Legal tender : love and legitimacy in the East German cultural imagination /

This book is important not only for the new perspective it offers (East German socialist society analyzed through its love stories), but also for the clarity of Urang's presentation. Many recent books on the former GDR are dense and nearly unreadable; by contrast, this study is uniformly precise and enlightening. Urang (presently, Reed College) enables one to see more brightly what one had already seen clearly. Exploring the connections between the precepts of romantic love and those of the nation's life as a whole, the author argues that romantic love is autarkic and marriage is its opposite: it articulates social order. He studies texts and films that have love as their theme, peering deeply into multiple aspects of practicing socialism in its East German manifestation. In doing so, Urang demonstrates why the GDR was unable to maintain its ideological system, which was intended to establish the ideals of justice, equality, and full development of the human being. The book is comparable to Julia Hell's Post-Fascist Fantasies (CH, Apr'98, 35-4377) and Benjamin Robinson's The Skin of the System (CH, Jul'10, 47-6122), in that all cover some of same material and all analyze East Germany's political economy through the prism of cultural production. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. C. Conard University of Dayton