Examining the development of German Communist novels from the late Weimar Republic through the early literature of the German Democratic Republic, my dissertation aims at understanding what these novels have to tell us about the structures of feeling of the twentieth century German workers' movement. Thus, the major focus of my dissertation is to explicate, historically and socially, the affective language of these novels. Echoing Ernst Bloch, my title suggests the utopian potentials embedded in the daily life of the working class, the latent collective horizon concealed beneath capitalist modernity, and the emancipatory promises of socialism, with its claims for solidarity, mutual aid, and self-development. At the same time, following Fredric Jameson's observation that every utopian discourse is to some degree dependent on the particular historical traumas of the group from which it emerges, I will focus on how this attempt, as it unfolds in the narratives of German Communism, embeds this utopian horizon in the failures, traumas, and disasters with which the building of socialism was inextricably entangled in the fraught period between 1918 to 1990. This concretely utopian representational schema is one that struggles to contain the traumas inscribed within it. The socialist literary tradition, formerly conceived of as a heroic continuity in East German literary critical discourse, is ruptured at its outset by historical trauma. The structures of feeling that emerge from these novels are based in the proletarian experience of modernity derived from the political defeats and the economic and social desperation of the Weimar Republic, as well as from the catastrophic experience of fascism and exile. The discussion of Brigitte Reimann's work demonstrates the long shadow that writers socialized in the struggles of the Weimar Republic cast over the GDR, with their mythologized saga of exile and return. In the postwar period, the GDR is explicitly figured in its literature as the redemption of the proletarian anti-Heimat of the Weimar Republic, as a socialist homeland, based on collective labor and mutual dependence. At the same time, narratives the GDR as a socialist homeland are repeatedly breached by the eruption of historical trauma.
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