ABSTRACT
The construction of nudity, the unclothed body set in opposition to the state, was further accentuated in East Germany, where the expansive apparatus of the socialist regime had forged a different cultural aesthetic. Following state doctrine, socialism was defined in direct opposition to Nazism, indeed, as its negation. East German discourse cultivated an official narrative of resistance and postwar leaders depicted themselves first and foremost as antifascist. Directed toward the abrogation of what Germans had been in the Third Reich, the East German state began to pattern a way of life different from that of the West. Condemning Western capitalism for its historical ties to Nazism, and in an attempt to consolidate its own political authority, the East German regime became obsessed with centralizing its power. During the 1950s, the state apparatus effected the radical restructuring of East German society: through the surveillance of citizens by state security agents (Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi); through the forced reorganization of households, domestic groups, and political alliances; through the nationalization of industry and other means of production; and through the political insistence on a sacred collective mission (Borneman 1992). The expansionist control mechanisms of the socialist state promoted a policy of demarcation (Abgrenzungspolitik) and containment, which culminated in the creation of a “protected space for its utopian experiment” (4): the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Official discourse constructed a narrative in which personal expressions of experience and choice were repressed in favor of community and family. Collective interests were privileged by a political apparatus that sought to control, even annihilate, private dreams of self-realization and personhood (Schaefer 1996). During its attempts at nation building, the East German state codified, and transformed into law, a blueprint for specific kinds of social relations and specific kinds of selves.
