ABSTRACT
Visitors to Berlin cannot miss the East German–built Television Tower. It is by far the city’s tallest structure and certainly its most distinctively shaped, with its 300 meters of concrete tapering gradually upwards to a glittering disco ball of an observation deck topped by a red-and-white striped antenna. For many, the tower is a symbol of the bygone Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) longed-for technological superiority, international profile, and the space-age socialist future it propagated. No doubt this symbolism was intended by the regime. Yet this and other modernist-looking projects of real-existing socialism from the 1960s were also trumpeted in a rhetoric of old-fashioned nationalism and nostalgic longing for a pre-capitalist past of unalienated social connections, connections that the regime’s proponents believed their brand of socialism had already brought into existence. 1 The ideological leaps necessary to reconcile such competing goals reveal fascinating tensions between different strands of the regime’s socialist ideology and competing intellectual-historical traditions within socialist thought.
