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

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

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Urang, John Griffith, 1975-
Imprint:	Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press : Cornell University Library, 2010.
Description:	1 online resource (x, 224 pages) : illustrations
Language:	English
Series:	Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)
Subject:	Romance fiction, German -- Germany (East) -- History and criticism. German fiction -- Germany (East) -- History and criticism. Romance films -- Germany (East) -- History. Love in literature. Love in motion pictures. Love -- Social aspects -- Germany (East) Civilization. German fiction. Love in literature. Love in motion pictures. Love -- Social aspects. Romance fiction, German. Romance films. Germany (East) -- Civilization. Germany (East) Criticism, interpretation, etc. History.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11283165

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780801460067 0801460069 9780801476532 0801476534
Digital file characteristics:	text file PDF
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index. In English. Print version record.
Summary:	At first glance, romance seems an improbable angle from which to write a cultural history of the German Democratic Republic. By most accounts the GDR was among the most dour and disciplined of socialist states, so devoted to the rigors of Stalinist aesthetics that the notion of an East German romantic comedy was more likely to generate punch lines than lines at the box office. But in fact, as John Urang shows in Legal Tender, love was freighted as a privileged site for the negotiation and reorganization of a surprising array of issues in East German public culture between 1949 and 1989. Through close readings of a diverse selection of films and novels from the former GDR, Urang offers an eye-opening account of the ideological stakes of love stories in East German culture. Throughout its forty-year existence the East German state was plagued with an ongoing problem of legitimacy. The love story's unique and unpredictable mix of stabilizing and subversive effects gave it a peculiar status in the cultural sphere. Urang shows how love stories could mediate the problem of social stratification, providing a language with which to discuss the experience of class antagonism without undermining the Party's legitimacy. But for the Party there was danger in borrowing legitimacy from the romantic plot: the love story's destabilizing influences of desire and drive could just as easily disrupt as reconcile. A unique contribution to German studies, Legal Tender offers remarkable insights into the uses and capacities of romance in modern Western culture.
Other form:	Print version: Urang, John Griffith, 1975- Legal tender. Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press : Cornell University Library, 2010
Standard no.:	10.7591/9780801460067

Table of Contents:

Introduction : Eros and exchange
Wares of love : socialist romance and the commodity
Love, labor, loss : modes of romance in the East German novel of arrival
Corrective affinities : love, class, and the propagation of socialism
W(h)ither Eros? : gender trouble in the GDR, 1975/1989
Eye contact : surveillance, perversion, and the last days of the GDR
Coda : a chameleon wedding.