My thesis reappraises the early years of literature in the German Democratic Republic, starting from its foundations in the Soviet Zone (SBZ) until the building of the Berlin Wall, called the Aufbau. Rather than apply a generalised aesthetic model to the period according to the Soviet or Lukácsian school, I seek out so-called dissidents and, with a reading of Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory which allows a fragmentary consciousness to find expression in literature, explore how aesthetic deviation from the party line shared in, not deviated from, the state’s ambitions. Highlighting the inherently un-constructed beginnings of the (literary) Aufbau, I analyse experimental, critical and superficially conventional works of literature (novels, novellas, plays) allegorically to conclude that they come to (new) meaning as signifiers by their engagement with the historical present and thus perform an aesthetic, if not ontological, ‘building’.