"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...

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past.

Several contributors...

Examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. This book argues that these socialist realist fictions were in fact complex fictions, sharing the theme of opposition to fascism. It is of interest to literary critics and historians of German literature.

Hell shows how the Third Reich was inspired by the Roman Empire--but, weirdly, more by its ruins than its heights, seeing in them a mark of its greatness and lasting legacy.