the Skin of System: On Germany's Socialist Modernity

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, wrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as antimodern ideological follies.