The Postwar Restoration in East and West

This article examines continuities between East German literary and filmic cultures in the late 1940s and 1950s and the Weimar Republic. The postwar account of Weimar history and the collapse of German democracy featured a heroic Communist Party and the concept of a genetic relationship between the struggles of Weimar culture and the effort to construct German socialism amid the ruins of the Nazi state. The article also demonstrates that there are more structural similarities between postwar East and West German culture than is commonly believed, as both cultures appealed to largely conservative aesthetic and cultural presuppositions.