The Privatization of Community: The Legacy of Collectivism in the Post-Socialist Literature of Eastern Germany

Abstract

The socialist system in the GDR sought to integrate all citizens into a social collective and to promote collective identity. With the collapse of the socialist system and the absorption of the former GDR into the FRG, citizens were confronted with the challenge to adapt to the entirely different conditions of a free market economy. This paper investigates the ways in which the literature of the post-unification period registers the disorientation created by the loss of collective identity and seeks to re-imagine community after the collapse of socialism. Using Zygmunt Bauman's and Anthony Giddens's social theory of modernity as a frame, the paper notes the themes of isolation, commodification, and the breakdown of human relationships in post-1990 works by Hensel, Königsdorf, Maron, Gröschner, Sparschuh, and Schulze, and identifies these as constituting a critique of 'liquid modernity'. It then looks at the exploration of post-socialist forms of community in Burmeister's Unter dem Namen Norma (1994).