Professor Bivens examines socialist literature in Germany, 1918 to 1989, through a discussion of narrative, ideology, and the built environment. Grounding the structures of feeling and narrative topoi central to East German literature in the proletarian experience of classical modernity, he moves from the factories and tenements of the Weimar Republic to the socialist cities and peoples’ enterprises of the GDR and back to the contested spaces of the “globalizing” Berlin Republic.
Hunter Bivens is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.