Title: Post-fascist fantasies
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: German literature, History and criticism, Fascism and literature, In literature, Psychoanalysis and literature, German literature, history and criticism, 20th century, Germany (east), history, Psychoanalysis, history
Places: Germany (East)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PT3705 .H4 1997