Some Aspects of Deconstruction of Totalitarianism in Russian and German Postmodernist Literature

JVF Conference Papers

While deconstruction of totalitarianism has been an important issue for Russian postmodernist authors since the 1980s, German-speaking postmodernists rather reluctantly take up the topics of National Socialism and the pro-Soviet regime in the GDR.

It is characteristic for both Russian and German literatures that they developed postmodernist poetics later than the American and the most European literatures. Nevertheless it seems that postmodernism has discovered its own strategies for reflecting totalitarianism. As in the postmodernist point of view there is no faithful history, and it’s the focus that makes the whole historiography, the authors neglect historical truth for the purpose of investigating the mechanisms of totalitarian power implicitly present in any public practice.

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