Matthew Philpotts

Sinn und Form: The Anatomy of a Literary Journal

This study of the legendary Berlin literary and cultural journal Sinn und Form (since 1949) has a twofold significance. Based on extensive archival research and a detailed reading of the journal?s published face, it is a comprehensive history of Sinn und Form, whose founding editor was Peter Huchel and whose authors include Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Pablo Neruda, Romain Rolland, Peter Weiss, Christa Wolf, Heiner M�ller and Durs Gr�nbein. As such, it offers a fascinating perspective on the cultural history of the GDR and post-unification Germany. The study is also a first typological analysis of the anatomy of such a journal, organised in seven analytical categories: founding conception; cultural-political context; institutional infrastructure; role of editors; network of contributors; textual and compositional dimension; readership and reception.Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu?s sociology of culture, the authors set out to explain how the journal acquired and maintained its influence over the last 60 years. In turn, this conceptualisation of the journal as an agent in the cultural field opens the way for systematic research into literary and cultural journalsfrom a comparative perspective, synthesising sociological and literary approaches.

Dimension: Fractal Forms and Periodical Texture

This essay argues that the patterns of sameness and difference inherent in periodical form can be understood by analogy with the infinitely complex but self-similar forms of fractal geometry. More specifically, the notion of fractal (or fractional) dimension supplies not only a new conceptual vocabulary to describe the increased dimensionality of periodicals but also a quantitative measure of the complexity of form. Using digital tools and visualisations, dimension, together with the complementary notion of texture, can be set to work as the theoretical basis for new comparative analyses. At the same time, this approach raises important questions about the transferability of theoretical concepts from the sciences to the humanities.

Irreconcilable Differences: The Troubled Founding of the Leipzig Institute for Literature

Abstract This essay presents the first detailed examination of the troubled founding phase of the Leipzig Literature Institute in the early 1950s. While existing accounts ascribe a decisive role to the direct intervention of such high-profile figures as Walther Ulbricht, Johannes R. Becher and Alfred Kurella, the archival evidence emphasises instead the essential contribution made by low-ranking cultural functionaries in what was a contradictory and highly conflicted process, from the earliest proposals for the Institute in 1950 to its opening in 1955 and beyond. Ultimately three factors explain the failure of the Institute to establish itself successfully as a literary institution: the immensely unstable cultural and political climate of the early GDR; the absence of a single, charismatic individual able to define and advocate the core ethos of the institute; and, most importantly, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions underlying an institution that sought to reconcile literary creativity with educational and ideological instruction.

The Ruins of Dictatorship: Prora and Other Spaces

Abstract Our fascination with the ambivalences of ruin shows little sign of abating. Taking as its focus the Baltic resort of Prora, this paper explores the particular ambivalences that arise when the East German socialist past inhabits the ruins of the preceding National Socialist dictatorship. Developing a theoretical approach to the ruin as palimpsest and heterotopia, I examine three types of intervention that have been made in the post-socialist present at this largely derelict and disused site: redevelopment; musealization; and photographic representation. In each case I consider, first, the strategies that stabilize the ruin in the present and, second, the processes through which the ruin persists as a more troubling and destabilizing force. Ultimately, I argue that the ambivalences of these ruins of dictatorship are increasingly being simplified and consolidated in the post-dictatorship setting, often at the expense of the socialist phase of the site.

The Boundaries of Dictatorship

The title of this concluding chapter alludes to a collection of essays which I first read more than ten years ago when I was working on the cultural politics not of the fascist dictatorships, but of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By focusing attention on what they termed Die Grenzen der Diktatur — the ‘boundaries’ or ‘limits of dictatorship’ — Richard Bessel and Ralph Jessen (1996) were breaking new ground, not only in the social history of the recently defunct East German state but also in the study of dictatorships more generally. At that time, emphasis on the limits of the dictatorial power was unusual. The fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 had prompted a renaissance in totalitarian theory and a revival of the accompanying preoccupation with the mechanisms of dictatorial power and control. Above all, the astonishing revelations concerning the sheer extent of the GDR state security service, the Stasi, had rekindled superficial, top-down comparisons with the Hitler dictatorship and reinforced perceptions of two states fundamentally different from the western liberal democracies. The comparison is a highly instructive one. For all the very fine scholarship which has emerged on the cultural practices of dictatorial regimes, this inflationary usage of highly problematic labels remains commonplace, especially in more traditional strands of literary studies and art history.

Cultural-political palimpsests: The reich aviation ministry and the multiple temporalities of dictatorship

What is now emerging is the more intriguing notion of Berlin as palimpsest, a disparate city-text that is being rewritten while previous text is preserved, traces are restored, erasures documented, all of it resulting in a complex web of historical markers that point to the continuing heterogeneous life of a vital city that is as ambivalent of its built past as it is of its urban future. —Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts

'Aus so prosaischen Dingen wie Kartoffeln, Straßen, Traktoren werden poetische Dinge!' Brecht, Sinn und Form, and Strittmatter's Katzgraben

This article takes as its starting–point an essay written by Bertolt Brecht in praise of the GDR playwright Erwin Strittmatter and his Socialist Realist drama, Katzgraben, which was staged by the Berliner Ensemble in May 1953. Published in the late summer of 1953 in Sinn und Form, this rather neglected essay is of significance because Brecht adopts in it a highly orthodox GDR position at a time when he was otherwise making dissenting interventions in GDR cultural politics. Publication of the essay, at a time when political pressure on Brecht had eased, is evidence that his interest in Strittmatters play was not merely a short–term tactical manoeuvre to placate the SED regime. Rather, it was part of a consistent belief in the necessity of demonstrating what Brecht perceived to be the genuine achievements of the GDR. The events of 17 June, and the fascist mindset which Brecht saw underlying them, only served to reinforce this necessity in his mind. Brechts pre–occupation with Katzgraben has a broader significance in highlighting the tendency in Brecht criticism to over–privilege tactical explanations for his behaviour in the GDR and in demonstrating that his cultural–political dissent was vitiated all the time by consistent ideological assent.