Post-fascist fantasies
Subtitle: psychoanalysis, history, and the literature of East Germany
By: Julia Hell.
Series: Post-contemporary interventions
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Durham [N.C.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 368
Subjects: German literature -- Germany (East) -- History and criticism.; German literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Psychoanalysis and literature -- Germany (East); Fascism and literature -- Germany (East); Germany (East) -- In literature.
Description: Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of Communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions sharing the theme of antifascism, the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic.

Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek's work on the Communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement. She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, in the GDR's effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-359) and index.