Abstract

This article understands George Orwell’s 1984, Gerd Ruge’s Metropol, and Ralf Rothmann’s Hotel der Schlaflosen as literary investigations of the emotional complexes of the renegade in the context of Stalinism. All three texts, it is argued, bring into focus different aspects of an affect space constituted by a crisis in the epistemology of enmity and a resulting hermeneutics of suspicion. While Orwell is primarily concerned with the mass psychological effects of hate, Ruge is interested in the ubiquity of fear among those who must fear being declared renegades. Rothmann’s short story, in contrast, portrays the subjectivity of an executioner who is capable of mass murder because he operates with absolute moral indifference.