Circular Utopia(s): Alfred Wellm’s Morisco and the Socialist City

Abstract

In the context of the German Democratic Republic’s longstanding aesthetic and political discourse on social utopianism, this article will discuss Alfred Wellm’s novel Morisco (1987) and Halle-Neustadt as a key to understanding the relationship between the socialist new town and the East German cultural imaginary. Through Wellm’s novel, the article will argue that the construction of modernist new towns provoked a cultural response engaging with the rift between built reality and the utopian imagination/ambition of the classless, socialist city in different literary and visual media. Evoking Tommaso Campanella’s utopian City of the Sun (1602), the novel critically positions Neustadt within a cyclical Marxist eschatology, simultaneously expressing frustration with and hope for the progress of the socialist project. It therefore also represents the post-Stalin aesthetic shift from grand socialist realist narratives to subjective everyday perspectives, and the revived interest of authors in utopian themes in the 1980s against the backdrop of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) claim that socialism had already been achieved.