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This chapter examines the work, biography, and institutional commitments of Franz Fühmann, including his experience reading Georg Trakl as a fascist Wehrmacht soldier in the 1940s, his antifascist re-education in prison camp, and his desperate fight against his own sarcasm and self-destructive rage in the face of East Germany's growing institutional absurdity in the 1970s and 1980s. It views Fühmann not only as both a part of socialism to be explained, but also as a singularly telling explicator of socialist phenomena. The chapter places Fühmann's work into a broader context of literary modernism and provides an overview of his oeuvre, with an emphasis on his travel journal Twenty-two Days, or Half a Lifetime. It also explores the sequence of ruptures in Fühmann's selfhood based on his highly conceptualized perception of the challenge presented by an existential demand for transformation to core subjective needs for boundary and identity.

In the early 1970s, critical socialists such as Franz Fühmann and Christa Wolf had felt optimistic that the Socialist Unity Party (SED) dictatorship in East Germany would finally give way to a mature era in which there would be “no taboos in the realm of art and literature.” However, the hardline revision of the criminal code in 1979 was anything but a mature piece of normative reflection on what the content of socialist justice could be. Instead, it demonstrated the sharpening strategic considerations of a system that seemed incapable of feeling secure in its sovereignty. This chapter shows that the promised new law of socialist order in East Germany remains stubbornly suspended between the emergence of socialism and its catastrophic state of emergency. This suspension is evident in Fühmann's correspondence around the time of several aggressive legal actions against East German writers in the mid-1970s.

In the highly wrought context of postwar Europe, Georg Lukács, who had earlier rejected any form of “yielding to fate” (Schicksalsergebenheit), declared a great “turn of fate” (Schicksalswende) and said: “Every German stands—utterly dramatically—at the intersection of most fateful decisions.” In the following four decades of East Germany, Lukács's Schicksalswende proved to be less a decisive turn away from the Third Reich's notorious univers concentrationnaire than a twist of fate concentrating fascism, liberalism, and socialism into a sustained experiment in rearticulating the political differentiations that emerged after the war. This chapter describes three institutional realms of camps, laws, and plans and how they correspond to three competing world orders in modernity: fascism, liberalism, and socialism. All three realms mark historical stations in Franz Fühmann's biography and conceptual stations in socialist transformation.

This chapter examines socialist ontology by focusing on East German literature—in particular, the life and work of the socialist author Franz Fühmann. It discusses the contrast between indexical pointing and symbolic mediation, presenting the examples of Fühmann and the most famous East German literary figure, Christa Wolf. Fühmann and Wolf represent what the chapter calls the “skin of the system,” referring to a system's being both an intact whole and a vulnerable body, and the “din of the system,” which indicates both a system's physical norms (a pun on DIN, or German Industrial Norms) and their susceptibility to the noise of infinite regression. The chapter considers an important aspect of Fühmann's poetics to illustrate a related theoretical term, sovereignty, which it subsequently turns back onto the poetics of real socialism. It demonstrates how Fühmann's depiction of socialism's encounter with antagonistic social forms is expressed in the poetry and philosophy of erotic desire.

This chapter examines Franz Fühmann's Muses to understand the poetics of transformation whose task is to ascertain the true difference a difference makes, rather than to ascertain just any difference. Fühmann's concern is not just transformation, but transformation for the better—in fact, for the best. A poetics of supercession—a socialist poetics—finds itself only beyond itself, where the ethereal Muses engage the workaday situation of those who enunciate their songs. Fühmann's Muses show themselves in just such a material engagement in “Marsyas,” a short story that illustrates a realist poetics that is also a socialist poetics. The chapter considers a physical erotics that is not conceived as an individual bodily experience, but as a systems erotics of social transformation. This systems erotics is the source of the central figures behind Fühmann's experience of socialism, above all the principle of a present and forceful difference: the logical law of the excluded middle, tertium non datur.

This chapter explores some of the key themes from Franz Fühmann's work, highlighting the landmarks of socialism from the vantage point of a brief trip to the West, a strange place free of socialism's anguished contortions. After providing a reading of Fühmann's “The Street of Perversions,” it considers his essay on E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella “Ignaz Denner.” In Fühmann's reading of the novella, the protagonist Andres is an archetype of German modernity. Andres represents the ultimate ecstasy, the inexplicable dissolution of subjectivity into the thinghood of the universe: the nunc stans of sovereignty and revolution.

This book explores an alternate form of modernity, one that is strangely different from the familiar modernity of liberal capitalism. It defines this strange system simply as capitalist modernity and argues that the socialist alternative is no political formation at all, but a system with a characteristic arrangement of subsystems. It views social reality as fundamentally agonistic—that is, one based in the inevitable fact of meaningful conflict. The book examines what made historical socialism in Eastern Europe different from social systems in the industrial West and considers the Cold War era as a period in which something universal took place with the advent of the socialist alternative. In analyzing socialist culture, the book looks at the insights into socialism of Franz Fühmann and discusses the relation of science to society and that of literature to economics. Moreover, it examines three institutional realms of camps, laws, and plans and how they correspond to three competing world orders in modernity: fascism, liberalism, and socialism.

This chapter focuses on the institutionalized form of providential reasoning that lies somewhere between normative law and factual description, focusing on the philosopher Georg Klaus. Klaus, the leading proponent of cybernetic systems theory in East Germany, proposes a cybernetic project that aims to find an efficient quantitative measure of the socialist system, but runs up against the problem of maintaining a substantial quality of socialism. The chapter considers how Klaus's systems theory circles around a gap in the very criteria of modernity that decided the outcome of the Cold War. These criteria include openness, pluralism, experimentalism, and incrementalism. The chapter then turns to Franz Fühmann's science fiction story “The Heap,” which asks when a quantity becomes a quality and answers it by referring to the unresolved problems of East German socialist identity: sovereign quality and quantifiable system must both yield again to transformation.