Neubau Atmospheres - East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture

The artistic potential modern, urban housing ("Neubau") offered to writers and directors in East Germany from the 1960s to 1980s remains underexplored. Neubau Atmospheres seeks to bridge that gap by providing an incisive analysis of East German cinematic, literary, and architectural case studies, highlighting how the modernist housing of the GDR provided a potent vehicle for mediating the emotional and social experience of its denizens. Considering how these cinematic and literary representations focalized ideas of class, gender, and age, author Stephan Ehrig makes a compelling case for viewing this engagement with the urban environment as a cultural genre in its own right.

About the author

Stephan Ehrig is a Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to East German cultural production pre- and post-1990, as well as on nineteenth to twenty-first-century literature, theatre and film. He is the author of Der dialektische Kleist (Transcript, 2018) and the co-editor (with Marcel Thomas and David Zell) of The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (Peter Lang, 2018), and (with Benjamin Schaper and Elizabeth Ward) of Entertaining German Culture: Contemporary Transnational Television and Film (Berghahn Books, 2023).

Product details

• Authors: Stephan Ehrig, Stephan Ehrig Ehrig
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 15.09.2025
• EAN: 9781836951797
• ISBN: 978-1-83695-179-7
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; Germany, Social & cultural history, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German, East Germany, Social and cultural history, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism