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.
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