Radioactive Marxisms & Atomic Fairytales from the former East Germany

The race for nuclear weapons animated the ideological battles and geopolitical relations that defined the Cold War. The German Democratic Republic became the third largest uranium producer in the world, supplying the Soviet Union with 220,000 tonnes: enough, reportedly, for the production of 32,000 Hiroshima bombs.

But nuclear radiation also had an afterlife in East Germany’s cultural worlds, within which art, literature and Marxist philosophies orbited around the dreams and nightmares of the atomic age. This paper explores three sites of nuclearity and artistic production in relation to their contrary visual cultures and politics. In so doing, it attempts to offer an art history attuned to cosmic time, radioactive half-lives, and the kinds of ultra-violet knowledge Walter Benjamin theorised.

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Image credit: Susanne Kriemann's 'Library for Radioactive Afterlife' (artist's book project), 2020.

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.