Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany

One of the first books to extend the currently burgeoning scholarship on East Germany to the visual arts, revealing that painting, like literature and film, was a space of contestation. East German studies today is thriving. Scholars have shown East Germany to be a complex society where culture played an important, if contested, role in the making of the socialist person. In English-language scholarship, however,the visual arts-and especially painting-have been largely ignored, the result of the