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Neubau Atmospheres: East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture

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Neubau Atmospheres

East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture

Stephan Ehrig

296 pages, 20 ills., bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-179-7 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (October 2025)

eISBN 978-1-83695-182-7 eBook Not Yet Published


View CartYour country: - edit Recommend to your LibraryAvailable in GOBI®

Reviews

“This […] is an impressive piece of scholarship that promises to be the standard study on East German architecture and its depiction in literature and DEFA film. This is a consummately researched work that demonstrates a level of expertise when it comes to socialist architectural theory, and film and literary analysis.” • Jason Doerre, Trinity College

“This is an original and readable study, one that combines deep knowledge of socio-cultural developments with political and ideological contexts in the GDR to examine a range of East German texts and films which either thematize the socialist city or in which the built environment plays a significant role.” • Nick Hodgin, Cardiff University

Description

The artistic potential modern, urban housing (“Neubau”) offered to writers and directors in East Germany from the 1960s to 1980s remains underexplored. Neubau Atmospheres seeks to bridge that gap by providing an incisive analysis of East German cinematic, literary, and architectural case studies, highlighting how the modernist housing of the GDR provided a potent vehicle for mediating the emotional and social experience of its denizens. Considering how these cinematic and literary representations focalized ideas of class, gender, and age, author Stephan Ehrig makes a compelling case for viewing this engagement with the urban environment as a cultural genre in its own right.

Stephan Ehrig is a Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to East German cultural production pre- and post-1990, as well as on nineteenth to twenty-first-century literature, theatre and film. He is the author of Der dialektische Kleist (Transcript, 2018) and the co-editor (with Marcel Thomas and David Zell) of The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (Peter Lang, 2018), and (with Benjamin Schaper and Elizabeth Ward) of Entertaining German Culture: Contemporary Transnational Television and Film (Berghahn Books, 2023).

Subject: Film and Television StudiesLiterary StudiesHistory: 20th Century to Present
Area: Germany


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