up the dead” as she does to imagine a dwelling for the living. Christa’s house is part of this process: the narrator uses it as an undeniable piece of material evidence that was inescapably connected to her friend’s death, the birth of her child, and her renewed intellectual productivity. The “subplot” of the house reveals that built space is as fundamental to existence as language and the human body itself. In Reimann and de Bruyn, the relationship of birth and death to the home interior during a time of rapid instutionalization of these aspects of human life reveals the built environment in a similarly rich way. In his Krankheit als Konflikt (1970), Alexander Mitscherlich claims that the medical establishment at mid-century was concertedly creating difficulties for the individual and collective “processing of experience” by insisting on clinics that spatially mirror the power structures of the medical profession: “the hierarchical authoritarian structure of the clinics and sanatoria protrudes into the present like a piece of pre-Enlightenment absolutism.”78 For Adorno, in the Minima Moralia, the hierarchical organization of clinics, including their “mass arraying of light, air, and hygiene” in a “twinkling transparency” has grave implications for home death and birth: to be sick, give birth, or die anywhere but a specialized space is seen by dominant forces as an “embarrassing waste of space.”79 Mumford is less subdued in his vitriol, ranting against “technocratic designers” and their spatial model for medicine: “Even more ingenuous minds, equally subservient to the Power Complex, have already conceived a hospital bed in which every function from the taking of temperature to the intravenous feeding 78 Alexander Mitscherlich, Krankheit als Konflikt Studien zur psychosomatischen Medizin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 39. The volume is in Reimann’s Nachlassbibliothek. 79 Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 4: Minima Moralia, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 65.

164  Building Socialism will be automatically performed within the limits of the bed. Solitary confinement thus becomes the last word in ‘tender and loving care’.”80 The effect of this spatial reduction is for Mumford that humans “return to the womb without the embryo’s prospect of natal delivery” and for Adorno that the regular, scrubbed skin of those officially deemed healthy takes on the dead perfection of “prepared corpses.”81 Modern clinical space penetrates home and body alike, making humans less human and spaces more reflective of authoritarian power structures. Adorno and Mumford were not writing mostly with the Eastern Bloc in mind. How were birth and death treated in the GDR as spatial problems? The empirical evidence relating to the institutionalization of birth and death there reveals that the process was in fact taking place much more rapidly than in West Germany. In 1962, free-practicing midwifery was banned as midwives were integrated into birth clinics attached to hospitals and medical practices. Homebirths still did occasionally happen, though most were accidental. Of those that were not, family tradition, rather than political resistance, was cited as the reason. When it came to dying at home, however, the situation was different. Into the 1970s, despite intensive institutionalization programs, two-thirds of the GDR’s citizens died at home rather than in a hospital. However, when surveyed at that time about where most deaths were taking place, most GDR citizens replied that the majority of deaths were taking place in hospitals; thus, a perception of institutionalized death existed, though empirical evidence did not confirm it.82 Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand in fact has a scene with an accidental home birth. At a point in the novel at which Franziska has already leveled some of her most stinging critiques of the new city’s spaces, a woman goes into labor in her apartment building and her neighbors gather around her in a solidarity in stark contrast to the facelessness of their hastily built dwellings (236–7). The emotions Franziska feels while watching the young woman in labor defy not only the coldness of the space as a domestic environment shaped by modern clinicality, but also the significatory potential of language itself. The laboring woman is “[u]nreachable for a human voice, for the foreign-language vocabulary pain, child, happiness, exclusively occupied with the labor of birthing and in a loneliness that is only comparable to that of 80 Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, 179. 81 Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 66. 82 See Monika Tschernko, “Entwicklung des Hebammenberufs in der DDR,” in Hebammenkunde: Lehrbuch für Schwangerschaft, Geburt, Wochenbett und Beruf, section 1.8, http://www.hebammen.uni-osnabrueck.de/AAnderssohn.pdf (accessed May 17, 2015); “Medizinische Ethik in der DDR: Erfahrungswert oder Altlast?,” 79.

Time at Home 165 dying.”83 The woman is beyond the reach of semantic language as her labor has rendered the formal aspects of her built environment secondary to its fundamental purpose as protection from the elements and housing for a community. Words have become alien to the physical language of her birthing body, just as the unintentional use of the home interior for childbearing defies the intentions of the buildings’ designers and builders. The environment of the dwelling itself, which Neutra, Gropius, and the editors at Kultur im Heim were so keen to point to the affective power of, melts away along with the strictures of language as the labor of use supplants the comparatively paltry fulminations of design. The “time” of the modern space is shifted to a past in which home birth was not legally prohibited. Reimann saves her sharpest irony for the end of the scene by revealing that an ambulance had in fact been called to take the laboring woman to the hospital. The birth happened in the apartment building because the ambulance driver could not tell one unornamented, faceless building from another and, as a result, lost his way in the city. The SED’s rigorous laws about midwifery are undermined by its equally rigorous approach to the relationship of dwellings to each other in Neustadt. The result is for Franziska a new sense of the meaning of her building: For a few days, Franziska sensed, when she entered the block in the evenings that she was coming home—as though in that night something had changed in her relationship to the house, perhaps even to the city, this labyrinth of concrete, anonymous streets and living-silos for a planned and statistically ascertainable quantity of dwellers with their planned in, little studied needs, the city that had meant nothing more than the photocopy of its construction plan.84 The use of the building, its existence in time for a group of users to which Franziska feels herself momentarily allied, contains a humane antidote to the exploitative, Mumfordian modernity that Reimann sees Neustadt’s architecture as embodying. But the qualifier, “for a few days,” already hints at the episodic quality of this textual temporalization of space: the accidental homebirth thus functions as a Klugean spatial subplot that emerges from the domestic architecture of the newly built town. As such, it forms part of the diverse set of critiques made in the novel that run independent of any narrative teleology. 83 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 234. 84 Ibid., 238.

166  Building Socialism In de Bruyn’s novel, Erp’s father’s desire to die at home is cause for similar reflection on rapidly shifting domestic environments and what it means to live in them. Toward the close of the novel as Erp considers his affair with Broder in a more critical light, the old man declares to his disbelieving bureaucrat son, “I want to die where I have lived.”85 The father represents here, in a realist gesture inherited from Fontane rather than modeled after Lukacs, a precisely located societal type (the old Prussian) who is attached to a specific neighborhood and house that are as much a part of him as his own body.86 While the old man would seem to have achieved an immediacy with his surroundings in which Bloch, with his focus on contentment, might find at least a partial cause for hope, Erp embodies, in a quite close and striking parallel, the Adornean technocrat’s desire to move death to specialized spaces: “[My father] is dying the old-fashioned way, as he lived, thought [Erp]. Who still does that to their loved ones? Birthing and dying belong in the hospital, antiseptic, out of the way, undisturbed and without creating disturbance.”87 For Erp, the specialization of spatial uses is shaped by an environmental view of the home and the institutions that supplant it, in which the library bureaucrat has taken on official assumptions about the relationship between death and the domestic sphere. The word “antiseptic,” when placed in the context of Erp’s ignorantly indignant emotional gesture, refers as much to specializing spaces of death in order to make them invisible as it does to actual hygienic concerns. Modernity, in the form of the hospital room, is for him a set of props or accoutrements that properly stage different life functions outside of the home. But the narrator intervenes in a characteristically invasive way to register the historical status of Erp’s father and his house as representive of an entire generation: This is told as if it is a special case, but it was hardly otherwise for others in his situation, for people who kept away from technological, civilizatory, and societal developments, and who allowed nothing more than the washing machine, electric iron, and radio into their parlor and in whose life automation, airplane travel, and new political conditions played no role and who dived beneath the storm surge of world history.88 85 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 208. 86 Kluge argues that Fontane “without ever using the word ‘dialectic’” had an understanding of how “the concrete biography of human beings” is structured “by social conditions” (11). The signaling of the attachment of people to interior spaces is de Bruyn’s literary technique for conveying this constructedness. 87 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 208. 88 Ibid., 204.

Time at Home 167 The father’s home is not presented here as a romantic antidote to Erp’s bureaucratic shortsightedness. Rather, beneath de Bruyn’s artificial characters lies a plain acknowledgement of diverse potential uses of home interiors in the GDR. The father’s house and his relationship to it thus unfurl a theoretically attuned spatial subplot that diversifies the texture of the novel. Indeed, de Bruyn’s combination of artifice and “exactness in the rendering of real experiences” harnesses the dialectic that Kluge, writing about Fontane, saw as characteristic of that author’s diverse realism.89 Realism, for Kluge, is a device, like a miscroscope or telescope, through which social conditions can be perceived anew. According to Kluge, the details of domestic space in Fontane are both reality and radical critique of reality: [Fontane] does not narrate, however, from sympathy with conditions as they are, that is to say dogmatically; rather, the details in the novels have a particular life: the flower beds, the sun dials in Effie Briest, a shrub, that is things to which human beings have created relationships. And in some measure, these things look critically at the things that happen by necessity in the novel and lead to death; and they protest against the strictures of this necessity … Fontane by no means stands on the side of a forced tragedy.90 The objects present (and not present) in Erp’s father’s house certainly work against mid-century modern notions of institutionality and the domestic interior. At least momentarily, Erp seems to learn something by looking at them, when he notes that “We live as though death didn’t exist, lie to ourselves to get beyond it. Because of cowardice? The more perfect our methods for killing become, the more tenaciously we repress the thought of it.”91 If the close of the novel left any faith that Erp had learned anything at all, the scene with the father could be seen as having a Dickensian embedding in the narrative teleology. It is 89 Lutz Kube has documented and analysed de Bruyn’s fascination with Fontane, which began in 1946 when de Bruyn worked in a village on the Havel and studied Fontane in his spare time. Kube has shown that Fontane’s Wanderungen helped de Bruyn write about regional identity in opposition to state propagated notions about it. Key to this was that de Bruyn was less interested in political structures and ideologies than he was, according to Kube, in “Alltags-und Kulturgeschichte.” Lutz Kube, “Mein Brandenburg: Zur Konstruktion regionaler Identität in essayistischen Arbeiten Günter de Bruyns,” in Günter de Bruyn in Perspective, ed. Dennis Tate (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 126. 90 Kluge, “Das Politische als Intensität alltäglicher Gefühle,” 11. 91 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 204.

168  Building Socialism rather the reader who is meant to learn from the theoretical critique that these reflections ultimately lead to. That critique stands as an isolated episode in a novel that contains a diverse patchwork of critiques of, to use Henselmann’s terminology, “the spatial organization of everyday life” in the GDR.

Nineteenth-Century Interiors and the “Vast Landscape of History”

Reimann and de Bruyn also reassess the meanings of several different characteristic interior spaces designed before the existence of the GDR including the nineteenth-century bourgeois villa and the tenement. There was a robust but simplistic discussion of nineteenth-century interiors in the GDR. Much-cited, much-studied texts such as Herbert Riecke’s Mietskasernen im Kapitalismus, Wohnpaläste im Sozialismus (1954) expressed many socialists’ visceral antipathy toward the poor living conditions in Berlin’s tenements and their insultingly historicist façade ornaments.92 Henselmann shared in this socialist antipathy, though his writings often evinced the more level-headed High Modernist disapproval of nineteenth-century living arrangements as an outdated, illogical social milieu that humane planning regimes needed to correct.93 Reimann, de Bruyn, and others, all of whom were well aware, as evident in their novels, of the standard discourse on nineteenth-century space in the East, wrote not so much in opposition to it as in willful isolation from it. They saw bourgeois interiors and tenements through theoretical lenses both socialist (Bloch, Seghers) and non-socialist (Zola, Fontane). They used the temporal dimensions of literature, mostly the kinds of non-narrative moments of reflection already seen, to reveal the way the meanings of objects shift with the movements of history and changing patterns of use. Reflection on historical objecthood was by no means alien to the Modernist architects whom Reimann read and whose work shaped the GDR debates that de Bruyn was unlikely to have been ignorant of. These writers would agree, for example, with Neutra’s theory of inherited interior objects: “An old—genuine!—piece of furniture in a modern house can serve as a window that opens a view from one 92 See Castillo, “East as True West.” 93 While at Harvard, Gropius polemicized against the “walk-up” apartment buildings of New York (The Scope of Total Architecture, 103–15). Henselmann, in his “Kolloquium über die Umgestaltung von Altbauwohngebieten” (1966), cautions the GDR planning establishment against tearing down Mietskasernen because of the emotional attachments those who live in them have formed to their spaces. In Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 121–4.

Time at Home 169 epoch to another, a momentary peek out of our narrowly limited, small, present moment in life into the vast landscape of history.”94 In a literary and object world in which Helmut Baierl, as seen in Chapter 3, was intervening to limit historiographies of space, these authors used non-narrative excursus to apply, albeit gently, Benjamin’s “emergency break” of history as a means for demolishing the unproductive strictures of the present.95 Objects remembered from childhood, for writers of Reimann’s generation as for Benjamin in his Berliner Kindheit, Gropius and Neutra in their architectural writings, and Bloch in Erbschaft dieser Zeit, function as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the movements of history and the formation of self. For Gropius, the accoutrements of the childhood home are a measure of historical change: “When I was a boy, my family lived in a city apartment with open gas jets, individual coal-heated stoves in each room, including the bathroom, where warm water was heated for the bath each Saturday: that took two hours.”96 Gropius views this childhood world as having been supplanted by a faster-paced modernity in which time and space converge. For Reimann’s Franziska, the refusal of her parents to recognize this convergence has left their house in a fundamentally different temporality from the post-war world around it. She complains about her parents’ house, a “crystal and silver-laden mausoleum” in which Zola and Hemingway are regarded as dangerously modern and in which her parents “sit[ting] in [their] magic mountain … are still playing nineteenth century.”97 Decorative choices have enshrined the stasis of nineteenth-century time as objects become containers of an outdated understanding of cultural history. Reimann’s diary, though, reveals a more ambivalent view of the bourgeois interior. She looked at the spaces of her own childhood with the fascination and sense of significance that can be found in Neutra, Benjamin, and Bloch. Accordingly, Reimann viewed her move to old town New Brandenburg in 1969 as something of a homecoming. This centered mostly on the return to a traditional urban area with narrow alleys and characteristic houses, but was reflected too in her feelings about her apartment, which took on for her the pleasingly gothic quality of a British detective novel. In a long letter to Christa Wolf in January of 1969 she ruminated on this association:

94 Neutra, Gestaltete Umwelt, 77. 95 The reference is to the “Parapilomena” of Benjamin’s much-quoted Theses on the Concept of History. 96 Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture, 14. 97 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 125.

170  Building Socialism Now I already feel quite at home, even in my cute little apartment that was a bit uncanny to me at first (after ten years in an apartment house, fourth floor, twelve families off of each stairwell); the ground floor of a shabby little villa, actually only a very large room … the walls are cracking, the floorboards groan, doors swing open unexpectedly … an Agatha Christie apartment … but it’s also romantic, I have a mini-terrace, a garden beneath the window, a cherry tree so near that I can pick cherries from my desk, grapevines encircling the bay window.98 The bourgeois villa, now chopped into apartments and in a state of decay, has come to embody the cozy emotional pleasures of reading a mystery novel, as the uncanniness of the nineteenth-century space is converted into an emancipatory form of play and the twentieth-century rationalism of new towns is shown to be uncanny. In the novel, the view of such spaces becomes increasingly contradictory. Franziska prizes the pride of ownership as an authentic antidote to the anonymity of contemporary dwellings, but scoffs at the trappings of bourgeois life and detests the exploitative structures of power under which the beautiful objects of the past were produced. For Reimann, experience of expropriation of her parents’ crystal, silver, and jewelry in 1945 remained a key moment in her life as a 1971 letter to Christa Wolf attests. She reports on recent … pleasurably wistful chatting about jewelry … we wanted to give mother a ring, a magical little thing that I would have liked to keep for myself … our family’s jewelry was gone in ’45, I told the story in my book because it belongs to the curious posture of a bourgeois world: as a child, I just marveled at the brilliant beauties, sparkling fairy-tale stuff—later, as an adult, [I marveled] at the position of these bourgeois ownership types to the War.99 In a similarly contradictory way, Benjamin and Neutra register with a mixture of awe, horror, and embarrassment their own lasting attachments to the 1870s interiors in which they grew up. Reimann’s work represents an echo of this Modernist grappling with inherited space 98 Brigitte Reimann, Alles schmeckt nach Abschied: Tagebücher, 1964–1970 (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch, 2000), 15–16. 99 Brigitte Reimann and Christa Wolf, Sei gegrüßt und lebe: Eine Freundschaft in Briefen, 1964–1973 (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch, 1999), 120. In the novel, the expropriation scene reaches its climax not with wearable jewelry, but with the family silverware and porcelain, i.e. the kinds of objects that Benjamin had such reverence for as a child.

Time at Home 171 as representing the specter of childhood. Benjamin in Berliner Kindheit describes the “dull mystery” of the family dining room, encapsulated most fully in the enormous Wilhelmine china cabinet with its oppressive “sovereign right … to its space in the room.”100 On days when company was to arrive, Its massif opened already in the morning to let me into its chambers, which were upholstered with velvet as with green moss, to see the silver treasure of the house … and when I saw these long, tight rows of demitasse spoons or knife rests, fruit knives or oyster spoons, my pleasure at this plenitude warred with the fear that the guests we were expecting might look as similar to one another as our pieces of silverware.101 Benjamin reminds us here that the nineteenth, rather than twentieth century, saw the advent of anonymity and alienation as faceless counterparts of a world in which the façade of objects reigns supreme over the human, embodying, and manufacturing desire. Neutra, in a remarkable parallel to Benjamin and likewise making use of the tools and terminology of psychoanalysis to make his case about the strong emotional effects of interior space, also remembers the family china cabinet as an object of imposition and fascination: Back then I experienced first the sensation of towering height when I gazed up at the carved crenelations of our sideboard in Wilhelmine style. It was a deeper and more powerful impression than that which the giant columns that supported the vaults of Milan cathedral or the roof of the temple at Luxor would later make … at night there were dark, inaccessible spaces, laden with secrets, for example that terrible place behind the olive green, upholstered sofa that stood diagonally in the corner of the room. When I think about it, goose bumps still run up and down my back.102 Reimann shares to some degree in Neutra’s shame at his childhood attachment, however uncanny, to ornamented objects in the family home. Yet as with Benjamin, part of her is able to reduce the bourgeois, as embodied by her parents, to a faceless type increasingly becoming historical in an era of intensive modernization. But her desire for 100 Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um 1900, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 76. 101 Ibid., 76–7. 102 Neutra, Gestaltete Umwelt, 27–8.

172  Building Socialism ornamentation, for the “superstition” Franziska sees missing in Schafheutlin’s house, balances out her very real support for the expropriative efforts of the SBZ/SED leadership. A more unambiguously negative view of nineteenth-century interiors is present in the novel, though. Franziska’s catastrophic marriage, before her move to Neustadt, to the abusive Wolfgang Exss is made yet worse by the once-glitzy, now-dank building they live in: … the house, solitary, with smoke-blackened walls at the edge of a park in what had once been a densely settled neighborhood … the neglected stairwell, walls of fake marble, covered by cracks as though by a spider web, the greasy, slippery wooden stairs that seemed to her like a keyboard, each step with its particular attack of sound, its unmistakable step-rhythm … steps that betray—I can already tell his mood by the time he gets to the second floor, and whether he’s drunk or sober or just tipsy, with stolen flowers, beer breath, and wet kisses.103 Several details here are borrowed from the “fine house” of Emil Zola’s Pot-Luck, which Reimann read in an East German edition under the title Feines Haus. Though the apartment building in Zola’s novel “was hardly discolored,” the neighboring buildings on its block in a densely settled section of Paris had “dirty stucco facades.”104 The opening of Zola’s novel is even more deeply ekphrastic than Reimann’s highly visual prose as every detail of the interior space of the building is rendered in a careful, probing descriptive language. Thus, “there was a gaudy splendor about the hall and staircase … The imitation marble paneling, white with pink edges went right up the staircase at regular intervals.”105 Once the main character, Octave, a young architect, like Franziska, enters his own quarters of “imitation wood” he notices “two great cracks running through the paneling on the ceiling” for which the landlord apologizes: “You see, these kinds of houses are built for effect. The walls though aren’t very solid. The house was only built twelve years ago and the walls are already cracking.”106 The building Wolfgang and Franziska live in reads as a fully decayed version of the nineteenth-century apartment building from Zola. The passage on its own is a powerful emotional evocation of the all-too-real nightmare of domestic abuse as experienced in connection to an interior space that reflects Franziska’s feelings even as it reveals 103 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 87. 104 Emil Zola, Pot-Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 105 Ibid., 5. 106 Ibid., 8.

Time at Home 173 the social stagnation of life in a state nominally committed to women’s rights; the interior is that of an Agatha Christa apartment in which the crime is real rather than imagined. The connection to Zola’s novel adds a historical dimension to this picture. Pot Luck is, at its core, a story of the sexual neurosis and domestic discontent that lies behind the already decaying facades of second empire Paris’s faux-lux apartment buildings. The unrevolutionized, petit-bourgeois milieu with its attendant social problems and emotional privations is rendered here as an enduring, if not intractable, burden inherited from capitalism. Zola had represented the instant decay of the cheaply built interiors of nineteenth-century speculative housing; in Reimann, the decay of interior space and psyche remain the same as in her French model, but are curiously amplified by their stagnation as they are increasingly perceived as festering relics in a fast-changing world. The connection to spatial and literary pasts thus forms a highly analytical subplot in the novel that emerges from the decayed nineteenth-century apartment building and the traumatic experiences that take place within it. Reimann’s novel likewise treats newly created spaces, which, like Zola’s tenements, also visibly decayed shortly after construction, in terms of that key nineteenth-century building type.107 Neustadt’s concrete mass of post-war housing starts for Franziska to take on a resemblance to pre-war tenements. This is at times something positive. Dining with Schafheutlin in her apartment in one of Neustadt’s prefab buildings, she finds a melancholy relief during a pause in the conversation: … the building came to her rescue, this honeycomb-dwelling with its dozens of cells packed above and next to one another and the occupants of the cells who broadcast their signals, signs of life, voices, music, sounds that Franziska had gotten used to … a shouting radio at an open window, a riotous clarinet, let’s twist, on her floor the girls from the excavation team were cutting a rug, shaking their bellies and their sturdy hips.”108 That the GDR’s first experiments in prefab building in the late 1950s have led not to the supplanting of the tenement but rather its replication 107 Stewart Brand describes this drawback of some Modernist buildings in How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built (New York: Penguin, 1994). 108 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 225–6. Characteristic of the Mietskaserne in Zola, Döblin, and in Georg Pijet’s chilling 1930 radio play, Mietskaserne, is the noise of these late capitalist spaces. See Georg Pijet, “Mietskaserne,” in Frühe Sozialistische Hörspiele (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982). The first post-war publication of Pijet’s radio play was in a series published by the GDR’s Henschelverlag. See Hörspiele, 4 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1964).

174  Building Socialism was an irony of which Reimann was painfully conscious. In her first letter to Wolf from Neubrandenburg, Reimann explained that she could no longer stand her “un-home” of Hoyerswerda: “burned forests, silos for living, the view to the socialist tenement court (houses arranged in squares, lawns you weren’t allowed to walk on, pathetic trees), to the windows, behind each of which light flickered on and then off at the same time every day—in the morning at five, before the first shift, and in the evening at ten when [television] programming stops for the night.”109 Reimann arrives here at an analysis of the GDR’s Modernist architecture that is similar to Adorno’s and Bloch’s critiques of architectural Modernism in the 1930s: that it represents a continuation of the privation and alienation of the proletariat under the functionalist regime of nineteenth-century modernity but with a new, more reduced façade.110 The tenement lives on but with a different architectural face. In de Bruyn’s novel, as in Reimann’s, the tenement is both a social reality to be analysed and a cultural trope to be pointed to in its symbolic dimensions.111 An example of this comes at the start of the romance between the librarian and the intern. On his first visit to Broder’s apartment, Erp sees her building through the lens of canonical literary Modernists who represented such structures in their work and projects as an imagined future looking back on tenements as historical 109 Reimann and Wolf, Sei gegrüßt und lebe, 13–14. 110 Refashioning interior space could also be resistive for Reimann and others. Philip Boudon’s study of redecorations and adaptations of Le Corbusier’s settlement at Pessac was a ground-breaking analysis of the political value of the reuse of programmed space. See his Lived in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). In a letter to Wolf, Reimann complained about the restrictions on the adaptation and use of green spaces at Hoyerswera. See Sei gegrüßt und lebe, 13. 111 Urang’s claim that Erp’s Hinterhaus affair represents only a pseudo-revolution may certainly be true of its party-political implications in the specifically GDR context. However, the extended digressions to describe the history of the building, which Urang notes but does not analyse, played a revolutionary role in terms of the upward revaluation of tenement living in the context of GDR urbanism. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. It is also quite possible that Wolf Biermann was the particular revolutionary romantic that de Bruyn had in mind, given his Berlin poems from the early 1960s and his attempts to aid the rise of an authentic working-class culture in Berlin’s Altbau neighborhoods. Also, from a housing-justice perspective, there was the need for genuine revolution in these areas of the city—according to a 1966 essay by Henselmann, most GDR citizens lived in Altbauwohnungen that lacked private baths while 58 percent of GDR industry remained ensconced in residential areas. He suggested the renovation of these buildings as a primary way to ensure housing equity in the GDR. While Karl Erp certainly was not about to lead the charge on this front, intelligentsia readers of de Bruyn’s novel without doubt gained a new sense of conditions in neglected dwellings.

Time at Home 175 relics: “In a few years, tourists will come see the last of these buildings just as we today go to see the half-timbered houses of Quedlinburg, and travel guides will cite Döblin or even Arno Holz: its roof thrust up almost to the stars, factory sounds pounded in the courtyard, it was a real Mietskaserne.”112 De Bruyn ironically positions Erp here as a cultural voyeur within the unfamiliar halls of the tenement building. That Erp sees what is a part of the present as something already historical shows his inability to grasp how processes of modernization inscribe themselves into everyday life in disjointed, uneven, and undesirable ways. Like party bureaucrats in suburban Pankow, he is keen to view the socialist revolution, in this particular case in the replacement of old buildings through new ones, as a completed project. De Bruyn shows how Erp’s subjectivity has been rewritten by official pronouncements about the new architecture of the Scientific-Technological Revolution as an inherently socialist architecture—and of the tenements as remnants of a capitalism best represented by Naturalists and Expressionists.113 That de Bruyn’s narrator can perch above this critically opens space for the reader to imagine different sets of meanings for architectural modernization and its effects on dwelling. The narrator’s faux-legalistic assessment of the tenement thus gains political value: Because up there [on the top floor], the new order had not yet won; up there, chaos ruled along with the lawlessness of the, at least officially, long-since dealt-with post-War moment; up there, the efficacy of all hygiene, fire, and air protection laws ceased; up there, the order-giving advances of the Communal Living Administration choked in dirt and cobwebs.114 We have a gap here in the SED’s dragnet of modernization which is at once a loophole in its monopolistic semantic regime—a potential site of critique, historical slippage, and alternative practices of everyday life—which de Bruyn accounts for in the novel by experimenting with different linguistic registers. The past, accordingly, appears both alive and dead on the uncanny top floor of the building, which de Bruyn renders in a dry descriptive language whose irony peeks through in particular word choices: 112 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 47 113 Peter Müller uses the example of the replanning of central Berlin between Bebelsplatz and Alexanderplatz as an example of the way GDR architectural rhetoric loaded architectural forms with specific political values. See his Symbolsuche: Die Ostberliner Zentrumsplanung zwischen Repräsentation und Agitation (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2005). 114 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 49.

176  Building Socialism Up there (exactly above Miss Broder’s room), Wolff secretly bred his pigeons, and the occupants of the building horded their coal behind wood, wire, or paper screens; up there, bedframes and sewing machines were rusting and in the pianos and sideboards of dead renters, well-fed woodworms housed themselves … lengths of TV antenna cord were wound like a garland around the roof beams.115 Pianos and buffets, crucial elements of nineteenth-century domestic life, both of which play an important role in Neutra’s memories of his parents house, rot away in the dusty attic and seem an oddly appropriate complement to the television antennas that signify the arrival of the masses’ new opiate at mid-century. Pigeon raising, long a traditional practice of European apartment dwellers, was not illegal in the East, though it was certainly heavily regulated.116 Such practices, and the spaces they were related to, are not gone in the GDR, but they are rendered in the novel as inheritances of a recent past still active in the present. Thus, it is crucial that de Bruyn describes the sewing machines as “rusting” rather than “rusted,” as the process of their obsolescence is still underway. His novel reveals the processes of time as they inscribe themselves on the objects with which we surround ourselves, even unintentially as with these objects in the attic; he converts ekphrastic descriptions of interior space into dynamically temporal digressions that interrupt the narrative of the text and are adequate to the diversity of GDR space in a time of social and physical change. While de Bruyn’s interior spaces do have broader resonance with long-standing critiques of the ordering of space by regimes of power, these passages do not evince the kind of totalizing urgency found in the mid-century theoretical literature such as Mumford or Adorno. Instead, the manipulation of realist narrative’s ability to flexibly capture the diversity of space as it intersects with time places de Bruyn’s fascination with objects and places that are left behind in a tradition with Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, whose jaunty refusal to Taylorize his labor in Modern Times becomes a vehicle for politically active satire. Another connection would be to the tragicomedies of the Weimar petit-bourgeois such as Der letzte Mann and even more its pseudo-sequel, Die letzte Droschke von 115 Ibid. 116 See the Rechtlinien Taubenzucht (Mylau: VEB Buch-und Werkdruckerei, 1965). This volume was edited by the Verband der Kleingärtner der DDR. It is thought that SED discomfort with pigeon keeping centered on the difficulty of monitoring pigeon post. See also Ringo Wagner, Der vergessene Sportverband der DDR: Die Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik in sporthistorischer Perspektive (Aachen: Meyer und Meyer, 2006), 99.

Time at Home 177 Berlin, who is unable and unwilling to adjust to new conditions and remains attached to old objects in his environment. As in Ernst Bloch’s ruminations on un-simultaneities, the material world in de Bruyn is penetrated by different registers of time. For Bloch, “Not everyone is here in the same now. They are only here on the outside inasmuch as they can be seen today.”117 There is certainly the suspension in de Bruyn between the bourgoeis living room of the prosperous bureaucrat and the revolutionary romantic lawlessness of the tenement interior. But a more precarious and productive balance in the novel is that between the “now-ness” of the tenement and the different natures of its “pastness,” as potential site of revolution and as a literary trope. As Neutra saw old objects as windows to the past and as Bloch’s un-simultaneities revealed threatening layers of pastness, so too does de Bruyn see different pasts as necessarily inscribed on present spaces and assert literature’s role in the revealing of those pasts. Understanding and representing Fräulein Broder’s apartment building is thus about injecting time into space. As the narrator notes of her building the first time it is mentioned in the novel, “Street and house number say little if you do not strike out on a temporal journey, a journey back in time” (35). The descriptive and reflective digressions that result from this approach coexist with but run parallel to the narrative trajectory of a novel of diversity about the maturing GDR and industrial modernity more broadly.

Epilogue: Gerhard Wolf

This expansion constitutes for Gerhard Wolf not just an impetus for making fictional prose more diverse; rather, the thought-images of his Beschreibung eines Zimmers are structured around the connection of different objects in Johannes Bobrowski’s office to the writer’s prose itself. The furniture, books, and walls of the office are so able to transport Wolf in time that being around Bobrowski’s things leads him to adopt Bobrowski’s contemplative, moving self-irony: “it is diffcult, when describing his things, not to fall into his diction. His gesture— which remains in the room, a little superior, a little ironic toward himself, serious or suddenly ebulliently funny, weighty and once again effortless. Equipped with all that is lively about his persona” (6–7).118 The nature of Bobrowski’s things is for Wolf inextricably bound up with a prose style which in turn contains the personality of the author himself. Beschreibung eines Zimmers, read and appreciated by Reimann just two years before her death, explores the writer’s home office object 117 Ernst Bloch, Werkausgabe 4: Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 104. 118 Gerhard Wolf, Beschreibung eines Zimmers (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1971).

178  Building Socialism by object, stretching each one’s set of meanings and associations to provide a diverse picture of subjectivity and space as in the sequenced thought-images of Benjamin, most notably in his Berliner Kindheit um 1900. The opening of Wolf’s Beschreibung eines Zimmers expresses programmatically the attitude toward interior space that Neutra, Gropius, and Henselmann were keen to introduce into the realm of architecture and that Christa Wolf, Mornger, de Bruyn, and Reimann were working toward in their own, less overtly programmatic texts: A room—four walls with doors and windows, with ceiling and floor. Three-dimensional space: length, width, height. But you come in through the door and the windows draw you outside. Constant coming and going, lingering, departing—the fourth dimension, time. Those who dwell in the room are encased in it; it passes irrevocably with them and begins again anew.119 If Neutra had seen objects as windows onto the vast landscape of history, Wolf is more self-reflective about language as a mediator in the process of gaining access to the past through things still present. It is precisely the non-death of objects in the built environment which Wolf sees here as essential to interior space’s dialecticality; objects remain, like text on the pages of a book, to attest to what is lost, acutely pointing to an absence even as they make the past present. After a highly detailed description of the objects in the room and their arrangement, Wolf closes his first chapter programmatically: “The only human expansion of this epoch: that accomplished through poetry, the old-fashioned word. And all this from here, from this room—a still place like naked green—Berlin-Friedrichshagen, Ahorn-allee 26.”120 Interior space, in a dialectical move, becomes simultaneously less significant, an addressbound surface which pales in comparison to the historical dimension of Bobrowski’s prose and Wolf’s literary memory-work, and more significant: a conduit, like language, for the most immediate possible, yet always incomplete, reckoning with the human agency that makes history as it shapes space. It is thus that Wolf, in a more structurally complete way than the novels of diversity considered in this chapter, turns the associative dimensions of the different rooms of Bobrowski’s house into a non-narrative sequence of thought-images that stage the encounter between the materiality of space and its meaning in absent temporalities in discrete, theoretical reflections.

119 Ibid., 5. 120 Ibid., 9.

Five Literary Responses to East German Urbanism

East German cities changed dramatically in the 1960s. Work continued on Brigitte Reimann’s “second socialist city” of Hoyerswerda as the town’s commercial center was filled out. Nearby, construction continued apace on the world’s largest lignite processing facility, the Schwarze Pumpe complex, which had begun rising from its greenfield site in the late 1950s. By 1964, construction had begun on the residential and commercial districts of the new town at Halle which would become the focus of architectural propaganda for the rest of the decade. In the capital city, block after block of nineteenth-century urban fabric fell to the wrecking ball as Berlin became, per the title of Wolf Jobst Siedler’s 1964 photo essay which Kunert read, “the murdered city.” While public and commercial districts in Berlin and at Halle were arranged according to more fluid geometries than the straight lines at Hoyerswerda, residential areas still tended to consist of phalanxes of mid-rise apartment buildings. The result was a proliferation of urban spaces that lacked the orienting visual force of Stalinist and Haussmannian urbanism, but shared their axiality.1 Top architects such as Henselmann and Paulick responded to these larger architectural trends (focus on heavy industry, mass demolition, and banal geometries) critically in their texts and, to a lesser extent, in their built work. Henselmann’s Haus des Lehrers complex (1964) and his refashioning of the university area in Leipzig (1968–70) and Paulick’s subtle commercial center for the new town at Halle created well-defined and symbolic public spaces that were a human-scaled counterweight to vast industrial zones and stultifying residential districts.2 For these 1

For a basic account of the development of Eisenhüttenstadt (built as Stalinstadt) and Hoyerswerda, see Joachim Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Reimer, 2000). 2 Peter Müller has read the remaking of Berlin’s city center in the early 1960s as a primarily symbolic effort, rather than one directed toward the facilitation

180  Building Socialism architects, the psychological experience of movement through space was crucially important; their designs imagined users walking around corners to unexpected vistas, across plazas with irregular shapes, and along pedestrian streets with a variety of uses. To experience a well-made city was to encounter a montage of different impressions and scales. Writers also responded critically to the GDR’s main architectural trends in the 1960s. Like Henselmann, they lamented the pace and extent of demolition in Berlin, mourned the loss of pre-war urban vitality, decried the banality of prefabricated neighborhoods, and marked the frightening quality of new industrial districts. In pursuing their critiques, writers arrived at three literary models. The first is represented by two well-known novels of the early 1960s: Karl-Heinz Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers (Description of a Summer, 1961) and Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, 1963). In striking descriptive passages, these works registered the inhuman rawness of the new industrial cities they dealt with (Schwarze Pumpe and its attendant workers’ settlements, and the chemical facility at Leuna). However, the intense, almost Expressionist pathos of these descriptions was blunted by stiff characterizations, formulaic plot devices, and a subdued narrative tone. For Neutsch and Jakobs, stories about the use of space promoted accommodation of industrial modernity’s excesses rather than resistance to it.3 In their containment of urban pathology, these novels rehearsed the New Objectivity’s defanging of Expressionist film, as Siegried Kracauer traced it in his standard work, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (1947). The second model is found in Christa Wolf’s short story “Unter den Linden” (1968). Wolf uses disorienting plot devices, such as framing and flashbacks, and unexpected reflective digressions to render a walk of patterns of everyday living. Peter Müller, Symbolsuche: Die Ostberliner Zentrumsplanung zwischen Repräsentation und Agitation (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2005), 7–12. 3 My reading of these two writers is quite critical, but I wish to stress that that critique is limited. I confine myself to the contrast between the emotional promise of descriptions and shortcomings in metaphor and plot. Seen from angles other than architectural ones, the works represent daring interventions. The threat of worker unrest in Neutsch and the bureaucratic failures in Jakobs made the novels genuinely controversial in East Germany. However, as reckonings with architecture and the city, they were incomplete. It is perhaps for this reason that Henselmann detested Neutsch’s novel. He encouraged Reimann in 1964 to distance herself from Neutsch’s work which, according to the architect, neatly fit party doctrines and was imbued with a banal spirit summed up in the phrase “Functionaries are people ‘too’ and make mistakes ‘too’.” Brigitte Reimann and Christa Wolf, Sei gegrüßt und lebe: Eine Freundschaft in Briefen, 1964–1973 (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch, 1999), 41.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 181 on the straight street of the story’s title an irregular and meandering journey through space and time. Wolf’s literary geometries of surprise and obfuscation come full circle as the narrator, at the close of the story, has a chance encounter with herself on an Unter den Linden sidewalk. While the physical street is an unbending line, the street as subject to human memory and use is an arabesque or a Freudian “picture puzzle” that evades the simplifying gaze of tourists. Freud, drawing on a favorite Romantic genre, likened dreams to Vexierbilder, picture puzzles going back to the Middle Ages that contain optical illusions for the viewer to sort out.4 Wolf’s story takes the seemingly straightforward avenue and similarly distorts it into a circle of ambiguous selfdiscovery. The result is a work that is highly critical of Enlightenment urbanism and its twentieth-century legacy and that finds redemptive potential for the city in its deconstruction through literature. The third model picks up to some extent on that developed in Chapter 4. Irmtraud Morgner, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, and Brigitte Reimann represented new residential neighborhoods and the encounter with the disappearing nineteenth-century city in increasingly fragmentary ways in their works. While the logic of Kluge’s novel of diversity and the turn to the social sciences are part of the explanation for this fragmentation, the city understood as a montage of experiences was an equally important factor. As seen in Chapter 1, Benjamin had already tried to point out the revolutionary potential of juxtapositions in the urban fabric. East German urban theory also came to the notion that diversity of visual experience was a key to creating vibrant socialist cities. For writers as for architects, buildings in their urban contexts were fodder for reflecting, independent of plot, on the status of the present as a historical moment and the revolutionary possibility of the use of architecture. The physical differences that resulted from the urban changes of the time, such as demolition and urban renewal, created equivalent ruptures in the experience of the city as rendered in literature. These ruptures, registered in theoretically, sociologically, and psychologically attuned ways, in turn formed an integral component of the fragmentation that characterized the texts in question. For the East German writers under this third model, as for Henselmann, architectural context was paramount. In his 1967 speech to the Street Building Technicians, acquired in typescript by Heiner 4 In my brief discussion of Freud here, I rely on Sigrid Weigel’s discussion of Benjamin’s use of Freud’s terminology. Weigel shows how Benjamin viewed obsolete objects as Vexierbilder that contain clues to the structure of modernity. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10, 95.

182  Building Socialism Müller, the architect had already developed a contextual view of urban architecture as a montage: … the individual works of architecture, particularly the social buildings, [serve] peoples’ intellectual communication. For that reason, the aesthetic mastery of individual facades, though certainly in play, is not so much the measure for architectonic experience of our environment, as the arrangement of residential buildings to one another and their connection to the other structures.5 The architect is responsible here not just for individual buildings, but also for coordinating space in line with lived patterns of existence; the position of different kinds of uses (industrial, residential, commercial) in relation to one another is given importance equal to the visual quality of individual buildings. Urban theorists in the GDR, such as Henselmann and Hans Schmidt, and in the U.S.A., such as Kevin Lynch and Edmund Bacon, used this contextualism to critique Modernist planning regimes in light of the spatial experience of the user.6 That user, in turn, became the lens through which writers registered gaps and disjunctures in the cities they represented in their work. Henselmann, Kunert, de Bruyn, and Reimann all harnessed the use-focused, contextual approach to the city to lament the stark regularity of new residential neighborhoods. In his “Typen und Eintönigkeit” (Types and Monotony, 1967), the architect approached an almost literary level of pathos and detail in exacting this critique: The monotony of the grassy areas, walking on which is forbidden, the standardized transformer houses that are found in LüttenKlein just as in the Hans-Loch District and in front of the central restaurant at the Friedrichstraße station, the same wire fencing on kindergarten playgrounds, which give the nice aunties with their children cause to flee to the nearest garden colony, give the “typical” residential district the unpleasant aftertaste of a standardized, that is to say an administrated and decreed life.7

5

The typescript is available in the Heiner-Müller-Archiv, File 5925, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 6 Emily Pugh has traced similarities between Henselmann’s and Lynch’s thought. Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 20–6. 7 Hermann Henselmann, “Typen und Eintönigkeit,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 152.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 183 This attention to urban detail in its psychological ramifications is the same kind of thinking that drives Kunert, de Bruyn, and Reimann as they analyse the textures of urban life. Their close reflections on this score acted as a destabilizing force that made their prose works as fragmented as the urban environments they treated. Henselmann was not the only GDR urban theorist in the 1960s whose work helps to frame the prose of Morgner, Kunert, de Bruyn, and Reimann. In Gestaltung und Umgestaltung der Stadt (Design and Redesign of the City, 1969), a team of architects led by Hans Schmidt, a Bauhaus-trained Modernist who worked in Switzerland and East Germany, bemoans the sacrificing of architecture’s experiential dimension to economic dictates and advocates for a return to a focus on human need.8 Schmidt emphasizes a harmonic coexistence of diversity and systematicity that resembles Brecht’s prescriptions, seen in Chapter 1, for a communist picturesque: “A city comprises a multiplicity of optical, plastic, and spatial perceptions, that are effected in part simultaneously, but mostly serially and that should assemble themselves into a whole, ordered in a particular way, according to the demands of composition.”9 In a later chapter, this “multiplicity” 8 Florian Urban characterizes Hans Schmidt as an “advanced functionalist” architect who recognized criticisms of poorly executed Modernist architecture but sought to retain the Modernist project of finding forms adequate to the objects’ purposes. Florian Urban, Neo-Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 148. Written together with Rolf Linke and Gerd Wessel and appearing in the VEB Verlag für Bauwesen’s “Kleine Reihe Architektur” in 1969, Gestaltung und Umgestaltung insisted that archicture’s value lay in its relationship to users, “as a connection between the aesthetically feeling person and the architectonic environment.” According to Schmidt and his co-authors, designers must turn to “the psychology of perception … semiotics, or digital aesthetics” in order to ensure that architecture can attain this relational value. Hans Schmidt, Rolf Linke, and Gerd Wessel, Gestaltung und Umgestaltung der Stadt (Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 1969), 10. The bibliography of the volume indicates that Schmidt’s thinking was highly international and interdisciplinary. It contains works by second-generation gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger, whose Gesetze des Sehens (Laws of Seeing) was first published in 1936, six years before he became a member of the NSDAP; by American urban theorist Kevin Lynch, who conducted sociological studies of urban use patterns in the 1950s and used his findings to make conclusions about shared cognition patterns in the experience of urban space; and by Virtuvius and Alberti, strange complements to the many East German technical tracts included in the list. 9 Schmidt et al., Gestaltung und Umgestaltung der Stadt, 50–1. The idea of regulating pluralistic systems has its own particular history in East Germany. Peter C. Caldwell has shown how complex systems theory, in its guise as cybernetics, acted as a sort of intellectual substitute in the GDR for the critiques of authorship, central authority, truth claims, and idealist subjectivity collectively

184  Building Socialism manifests specifically in juxtapositions between new and old, which for Schmidt and his co-authors have aesthetic potential that designers must harness: Both among the individual works of architecture and within the urbanistic unit (block, street, square) or between individual sections of the city, contrasts emerge between the architecture and urbanism of the past and the present, that have their foundation in the different scales and measures and in different characters. The task of composition must consist in making these contrasts effective and palpable as an aesthetic moment that creates particular relationships between the juxtaposed elements.10 As much as the sweeping proclamations of Bitterfeld I or II or the logic of Kluge’s novel of diversity, the pronouncements made here reflect the brief that Kunert, Reimann, and de Bruyn set for themselves in their treatment of the city in the 1960s, a brief within whose confines they created literary compositions as self-consciously fragmentary as the experience of the city during a time of rapid change. This chapter presents the three models for the interaction between cities and literature across five sections that proceed more or less chronologically. The first traces Jacobs’s and Neutsch’s containment strategy for the horrors of the industrial city. The second deals with melancholic consciousness about the loss of urban vitality in post-war Germany in Morgner’s Haus am Rand der Stadt, Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand, and de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel. The third section outlines Wolf’s literary bending of Unter den Linden through an urban dream logic. Section four shows how Kunert in his Tagträume in Berlin (Daydreams in Berlin, 1971) and de Bruyn in his Buridans Esel used fragmenting juxtapositions between new and old as a vehicle for revealing histories that could “demolish” a complacent, amnesiac present.11 The final section analyses seen as constituting Post-Modernism in the West. Complex systems theory in its GDR form became a cipher for efforts to arrange self-regulating economic systems that would not be subject to the whims of market chaos nor rely on the stiff, inflexible mandates of centralized agencies. Needless to say, in urban planning or any other discipline, the GDR never became the realization of cyberneticist dreams of self-regulating multiplicity and ordered pluralism. Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–101, 142. 10 Schmidt et al., Gestaltung und Umgestaltung der Stadt, 198–9. 11 Andreas Huyssen has shown the fading of memory and the struggle against its loss as characteristic of modern memory discourses. There is an extent to which Kunert’s cityscapes are, to use Huyssen’s words, “memories that reflect the

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 185 Reimann’s user-based critique of new architecture and Volker Braun’s, Jan Koplowitz’s, and Günter Kunert’s attempts to see the GDR’s new neighborhoods as embedded in the dialectical movements of history.12

The Literature of the Communist Company Town

In the early 1960s, Karl-Heinz Jakobs and Erik Neutsch each wrote a novel set in an under-construction, single-industry city in East Germany. Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers and Neutsch’s Spur der Steine have been read in terms of the consolidation of everyday life in the GDR in the wake of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the shift in cultural-political doctrine from a Stalinist “production” literature to the “literature of planners and leaders,” and relative party liberality regarding the representation of functionaries.13 Such readings have productively analysed the works’ dialogue and plot structures. But another side to these novels emerges in their rich descriptive passages in which the dangers of the construction process, the monstrosity of new factories, and the banality of new residential quarters come most strongly to light. These passages, when isolated, evoke a tradition of critical, left-wing representations of singleindustry cities. These include IG Farben’s Ludwigshafen, as depicted by Bloch in Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935), and the Silesian mining town of B. in Anna Seghers’s Die Rettung (1937). Whereas Bloch and Seghers used innovative techniques such as montage to match the grim urban ruptures created by capitalism’s utilitarian dictates, the GDR novels used realist structures to contain the anxiety, legible in the descriptive passages, that the GDR’s new industrial cities were reproducing the threatening, vacuous spaces characteristic of capitalist cities shaped by industry rather than by genuine human need. Neutsch and twilight status of memory itself.” Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 12 In a letter of August 10, 1964 to Central Committee member Kurt Hager, Koplowitz touted his reportages on an anti-fascist housing complex in Weimar-era Berlin and his innovation of the genre of the “living newspaper” to record life on the GDR’s construction sites. Jan-Koplowitz-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Box 54. 13 On cultural consolidation after the Berlin Wall, see Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch, 2000). On Neutsch as a precursor to Bitterfeld II, see Peter Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR: Von Helden der Arbeit zum Planer und Leiter (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984), 213–14. On Jakobs and the significance of the love plot, see John Griffith Urang, Legal Tender: Love and Legitimacy in the East German Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 79–89. On Neutsch and relative conformism to party-line doctrines, see J. H. Reid, “Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine: The Book, the Play, the Film,” in Geist und Macht: Writers and the State in the GDR (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992), 58–67.

186  Building Socialism Jakobs, in a reverse of Reimann’s challenging of prescriptive images of Wohnkultur, use narratives about the use of new spaces to neutralize and contain the almost Expressionist horror of cities built for industry. Their descriptions point up the nearly intolerable contrasts caused by modernization, but their stories ultimately integrate those contrasts into a narrative of progress and, in so doing, foreclose on the possibility that their renderings of urban space can yield the ambiguous urban montages found in Benjamin, Reimann, and Kunert. As such, the novels re-enact the deceptive mimicking of social stability that Bloch had seen as characteristic of the New Objectivity’s representation of urban modernity. Bloch writes in a concrete, visual way about what urban space looks like in towns designed to serve the needs of industry rather than people and ruminates on the rupture with the past that such towns represent. The third section of his 1935 Erbschaft dieser Zeit, entitled Großbürgertum, Sachlichkeit und Montage (High Bourgeoisie, Objectivity, and Montage), contains his most stinging and personal reflections in this connection. There, he uses the Ludwigshafen of his childhood, BASF’s company town (see Figure 11), to reveal alienation, exploitation, environmental destruction, and the cold exercise of power as characteristic of modern capitalist cities: [Ludwigshafen’s] industry certainly did not destroy natural, cultural conditions, but stands ab ovo estranged from them. This is the most genuine vacuous space of capitalism: this dirt, this raw, dead-tired proletariat, scantily paid, sent scanty to the running conveyor belt, this project-making of ice-cold masters.14 The physical fabric of the edge of town becomes a key site for marking the mundane yet over-scaled ambitions of the capitalist city as it creates its estranged, modern spaces totally unlike those that preceded it: And around the edge of Ludwigshafen, the misty flats with sloughs and catch basins, a kind of prairie that knows no little manor houses or idylls and with which factory walls and smoke stacks fit meaningfully; the telephone poles sing along.15 The edge of the capitalist city is nature negatively transfigured by the hand of humans working in the confines of a system based on exploitation of resources and bodies. The words “Sumpfloch” (slough) and “Wassertümpel” (catch basins) can represent, though their English 14 Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 210. 15 Ibid., 211.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 187

Figure 11  Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik Ludwigshafen a/Rhein (Baden Aniline and Soda Factory, Ludwigshafen on the Rhine), 1897.

translations do not necessarily reflect this, both natural and man-made phenomena. A “Sumpfloch” can be either a swamp or an area of sludge the result of an artificial process of silting (Verschlammen). A “Tümpel” can likewise be either a natural depression in the earth or an artificial basin such as those into which waste water is poured. At the edge of the industrial city, exploitation and destruction are laid bare in an un-urban urban space that evokes the stark, empty functionality of the American prairie as Bloch imagines it. For Seghers too, the exploitative nature of the capitalist city becomes most visible at the edge of town. In Die Rettung, the city of B. and adjacent mines run into each other at a porous border that leaves residential and recreational space open to domination by industrial, extractive space. Seghers, as seen in Chapter 1, describes the desecration of urban gardens by the construction of a coal dumping site. In her work, urbanism suited to the needs of the coal industry, rather than to the needs of human beings, threatens to overtake the area in which the residents of this district have attempted to claim space for their own recreation. The result is a no-place, a dystopia of industrial chaos in which the arrangements of the urban fabric are governed by the pursuit of materials and the exploitation of labor. The culmination of such exploitation is something Bloch considers with a shudder as he looks at the desolate open areas on the edge of Ludwigshafen: “In 50 years, a city could stand on the crude earth, that has grown into itself,

188  Building Socialism that has not grown at all, but rather is the most direct outgrowth of ship building, silos, elevators, factory hall.”16 Bloch was writing in 1935 and the construction of Hoyerswerda to house workers at the Schwarze Pumpe petrochemical complex in East Germany began in 1957, just twenty-two years later. The similarities between capitalist and communist industrial urbanism were close enough that the underappreciated East German architectural and urban theorist Bruno Flierl felt compelled to write a dissertation on why superficial similarities between capitalist and communist cities in the 1960s did not mean that socialist and free market societies were just versions of the modern “industrial society.”17 However, in an implicit critique of East Germany’s industrial cities in which life is made subservient to the needs of production, he makes a plea at the close of his book for cities that serve diverse forms of human contact: a city in which fragmentation is not an anti-human rupture with the past, but a beneficial form of urban diversity. For Flierl, planners must remember that “The societal function of the city is based on the activity of social life. Its elements are working, dwelling, educating oneself, and cultural activity, recreating. Its structure is that network of relationships that we call communication and that connects these elements to each other.”18 The implication, clouded in the jargon of the time, is that the planning of the GDR’s industrial cities misses the elemental focus on promoting human contact and creates breaks that undermine social life: GDR cities look and feel too much like the authoritarian, exploitative cities of the capitalist past.19 16 Ibid. 17 Bruno Flierl, Industriegesellschaft im Städtebau (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973), 10. 18 Ibid., 116. 19 Flierl is an exceptional case in some regards. Architectural discussions of factory towns in the GDR were extensive but tended not to be led by top architectural theorists in the East, i.e. Henselmann, Flierl, and Paulick. These discussions led a strange dual existence that straddled fairly traditional ideas about what constituted Baukunst and a case-by-case pragmatism that sought specific solutions for the kinds of problems (supply shortages, last-minute design changes, rushed building leading to faulty results) that plague construction sites in the works of Müller, Jakobs, and Neutsch. Starting in 1967, that bastion of tradition, the Deutsche Bauakademie, began issuing a series of publications on the construction of industrial complexes. These remained mostly in the realm of the highly technical and highly specialized (i.e. Werner Teuber’s Leichte Umhüllungskonstruktionen für eingeschossige Gebäude, 1969). Many such specialist tracts were devoted to hygiene and safety, a response to the kinds of dangers depicted in the works treated in this chapter. Two other texts from the Bauakademie’s series stand out as theoretical cries in the pragmatist wilderness that attempt to bring something of the new understandings of environmental

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 189 This anxiety is legible in the descriptive passages of Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers. The novel is Tom Breitsprecher’s firstperson, past-tense account of a summer in which he, a top-notch engineer, is called in from Berlin to lead construction at the industrial city, Wartha. Despite the challenges of the labor, Tom’s initial cynicism is overcome through a love affair with the married FDJ secretary Grit, who ultimately stands by him to the possible detriment of both their careers and status within the party. John Urang has given the best reading of the novel, seeing the love plot as a device through which Breitsprecher’s potentially critical attitude is brought into accord with cultural-political dictates about positive endings.20 My reading builds on Urang’s by taking into account the spatial world that the Breitsprecher figure makes visible to the reader: the grim social realities of urban life in industrial cities, similar to those which Bloch described, and the alienated rawness of the construction site. Recalling his arrival at Wartha, Breitsprecher, offers an astounding four-page description of the ruined old town, the current state of construction efforts in the new residential and industrial districts, the banal arrangement of streets in the new areas, the difficulty of travel between housing and construction site, and the feverish activity at the freight rail depot near his own tiny apartment. The first component of the description is an account of the new city being constructed for the workers building the chemical processing complex: Construction Site One was the living quarters, the boiler room, the culture house. The living quarters consisted of four residential ensembles. Each ensemble contained four modern wooden barracks that adjoined a massive central tract. The central tract contained the sanitary facilities. Construction Site Two was on H Street and H stood for the Hauptstraße [main street] of the design to the making of factory districts as spatial environments. Herbert Winkler’s Industrieraumgestaltung of 1967 was the first GDR text to claim that the ways factories and factory districts looked and felt mattered as an integral part of the spatial arrangement of industrial labor. In Winkler’s view, color selection, lighting, noise control, and convenient placement of factories in relation to housing all had a role to play in ensuring that the quality of life of the workers and farmers in their eponymous state was not sacrificed to a production process supposedly intended for their collective benefit. Hans Bonitz’s Planung städtischer Industriegebiete: Empfehlungen (1975), published thirteen years after Jakobs’s novel, continued the urbanistic aspect of Winkler’s text by making recommendations about transit planning and placement of industrial facilities that remedy the kinds of problems Jakobs and Neutsch describe in passages cited below. 20 Urang, Legal Tender, 79–91.

190  Building Socialism industrial plant. The gate to the facility and the polyclinic were planned for this location. Before that, this was the place where a provisional commercial building was built which, for a limited number of years, served simultaneously as company store, kitchen, and cafeteria.21 The subservience of living arrangements to the project of creating the chemical plant, whose main street functions, like the Leuschnerstraße which connects Ludwigshafen’s center to the BASF facility, as a hierarchical visual glorification of industry, is a planning strategy that links capitalist and socialist company towns. Breitsprecher’s dry, objective stance converts that strategy, however, into a matter-of-fact reality of existence whose unquestionability forecloses on making the historical connection between Wartha and capitalist company towns. As Breitsprecher’s description of the construction site and life there continues, though, the links between the two become clearer. Bloch’s “dead-tired proletariat” is still present: construction workers at the factory site in Wartha who miss the shuttle bus back to the temporary housing have to walk the seven kilometers to their barracks. Breitsprecher grimly describes the mobilization of FDJ laborers to clear cut forest and relates how one of them accidentally slams an axe into his leg while working. As above, Breitsprecher’s detached tone reads as Jakobs’s own defense mechanism for maintaining psychological distance from the horrors of the process through which industrial cities, even socialist ones, come into being. The four-page description of life at Wartha culminates in a chilling rendering of the hazards of unloading building materials: But one time when the extension arm of an excavator was unloaded, one end got stuck on the flat car and some idiot went at it with a crowbar to free it and before the loading foreman could jump in, the stuck end came loose. The crank-handle of the winch snapped up and grabbed one of the men standing at the crank and flung him several meters away. He was put straight onto a stretcher, and, at first, he screamed and then he was silent, and you could tell how he held his breath in pain and when he breathed in, he groaned loudly, and then, the ambulance came and took him to the hospital.22 Working conditions had been a focus of Bloch’s analysis, however poeticized, of Ludwigshafen and reappear here in Breitsprecher’s cold 21 Karl-Heinz Jakobs, Beschreibung eines Sommers (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1961), 33. 22 Ibid., 34.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 191 portrayal of job-site injury. Jakobs has used his affect-less narrative persona as a shield against the realities of life in the socialist company town just as he used Breitsprecher’s heightened affect in the later portions of the novel to legitimate, as Urang has shown, naïve enthusiasm for labor on the socialist construction site. In Neutsch’s novel, industrial space is rendered in a more intensely visual way and the emotional energies generated by it are acknowledged more candidly. The central figures of the novel are the cool but sympathetic party secretary, Horrath; the up-and-coming engineer, Kati Klee; and the rebellious but talented worker Hannes Balla. The site of the action is the new petro-chemical city at Schkona (a thinly disguised version of Leuna) at a crucial point in its construction. Balla and his crew are the productive but troublesome bullies of the construction site who eventually come to see the value of socialist organization of production and the introduction of modern building methods and new building materials. These characters’ emotional transformations form the center of the novel, but the breathtaking urban industrial dystopia of the work’s opening page stands as a powerful prose description worth citing in full: Sixteen smokestacks buttressed the sky over the city, jutting up higher than the highest towers in the area, sixteen factory smokestacks, in a row, dust-gray and steep, as they are to be found nowhere else in Germany. Day and night, the fumes roll out of the sixteen hungry maws, day and night. They blacken the new snow on the fields in winter, soot the white blossoms of the cherry-treerows on the allées in spring, even yet muddy the November-dark rivers in fall, and veil the hot yellow sun in summer. When the west wind blows, which does not seldom happen, it pushes the factory smoke into the streets of the city; it often brings rain, a dirty, sticky rain that has sucked up the soot and laid it on the pavements, the roofs, on the fields and tree-tops. The sun then burns out the puddles that the rain melted, like lead, into impresses; on the ground, the moisture steams and the soot, the dirt remain. All the houses carry a dark gray plastering, the colors are etched away, the once-red roof tiles are black, the window panes always opaque like milk glass. The rivers are musty too, pumped full of factory waste water, and the White Elster is no longer white; it is banked now by swampy ponds, leftovers of the snow melt in which the branches of dead trees gather into barricades.23

23 Erik Neutsch, Spur der Steine (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1963), 1.

192  Building Socialism The novel’s highly visual opening is a catalog of the horrors of living in a city subverted to the needs of production. Only the kitschy line, “to be found nowhere else in Germany,” betrays the party-line conviction that will guide the novel’s narrative trajectory. The cold indifference of the factories to the existence of the residential section of the town remind us of Marx’s insistence that the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of nature go hand in hand.24 Neutsch employs the realist narrative trajectory of an anarchist laborer’s individual conversion to belief in the “socialist” quality of this city to neutralize the almost Expressionist pathos latent in the novel’s opening imagery. In making this move, he rehearses the containment strategy that Siegfried Kracauer saw in the New Objectivity’s insistence on the healability of the broken psyches that Expressionism had revealed: “Now that the life had resumed normal aspects and social revolution was no longer impending, the fantastic figures and unreal settings of the postwar [Expressionist] screen dissolved into thin air like the vampire of Nosferatu.”25 The threat the industrial city poses to human bodies and social structures “disappears into thin air” in a novel that treats them as resolvable contradictions in a mature socialist society. For Kracauer, the director Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s slavish attention to the empirical facts of social relationships created a mythology of progress in which the pathological personalities which Expressionism had placed in the foreground are revealed, as in Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926), as curable.26 Ultimately, Pabst’s “psychological finesse is grafted upon an indifference to the primary events of inner life” as he eschews the way that Expressionist film “quivers with an excitement indicating the vital importance of the issues involved.”27 That “vital importance” appears at the start of Neutsch’s novel and lies in the unlivability of cities subverted to the needs of production; it is an importance ultimately obscured by the ideological overlay of its conversion narrative. Neutsch even dampens potentially rich metaphors as Balla’s back is compared to “a precast concrete slab.”28 Similar metaphors in Müller conveyed important ideas about modern society. In Neutsch, they only attest to the character’s physical strength. Neutsch, in contrast to Daniil Granin, the Soviet writer whose novel Those Who 24 John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 6–15. 25 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychology History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 134. 26 Ibid., 167, 170–2. 27 Ibid., 172. 28 Neutsch, Spur der Steine, 169.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 193 Seek (1954) was a model for Spur der Steine, sees industry and science as purely positive.29 In a 1973 interview with Dietrich Sommer, the East German novelist affirmed the search for aesthetic totalities based on combining “rational knowledge with political practice.”30 He criticized a group of fellow writers who were injecting a subjective perspective on physical reality into their work and indulging in an “inclination perceptible now and then toward psychologizing and toward an almost subjectivistic representation of reality.” The opening descriptions of Neutsch’s novel, in their surprisingly elegiac diction, invite precisely such “subjective” perspectives that could “quiver” with significance; the story of the novel is effectively written against that promise as Neutsch assiduously avoids the turn to psychology that Hans Schmidt and Hermann Henselmann were making the centerpiece of their architectural theories. Volker Braun’s poetry from the early and mid-1960s provides an illustrative coda to the novels of Jakobs and Neutsch as he articulates the invasiveness of socialist industrial cities with a vital pathos that points up the modernity of new spaces. Braun’s return to Hoyerswerda in 1964, seven years after having labored on the construction site at Schwarze Pumpe, yielded several poems and prose pieces, including a poem entitled “Nachts, fern vom AS 1120” (At Night, Far from AS 1120). The AS 1120 was one of the largest earth moving machines produced in East Germany, a bucket-wheel digger used in open-pit mining (see 29 Granin, though not necessarily condemning technology, seemed better than Neutsch by the late 1960s to understand that its risks could easily outweigh its gains if scientists were not careful. See Daniil Granin, “And Yet … A Soviet Writer Looks to the Future” (New York: Radio Liberty Committee, 1968). Originally published in Inostrannaya Literatura, 1967, 1. 30 “Das Revolutionäre in unseren Tagen”, 169. Cited here from Erik Neutsch, Fast die Wahrheit: Ansichten zu Kunst und Literatur (Berlin: Tribüne, 1978). The interview originally appeared in Weimarer Beiträge 9, 1973. Rationalism plays an important role in another of the novel’s grating “conversion” scenes. Towards the beginning, Kati Klee is “converted” by one of her teachers into believing in the formal and economic value of the GDR’s ornament-less Plattenbauten as socialist architecture par excellence (Neutsch, Spur der Steine, 47). Bloch’s notion of the New Objectivity saw that tendency as a puritanical “classicism”: “He who perpetrates simple deception by means of lightness apes par excellence deeper, classicist means, austerity, ornamentless-ness, puritanity: such Sachlichkeit has its ornament in having none. It has long not been pure functional form, but rather covered into technoidal decoration. Its machine-based model has long become an end in itself, serves as a substitute for ornament and once more no other purpose than the reinforcement of the facade.” Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 217. Neutsch’s novel, in Kati’s conversion, makes recourse to the façade-based, technophilic thinking that undergirded the artistic production of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

194  Building Socialism Figure 12). Such machines were infamous for the number of accidents involving them, the most notorious at a vast open-pit mining complex in the Mittelgebirge in 1957. Open-pit mining would seem an activity only ancillary to the building of cities, but in Braun’s poem, machines for extraction and new towns are part of the same phenomenon.31 The speaker in Braun’s poem in fact compares AS 1120 to a city as he hears its motor from his apartment, an implicit recognition that the East’s single-industry cities are subservient to the machines that drive their economies: “The city droned beneath me like a compressor / like the big digger idling.”32 Braun closes the poem with an image in which the speaker receives productive energy on the construction site but is glad in equal measure to have left the new single-industry towns in his past: “And after the night of thousand-leaved old books [Scharteken] / I would like to drink luke warm lubricant against word-dust: oh, I left behind me the smoke of concrete stacks / and the animal cry of bucket chains / I escaped the noise of the large block houses.”33 Housing blocks built using industrialized methods such as the Großlockbauweise Braun refers to here can be, as seen in passages from Reimann’s Franziska treated in Chapter 4, as noisy as the chain of buckets on an enormous open-pit mining digger. Subjecting poetry to the material realities of monstrous machines with which single-industry towns are wrought from the earth is an inoculation against retreat into tired forumulae, the dusty “old books” of the past. Industrial cities demand a linguistic densification that reveals single-industry towns as despoiled spaces while holding out utopian hope for the value of vast collective economic effort as fuel for the making of art. In a much more expansive way than Neutsch, Braun’s poetry asks what the relationship is between modern production methods, with their “screaming” machinery, and the production of poetic texts. This approach reaches its height and its breaking point in another of Braun’s poems from around the same time, a long work laconically entitled “Industrie.” The poem closes with an idea that Braun would pick up on in his later lecture on “The Structure of New Plays” —dealt with later in this chapter—that all art should mimic architecture’s dual status as representation and reality. The process of constructing cities to meet the needs of industry becomes in the poem a vehicle through 31 The comparison of open-pit mining equipment and cities is not confined to the GDR. Germany has long been, and continues to be, renowned for the production of the largest open-pit mining diggers, including the world’s largest vehicle, Bagger 293, in service in the Ruhrgebiet and nicknamed, “the city on wheels.” See the video Bucket-Wheel Excavator, Bagger 293 on the video channel of National Geographic. 32 Volker Braun, Provokation für mich (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1965), 30. 33 Ibid.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 195

Figure 12  AS 1120 digger at the open-pit mine, Nochten, 1995. which poetry can strive to make such direct connections to reality. The first step in the process is, with a critical reference to Neutsch’s novel, the sacrifice of body to construction: The river on which I live pronounced dry The dusty trace of stones: On its shores greened for us wild (so to speak) time; in the trenches We constructed ourselves, up to the chest Planned in and nailed up In the scaffold.34 Laboring bodies experience the blossoming of the temporal movement of history in which they paradoxically construct themselves by nailing themselves into the scaffolds of the new buildings they work on. Yet what they build, the fruits of their sacrifice along a river they themselves helped to kill, looks dangerously like the invasive, vacuous urban space described by Bloch and Seghers: “Dispersed on the central 34 Volker Braun, Im Querschnitt: Gedichte, Prosa, Stücke, Aufsätze (Halle-Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1978), 70.

196  Building Socialism German plain / we sit, hoist plumes of smoke / soiled region. Luck-onthe-way-up / And down into shells for living [Wohnhülsen]. The breasts of the woman / handholds in the rapid transit train / Sleep. The sun, or we say: / rain pisses on concrete.”35 The skies are filled with banners of smoke; the land is filthy; the apartments are like mine shafts; molesters populate city trains; the workers are, like Bloch’s, tired; the sun is like a urinary rain on concrete. Braun’s final stanza, though, tries to leave open possibilities for redemption in that the recounting of this process of construction enacted in the poem has prepared the ground for art to enter reality: “Close the book. / Art is just beginning / Really.”36 City building in its effects on human relationships can become, as fodder for experimental literature, a step on the way to allowing reality and art to exist as a unity. As Gottfried Benn had allowed the cold horror of damaged human bodies to structure powerfully reduced and affecting poetic language, Braun converts Bloch’s vacuous space not into the detached coolness of American realism or the optimism of a teleological narrative, but rather into the concentrated emotive intensity of Expressionist poetry about World War I.

Fantasies of Urbanity in the Castrated City

For Günter de Bruyn, Irmtraud Morgner, and Brigitte Reimann, juxtaposition of East German cities and the metropolises of the past interrupted the forward momentum of plots and yielded more fragmented prose. These authors lamented the way Nazi authoritarianism, Allied firebombing, and post-war planning regimes obliterated traditional streetlife and the metropolitan modernity of the 1920s. This manifested itself in Morgner’s, de Bruyn’s, and Reimann’s works most saliently in the form of characters’ fantasy projections about urban space in relation to their own self-image. These fantasies deal with the contrast between past and present in the urban context and yielded stand-alone reflections on the nature of modern urban space. For Siegfried Kracauer in his The Salaried Masses (1930), the embrace of cold detachment by a new class of white-collar workers in Berlin, “where links to roots and the soil are so reduced,” represented the sickening acceleration of late capitalism’s decline.37 In de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel, the anonymous white-collar masses that Karl Erp encounters on his daily S-Bahn commute are, unlike Kracauer’s modern conformists, conducive to the discovery of individuality. On

35 Ibid., 71 36 Ibid. 37 Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (New York: Verso, 1998), 32.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 197 public transport, Erp relishes the perception of his own insignificance as a liberating force: Before [having a car], he was nothing but an S-Bahn passenger for two relaxed hours per day, one among thousands, perceived daily that the world did not just consist of family and library, was two hours long himself among many, could talk, read, be silent, observe, listen or complain; now he was just a boss at home because of family authority and in between alone in his drivable cell.38 Erp’s alienation in the “drivable cell” of his car constitutes a theoretical moment that explores how individualized transport can limit individuality.39 In fact, public transport was a key preoccupation of Henselmann’s in the late 1960s. Following the theories of Soviet urban planners in his essay “Medizin und Städtebauforschung” (Medicine and Urban Planning Research), he delves into the psychic and physiological dimensions of trolley and subway travel. Instead, as one might expect, of criticizing cultures of distraction in which the modern metropolis, as it was for Kracauer, is seen as a culture of overstimulation in built form, Henselmann sees the opposite at work in GDR cities. He asserts that planners must take into account the experiential dimensions of work–home relationships: “In the design of transport relationships, it is not just about a purely economic-spatial problem; rather, psychic factors have an effect on the constitution of relationships to work.”40 He goes on to say that communication and stimulation in the urban environment are basic bodily needs and that “informational undersupply” in this connection is a risk in East German cities. This deficit is, as Henselmann shows, one reason why many of East Germany’s citizens, like Erp, favored above-ground public transit lines to underground ones. For Erp, the car and its attendant car-centric path through the city becomes another form of stimulus-deprivation that forecloses on the freedoms afforded by the metropolitan public sphere. 38 Günter de Bruyn, Buridans Esel (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1968), 17. 39 Erp’s sentiments resonate with the decadent and often equally sexist characters of the literature of upper-middle-class alienation in the United States at mid-century, which also noted the role of commuter trains and cars and the new kinds of relationships between work and home. John Cheever’s story, “The Five Forty-Eight” is one example. John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Knopf, 1978), 236–47. 40 Hermann Henselmann, “Zur Medizin und Städtebauforschung,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 149.

198  Building Socialism In Irmtraud Morgner’s Haus am Rand der Stadt, fantasies of metropolitan life, including of suspiciously idle flanerie, are antidotes to socialist functionalism. Britt, as discussed in Chapter 4, tires of her father’s kitschy moralism, and goes for romantic late-night walks with Jochen Büsch in the older parts of their town. Strolling the streets, Britt imagines herself in the role of a glamorous city girl and Jochen imagines himself as a bohemian character in a French silent movie. The urban context of the older part of town becomes fodder for imagining vital cities unlike the standardized new ones being built in the East. Morgner emphasizes the political value of these walks and their visual dimension by showing the stodgy, utilitarian Mayer’s rejection of walking as labor: “Now these days you’re just supposed to bum around the city in order to enrich your life? What do other people’s houses have to do with me? Nobody becomes happy just by looking. The opposite.”41 Morgner’s novel, through the characters of Britt and Jochen, refutes this claim and makes an implicit case for reviving the tensions characteristic of the pre-war city as a productive form of labor in a post-war world characterized by the double banality of prudery and technocracy. For Reimann, the mental and visual experience not just of the metropolis, but of vital street life and the cultures particular to it since the early modern period, become vehicles for reflection on the historical status of East German cities. In Neustadt, Franziska wants to experience the “characterful and intolerant pride of a city whose citizens have inherited for two hundred years their pride in palace, cathedral, and town hall as elsewhere their table cloths and silver spoons; a city to which baroque is over-familiar like bread and beer and life between monuments and stucco, under greening copper roofs, patina, comeliness, [a city] that has survived nights of bombing.”42 Whereas Kracauer criticizes and Morgner playfully revives the cool anonymity of the 1920s urban dweller, Reimann sees an excess of cool detachment in Neustadt and revives a bourgeois concept of the connection between cities and citizens. This concept echoes Henselmann’s and Schmidt’s insistence that emotional relationships of people to space should constitute a central pillar of city planning.43 Reimann goes on to register the loss of this emotional possibility in GDR cities by having Franziska oversee a demolition project. The young 41 Irmtraud Morgner, Haus am Rand der Stadt (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 18. 42 Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1974), 266. 43 In his reading of the novel, Hunter Bivens focuses on the specifically workingclass imaginary of urban experience. See Hunter Bivens, “Neustadt: Affect and Architecture in Brigitte Reiman’s East German Novel, Franziska Linkerhand,” Germanic Review 83, no. 2 (2008): 139–66.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 199 architect is assigned responsibility for sketching the foundations of buildings in the old town adjacent to Neustadt which are to be demolished. The quarter appears to Franziska as a kind of “dingy poetry” with its crooked, narrow alleys and small door openings.44 Furthermore, the old quarter of the city, with its small, independent butchers and bakers, has gained new life as residents from surrounding towns come in search of fresh meats and breads. Franziska quickly assumes a professional guise, though, noting that the “curves in the streets [are] an irritant to traffic planners.”45 This guise appears at its most thorough as Franziska fulfills the bureaucratic function of signing off on the demolitions: “Franziska signed the death warrant, unmoved by a romanticism without modern plumbing.”46 The young architect is, despite her performance of modernity, of course emotionally riven: the narrator’s reference to centralized plumbing is a signal that Franziska struggles here to stave off the guilt associated with having this vital urban district destroyed. Reimann is drawing theoretically in such passages on Jane Jacobs’s concept of the street. In her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs saw pre-war, pre-housing-project New York as an exemplar of urban vitality. A street, for her, must possess the contextual diversity that Henselmann and Schmidt called for in their theories: “A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it.”47 As such, the thoroughfares of traditional, dense, mixed-use neighborhoods become sites in which urban diversity is shaped into a social unity: Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance— not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good 44 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 207. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 29.

200  Building Socialism city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.48 The merging of life into art that Jacobs finds in inherited neighborhoods is a parallel dualism to the reconciliation of order and spontaneity that Reimann calls for at the end of her novel, that urban theorist Alexander Mitscherlich, whom Reimann read, locates in the planning of medieval Siena, and that Brecht sees potentially picturequse communist space as needing to embody. Franziska ultimately sees Neustadt’s open, park-like axes as unworthy of being called “streets.” Elsewhere in the novel, Reimann, in contrast to Brecht, celebrates the Stalinallee as the last real “street” in the GDR. However wide and over-styled, it shaped and cradled the space along which pedestrians were meant to walk, and it mixed commercial and residential uses.49 Stalinist Haussmannianism, with its attempt to evoke the nineteenth century’s “city as a work of art,” creates a framed, non-abstracted urban context that, for Reimann, corresponds to the pre-war urban models from which Jacobs derives her planning principles. Thus, Reimann locates East Germany’s Benjaminian “one-way street” in the new housing settlements after 1957, not in the boulevard-like Stalinallee. Reimann even goes so far as to reflect on the official historical narratives about Stalinist urbanism in East Germany in the mid-to-late-1960s, by which time the nationalist ornament of the street’s façade was viewed as a national embarrassment. On a visit to her friend Jazwauk in the middle of the novel, Franziska defends the architecture of the GDR’s early years: … the new houses, the house in which Jazwauk lived too, were built in the early fifties in the style that is now called “wedding cake” style, in an architectural epoch (why epoch? why so soon that iron-and-granite word?) about which, if ever at all, one talked in sarcastic or in sweep-under-the-rug tones.50 Reimann reveals here that the attempt in certain corners of official discourse in East Germany to dictate the meanings of urban space have been so successful that buildings from fifteen years before feel as though they belong to a different era. More prosaically, the spirit at work here in these examples was carried into the realm of practice by Henselmann and to a lesser degree Paulick. Furthermore, Florian Urban has traced how the 48 Ibid., 50. 49 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 249. 50 Ibid., 319.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 201 desire for mixed-use urban vitality drove East German young professionals’ sociologically documented demands for the renovation of housing in Berlin’s tenement districts in the 1970s. These young people, often with children, wanted dense neighborhoods in which childcare and work were within walking distance—exactly what the gentrifiers of Prenzlauer Berg sought starting in the mid-1990s.51 The GDR’s little-known and quite successful efforts at creating pedestrianized historic districts, an effort that merited a celebratory history of DDR-Fußgängerzonen in 1979, was part of a shift in public opinion about the value of living in pre-war urban neighborhoods that originated in 1960s literary prose.52

From Axial to Arabesque: Christa Wolf’s “Unter den Linden”

In his 1968 travelogue of a journey through the GDR, Reisen in Bekanntes und Unbekanntes (Travels to the Known and Unknown), published by the women’s magazine Sybille in conjunction with VEB Verlag der Frau, Henselmann focuses on streets and neighborhoods not often photographed, seldom featured in press coverage, and little visited by tourists. The extent of this focus is most evident in his entries on Halle and Berlin. In the former, Henselmann makes no mention of the construction projects at Halle-Neustadt, the centerpiece of a multifront promotion effort by writers, journalists, and bureaucrats. In his fourteen pages on the capital city, the showpiece boulevard Unter den Linden is mentioned once—in abbreviated form as “Linden” and only to indicate that the pulse of the city is not to be found there. Henselmann urges readers instead to understand that Berlin “is, in terms of its temporality, located in a shifting space” (45) and that its contradictions are best examined … where Berliners truly have time. I do no not mean the spectacular museums or the famous libraries. There, more strangers than Berliners are likely found. I mean the market halls, where, astoundingly enough, buying and selling happens completely without hurry, with meandering, with slow ferreting out and with a quite humorous relaxation. I mean the Tierpark, about which Berliners are very proud, but in a different way than they are about Linden or the Karl-Marx-Allee. It belongs, so to speak, to their private sphere.53 51 Urban, Neo-Historical East Berlin, 144–7. 52 See Klaus Andrä et al., Fußgängerbereiche in Stadtzentren (Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 1979). 53 Hermann Henselmann, Reisen in Bekanntes und Unbekantes: Sybilles Reisebuch (Leipzig: Verlag die Frau, 1968), 49.

202  Building Socialism Henselmann is keen to find those urban spaces which Berliners feel most deeply to be their own. He sees in the showpiece urbanism of the center a façade that communicates political meanings internationally and cultural significance nationally. These are places that Berliners hurry away from, choosing instead to linger in neighborhoods like those around Rosenthaler Platz, where the Markthalle Ackerstraße was and is located.54 Like Henselmann, Christa Wolf, in her short story “Unter den Linden” (1967), seeks to work against the image of Berlin’s urban spaces as tourist destinations and fodder for propaganda. But she does so not by avoiding the most visited sites, but instead by using an intricate narrative structure and highly associative language to render the street of the story’s title afresh: converting its planned grandeur into a seemingly spontaneous expression of dream-like discontinuity and converting its baroque axiality into a medieval meander. The story is of the narrator’s return, in a dream, to Unter den Linden after a presumed long absence. She passes by shop windows, tour groups, bars, and through the halls of the library at the Humboldt all the while interspersing descriptions of present urban spaces with events narrated from her past as a university student. These events center on a fashionable, attractive, and unnamed young woman and her relationship to her friend and fellow student, Peter, who compromises his academic ideals in order to achieve career success. The narrator’s emotional stance toward these figures ranges from the cool detachment of the narrator in a mystery novel reconstructing a crime to a pervasive paranoia that it is the narrator herself who is being placed on trial for unnamed transgressions. The visit, in a dream, to the current Unter den Linden to investigate events related to a personal past and the social pressures that were part of it ultimately ends in a sudden, ambiguous self-realization at the close of the story: a chance meeting on the stately boulevard with a woman who is inexplicably happy, a woman who turns out to be the narrator herself. The urban milieu as Wolf creates it thus becomes the staging ground of a chance encounter with one’s self. The principle of the narration, despite this seemingly pat ending, is that of repeated dissolution of urban space through memory and association as the “unreal” existence of the city as a mental construct becomes more real than the physical bricks and mortar. The opening of the story functions as a frame that establishes this principle as the 54 That Market Hall was the only one of Berlin’s nineteenth-century halls to survive World War II completely intact. In East Germany, it functioned in its intended capacity and was state-owned and operated. Candid scenes from the banned 1965 film, Fräulein Schmetterling (Miss Butterfly), directed by Kurt Barthel and with a screenplay by Christa Wolf, take place in the market hall.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 203 narrator reflects on the changing status of Unter den Linden. The narrator asserts that it is two streets rather than one: That the street is famous never bothered me, waking and certainly never dreaming. I grasp that it owes this misfortune to its situation: East–West axis. It and the street that has appeared to me in dreams have nothing to do with each other. The one is misused in my absence by means of newspaper images and tourist photos, the other holds itself ready for me across long spaces of time. I admit, the both can, seen superficially, be mistaken for one another. I myself lapse into this mistake: then, I cross my street carelessly and do not recognize it.55 Unsettled by the visual elision of the personal and tourist streets, the narrator strikes out with the intention of “finally seeing the new city districts which have been spoken and written of everywhere” (66). However, Unter den Linden reasserts its primacy: a bus driver drops her off not at the new district she intends to visit, but at the Staatsoper, a location where an unspecified “they” wanted her to be dropped off. In a classically Modernist situation, the narrator’s task is now to reconstruct what her task might be and, in turn, define herself within or against it. Wolf acknowledges this, as had Kafka, through legal metaphor. After the narrator introduces the “girl” with whose fate she is clearly preoccupied, she defines her task more precisely: The girl—yes! She lied and deceived, but I built upon her, never had that become so clear to me as now, dreaming. For a time, I even had the suspicion I came here because of her; I would have followed the intention right from the beginning to view certain localities [Örtlichkeiten] that played along as a coulisse in her drama: what is called at court a Lokaltermin.56 The narrator comes close to acknowledging that her intention to see new quarters of the city is cover for her investigation of the girl and her fate. This investigation, which may or may not be part of the narrator’s intention, asserts its quasi-legal nature in the narrator’s word choice: “building” a case; “suspicion”; and the bureaucratic sounding word “Örtlichkeit.” A Lokaltermin is not just an investigative visit to the scene of a crime; historically, it involves actually holding court at the crime scene under the assumption that the judge might make a more accurate 55 Christa Wolf, “Unter den Linden,” in Gesammelte Erzählungen (Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1974), 65. 56 Ibid., 70.

204  Building Socialism statement about events that occurred by being physically present at the place of their occurrence.57 Buildings are here a material reality with formal dimensions that, though not in the same way as people, have a role to “play” in the same way theater sets do. But the buildings in question must be dissolved into their temporal existence as actors in the human drama at both the personal and historical levels. Wolf thus updates Seghers’s subsumption of architecture into stories that convey working-class consciousness by showing how urban space is, in the post-war period, implicated in subjective ruminations on the relation of the present to a traumatic past. Wolf’s story and the only partially revealed life stories of her narrator are thus bound to the dream urbanism of an Unter den Linden whose simultaneous monumentality and fragility offer possibilities for imagining different subjectivities and exploring how the instituions— from the university to the state of the art Hotel Unter den Linden, colloquially referred to as the Lindenhotel—relate to the indentities of the narrator and her alter ego (see Figure 13). Having followed the girl through the university library and become reacquainted in memory with her friend Peter, the narrator emerges once again on the street. There she looks into the display window of a bookstore and sees the reflection of the Lindenhotel across the street. At the same time, she overhears a conversation in which the services, from shoe shines to umbrella lending, that the hotel offers are listed; at the end of the conversation, the reflection in the window changes: There, in an unnoticed moment in the twinkling pane, appears, in place of the Lindenhotel, a landscape of ruins, whistled through by the winds, grown upon by weeds, crossed by a dirt trail, upon which walk three figures who look familiar to me. I whirl around: not fast enough. My landscape is gone.58 The memories of Berlin as a destroyed city impinge on the present. This intense literary temporality of space points up, in a Benjaminian way, the fragility of the architectural fulminations of the modernizing present and the “blasting agent” of past urban spaces that can productively demolish that present. Over the course of this description of disappearing and reappearing buildings, of the intrusion of the past into a present told as a dream, the narrator begins to address the girl directly. The connection between the narrator’s and the girl’s lives to the Hotel Unter den Linden becomes a matter of a polemic force. There is a distinction between those who 57 Braun wrote a poem entitled “Lokaltermin.” Its subject is the Berlin Wall. 58 Wolf, “Unter den Linden,” 86.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 205

Figure 13  Berlin-Hauptstadt der DDR, Interhotel “Unter den Linden” (Berlin – Capital of the GDR, Interhotel, “Unter den Linden”), 1969.

experienced the ruins and those whose experience is defined by construction: Just so that you know, girl. So that you don’t think someone crazy, when, for that person, the walls of a new hotel of large-block construction [Großblockbauhotel] suddenly start to sway, become transparent, as though they weren’t there. When you surfaced here at this intersection, Miss, nineteen, innocent and nothing more, the street had then just been ripped up, riven by deep excavation pits, convulsed by pile-drivers, I know.59 The entry of the girl into the story and its urban space comes after the ruined landscapes of the immediate post-war period are starting to be ameliorated through new construction. Given the multiple layers of doubt Wolf casts on what her narrator tells, it seems pedantic to try to date the story’s events. However, Wolf’s refusal to cast aside reality altogether (the story is named after a real street; the buildings named did in fact exist) makes it crucial. The hotel was completed in 1966 and the preparation work on the site, described above, was begun in 1964. 59 Ibid., 88.

206  Building Socialism The difference the narrator locates between herself and the girl has to do with changes to the urban environment between 1945, incidentally the girl’s birth year if we follow the quotations above, and the mid-1960s. The gap in experience seems unbridgeable: the girl’s world is one of construction, the narrator’s one of destruction. Thus, the narrator is a Berliner on Unter den Linden, but with the “time” that Henselmann saw as so characteristic of life in the older residential districts. She adopts the pose of a tourist, walking the famous landscaped median of the boulevard as she “slowly strolled to the Brandenburg Gate, among tourists who had the same desti nation but not as much time as I.”60 Pulled from her reverie as she spots figures she recognizes, including a telephone operator from Alexanderplatz and an old train worker, mild anxiety turns to panic as the narrator remembers that her task is centered on the girl, whom she once again encounters. The two have an extended conversation, interrupted by moments of third-person narration, in which the girl’s official condemnation by the university and betrayal by Peter are related. The narrator has one last conversation with Peter in which she, therapeutically for her, confesses that “she cannot take [vertragen] love.”61 The narrator stands up to leave, turning one last time to her table, only to find no one there. Once again, she returns to the street: In my bitter shame I stepped onto the street. I mocked it: straightline street, I hectored. Street at the heart of the matter … street of chance, I cursed it, newsprint-street. Clean and orderly, it lay before me. One stone next to the other, good labor. What had I promised myself from it? A distraction between two works. A new dress. A tangential dialogue in a café. It gave me all of this in a correct manner. Differently from before, I partake of the useful invention of going for a stroll. The time of day flushes the wave of office workers out of the administrative buildings. To where do they but fear to come too late? Which train will roll away without them, which morsel forever snapped away from them? Or do they too, who, by the millions, have sold away their lives, preserve the secret longing for real flesh, for red, juicy flesh?62 For the moment it would seem as though the straight boulevard has resisted the narrator’s meander. Its axiality is intact as the urgent flow of bureaucratic sell-outs, like those who forced the girl from her place at the university, flood its sidewalks. The narrator even asks whether 60 Ibid., 99. 61 Ibid., 114. 62 Ibid., 11.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 207 her simultaneous journey down the street and into a difficult episode from her past was a simple distraction, one that, once finished, leaves Unter den Linden as the “newspaper street” it seems to want to be. The Benjaminian urban montage that the story creates has failed to uncover the city’s true temporalities. Two details from this passage, though, indicate that the narrator’s meander through urban space and biographical and historical time have still managed to redefine the meaning of Unter den Linden. One is the narrator’s willingness to see the street as the “Herz aller Dinge” (heart of all things) and as a “Zufallsstraße” (street of chance). The former phrase is reminiscent of the German title of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, a novel which Wolf had read by this time.63 In that novel, Greene’s Scobie is unable to reconcile the internal conflict between the fulfillment of his desires in a love affair and his commitment to the Catholic Church. The result is a total alienation, which his faith had been intended to guard against, and the ultimate betrayal of his own beliefs as he commits suicide. For the narrator of Wolf’s story, the street is similarly at the crux of conflicts between the quest for authentic subjectivity and the dictates of a socialism that has taken on a bureaucratic face. It is thus that the street is a “Zufallsstraße”—its unbending straightness, like the rigidity of mid-century bureaucracies, is ultimately evocative of the caprice of governmental orders that cannot account fully for the vicissitudes of human existence. Geometric order and cleanliness can easily leave chaos and wreckage in their wake. But unlike Greene’s Scobie, recourse to self-destruction is not the solution. In fact, the solution presents itself to the narrator in one more act of chance on Unter den Linden. She spots a young woman wearing fabrics she would like to wear, walking as she would wish to walk, miraculously free of “unsolvable entanglements” and able to “choose freely what would come to her from among the promises and temptations of life.”64 The narrator, beset by envy and anguish, begins to cry at which point she wakes up only to realize with joy what her task on Unter den Linden had been: “to find myself again.”65 The street has helped effect the paradox of catharsis itself: the narrator has returned to herself in a new and refreshed form. Unter den Linden’s axiality has been subjected to the circularity of the cathartic experience of an artwork, which culminates in the rediscovery of self. Once again 63 See Joyce Crick, “Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf: Selective Affinities,” in Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 91–107. 64 Wolf, “Unter den Linden,” 116. 65 Ibid.

208  Building Socialism the second person “you” is evoked as the natural audience for this meandering journey on a straight boulevard back to oneself as the last lines of the story rehearse the first. The narrator repeats the story’s opening: “I came to you, saw that you wanted to hear and began: I always liked walking Unter den Linden. Most, you know, alone.”66 The circularity of the quest for idenity enacted in a meandering, associative story is mirrored by indentical language at the story’s beginning and end. Urban space is made complicit in a subjective view of the circular yet progressive effects of the artwork on the self.

On the Threshold of History

Wolf used the Lokaltermin to reclaim the self in a seemingly unconducive urban environment. De Bruyn and Kunert, by contrast, are less interested in how the subject shapes the meanings of the urban environment than they are in the embeddedness of buildings in history and in urban space as a material witness to the past. Both writers evoke an intellectual stance quite close to that described by Benjamin in relation to the dual political value of antiquated architecture in a changing urban environment. In addition, they take up the principle of the city as a productive montage by allowing the stories that emerge from Berlin’s post-war fabric to yield disjointed prose structures with digression as a central principle. For de Bruyn, this takes the form of the narrator’s self-conscious intrusions into the story; Kunert turns to the completely non-narrative genre of the thought-image.67 Early in the novel as the main character Erp begins to develop an attachment to Fräulein Broder, he rejects the notion that East Germany lacks a genuine metropolis. Ludicrously, though, he asserts that there 66 Ibid., 117. 67 Kunert wrote extensively about Berlin in the period from 1968 to 1974, and the interpretations offered here by no means represent a complete account of his Berlin literature. His work includes poems, parables, and thought-images which were collected in different arrangements in volumes in both East and West Germany. The most complete collection of the parables and thoughtimages is a West German volume, which is the one I will cite from: Günter Kunert, Tagträume in Berlin und Andernorts: Kleine Prosa, Erzählungen, Aufsätze (Munich: Hanser, 1972). One of the thought-images I treat, “Haltungen zu einer Stadt I,” also appeared in the GDR collection, Kramen in Fächern: Parabeln, Geschichten, Merkmale (Berlin: Aufbau, 1968). It is outside the scope of this study to determine the specific ideological reasons that may or may not lie behind the selection of slightly different works for West and East German collections. The Aufbau collections, including Ortsangaben (Berlin: Aufbau, 1974), are as rich and critical as the Hanser collections in terms of politics and textual merit. This last volume merits further scholarly attention particularly as it contains illustrations by Kunert himself that make visual reference to taboo artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 209 is more metropolitan spirit in Leipzig and Dresden than in the capital. Making the scene even funnier is that Erp makes these claims in a conversation with his intern Kratsch, who was passed over for the full-time job that Fräulein Broder landed, and must now settle for a job in a provincial town: But since we’re on the subject of big cities, what do they really do for you, soberly considered? Couldn’t you feel [the big-city feeling] in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, or Rostock more than in this fragment of a city, in this third of a six-piecer that poses as a whole, in this ugly collection of locales that grew into each other with the hacked up remnant of a city center whose streets lead to nothing?68 The attempt to comfort Kratsch by making divided Berlin seem un-urban is an affirmation of interest in Berlin as a tragically flawed city: a montage of different neighborhoods whose streets and buildings mark the movements of local and world history. Berlin in the mid-to-late 1960s is a specifically post-war urban environment whose fragmentation, division, and dereliction make its buildings and neigbhorhoods thresholds to the stories of its past. Such stories are at issue when de Bruyn’s narrator misleadingly claims when Erp first comes to Fräulein Broder’s tenement neighborhood that, “in this chapter, only the conversation between Karl and Fräulein Broder is important and much space is taken up for it.”69 The conversation between the two is, of course, “important.” However, the intrusive narrator interrupts the story fifteen lines after the assertion of that importance to launch into a ten-page digression in which the building’s use history is described in detail. The narrator, as Erp stands on the threshold of Broder’s apartment, offers a sociological account of the historical processes, to which the physicality of the structure is itself a doorstep.70 The narrator first describes the place of Broder’s building in the urban environment: “an old rental house in Berlin-Mitte or, more exactly, in postal district 104 (previously N 4), thus in the area bordered to the south roughly by the Spree, to the east by Rosenthalerstraße and Brunnenstraße, to the west and 68 De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 27–8. 69 Ibid., 34. 70 An irony here is that Erp’s main research interest in the 1950s had been the study of cultures of reading, a line of inquiry whose methods “looked suspiciously like sociology (which back then was considered bourgeois).” De Bruyn, Buridans Esel, 75. De Bruyn’s interest in the sociology of literature was treated in Chapter 4.

210  Building Socialism north by the Wall.”71 This seemingly dry pinpointing of the building’s location reveals how mundane details such as postal district numbers change with changes in government and how the Wall reshapes understandings of Berlin’s central districts. Broder’s tenement also has an intimate connection to the history of Jewish Berlin. The narrator tells the story of Aaron Wallstein who came through Berlin’s Rosenthaler Tor on the same day as Moses Mendelssohn in 1743 and whose descendents occupied Fräulein Broder’s building until a neighbor reported on them in the late 1930s for leaving the house without the yellow stars marking them as Jews. Wilhelm Broder, Fräulein Broder’s father, who was born in 1900 and whose family had come from Poland to Berlin in the late nineteenth century, lost his job at the time as a result of his friendliness with the Wallstein family whose massive book collection had fed his obsession with Berlin’s history. Fräulein Broder herself has a constant reminder of the story of her building and its users, as her room overlooks the cemetery where Moses Mendelssohn is buried.72 Standing at Fräulein Broder’s door, Erp has no idea of the building’s history. He can compare it to literary models, but he is not privy to the specific stories, in Henselmann’s terms, the forms of “communication,” that have given the structure social meanings that are particular to those who dwell in it and that form part of broader intellectual and political developments. He thus does not have access to its architectural meanings in the sense developed by Benjamin in the Arcades, as seen in Chapter 1. In the Arcades, Benjamin saw obsolete buildings as the “blasting agent” that could demolish a complacent present. Under this model, buildings are “signals of true historical existence,” key to the re-emergence of historical agency. For de Bruyn, historical buildings are useful because they remind viewers of the contingency of a present that continually asserts its unconditionality. This lies not alone in the building itself or in the writing subject, but in the relationship between the two as agents in the creation, in the broad sense developed by Benjamin, but also by Henselmann, of the built environment. In the post-war period, though, the political potential of the past no longer centers on Benjamin’s nineteenth-century dreamers awakening to revolutionary consciousness. Instead, it is about intervening in an urban environment that helps viewers understand the Nazi crimes. Urban environments are for de Bruyn bits of evidence in a city, Berlin, whose main guise is as one of history’s most horrific crime scenes. His writing of Berlin is thus, as it was for Wolf in a more subjective way, a Lokaltermin for a reckoning with the past. The history 71 Ibid., 35. 72 Ibid., 34–43.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 211 of Broder’s building ends in the historic trauma of the Nazi past which drives a rift through its organic community, at the same time revealing that community’s previous harmony as a mere appearance. In the curious character of Fräulein Broder herself, de Bruyn creates an allegorical evocation of post-war Berlin as a patchwork city capable of producing citizens beholden neither to bureaucratic stasis nor to the proletariat of pre-war communist movments. Broder is thus a utopian figure. Her early life is defined by the city’s geography and social life, which from an early age she was eager to explore starting with the “neighborhood right around her with all its pensioners, day laborers, whores, pushers, newspaper vendors who at first just tolerated the new state (which they simply grew into) as they had all regimes previously: with head drawn in, sneaky caution, the wiliness necessary for survival.”73 The geography and class diversity of her explorations, increasingly erotic as she enters adolescence, expand as she matures: “school and FDJ friends were daughters of furniture store owners, specialist technicians, factory directors … she conducted romances in villas in Pankow, garden houses in Grünau, storefront apartments in Friedrichshain.”74 Fräulein Broder becomes an allegorical amalgam of the class textures and geographies that constitute the city of Berlin and that were increasingly the focus of Schmidt’s and Henselmann’s plea for diversity in the urban environment. Her sexual partners go nameless here as the reader’s main task is to imagine her lovers’ social types as indicated by the names of Berlin neighborhoods and of characteristic building types. Her erotic desire, following Urang’s argument, is for knowledge of the full complexity of the city she inhabits. The fact that de Bruyn never indicates the first name she was given at birth is a recognition on his part of her fundamental artificiality as a character. Neither a stand-in for authentic working-class subjectivity, nor solely the product of GDR education bureaucracies, her persona derives from Berlin itself as a canvas for aesthetic-sociological study. The result, literarily, is that she functions as an amalgam of the diversity of experience possible in gritty post-war Berlin and as a conduit for the knowledge that the city provides. Like de Bruyn, Kunert addresses the diversity of post-war Berlin in all its painful specificity. However, he more forcefully eschews idealism by treating the city’s buildings as raw and irreplaceable witnesses to history. He insists on the singularity of experience of the urban environment in its historical dimensions and portrays the city, in terms drawn from Plato’s Symposium, as an object of love that remains as inscrutable as human beings themselves. The result is a breathtaking 73 Ibid., 173. 74 Ibid., 173–4.

212  Building Socialism concentration of his prose language into aphoristic sentences pregnant with outrage but unspoiled by moralism. This formal development, adequate to the emotional dimensions of history as legible in the city, creates for the reader the sense of deep-sea diving into one’s own present to make the ordinary visible anew. Kunert’s various thoughtimages about Berlin are a radical example of the way the city as a montage of juxtapositions can be captured in montaged prose structure. Kunert sees buildings as analogous to human beings in the irreplaceability of their relationship to place and history. In the thought-image “Houses on the Spree” (c. 1970), he crafts what amounts to a eulogy for buildings scheduled for demolition: The stones speak to me. Though not all of them. But not all people are capable of expressing themselves. The gray pre-fab blocks, the fresh young bricks, say absolutely nothing to me, only those fragile from experience, loaded by existing, those beset, bemossed, overgrown by this life and that. Thus I stand before the wallwork of old Berlin houses, before the age-spots of missing plaster, streaky from water trickling down, still furnished with grenade shards and bullet holes, cleared and demolitionready on the inside since even in their stead the square concrete is to replace the unreplaceable: the signs of lived life. Expansive commiseration besets me before such stonework, and because they are treated as cavalierly as people made of flesh and blood.75 Kunert sees history in the materiality and use of old buildings and creates memorials to the stories they represent in a protest against state demolition efforts. The formal result is that he concentrates his prose into an iambic meter—as in the first two sentences, the end of the third, and then briefly in the second to last. Buildings become “signs of lived life”; the “flesh and blood” of demolished buildings and dead human beings is gone and Kunert’s prose is a matter-of-fact elegy of loss that “replaces” absent history by insisting on its irreplaceability. Architecture and its loss along with the juxtaposition of new and old materials shape Kunert’s turn to concentrated theoretical rumination and non-narrative genres. Kunert’s emotional and theoretical stance were shared by Henselmann. In the more prosaic language of the persuasive essay, he dryly points out in his “On the City in Socialism” (1972) that demolition programs should by no means be seen as an inherent part of socialist urbanism and that the tearing down of tenements should by no means be considered a popular social housing policy: 75 Kunert, Tagträume in Berlin und Andernorts, 147.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 213 Aside from the fact that no socialist revolution can begin with the demolition of all our old structures, one must have serious doubt about whether the replacement of the buildings in the Schönhauser Allee with residential highrises or the like will be greeted with resounding cheers. This is quite simply because buildings with which the life and fate of whole generations have been connected, without prejudice to their other qualities, belong, as an integral part, to the image of home.76 Henselmann uses the conservative-sounding word Heimatbild to describe the embeddeness of nineteenth-century urban fabric in Berlin’s collective consciousness.77 But the sentences nevertheless represent a continuation of the architect’s focus on the relationship between urban planning and communication: associative meanings can run deep and are difficult to intervene in. What separates Kunert from Henselmann is the willingness to give a central place to the materiality of structures as an integral part of their status as witnesses to history. In a thought-image laconically entitled “Brick,” he affirms that material as a symbol of the imperfection of human life. Bricks’ “visible lack of perfection touches the viewer, because of course he too suffers from the same lack.” The difference from one brick to the next works against a fetishism in which preconceived designs compensate for an inherent fragmentation in human nature. That fragmentation must be accepted in order to overcome the vicious circle of absolutism in which humanity has trapped itself—the fragmentation of the thought-image and the individuality and imperfection of bricks become parallel tokens of this productive acceptance: “Of this, the bricks speak in a brotherly way; buildings should be designed for them for no other use than their preservation and their eloquence: a walled refuge for an honorable product that in the course of five-thousand years of serving its function has reached a secret status as a paradigm.”78 Kunert reveals here the hidden meanings below

76 Hermann Henselmann, “Über die Stadt im Sozialismus,” in Hermann Henselmann: Gedanken, Ideen, Bauten, Projekte, ed. Wolfgang Heise and Bruno Flierl (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1978), 153. 77 Emily Pugh has shown how notions of Heimat played a role in the rhetoric of the West Berlin squatters’ movement. Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin, 207–15. Sylvia Fischer sees the conflict between critical and state concepts of Heimat as constitutive for GDR culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Sylvia Fischer, “Dass Hämmer und Herzen synchron erschallen”: Erkundungen zu Heimat in Literatur und Film der DDR der 50er und 60er Jahre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015). 78 Kunert, Tagträume in Berlin und Andernorts, 151.

214  Building Socialism diverse urban surfaces in order to assert the primacy of history as a means for ameliorating the present. In “Haltungen zu einer Stadt III” (Positions toward a City III, 1968), Kunert accords streets a politically productive agency; they must storm our consciousness with knowledge of the past. However, they remain reticent: “the streets do not yet dare to carry out their service … when at some point the boxes full of people open their gates, as though they wanted finally to bestow a little word of their wisdom with tame mouth, they close it, however, once more right before [speaking].”79 The mouth that must speak for them is Kunert’s as his thought-images become a form of architectural ventriloquism in which the material world is converted into language meant to reveal the legibility of historical cataclysms in the contrasts of the urban environment.80 Kunert’s resolute attention to materiality brings him back to buildings’ visual aspects. His “Lübeckerstr.,” a rumination on the Moabit apartment building in which Kurt Tucholsky lived in the 1920s, gives primacy to use as visible in and on the structure. However, in keeping with “Haltungen zu einer Stadt III,” he privileges the agency of users over architects: … the particularity of the work of architecture is also not created by the facade, its second empire ornament long gone, provided with new stucco that has already absorbed dirt and damp, in order not to stick out among the contented decay of the other facades. The particular is found in the house and in the street itself; it defied not just bombs but also the economic miracle, does not sparkle with chrome and glass and neon signs, but rather insists on the appearance of its long gone twenties: a bit cheap, a bit dirty, poor, unhurried, forgotten.81 The building’s interior and its street, the loss of its nineteenth-century ornament and the lack of a glitzy post-war redo all attest to the 79 Ibid., 150. 80 In a letter to me, Kunert indicated that Wolf Jobst Siedler’s, Elisabeth Niggemeyer’s, and Gina Angreß’s Berlin photo essay, Die gemordete Stadt (The Murdered City), was important to his consideration of the city in the mid- and late 1960s. The book deals with urban fabric destroyed by war and post-war planning schemes. It also attempts to informally catalog areas of the city in which buildings and older forms of social life have survived. It does so by juxtaposing 1960s photos of children playing in the streets and customers lining up at street vendors with quotations from nineteenth-century texts about Berlin’s unique urban vitality. Wolf Jobst Siedler, Elisabeth Niggemeyer, and Gina Angreß, Die gemordete Stadt (West Berlin: Herbig, 1964). 81 Ibid., 140.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 215 structure’s use and its status as a witness to history. That status allows Kunert to redefine the role of memorials in the post-war period, in this case of a tenement in West Berlin. He writes that Tucholsky’s house and its street begin to feel like a memorial that can remove “the opaque blindfold of the present over our eyes.”82 The political potential of old buildings lies, as it had for Benjamin, in their ability to work against the amnesiac tendencies of the present.83 And like Benjamin, Kunert uses the principles of agglomeration and montage to account for the juxtapositions of past and present in the urban environment out of which political meaning can be made. Kunert’s work is thus both internationally relevant and deelply socialist in a flexible way. In his thought-image “Exkursion in die Geschichte nebst Abschweifungen” (Excursion into History along with Digressions, 1971), the architecture of the village of Bernau becomes a jumpingoff point for affirming a view of Marxism in which voluntary human agency in history, and the singularity of each historical act, even in the comparatively narrow sphere of everyday life, take center stage: By establishing man as the subject of history, Marx freed him from the nightmare of eternal slavery: viewed thus, all past and contemporary history, all of their relics and projects, not naked necessity, but rather possibility: one among many. Viewed thus, the little place [Bernau] contains an abundance of life and the latency of the future. Viewed thus, the gap between the animated remnants and the viewer is reduced: the old houses with the washed out walls and beams torn through with long cracks, become the expression rather than the prison of their one time and current occupants.84 Key here is the use of the work Relikt; the latin relictus connotes having been forgotten, abandoned, or cast aside. The attempt to rediscover traces of human historical agency in the fading and cracks of old building facades is a valuable written labor that opens up possibilities for the use and understanding of these structures; for Kunert, a Marxist view of history does not see the dialectic between humans 82 Ibid., 143. 83 Kunert can also stand as an example of what Andreas Huyssen calls “twilight memories.” These are “generational memories on the wane due to the passing of time and the continual speed of technological modernization, and memories that reflect the twilight status of memory itself.” Andreas Huyssen, from the introduction to Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 84 Ibid., 166.

216  Building Socialism and the architecture they create for themselves as a continual self-reensnarement, but rather as an expression of human action that can narrow, if not bridge, the uncrossable threshold between the singularity of the present and the singularity of different pasts.

Living with Prefab High-Rises

The large-block and panel building methods (Großblockbau and Plattenbau) that became standard in East Germany after the industrialization of construction in the late 1950s were accorded symbolic value from their inception. Greg Castillo has shown how these new techniques and the buildings they yielded were understood as expressions of socialism in built form by enthusiastic technocrats even as cultural Stalinists took “rearguard action” against their plain facades into the early 1960s.85 As was shown in Chapter 1, many Modernist writers and thinkers had long tended to deride the artistic amibitions and economic reductivism of such structures and their makers. By the 1980s, such critiques had become quite standard in GDR literature, a foreshadowing of the continuation of the tourist apparatus of the Berlin Republic to treat high-rise settlements like Berlin-Marzahn, ironically enough, as expressions of socialism in built form, but, of course, with socialism as something seen negatively. In the 1960s, by contrast, Reimann bemoaned in her diary entries, letters, and her Franziska Linkerhand the isolation and alienation fostered by prefab cities.86 This was a position like that of reformist Modernists in the U.S. and Western Europe as characterized by architectural historian William J. R. Curtis: The characteristic types of the new [technological, materialist] economic order were box-like offices and housing slabs, in any event isolated objects surrounded by a wilderness of roads and parking—a sprawl which not only lacked urbanity but also destroyed the countryside. Little wonder that so many of the critical discourses of the period addressed the need to create a viable public realm, to combine the new with the pre-existing patterns of streets and squares, to draw upon the layers of memory and social custom inherent in particular places.87 85 See Greg Castillo, “East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Design Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie,” Kritika 9, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 747–68. 86 Reimann noted in letters that she kept certain key texts on her desk at all times while writing. These included Mitscherlich’s Unwirtlichkeit, Jacobs’s Death and Life, and Mumford’s The City in History. 87 William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1996), 549.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 217 Even in the neutral context of scholarly writing, the vitriol against the worst of mid-century architecture demands recourse to metaphorical language: parking and roads form a “wilderness”; offices and apartment buildings are “boxes.” As a representative of the critical discourses that Curtis describes here, Reimann shares in his vitriol and attends to the juxtaposition between bland East German city planning and potentially more humanist alternatives. The stakes of this juxtaposition are high for Franziska as she links possibilities for self-realization to urban form. Toward the middle of the novel, when she is settled in Neustadt, she puts an aerial photograph of the new town on the wall of the architecture office in which she works. Next to the photograph she posts a quotation: “The city is the most valuable invention of civilization, which, as a mediator of culture, is second only to language.”88 She publicly attributes the words to Marx, though, as she knows, they in fact come from Mumford’s The City in History. Her straight-laced boss, Schafheutlin, believing at first that the words are in fact Marx’s, is incensed at seeing a new East German city devalued by destructive irony. He becomes even more irate when he uncovers their true attribution. Franziska uses urbanism here as a vehicle for reinvigorating Marxism. Her boss even acknowledges the potential connection between Marxism and urban vitality: So he felt the shocking contradiction, the chasm between that which really is and that which should be, between the stupid lining up of blocks and the city advocated by Marx and Mumford that fulfills its function as a mediator of culture.89 The elision of Mumford’s critique of bottom-line urbanism with Marx’s concept of the role of the city reveals the extent to which Reimann wanted, like Henselmann and Schmidt, to recentralize everyday urban experience in socialism. For Mumford, properly functioning “neighborhood units” have an “individuality and charm” much different from the “diffused low-density mass” produced by developments planned at the scale of the automobile rather than the human being.90 Self-sufficient neighborhoods are scaled to pedestrians and contain mixed uses so that residents can walk or bike to work.91 This means too that neighborhoods contain an internal texture of different uses and 88 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 331. 89 Ibid., 332. 90 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961), 505. 91 Ibid.

218  Building Socialism that cities contain different neighborhoods with distinct characters. He thinks that the conditions of the historical city can be improved “without erecting the sterile, space-mangling high-rise slabs that now grimly parade, in both Europe and America, as the ultimate contribution of ‘modern’ architecture.”92 Reimann likewise uses her novel as a theoretical platform for investigating reformist alternatives to the high-rise tower. It is in its becoming such a platform that the novel begins to take on its increasingly fragmentary quality. Like Henselmann, Mumford sees the city as a medium for the realization of human goals through highly complex interactions of individuals and groups. Whereas Henselmann’s key term for these interactions was “communication,” Mumford, in an almost Expressionist word choice, tended to write of “energy”: The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. The positive functions of the city cannot be performed without creating new institutional arrangements, capable of coping with the vast energies modern man now commands: arrangements just as bold as those that originally transformed the overgrown village and its stronghold into the nucleated, highly organized city.93 Henselman’s “Typen und Eintönigkeit,” dealt with above, tends implicitly to treat socialism as a cipher for a hoped-for social and economic order that could arrange precisely those kinds of “energies” that Mumford writes of here to the end of the greatest possible fostering of human survival. Just as Reimann lamented to Schafheutlin the gap between the “stupid lining up of blocks” and a genuinely humane urbanism, Henselmann sees in standardized concrete housing blocks an authoritarian architecture of “decrees” and a willful limitation of possibilities for human expression. For the inhabitants of Reiman’s Neustadt/Hoyerswerda, such energies are sorely lacking. They live in a too-suddenly produced vision of urbanistic regularity that has more in common with models, photos, or drawings of architecture than with actual patterns of habitation: The lamps on whips masts shook from their skinny lizard heads a flood of cold green light, film light, that drowned out more tender half shadows and overemphasized everything angled and straight, house corners and compassed paths and created 92 Ibid., 511. 93 Ibid., 571.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 219

Figure 14  Bautzener Allee, main street of Hoyerswerda, 1965. A whip-mast street light is in the center foreground.

an artificial world, an atelier street right through the center of the monstrously blown up model of a city in plaster, glue, and paper mache.94 The city is likened here to a film set, a vision in an architect’s studio, and a blown-up architectural model made of provisional materials like plaster and paper mache, all spotlighted by whip-mast lights [Peitschenmasten], the characteristic curved metal street lights used on auto-centric roads after World War II (see Figure 14).95 Reimann sees the attempt to create large-scale cities from whole cloth in a short time period as a hubristic architectural bombardment that forecloses on possibilities for the development of an organic urbanism in which people feel attached to their cities. Such critiques surface and resurface throughout the course of the novel, often punctuating scenes of Neustadt’s increasing social dissolution. Later in the novel, Franziska, walking through the city after witnessing a bar fight, sees only a “labyrinth of concrete, anonymous streets and dwelling-silos for a planned and statistically graspable quantity of residents with their planned in, little researched needs, [a] city that meant nothing more to her than a photocopy of its planned 94 Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand, 150. 95 Siedler, Niggemeyer, and Angreß, in their Die gemordete Stadt, devote seven pages to the history of street lights, three of which are used for critiquing post-war whip-mast lighting. Siedler et al., Die gemordete Stadt, 34–41.

220  Building Socialism layout.”96 We recall from Chapter 1 Tret’iakov’s comparison of the Weißenhofsiedlung to a collection of children’s toys. Even a cursory inspection of illustrated popular journals and official government publications reveals that Ulbricht in particular enjoyed appearing in photographs of ambitious architectural models. A photo from the 1964 exhibition “Deutschland ist hier” on the continued development of East Berlin’s center between Alexanderplatz and the GDR’s government quarter shows Ulbricht leaning over an architectural model, pointing to the proposed television tower and, according to accounts, offering suggestions as to the best position for it in the cityscape.97 The 1965 Handbuch der DDR even shows a picture of Brezhnev before the same model, also pointing, surrounded by an attentive entourage.98 The model, as the realization of a predetermined vision for a better future, played into the state’s key metaphor of “building socialism.” Reimann here critically harnesses a comparison that was integral to state propaganda campaigns and neatly converts it into a critique of the deficiencies in GDR urban planning. The result is the increasingly montaged quality of a narrative interrupted by theoretical reflection on the juxtaposition between East German urbanism and more humane alternatives. There were prominent writers in the 1960s who saw new East German cities as expressions of socialist ideals. Erik Neutsch in his “Drei Tage unseres Lebens” (Three Days of Our Life, 1970) and Jan Koplowitz, Werner Bräunig, and others in their Städte machen Leute (1969) advocated for an urbanism quite close to official opinions on the role of new socialist cities.99 In so doing, they clung to a focus 96 Ibid., 238. 97 P. Müller, Symbolsuche, 297–8. 98 Handbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, ed. Deutsches Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1964), 520. Fondness for architectural models was one area where the selfaggrandizing pomposity of Modernist auteur architects like Le Corbusier overlapped with the megalomaniac authoritarianism of socialist powerbrokers. Architectural historians of Modernism have, for two generations now, handed down an image of Le Corbusier, pointer at the ready, standing before an architectural model of housing blocks for his ‘Ville Radieuse’. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, 324. 99 The historian of political culture, Albrecht Wiesener, singles out these two authors in an article on cultural perceptions of Halle-Neustadt and its construction in the 1960s. While not placing Koplowitz and Neutsch in literary-historical trajectories, Wiesener’s argument nevertheless brings insights relevant to my work. He sees Koplowitz’s Die Taktstraße (1969) as a testament to the discursive power of this particular city as a model of urban planning in the late 1960s and as an avenue for comparing the social practice of everyday life there with official representations of it. Wiesener also analyses

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 221 on the “production” of new cities’ architecture rather than on the actual patterns of habitation in those cities, patterns of increasing interest to the architects Henselmann and Schmidt. Koplowitz in his reportage on the building of Halle-Neustadt and Neutsch in his short story stubbornly refuse to recognize the problematic nature of the gap between architecture as a material piece of reality and the production of its meaning through use and discourse; as a result, their texts, like Baierl’s Frau Flinz, assert unequivocally that the material world is as they say it is. What Koplowitz and company in particular say the world is in their Städte machen Leute looks a lot like the pages of Deutsche Architektur around the same time. In addition, many of the aspects of GDR urban planning of which Reimann was most critical are lauded in the work. Whereas Reimann would lament Hoyerwerda’s resemblance to an overgrown architectural model, the writers of Städte machen Leute celebrated such connections: “Even here, the Republic’s most modern city will have its center; perhaps you are standing right at the moment on a twenty-two storey piece of open land. No clump of grass in the area that will experience the next decade. Here, stand where you will, you’ll be standing on lined land, dozens of drawings in pencil or ink.”100 It is presumed here not only that the reader wants to live in the “most modern city of the republic” but also that standing in a place to be reshaped in the image of a planner’s drawing is a particular honor. It is the deconstruction of this dubious honor that is one of the chief goals of Reimann’s novel.101 For the Städte machen Leute authors, by contrast, the egalitarian nature of Halle-Neustadt’s urban planning insulates it from the suspect diversity of Berlin’s urban tapestry. Werner Bräunig writes that “There are in Halle-Neustadt no better and worse districts, no privileged and disadvantaged, which in a certain context one could capitalize; among other things, the matter interests the newspaper of the “Wohnungsbaukombinat” in Halle, which was called “taktstraße.” In addition, he cites Neutsch’s “Drei Tage unseres Lebens” as an example of “overwhelming faith in progress” that is tempered slightly by some concern for social aspects of dwelling. Albrecht Wiesener, “Steinerne Verheißungen einer sozialistischen Zukunft? Der Bau Halle-Neustadts aus gesellschaftsgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” in Schönheit und Typenprojektierung: Der DDR-Städtebau im internationalen Kontext (Erkner bei Berlin: Leibniz-Institut für Regionalentwickulung und Strukturplanung, 2005), 229–31, 239, 252–3. 100 Jan Koplowitz et al., Städte machen Leute (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1969), 11. 101 As is well known, there were clear advantages that newly built housing often had over older stock in the GDR—foremost among them central heating and hot water from the tap. My goal here, though, is to highlight the various intellectual differences that crystallized around issues of urban planning and texture in the GDR of the 1960s, not to assess the merits of different forms of housing.

222  Building Socialism me precisely because of this.”102 In one of the more literarily interesting moments of the text (Bräunig was the best of the writers involved), there is nevertheless a tremendous willingness to gloss over class difference between city sections and between social groups themselves (the “grob schreiben” Bräunig mentions here implies that society as well as the city is, as a point of fact, classless). The “capitalization” he refers to is of the adjectives “privileged” and “disadvantaged,” which in the German text are in lower case, meaning that they function as adjectives for an implied repetition of the plural noun “districts.” To capitalize them would change their meaning to “privileged people” and “disadvantaged people,” thus adding the social dimension to the architectural and implying architecture’s boundedness to economic processes over time. What Bräunig lauds here, however, is the complete lack of historically derived texture in the new city—here in 1969, several years after the tide had turned internationally against this kind of planning. Much as Kultur im Heim was still fighting against the aesthetic it associated with early twentieth-century factory owners, the authors of Städte machen Leute are still combating the class differences wrought by the speculative extremes of nineteenth-century real estate barons, as though such extremes were still burningly current after twenty years of socialist authoritarianism. Bräunig even expresses frustration with Berlin precisely because of the diversity of its urban textures. For Volker Braun and Günter Kunert, the use of new architecture had revolutionary potential. For Braun, in his poem “Bericht der Erbauer der Stadt Hoywoy” (Report of the Builders of the City of Hoywoy, 1962), new architecture is a sublime and fearful measure of historical time. In ten four-line stanzas, Braun describes the building and habitation of Hoyerswerda through juxtapositions: high-flown Expressionist imagery against the small details of a gray and muddy everyday existence; and through a play with time: each stanza revisits the city at a different stage of its building or inhabitation reflecting on its status as an intervention in history.103 The first seven stanzas indeed render the difficulties of the construction process, but a temporal shift comes in stanza eight as Braun paradoxically uses the past tense to render Hoyerswerda’s future, a future in which “[streets] flew like 102 Koplowitz et al., Städte machen Leute, 14. 103 A line from stanza six is worth noting not because it furthers my argument, but because it contains a phrase that may have inspired the name of Brigitte Reimann’s title character. Reflecting in a way akin to Müller on the effects of the building efforts on the workers, Braun writes, “the stone stream concrete threw us down / into the land/ and the famous houses, we put soon with the left hand [mit der linken Hand] / together/ And the days became too short and our hand too big.” Braun, Provokation für mich, 57.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 223 small lines in the sand / away, no house / simply let us in, we stooped in the doorways: here are playing / children—perhaps—someone yet said.”104 The streets of the future city have been erased as by wind, but small, metaphorical houses are left that may, “perhaps,” serve as play places for children. If the Modernist buildings of the Weißenhofsiedlung for Tret’iakov, referred to in Chapter 1, had been like overgrown children’s toys unsuited to human dwelling, it is, for Braun, precisely in the new cities’ potential use through play that their unsettling remaking of everyday life can be dialectically converted into a new, better form of existence. In 1968, six years after the poem just analysed and ten years after Braun’s time in Hoyerswerda, he returned to that city and wrote a short first-person thought-image about his experience there, entitled “Die Leute von Hoywoy” (The People of Hoywoy). The highly imperfect new architecture of the city turns inhabitants into potential revolutionary agents and leads Braun to confront simplistic dualisms of new and old.105 Upon arrival in Hoyerswerda, Braun finds a populace unfamiliar to him. Puzzled, he goes to a bar and, after several glasses of bad beer, conjures ideas about the cause of his feeling so foreign in the city where he once worked and felt at home. One idea is that the city and its industrial districts were always treated provisionally, especially by workers: “thus they likely had moved on through the country, filled it, in constant light circling about housing blocks and industrial areas, without stopping.”106 Upon further inspection, the current residents of the city too appear only provisional in Hoyerswera: “Certainly there were still people here on the white concrete who looked a little bit like those others back then—but how long would they stay?”107 Slowly, the (inebriated) realization dawns on Braun that those laborers who had changed entire cityscapes may well have changed themselves: “Are they perhaps present here, and I didn’t recognize them? What do ten years do to a face! Hadn’t all of them already jumped out of their own skin several times? They are known for that! What does this time do

104 Ibid., 58. 105 Written at the start of Braun’s time as an independent writer in Berlin, the piece, part of a group of anecdotes about everyday life in the GDR written around the same time, represents a departure from the Schillerian idealism that had characterized Braun’s view of the changing built spaces of socialism in his play Die Kipper and in his prose of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including “Der Schlamm” (Mud, 1959) and “Der Hörsaal,” (The Lecture Hall, 1964), published with another prose piece as Das ungezwungene Leben Kasts (The Uncoerced Life of Kast) in 1972. 106 Braun, Im Querschnitt, 107. 107 Ibid.

224  Building Socialism to people?”108 Braun asks here a question about the qualitative nature of the change that workers’ labor building cities has brought about. Though there is a deceptive simplicity in his tone, the profundity of the final query is a recognition that a new city and a new person are not merely dualistic dialectical reactions to that which preceeded them. New qualities of built space and everyday human life emerge over time in ways that are surprising, multiplicitous, and in the politically pointed sense of the word, emergent.109 These are dilemmas that would preoccupy Braun into the early 1970s and shape his literary and theoretical work. The encounter with the mysterious possibility of discovering revolutionary life at Hoyerswerda anticipated his line of reasoning in one of his most philosophically sophisticated pieces, a 1973 lecture in Klagenfurt, “Über die Bauweise neuer Stücke” (On the Building Method of New Plays). Braun uses an architectural metaphor to explain his method of making theater from the time of his Kipper, 1962–5. Then, he tried to combine the “raw vaults of the open structure” inherited from Goethe with “the antiseptic walls of the closed structure,” the legacy of Schiller, in order to capture the newness of East Germany’s prefab architecture.110 Braun, writing of himself in the third person, asserts that this dualistic approach was also part of Brecht’s theater and that it was appropriate to the lived experience of the labor of building cities: “Indeed, without being too hard on the author, Kipper Bauch seems to me like a crossing of [Schiller’s] Robber Moor and [Goethe’s] Marquis Post—a crossing, as we in fact encounter it at certain street crossings of the big construction sites in a society that wrote much on its flags but had, in part, to make its way through the sands.”111 It was necessary, according to Braun, to do what Brecht had done, namely “to capture the open form in solid structures.”112 However, in an echo of the fundamental question about the qualitative nature of social change posed in his Hoyerswerda writings, Braun asserts here that treating the seemingly simple matter of “changing society” is no longer a question of the two-dimensionality of “the dramatics of the class struggle” but rather, following the theories of Robert Weimann, a “multidimensionality.” This multidimentionality 108 Ibid., 108. 109 My use of the word “quality” here refers again to Benjamin Robinson’s analysis of Franz Fühmann’s preoccupation with the qualitative nature of life under socialism and the question of his own ability to experience it. See Benjamin Robinson, The Skin of the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 110 Braun, Im Querschnitt, 324. 111 Ibid., 326. 112 Ibid. We think here too of Brecht’s vision for a communist picturesque.

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 225 “becomes appropriate to pieces that can be viewed as a multilayered total process, which can be associatively derived from the sequence of scenes, pieces, in which the processes are not simply doubled or pluralized, but rather have their total context become transparent.”113 Braun echoes here the language of complex systems theory which was received via cybernetic discourse in the GDR and, as Peter C. Caldwell has shown, was East Germany’s answer to the set of questions about process and social change that manifested themselves in capitalist industrial countries as Post-Modernism.114 In a similar way, Henselman represented the need for greater complexity in the understanding of architecture as a component of everyday life using a mathematical analogy. Calculus, rather than basic arithmetic, is needed to help alleviate the monotony fostered by new towns: “Man feels himself to be at home in his environment, his surroundings lose their monotony—and this is a basic principle of the architectonic mastery of space—only when disorder becomes possible within order. And here, we enter a territory that can be mastered by integrations and differentials not with the little one-plus-one of recipies.”115 The content of a socialist built world diverse and pluralistic enough to foster feelings of well-being requires not the banal listing of sums and figures, but rather the integrals and differentials of a mathematical system devoted to time: calculus as the study of change. The revolutionary content of socialist urban space is the social life of people over time who can use that space to move history forward. Braun closes his talk with a call for art to become “a form of reality,” a genuine component of revolution in the same measure as the process of construction itself.116 To capture this brand of revolution, Braun returns to architectural metaphor: The revolution, Marx said, must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. Insofar will the house [of dramatic structure] we beheld not become a house of the dead. 113 Ibid., 329. 114 See Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Though Braun is keen to assert the way complex systems theory, in its focus on “transparent” totalities, transcends Modernist dualism, there are degrees to which his formulation here still seems to echo classic modern dichotomies such as those Brecht developed in relation to architecture. The question of whether complex systems theory in the GDR in fact rehearsed rather than transcended modern dualisms is well beyond the scope of this project. 115 Henselmann, “Typen und Eintöngigkeit,” 152. 116 Braun, Im Querschnitt, 330.

226  Building Socialism And it will truly stand for society: I mean not merely as a house number, but rather as house, in which the possibilities of society are played out such that they become more favorable and more likely. So that they become their own content.117 The art of theater becomes reality by being the reality of everyday social life (“possibilities of society”) as led in a productive way in the spaces made for it, which in turn transcend their existence as intrusive, planned calculations (“house number”) and become socialist life. Braun’s metaphor actually fulfills the call of the theory he is devising here: it is not just an artful form devised to display something about the content of theater. Human social life as contributed to by theater can perhaps convert prefab residential districts into sites for the collective living of a socialist life. In a more cutting and ultimately more moving consideration of the integration of high-rise housing projects into socialist everyday life, Kunert muses in his thought-image “Spazierengehen” (Going for a Walk, 1972) on what cities lose and gain with the movements of time, specifically in the post-war context: Those who have never, between split open wall structures in their waste and filth, peered down into the telling, contradictory remnants of a dubious civilization, shivering and mourning at once, they will surely one day consider even a monotonous building-block district made of concrete the living body of a close relative, with whom one only just lives together by chance, a chance that familial relationships simply just have as part of their nature.118 Plattenbauten can become naturalized over time as the horrific and alluring ruinscapes of the immediate post-war period fade into memory and new, unpredictable forms of symbiosis emerge. Not only does Kunert’s view of the new spaces of Berlin reflect Henri Lefebvre’s idea that human agency can reassert itself on the seemingly anti-human template of modern concrete high-rises; it prefigures by a generation the sociological study of practices of everyday life in Plattenbau apartments across the Second World that would constitute a major branch of the history of socialism starting in the 1990s.119 Yet Kunert’s idea that 117 Ibid. 118 Kunert, Tagträume in Berlin und Andernorts, 138. 119 To name just two titles: Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (New York: Berg, 1999); Wohnkultur und Plattenbau: Beispiele aus Berlin und Budapest, ed. Kerstin Dörhöfer (Berlin: Reimer, 1994).

Literary Responses to East German Urbanism 227 people create the content of architecture has, as we saw in Chapter 1, roots in socialist thought that run as deep as Bertolt Brecht’s prose of the 1920s. The GDR literature of the 1960s represents a particularly urgent articulation of a set of modern problems that remain relevant even as the forces of economic globalization reshape cities across the world.

228

Conclusion

Building Socialism began with a simple intuition. I was walking from my apartment near Torstraße in Berlin to the apartment of a new acquaintance on the Mollstraße just north of Karl-Marx-Allee. As the nineteenth-century tenement district gave way to the 1960s mid-rise district, I said to myself, “East German writers must have written novels and plays about this.” I immersed myself in GDR literature and found a concentration of works from the late 1950s to the early 1970s dealing with architectural problems in a much more fundamental and experimental way than the Stalinist literature of East Germany’s early years and in a fresher way than the alternately caustic and elegaic 1980s literature of social and political stasis. But I found very little to quibble with in the abundant scholarship on the 1960s from the work of Bathrick and Silberman to that of Fehervary, Hell, and Emmerich: the architectural theme in East German literature would by no means totally rewrite our narrative of cultural production there. Yet, based on the emotional intensity and provocatively self-conscious quality of architectural passages in the works I was interested in, I had a hunch that there was a personal side to the story of architecture in East German literature that had been missed in more general treatments of the 1960s. Extensive archival research confirmed my hunch. Architecture in GDR literature would help us see the terms on which texts were produced in the East from a very different angle: that Heiner Müller studied urban planner Werner Hegemann and was thinking about materiality in terms of Ovid as early as the 1950s; that Reimann was attentive to French literature’s critiques of consumer culture and the objectification of everyday life; that Günter Kunert’s reception of Benjamin could have an urgent currency in terms of GDR planning and architectural theory; that the experimental realism of de Bruyn and Wolf could be clarified in terms of Mumford and Adorno. Thanks to the architectural analysis, we now see more clearly the extent to which East German literature was permeated by the sophisticated literary and philosophical Modernisms

230  Building Socialism of the twentieth century and the status of that literature as a minor high point. So, the story of architecture in East German literature is not one about the evolving interaction of a literary trope with the constraints of East German discourse.1 It is about the centrality of architecture as a driver of literary choices among a diverse group of individual authors, first in theater and later in prose. A chief contribution of this study, then, is the model it develops for the treatment of built space in literature. It has been shown, particularly in the cases of Müller and Reimann, the extent to which author-focused contexts, drawn from archival materials and personal libraries, can be used to reconstruct literary and theoretical positions that treat literary texts on their own terms, rather than on the terms of official cultural-political proclamations. Such specificity is crucial in the case of the studies of built space in which the authors, filmmakers, or artists under examination are not experts in the field of architecture. As amateurs with a contingent interest in architecture, writers like Müller and Reimann necessarily engaged in a somewhat idiosyncratic reception of ideas about built space. These idiosyncracies by no means make their treatment of architecture less germane to theoretical discussions of built space. Rather, the synthesis for Müller of concepts of history, Brechtian notions of the political status of the material world, and Kafka-esque metaphor versus Tret’iakovian operativity and for Reimann of Modernist architectural humanism and nineteenth-century literary techniques reveals the extent to which the representation of built space can become a prism for crystallizing broader questions about architectural and literary modernity. What is the value today of the 1960s East German version of this crystallization? For studies of post-Wende East German culture, understanding the stakes within which such key spaces as factories and tenements were lodged for canonical GDR authors might be a productive avenue for exploring what distinguishes post-Wende from pre-Wende GDR culture. One example of a post-Wende artistic project that has not yet attracted critical interest in the United States but that could well be analysed in light of Building Socialism’s findings is dostoprimetschtjelnosti (the German transliteration of the Russian word for “sights”), the title of an extended occupation by artists and philosophers of a high-rise housing tower slated for demolition in Berlin’s Marzahn district.2 The emotional dimensions of Plattenbau architecture 1 This differentiates Building Socialism from Urang’s Legal Tender, in which romance as a plot device is explored in terms of the ways in which it fails to comport with cultural norms. 2 See the project catalog, dostoprimetschtjelnosti, ed. Ole Mads Vevle (Berlin: Junius

Conclusion 231 and the visibility of history, key themes of Reimann, Kunert, and de Bruyn, resurface as artists engage with the potentially productive reclamation, not of the capitalist tenements of the nineteenth century, but the socialist high-rises of the mid-to-late twentieth. This foregrounding of marginalized cultures and places, certainly part of what some of the authors treated in Building Socialism were doing in their works from the 1960s, is also a component of the postWende discourses on the GDR as a cultural political legacy.3 Indeed, in taking built space as a conceptual armature, Building Socialism productively complicates notions of “space” that have played a key role in cultural studies over the past fifteen years by revealing the extent to which disciplinary discussions among architects and planners overlap with the more interdisciplinary cultural theories of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja. This focus also, in turn, overlaps with some terms of the global cities discourse, particularly in its politicized guise as a mode of locating resistance to the expansion of capital.4 One claim that might be worth further investigation is the degree to which the 1960s discussion of modernity and the city in East Germany is a precursor for today’s critical discourses on the capitalist mega-city. The megalopolises of China, like European cities of the 1960s, are certainly beset by mass demolition programs, peripheral housing projects, and fears of cultural standardization.5 Such comparative work could extend the international Verlag, 2003). 3 This is particularly the case where scholars have focused with a critical eye on cultural change and, later, gentrification in East Berlin neighborhoods. Such scholarship began shortly after the Wende. See, for example, Matthias Rau and Danica Shaw, “New Models of Local Cultural Projects: The Example of Prenzlauer Berg,” in Cultural Transformations in the New Germany: American and German Perspectives, ed. Friederike Eigler and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 180–90. 4 Andreas Huyssen offers by far the most lucid overview of the terms of this discourse in the introduction to Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 126. Huyssen critiques simplistic notions of Modernitätskritik as they have entered into global left-wing discourses in the United States and abroad as a simple rejection of a Western modernity seen as a threatening global hegemon. By contrast, for Huyssen, “Another definition of global culture … seems more promising and perhaps even cosmopolitan in a new way in that it embraces and maintains a dialectical tension between the universal and the particular rather than opting for one against the other” (4). That such dialectical tensions drove the spatial imaginaries of East German literature in the 1960s is evidenced in precisely the dual definition of architecture that Müller mobilized for understanding modernity and the balance that Wolf sought between self and built environment. That the GDR literature of the 1960s was not simply modernitätskritisch is part of its achievement. 5 New work presented at the most recent German Studies Association conference

232  Building Socialism dimension of the debates on architecture that shaped GDR literature’s treatment of it and in turn define more precisely what is unique about that literature. It should also be asked whether the Post-Structuralist, anti-establishment elán of the 1970s and 1980s is really the most appropriate model for theorizing the marginalization of potentially critical culture in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism. It might be argued that the dialectic of simultaneous complicity and critique, characteristic of the early work of Kunert, Müller, and Wolf, is precisely what shapes the politics of literature today. Despite its international relevance, East German literature in the 1960s does have a national component. While all the authors engaged literary traditions from abroad (Reimann with France; Müller with the Soviet Union; Wolf with England), familiarity with the German literary canon informs their architectural insights. Müller borrowed Benn’s concrete and reduced characterization of the injured human body in his representation of bodily perils on the construction site. For De Bruyn, Fontane’s late work was a model for dealing with urban space. In Wolf’s “Unter den Linden,” one can sense E. T. A. Hoffmann’s disorienting dream logic. In addition, there are moments where the architectural theme is embedded in issues particular to Germany. Kunert and Müller, whose works see post-war buildings in light of the Holocaust, are the most prominent examples in this respect. Also for Müller, problems of mid-century architecture in East Germany are traceable in part to Lenin’s obsession with technological progress: that obsession and its ascendance in international socialism after 1917 undermined a specifically German socialism traceable to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In addition, especially for the early Morgner and to a lesser degree for Reimann, the German novels of the Popular Front period, recently studied in depth by Hunter Bivens, remain highly influential.6 Most importantly, as has been stressed, authors were responding revealed that tensions in the engagement with such problems remains productively contested ground in the discipline. Nina Berman, in a talk entitled “Against Modernity: Thoughts on the Usefulness of a Concept for Transnational and Global Studies,” suggested that radically new frameworks are necessary for the study, among other things, of spatial imaginaries in the global age. By contrast, a GSA seminar, “GDR Historiography—What’s Next?,” advanced the idea that understanding East Germany as partaking of a larger twentiethcentury “modernity” could help scholars “to locate the GDR within broader developments of the 20th century—such as industrialization, mechanization, rationalization or bureaucratization.” See the GSA Conference program for 2015. 6 Hunter Bivens, Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933–1945 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

Conclusion 233 to East Germany’s version of modern architecture as it appeared in its local context in Berlin, Hoyerswerda, and Halle-Neustadt. The starting point of writers’ architectural analyses was the changing built environment of East Germany; international relevance grew from that starting point. As a result, the question of internationalism in East German literature is connected to the degree to which East German buildings resembled international counterparts. For the purposes of East German writers, the housing projects of the Bronx, the new neighborhoods of Berlin, and the council flats of Britain looked and were planned enough alike that many GDR architectural passages could be applied to similar architecture abroad. In addition, Jane Jacobs’s and Lewis Mumford’s complaints about architectural standardization resonated strongly with Henselmann. Such similarities meant for GDR writers that a context-specific line of thinking could become part of an international discussion. In this overlap of the national and international intentions, East Germany was somewhat different from its Warsaw Pact allies. While Soviet architecture shot ahead of East German architecture in the 1980s in the reception of international trends such as Post-Modernism, in the 1960s, East Germany was closer architecturally to the West in two ways. The first is the avowed internationalism of Bruno Flierl and the editorial team at Deutsche Architektur in the 1961–4 period. While Soviet architects looked back to the constructivist heritage of their own country, East German architects such as Henselmann and Paulick took in the whole panoply of Western architectural movements. The second link to the West is that, while East Germany had a housing crunch in the period in question, it was nowhere near as thoroughgoing as the crisis in Soviet cities. Albrecht Martiny in his extraordinary study of housing in the Soviet Union asserts that Alexander Mitscherlich’s criticism of architectural modernity in his Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte had no relevance whatsoever to new buildings in Moscow. Failed housing redistribution in the early years of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s focus on heavy industry led to the development of the kommunalka system and its mandated sharing of living space.7 As a result, the average Soviet citizen in 1953 had 7 square meters of living space. In West Germany, the average was 23 square meters per person; in East Germany 19 square meters per person. In the subsequent twenty-five years, the ratios improved significantly in each of the three countries, but they remained in proportion to one another into the 1970s.8 The result is that 7 Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Bauarbeiterschaft, Architektur und Wohnverhältnisse im sozialen Wandel (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1983), 20–4. 8 Ralf Mairose, Wohnungs-und Bodenpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland:

234  Building Socialism West Germany and other Western countries were a much closer point of residential comparison for East Germany than was the Soviet Union. It is thus that Mitscherlich’s critique of architectural banality and modern bureaucracy could find resonance in the GDR in a way it did not in the Soviet Union where the shortage of living space remained, as Martiny has pointed out, the focus of architectural critique in literature.9 Did East German literature’s architectural critique have an impact in the GDR? Direct evidence on this score is hard to come by. However, it surely cannot be a coincidence that it was in the years following the publication of de Bruyn’s and Reimann’s novels and Kunert’s prose pieces that the preservation of historic neighborhoods became a component of official city planning. As mentioned in Chapter 5, East Germany pursued in the 1970s a quite aggressive policy of establishing pedestrian zones in inner cities. Many of Berlin’s inner-city neighborhoods began to be redeveloped through renovation and infill rather than demolition. Inasmuch as the urban novels of the 1960s represented a public reaction against the GDR’s uninspired Modernist planning, they fit into Bathrick’s scheme of literature as a substitute public sphere. Henselmann’s 1967 claim that Berliners along the Schönhauser Allee liked their tenements, a claim implicitly present in de Bruyn’s Buridans Esel, buttresses this connection between the preoccupations of writers and the demands of the public. It should be noted, though, that Henselmann saw his exchange with Reimann as a one-way street. Much to her chagrin, he was probably right—she never voiced her criticism of the Haus des Lehrers complex to him. In any case, like many architects in the GDR, Henselmann remained as beholden to Kevin Lynch’s idea of the “city image” as to Jacobs’s (and Reimann’s) focus on the social life of the street. This would explain why the Haus des Lehrers and also the university tower in Leipzig have visual force as markers of urban space but lack the gritty urban vitality that Reimann wanted. In addition, while it is unsurprising that stalwart old Modernists like Henselmann and young, thoughtful ones like Flierl would criticize bottom-line planning dogma, it is worth noting that less broad-minded cultural officials also saw the shortcomings of new architecture. Akademie der Künste committee meetings pertaining to the visits of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Mexican communist muralist, to East Germany reveal that a group of mostly party-line art historians and artists were quite painfully aware of public resentments against the new towns, particularly HalleNeustadt.10 Writers are not mentioned in the meetings, but it is certainly Kostenmiete, Städtebaurecht Wohnungseigentum durch Mietkauf (Opladen: Leske Verlag, 1975), 16. 9 Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, 19–20. 10 Akademie der Künste, executive meeting minutes from July 2, 1970, O 511, Fiche 3.

Conclusion 235 possible that works like de Bruyn’s and Kunert’s had contributed to the sense that the failings of East German architecture were an open secret. In any case, the degree to which architecture played such a central structural and theoretical role in GDR literature must be counted as one of its unique qualities. The omnipresence of Aufbau as a central trope of East German social reality and debate is reflected in the depth to which it exerted its force as an agent in the writing process. For Heiner Müller, even as early as the late 1950s, the fast-changing built environment was integral both to an understanding of the violence modernity does to the bodies of its subjects and to the development of a metaphorics through which the playwright later came to conceive of the Shoah. For Helmut Baierl, Manfred Wekwerth, and Karl von Appen, built space was a powerful but static medium whose forms could systematically convey the emotional dimensions of political allegiance and draw a constrictive historiographical net around the terms of that allegiance. For Braun, de Bruyn, Kunert, Reimann, and the Wolfs, sustained reflection on the historical status and use of houses and cities became a chief instigator of more dissonant prose structures in which theoretical and sociological reflection impinged on narrative continuity and turned realist works into an experimental rumination on surface and depth. The focus on architecture reveals that East German literature of the 1960s must be seen afresh, not as a parochialized curiosity of a bygone culture, but as a significant achievement of modern European literature.

236

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Index

abstraction 111, 199–200 in literature 131 Achelis, Thomas 80 Adorno, Theodor 3–4, 19, 26, 30–2, 41–2, 134 n.9, 160, 174, 176, 229 Ästhetische Theorie 7, 45–7 ‘Funktionalismus heute’ 45–6 Minima Moralia, 136, 163–4 agit-prop 31 Alberti, Leon Battista 17–18, 183, n.8 alienation 14, 18 n.32, 19–21, 92, 101, 161, 171, 174, 186, 197, 207, 216 Anahuacalli 59, 159–60 analogy 53 n.69, 132, 225 Anders, Günther 136, 152–4 Ankunftsliteratur see Arrival Literature Antonioni, Michelangelo 16 n.25 Appen, Karl von 104–14, 118–19, 124–7, 235 architectural theory 4, n.3, 7–8 ancient 4 n.4, 16–20 in East Germany 21–5, 134, 137–41, 181–5, 229 Modernist see Gropius, Walter; Neutra, Richard Renaissance see Alberti, Leon Battista architecture 3–9, 12–25, 65–70, 193

n.30, 194, 204, 208, 212, 225 n.114, 227, 229–35 baroque 8, 104, 110, 142, 198, 202 Bauhaus see Bauhaus East German 14, 21–5, 33 137–41, 181–5, 179, 229, 233 and façade composition 4, 19, 21, 23 n.46, 25, 45 n.52, 59, 168, 172–4, 182, 193 n.30, 200, 202, 214, 216 industrial 83–4, 185–96 models of, 28, 50–1, 220 Modernist 7, 30, 32, 42, 44–7, 50, 57–8, 98, 138, 158, 174, 183 nineteenth century 42–3, 106–12, 168–77, 208–16 pre-fabricated 41 n.34, 46 n.52, 126, 193 n.30, 212, 216–26 Stalinist 14, 36–8, 40, 78, 95, 137, 151, 200–1 Arrival Literature 12 artistic autonomy 5 n.4, 46, 66 Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) 53–4, 105 n.5 Auschwitz see Prinzip Auschwitz automobiles see cars axiality 28, 179, 201–2, 206–7 Bacon, Edmund 182 Baierl, Helmut 6, 10, 120–2, 124, 127

250 Index Frau Flinz 8–9, 26–7, 103–8, 114–18 Bakhtin, M. M. 36 n.18 Balzac, Honoré de 42 Bathrick, David 3 n.1, 4 n.2, 10, 31–3, 234 Bauhaus 33–4, 44, 46, 58, 78, 104 n.3, 112, 136, 144, 149, 183 Baukunst 134, 188 n.19 see also architecture Behne, Adolf 22 n.45, 30 n.4, 34 Benjamin, Walter 3–8, 9 n.11, 10, 13, 19–20, 26, 30–3, 35, 48, 54–5, 72 n.20, 77, 86–7, 133 n.7, 152, 181, 186, 200, 204, 207–8, 215, 229 Arcades 41–5, 210 Berliner Kindheit um 1900, 169–71, 178 Bentzien, Hans 125 Berlin 8, 15 n.23, 16 n.24, 28, 34, 40, 45, 54–5, 66–70, 72, 74, 78, 83, 94, 101–2, 122, 131, 168, 174 n.111, 179–80, 196–7, 208–16 Alexanderplatz 37, 125 n.113, 206, 220 Friedrichshagen 178 Friedrichshain 101, 211 Karl-Marx-Allee 37–8, 40, 78, 95, 137, 151, 200 Lütten-Klein 182 Hans Loch District 182 market halls 201, 202 n.54 Marzahn 216, 230 Pankow 175, 211 Prenzlauer Berg 101, 140, 201 Scheunenviertel 150 Treptow 83, 122 Unter den Linden 184, 201–8 West 213 n.77, 215 Berlin Wall 12, 95–7, 127, 131, 185 Berman, Marshall 32

Biermann, Wolf 16 n.24, 116 n.38, 174 n.111 biology 99–100, 139, 147, 163, 218 Bitterfelder Weg 12, 54, 79–80, 124–5, 131, 184–5 Bivens, Hunter 145, 232 Bloch, Ernst 14, 19 n.24, 26, 28, 32, 42 n.37, 58, 60, 166, 168, 174 Erbschaft dieser Zeit 46 n.52, 137, 169, 177, 185–9, 190, 193 n.30, 196 Prinzip Hoffnung 161–2 Bobrowski, Johannes 27, 133, 137, 177–8 bourgeoisie 3, 19 n.34, 33, 38, 40, 42 n.37, 50, 57, 75, 103–4, 106–8, 110–11, 113, 116, 120, 125, 141, 143–4, 146, 152, 168–70, 173, 176, 186, 198 Braun, Volker 27–8, 40–1, 185, 222–6, 235 Die Kipper, 15, 224 poetry by 193–6, 204 n.57 Bräunig, Werner 16, 220–2 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 13, 15, 18, 19 n.34, 23, 25–6, 29–33, 46 n.52, 48, 50, 52, 66, 76, 80 n.42, 82, 84, 86 n.61, 95, 102, 109, 120–2, 126, 140–1, 143, 157, 183, 200, 224–5, 230 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny 23, 139 n.21 journals 38–41, 227 poetry 36–8 short stories 34–6 Breuer, Marcel 76 brick 61, 75, 158, 212–13 Bruyn, Günter de 13–14, 16, 25, 27–8, 41, 45, 102, 153 n.56, 182–4, 229, 231–2, 234–5 Buridans Esel 132–3, 136–7, 141, 142 n.31, 150–3, 166–8, 174 n.111, 175–8, 196–8, 208–11 and library science 152

Index 251 and sociology 209 n.70 built environment 4–7, 9, 17 n.27, 20–2, 23 n.46, 24 n.50, 25, 27, 30, 40, 54, 68, 75, 78, 94, 99, 105, 120, 127, 131, 133, 134 n.10, 135, 137, 139–40, 145, 153, 158, 163, 165, 178, 210, 233, 235 see also architecture bureaucracy 74, 97, 114, 116–17, 145–6, 234 Campanella, Tomaso 85 capitalism 23, 25, 30, 33, 35, 38, 41–2, 59, 62, 86. 108, 121, 158, 173, 175, 185–6, 196, 232 caricature 40, 114, 120 cars 99, 124, 129, 197, 217 Cheever, John 197 n.39 childbirth 100–1, 136, 153, 155, 160, 162–6 see also home birth cinema 10, 13, 15 n.23, 16 n.25, 19, 61, 133, 180, 192, 202 n.54, 219 Claudius, Eduard 15, 77–80, 121 commodification 36 concrete 15, 26, 43, 49–50, 55, 68–9, 78, 86–94, 96, 101, 122, 155, 165, 173, 192, 194, 196, 212, 218–19, 222 n.103, 223, 226 construction 5, 8, 10, 14, 17, 26, 40, 43, 49, 159, 222 and the body 89–95 in East Germany 11 n.19, 67–72, 74, 82, 85–6, 95–7, 100–2, 121, 179, 185–96, 216, 224–5, 232 in the Soviet Union 37, 52, 83–4 in the Weimar Republic 49, 51, 83 Constructivism 53, 113, 233 consumer culture 13, 34–5, 41, 104, 149–50, 158, 229 Curtis, William J. R. 216

death 58–9, 93–4, 136, 153, 155, 157, 160–7 demolition 8–9, 11, 27, 62, 179–81, 198–9, 212–13, 230–1, 234 Denkbild see thought image description 7–8, 54–62, 75, 132, 136, 145, 149, 176, 178, 180, 186, 189–94, 202, 204 design 5–8, 18, 20–8, 33, 43, 50, 56, 58, 66, 99, 104–6, 108, 110, 112–16, 120, 124–5, 134, 138, 140, 146, 149, 158, 165, 183–8 Deutsche Architektur 24, 137 n.17, 221, 233 dialectical thinking 3, 10, 17, 28, 31, 37, 40, 42–54, 65–70, 94 n.91, 100, 107, 121, 126, 132–3, 160, 166 n.86, 167, 178, 185, 215, 223–4, 231 n.4, 232 Dickens, Charles 9, 132–3, 137, 142, 167 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 69 East Germany 3, 5–6, 8–9, 14, 16, 21, 29, 45, 47, 96, 106, 121, 125, 127, 135, 200, 202 n.54, 208, 216, 225, 229, 232–5 see also German Democratic Republic ecology see natural environment Eichendorff, Joseph 19 ekphrasis 27, 62 see also description 27 Eliot, T. S. 91 Emmerich, Wolfgang 229 Engels, Friedrich 19 everyday life 4–6, 11–13, 18–19, 21, 26, 35, 40, 41 n.36, 49, 57, 60, 62, 66, 79, 80 n.42, 83, 97–100, 106, 136, 142, 144–6, 153, 160, 168, 175, 185, 215, 220 n.99, 223, 225–6, 229 see also street life Exner, Hermann 138, 143

252 Index Expressionism 19, 59–60, 62, 158, 175, 180, 186, 192, 196, 218, 222 fashion 20, 34–5, 43–5, 149–50, 200, 202 Federal Republic of Germany 98 n. 99, 99 see also West Germany Fehervary, Helen 29 n.1, 31 n.6, 80 n.40, 85 n.58, 89 n.71, 229 Fellini, Federico 15 n.23, 16 n.25 fetish 18 n.32, 20, 29, 33, 50, 148, 156, 213 film see cinema flaneur 42–3 Flierl, Bruno 23, 137 n.17, 138 n.20, 140, 188, 223, 234 Fontane, Theodor 9, 133, 137, 140, 154, 166–8, 232 Fore, Devin 49, 52 n.69, 83, 86 formalism 46 n.52, 52 Foucault, Michel 16, 18, 21, 85 n.58, 231 Frankfurt School 3 n.2, 4 n.3, 18, 30 n.3, 32, 41, 46 n.52, 57, 135 see also Adorno, Theodor; Benjamin Walter; Bloch, Ernst; Marcuse, Herbert Frederick the Great 72 n.20 Freud, Sigmund 181 Fühmann, Franz 14 n.22, 41 n.36, 224 n.109 functionalism 26, 30 n.4, 34–5, 45–6, 46 n.52, 148, 198 Garbe, Hans 67, 70–1, 77, 79 Geiẞler, Rolf 135–6 gentrification 201, 231 n.3 geometry 38–9, 46 n.52, 78, 154, 207 German Democratic Republic 5 n.7, 9 n.11, 10, 11 n.19, 13, 27, 38, 70, 75–6, 108 n.7, 114, 117, 120–4, 145–6, 211, 220,

223 n.105, 225, 229–35 see also East Germany Giedion, Siegfried 5, 43–5, 87, 138 n.20, 139 Ginzburg, Moshei 51 Gladkov, Fyodor 54–5 glass 42 n.37, 57–8, 62, 158–63, 214 Granin, Daniil 192, 193 n.29 Greene, Graham 207 Gropius, Walter 3, 5, 22–4, 42, 46–7, 139, 145–6, 153 n.56, 165, 168–9, 178 Groẞbaustelle see construction grotesque 25, 30, 33–7, 40, 44, 107 Hager, Kurt 185 n.12 Halle-Neustadt 68 n.9, 131 n.1, 201, 220–1, 233–4 Handelsorganisation (HO) 67–76 Hauptmann, Elisabeth 33–5 Haus des Lehrers 137, 179, 234 Hegemann, Werner 72–4, 94, 229 Henselmann, Hermann 3–7, 13, 15 n.23, 20–5, 33, 37, 66–9, 94 n.91, 98–9, 132–42, 146–7, 153, 157, 161, 168, 174 n.111, 179–83, 188, 193, 197–202, 206, 210–13, 217–18, 221, 225, 233–4 Heynen, Hilde 30 n.3, 32–3 high-rise housing 41 n.34, 46 n.52, 140, 193 n.30, 216–28, 230–1 historiography 20, 105, 114 history 7, 17, 25, 32, 43, 67, 69–70, 84–5, 105, 120–1, 133–7, 141, 166–7, 225–6, 230–1 of Berlin 208–16 of interior furnishings 168–77 of the working class 6, 28, 143–4, 195 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 19, 232 Holocaust 13, 68–9, 84–7, 94, 232 see also Shoah home birth 164–5 see also childbirth

Index 253 hospitals 163–6 Hoyerswerda 12, 144, 147–8, 150, 174, 179, 188, 193, 218–19, 222–4, 233 Huyssen, Andreas 161, 184 n.11, 215 n.83, 231 n.4 irony 53, 142, 165, 174–7, 217 Jacobs, Jane 13, 98, 150 n.48, 184, 199–200, 216, 233–4 Jakobs, Karl-Heinz 6, 28, 62, 180, 185–93 Jay, Martin 4 n.3, 18 n.32 Jugendstil 104, 108–9 Jutzi, Piel 61 Kafka, Franz 9, 13, 69, 96–7, 131, 135, 203, 230 Kant, Hermann 105 kitsch 112–13, 116 n.38, 134, 144, 147, 149, 198 Kluge, Alexander 8, 27, 68, 80–2, 84, 92, 133–4, 140, 145, 154, 165–7, 181, 184 kommunalka 233 Koplowitz, Jan 185, 220–2 Korsch, Karl 76, 84, 143 Kracauer, Siegfried 9, 35, 133, 180, 192, 196–8 Kruschchev, Nikita 37 Kühne, Lothar 134 Kultur im Heim 104–6, 108–9, 112–17, 134, 138, 143, 146–8, 165, 222 Kunert, Günter 6, 8–10, 13–16, 25–8, 40–1, 45, 54, 69, 72 n.20, 94, 102, 222, 229, 231–2, 234–5 Berlin thought images 179–85, 208–16, 226 ‘Betonformen’ 84–9 labor 20–1, 36–7, 42, 48, 68–70,

76–81, 83–6, 92–5, 134, 153, 156, 176, 187, 191–5, 198, 215, 223–4 Lang, Fritz 19 language 4, 6–7, 12, 15, 17, 27–8, 36, 88, 91, 127, 133 n.7, 160–5, 178, 196, 202, 212, 214 bureaucratic 71–5 materialist 67–76 metaphoric see metaphor Le Corbusier 5, 22 n.45, 24, 30 n.4, 42, 46, 50–1, 138 n.20, 145 n.39, 174 n.110, 220 n.98 Lefebvre, Henri 16–18, 69, 100, 226, 231 Leipzig 76, 137, 179, 209, 234 Liebknecht, Karl 232 Lem, Stalinlaw 156 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 40, 94 n.91, 106, 122–4, 232 Levittown 142, 146 see also single-family homes; suburbanization Lewitzsky, Hans 138, 143 library science 151 literary experimentation 9–10, 13, 21, 48, 53, 102, 132, 135, 150, 196, 229, 235 see also Modernism Lokaltermin 28, 203–4, 208, 210 Loos, Adolf 46 Ludwigshafen 28, 185–7, 190 Lukacs, György 60, 70, 75–6, 135, 166 Luxemburg, Rosa 232 Lynch, Kevin 182–3, 234 Lyon, John 16–17 machine stormers 156 Marchwitza, Hans 15 Marcuse, Herbert 20, 69, 84, Marxism, Western see Frankfurt School

254 Index Marx, Karl 19–21, 84, 192, 215, 217, 225–6 Maschinenstürmer see machine stormers Mayakovsky, Vladimir 25, 53, 71 Melnikov, Konstantin 51 metaphor 6, 15, 26, 40, 44, 49, 54, 67–101, 126–7, 132, 156, 160, 180, 192, 203, 217, 220, 223–6, 230, 235 McKay, Marina 132–3 Mendelsohn, Erich 59 Mendelssohn, Moses 210 midwifery see home birth Mietskaserne see tenement housing mining 57–61, 121, 185, 193–5 Mitscherlich, Alexander 15 n.23, 46 n.52, 98, 134 n.9, 136, 138, 140, 163, 200, 216n. 86, 233–4 Modernism 3–11, 13, 22–4, 28, 29–35, 38, 40–1, 43, 50, 58–9, 110, 112, 116, 134, 136, 141, 146, 149, 174, 229 Modernitätskritik 231 n.4 see also modernity, criticism of modernity 6–17, 21, 26–7, 41–7, 58, 60, 68–9, 76, 80–7, 91–3, 95–8, 100–2, 105, 114, 132, 136, 149 criticism of 3 n.2, 54, 153–68, 177, 180, 186, 193, 196, 230–3, 235 definition of 29–30 paradoxes of 66, 80–7 montage 8, 27, 41–3, 49, 89, 132–5, 141, 157, 180–5, 207–12, 215, 220 monumentality 36 n.22, 94 n.91, 160, 204 Morgner, Irmtraud 8–10, 16, 27–8, 131–2, 137, 141–4, 181–4, 196, 198, 232 Moscow 22, 33, 36–7, 40, 48, 52, 83, 93 n.88, 95, 96 n.4, 233

Müller, Heiner 5–6, 8–10, 12–15, 19–20, 23, 25–6, 29 n.1, 40–1, 45, 47, 53–4, 103, 114, 120, 124, 126, 144, 163, 192, 222 n.103, 229–32, 235 Der Bau 65–70, 89–102 concept of architecture 65–7 and Kunert 69, 84–9 Der Lohndrücker 65–77 and metaphor 65–70, 67–101 and Ovid 92–3 and the Prinzip Auschwitz see Prinzip Auschwitz Mumford, Lewis 13, 136, 139 n.21, 153–55, 163–5, 176, 216 n.86, 217–18, 229, 233 Münchener Neuste Nachrichten 34 narration 6, 12, 141–2, 202 digression in 26–7, 131–7, 145–6, 149–50, 152, 154, 156, 179–85, 212, 235 first person 34, 144, 157, 223 third person 144, 206 of working class context 54–64 natural environment 158–62, 186–7, 191–2, 195–6 Nazi Germany 86–8, 91, 196, 210–1 see also Holocaust; Shoah; Third Reich Neue Sachlichkeit 193 n.30 see also New Objectivity Neues Bauen 30, 34, 41, 43, 46 n.52, 158 see also architecture, Modernist; Gropius, Walter; Le Corbusier; Neutra, Richard Neutra, Richard 5, 13, 20, 22–4, 134 n.9, 136, 138–40, 142, 148–50, 155, 165, 168–71, 176–8 Neutsch, Erik 6, 14–5, 28 Spur der Steine 62, 67, 89, 180, 184–5, 188–95, 220–1

Index 255 New Objectivity 180, 186, 192–3 see also Neue Sachlichkeit New York City 156, 199 see also Jacobs, Jane noise 124, 173, 189, 194 novel of diversity 8, 27, 133, 145–6, 154, 177, 181, 184 obsolescence 45, 152, 176 Offenbach, Jacques 111 operative writing 18, 26, 31, 47–54, 77–84 organicism 24, 39–41, 99, 101, 146, 155, 161, 163, 211, 219 ornament 14, 19 n.34, 24, 26, 30, 38, 42–4, 46, 52, 58–9, 78, 104, 108, 110–16, 134, 143, 147–9, 155, 162, 165, 168, 171–2, 193 n.30, 200, 214 Ovid (Publius Ovidus Naso) 32, 92–3, 162–3, 229 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 143, 192 Palitzsch, Peter 104, 108 Paris 5, 30, 35, 41–2, 45, 111, 161, 172–3 Paulick, Richard 179, 188 n.19, 200, 233 People’s Own Companies 25, 91 Perec, Georges 13, 136, 149–52 photography 48 physiognomy 43, 144 physiology 44, 134, 140, 155, 197 Picasso, Pablo 111, 126 picturesque 26, 30, 33–4, 38–40, 183, 224 n.112 Piscator, Erwin 125 planning, boulevard 179, 200 see also axiality Plattenbau see architecture, prefabricated; high-rise housing political economy 19, 138 Pop Art 126

positivism 52, 75–6 Post-Modernism 184, 225, 233 Prinzip Auschwitz 26, 68–9, 84–5, 93–100 proletariat 50, 55, 60, 86 n.61, 174, 186, 190, 211 see also working class proletkult 105 n.5 psychology 22 n.45, 37, 98 n.98, 98 n.99, 134–40, 144–6, 150 n.48, 183 n.8, 193 public transit 196–7 Pugh, Emily 111 n.21, 134 n.10, 140, 213 n.77 Rabelais, François 35–6 Raddatz, Fritz 85, 87, 91, 99 RAPP see Association of Proletarian Writers realism 26, 31, 54–63, 75–6, 111, 133–4, 153, 167, 169, 229 see also socialist realism Reimann, Brigitte 6, 8–9, 13–16, 22, 25, 27–8, 45, 102, 177, 179–85, 186, 194, 196 correspondence 170 Franziska Linkerhand 40, 47, 54, 62, 132–3, 136, 139, 141–2, 145–56, 163–9, 172–4, 198–200, 216–22 and Hermann Henselmann 98 n.99, 137, 183, 217–18, 221 and Jane Jacobs 199–200, 216, 233–4 and Lewis Mumford 163–5, 217–18 Reinhardt, Max 125 revolution 6–8, 13, 19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30–3, 44–55, 65–71, 74, 76–7, 94 n.91, 97, 100–2, 108, 112, 114, 116, 125–6, 144–53, 175, 177, 181, 210, 213, 222–5

256 Index Robinson, Benjamin 14 n.22, 41 n.36, 224 n.109 satire 26, 35, 72 n.20, 145, 176 Scheerbart, Paul 158 Schmidt, Hans 4 n.4, 182–5, 193, 198–9, 211, 217, 221 Schnitzler, Arthur 135 Schwarze Pumpe lignite facility 68, 70, 77, 179–80, 188, 193 Scientific-Technological Revolution 8, 31–2, 40, 54, 104 n.3, 114–29, 175 sculpture 19, 101 n.106 Second International 84, 143 Seghers, Anna 7, 10, 15, 18, 26, 29 n.1, 31, 33, 58–60, 72, 89 n.71, 143, 158–9, 195, 204 Die Rettung 57–8, 60–2, 185–6 ‘Werkstattbesuch’ 54–7 Selmanagic, Selman 104 n.3, 112, 116 n.38 set design 53 n.69, 67, 76, 103–5, 109–14, 118 n.41 Shoah 69, 84–7, 235 see also Holocaust Siedler, Wolf Jobst 15 n.23, 179, 214 n.80, 219 n.95 single family homes 38, 142–7 see also Levittown; suburbanization Sinn und Form 69 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 234 socialism 14–15, 29, 41 n.36, 52, 86 n.61, 87, 96–8, 101, 151, 160–1, 207, 212–26, 232 and science, 9, 40, 62, 70, 76, 81, 95, 105–6, 114, 116–27, 143 Soviet 38, 53–4 socialist realism 53–4, 75–6, 79 n.37, 105 n.5, 111, 126, 131 Socialist Unity Party (SED) 9, 11–12, 31, 41 n.36, 47, 95, 102, 105–6, 116 n.38, 120–4,

143–4, 165, 172, 175, 176 n.116, 185, 189 social science 17 n. 27, 134–7, 181 see also library science; psychology; sociology sociology 80, 98 n.98, 134–40, 209 n.70 see also social science Soja, Edward 16, 231 Soviet Union 26, 30, 31, 38, 51, 53–4, 71, 79, 108, 110, 232–4 space agricultural 118–19 and the body 84–95 built see architecture; built environment carceral 95–8 in cultural studies 9 n.11, 16–17 expropriation of 114–7, 170 grotesque 25, 30, 33–7, 40, 44, 107 medical see hospitals picturesque 26, 30, 33–4, 38–40, 183, 224 n.112 Raumgesaltung 22 Sitte, Camillo 39 Stalin, Joseph 52–4, 110, 134, 233 stalinist culture 14–6, 24, 51–4, 67–79, 110–13, 185, 229 Stalinallee see Karl-Marx-Allee standardization 39, 91, 141, 145, 182, 198, 218, 231, 233 Steiner, Rudolf 59–60 stone 36, 58–62, 68, 74–5, 86, 88–9, 91–4, 100, 116, 142, 159–3, 206, 212, 222 n.103 storytelling see narration street life 14, 62, 98–102, 196–201, 211 see also Jacobs, Jane suburbanization 23, 27, 145, 150, 175 see also Levittown; single-family homes; villas Surrealism 10, 41, 77, 126, 208 n.67 systems theory 40, 183 n.9, 225

Index 257 Taut, Bruno 50 technocracy 40, 45, 47, 51–2, 109 n.12, 122, 125, 141, 144, 163, 166, 198 technology 45, 61, 65, 68, 87, 92, 100, 127, 136 n.14, 154–6, 193 n.29 technophilia 40, 44, 48, 52, 76, 193 n.30 television 152–4, 174, 176 tenement housing 27, 29, 38, 41, 44–5, 55, 61, 74, 143 n.35, 150, 168, 172–77, 201, 209–16, 229–31, 234 Theater der Zeit 125 Third Reich 68–9, 86–8, 109 see also Holocaust; Nazi Germany; Shoah thought image 9, 27–8, 40, 45, 54, 69, 86, 133, 177–8, 208–16, 223–4, 226–7 Tret’iakov, Sergei 7, 18, 26, 30–3, 67, 71, 75, 79, 89 n.72, 118, 124, 220, 223, 230 Menschen eines Scheiterhaufens 47–54 Tucholsky, Kurt 214–15 Ulbricht, Walter 8, 27, 32, 75, 104–9, 112, 116 n.38, 220 Urang, John 41 n.36, 142 n.31, 174 n.111, 189, 211 Urban, Florian 140, 183 n.8, 200–1 use value 20, 46 n.52, 72, 84, 101 utilitas 20 utopia 10, 60, 77, 85–7, 157–62, 211 VEBs see People’s Own Companies Vexierbilder 181 Vielfältigkeitsroman see novel of diversity

villas 27, 116, 168–70, 211 see also single-family homes; suburbanization Vitruvius 4 n.4, 17–18, 22 n.45 Weimann, Robert 64, 81, 224–5 Weimar Republic 13 n.21, 32, 35, 83, 176 Weiskopf, F. C. 69, 82–3, 93 n.88 Weiẞenhofsiedlung 35 n.15, 49–51, 220, 223 Wekwerth, Manfred 104–9, 118, 121, 124, 235 Wende 100, 230–1 West Germany 24, 30 n. 4, 78–9, 164, 208 n. 67, 233–4 see also Federal Republic of Germany Wiens, Paul 40 n.32 Wohnkultur 27, 136, 141–2, 186 Wolf, Christa 6, 8–11, 13–14, 16, 25, 27–8, 41, 62, 102, 132–3, 137, 141, 169–70, 174, 180–1, 229, 231 n.4, 232, 235 Nachdenken über Christa T. 153, 156–63 ‘Unter den Linden’ 47, 184, 201–8 Wolf, Friedrich 48, 50–1 Wolf, Gerhard 9, 27, 177–8, 235 working class 6, 14, 19, 33, 36–40, 48, 60–2, 78, 83, 109–10, 113, 115–16, 121, 174 n.111, 204, 211 Zimmermann, Peter 11, 105, 185 n.13 Zola, Emil 137, 168–9, 172–3 Zweck 46, 113, 155 see also functionalism