We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
PRODUCING A FUTURE, COMMEMORATING A PAST: JAN FAKTOR AND THE AVANTGARDES.
- Authors
Horakova, Anna
- Abstract
Scholarship has often ascribed to the third generation of East German writers associated with the Prenzlauer Berg scene (1979-89) a monolithic attitude of dissociation from the 'really existing socialist state'. The present study reevaluates Prenzlauer Berg literary production in the light of its engagement with the transnational aesthetic and political projects of the avantgardes from before and after the Second World War, which continued to be thematised in the literature and culture of unified Germany after the fall of the Wall. A continuous engagement with the avantgardes can be discerned in two texts by the erstwhile Prenzlauer Berg poet and contemporary novelist Jan Faktor: first, in the serial poem 'Georgs Sorgen um die Zukunft' (1982), and second, in the novel Georgs Sorgen um die Vergangenheit (2010). The poem, I argue, criticises the advanced state of ideological decay in the GDR in the 1980s but also generates possibilities for an aesthetic renewal. The post-'Wende' novel narrates the history of state-sponsored socialism in Czechoslovakia from a transnational standpoint that fosters the formation of an entangled past among countries of the former Eastern bloc. The novel's reflection on the disintegration of architectural projects once meant to organise life for a socialist future, however, commemorates the utopian spirit of the Russian Constructivist avantgarde and its productivist aesthetic.
- Subjects
FAKTOR, Jan; GEORGS Sorgen um die Vergangenheit (Book); GEORGS Sorgen um die Zukunft (Poem); AVANT-garde (Arts); COMMUNISM in literature; EXPERIMENTAL fiction; EXPERIMENTAL poetry
- Publication
German Life & Letters, 2015, Vol 68, Issue 2, p284
- ISSN
0016-8777
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1111/glal.12081