Neubau Atmospheres
East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
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).
Press 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
> From the same author:
Entertaining German Culture (2023)
Contemporary Transnational Television and Film
Dir. Stephan Ehrig, Benjamin Schaper and Elizabeth Ward
> On a related topic:
Screening Art (2022)
Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema
by Seán Allan
Re-Imagining DEFA (2016)
East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts
Dir. Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
Hollywood Behind the Wall (2005)
The Cinema of East Germany
The Triumph of the Ordinary (2002)
Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989
Cinema of Collaboration (2022)
DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe
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