Author: Hell, Julia
Title: Post-fascist Fantasies : Psychoanalysis, History and the Literature of East Germany
Description: Durham [NC], Duke University Press, 1997. orig.wrappers. 23x15cm, x,368 pp, PAPERBACK.. Minor rubbing. An ink mark to top page-edge. VG. ¶ Postfascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Other critics of this genre 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 opposition to fascism, which made antifascism the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed both by Slavoj Zizek's work on the communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell concentrates on works written by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement in the first part of the book. In part two, she strives in particular to understand the ways in which the writing of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, is engaged in this reconstruction of symbolic power. By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about postfascist body and postfascist voice that suffuse Wolf's (and others') texts, Hell radically reconceptualizes the author's notion of subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of GDR culture, Hell's psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from that country's dominant ideological narrative..." - Publisher's description.

Keywords: German Literary History, East Germany, Literature, Psychoanalysis, Fascism, Criticism, Psychoanalytic, D.D.R., Slavoj Zizek, Christa Wolf