The Skin of the System : On Germany's Socialist Modernity

The Skin of the System objects to the idea that there is only one modernity—that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all? To approach this question, Robinson turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fühmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism. Fühmann's own serial loyalties to Hitler and Stalin inform his existential meditations on change and difference. By placing Fühmann's politically alert and intensely personal literary inventions in the context of an inquiry into radical social rupture, The Skin of the System wrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as antimodern ideological follies. "The Skin of the System objects to the idea that there is only one modernity - that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all?" "To approach this question, Robinson turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fuhmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism. Fuhmann's own serial loyalties to Hitler and Stalin inform his existential meditations on change and difference. By placing Fuhmann's politically alert and intensely personal literary inventions in the context of an inquiry into radical social rupture, The Skin of the System wrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as antimodern ideological follies."--BOOK JACKET This book objects to the idea that there is only one modernity - that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all? To approach this question, the book turns to the writer Franz Fühmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism Introduction : on socialist vacation -- Utopia and actuality: what is to be done with really existing socialism? -- Other systems: mud, mana, money -- The skin of the system and the DIN of the system: a poetics of sovereignty and system -- Diabolical transformations: a necessary comrade -- Tertium non datur: the systems erotics of socialism -- Camps, laws, and plans: the socialist camp -- Revolutionary laws: emergence and emergency -- Plans, leaps, heaps: the measure of the human -- The DIN of the system: the devil's due