Space, time and power: the chronotopes of Uwe Tellkmap’s "Der Turm"

This article examines the evocation of Dresden in the 1980s in Uwe Tellkamp’s bestselling novel 'Der Turm' (2008). The article highlights how Bakthin’s notion of ‘chronotopes’ can illuminate the spatial politics of the city as imagined by Tellkamp and the critique of its Bildungsbürgertum formulated in his novel. Whereas the inhabitants of the ‘Turmviertel’ portrayed in the text attempt to create a space rooted in cultural nostalgia as a refuge from the influence of the state, Tellkamp demonstrates how this strategy is founded on a misconception of the nature of state power in the GDR. This power can understood with reference to Giorgio Agamben as the power to reduce the citizen to a state of ‘bare life’.