The Skin of the System On Germany's Socialist Modernity [Hardcover]

The Skin of the Systemobjects to the idea that there is only one modernitythat of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think anothersystem at all?

To approach this question, Robinson turns to the remarkable writer Franz F?hmann, the East German who most single-mindedly dedicated himself to understanding what it means to transform from fascism to socialism. F?hmann's own serial loyalties to Hitler and Stalin inform his existential meditations on change and difference. By placing F?hmann's politically alert and intensely personal literary inventions in the context of an inquiry into radical social rupture,The Skin of the Systemwrests the brutal materiality of twentieth-century socialism from attempts to provincialize both its desires and its failures as antimodern ideological follies.

This is a fascinating study of the literary records of Eastern European state socialism, which reopens a specific set of experiences and paradoxes that seem at times concealed to many today . . . [The Skin of the System] contains a wealth of original and worthwhile insights. Robinson's book is one of the most interesting and provocative reconsiderations of Socialism and socialist culture to date. Its achievement lies primarily in using the historical distance to think of socialist culture not as a failed experiment, but as a case study about the fundamental problem of social change. As capitalism's self-generated crises become increasingly manifest, Robinson re-examines a not-so-distant past that might not have been better, but was certainly different. What counts, and what interests him, is that difference. Given its high academic quality, I have no doubt thatOther Systemswill be widlÓ5