“What Might Have Been”: The GDR as Speculative Utopia at the Post-Wende Volksbühne

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Acknowledgments V
3. Contents VII
4. Introduction: Socialism’s Pasts and Futurities 1
5. Foreword: Marica Bodrožić’s Poetic Reason in a Time of Cast-Iron Ideas 19
6. Part I: Memories of Unrealized Futures in the Extended Wende Period
7. Ruins of the GDR: Multimedial Aesthetics and Visions of Collapse in Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (1990) 29
8. “What Might Have Been”: The GDR as Speculative Utopia at the Post-Wende Volksbühne 51
9. Return from the Future: Ingo Schulze’s Open-Ended Wende Narratives 75
10. Part II: Memories of Unrealized Futures in the New Millennium
11. Post-Socialist Historiographies: Visual Art in Eastern Germany 30 Years after the GDR 101
12. From Hollywood to Hoyerswerda: Reclaiming East German (Film) History in Andreas Dresen’s Gundermann 125
13. Postsocialist Melancholy: The Highs and Lows of Terézia Mora’s Darius-Kopp Trilogy 149
14. Part III: The Europeanization of Memories of the Future
15. A Continent at Dusk or Dawn? The Multi-Author play Ein europäisches Abendmahl as Transcultural Reflection on European Identity 175
16. Recollecting Fragments, Rethinking the Future: Saša Stanišić’s Assemblages of a Transnational Europe 197
17. Challenging Collective Memory and Identities after Sarajevo: The Imaginative Resource of Individual Memory in Marica Bodrožić’s Work 231
18. About the Authors 251
19. Index 253