The Skin of the System: On Germany's Socialist Modernity

The Skin of the System objects to the idea that there is only one modernity—that of liberal capitalism. Starting from the simple conviction that whatever else East German socialism was, it was real, this book focuses on what made historical socialism different from social systems in the West. In this way, the study elicits the general question: what must we think in order to think an other system at all?

To approach this question, Robinson turns to the remarkable writer Franz Fühmann, the Ea...