Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun's Unvollendete Geschichte
Abstract
One aspect of the Cold War’s legacy has slipped from collective memory: the distinctly
socialist arguments against the regimes of the East, for instance the GDR.Volker Braun’s
1977 novella Unvollendete Geschichte provides an instructive example of the current
invisibility of such socialist arguments. In the West, Unvollendete Geschichte has
been read as a straightforward condemnation of an authoritarian state that penalizes
individuals on illegitimate grounds. Yet Braun is a committed socialist and criticizes
the state not for its violation of the individual’s integrity, but for the suppression
of conflict internal to the collective. A historically sensitive reading reveals that
Braun seeks to expose the (East German) state as a distorted manifestation of social
collaboration, in line with a radical socialist tradition.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6389Citation
Norberg, Jakob (2010). Disappearing Socialism: Volker Braun's Unvollendete Geschichte. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/6389.Collections
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Jakob Norberg
Professor of German Studies
Jakob Norberg’s research explores conceptions of community in German thought and literature.
His first book, Sociability and Its Enemies (Northwestern UP 2014), examines the search
for non-authoritarian forms of collective life after the end of the Second World War
and focuses on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Jürgen Habermas.
The second book, The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge
UP 2022), reveals how Jacob an

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