Just as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was seeking re-election on a campaign of "no experiments," art avant-garde groups in West Germany were reviving the utopian impulse to unite art and society. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany examines these groups and their legacy. Postwar artists built international as well as intergenerational networks such as Fluxus, which was active in Düsseldorf, Wiesbaden, and Cologne, and the Situationist International based in Paris. These groups were committed to undoing the compartmentalization of everyday life and the isolation of the artist in society. And as artists recast politics to address culture and everyday life, they helped forge a path for the West German extraparliamentary left. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany traces these connections and presents a chronological map of the networks that fed into the extraparliamentary left as well as a geographical map of increasing radicalism as the locus of action shifted to West Berlin. These two maps show that in West Germany artists and their interventions in the structures of everyday life were a key starting point for challenging the postwar order.

“This book brings fresh light to previously marginalized subject in German history. It is an original approach, up-to-date written without scholarly jargon, easily accessible to students, both at undergraduate and graduate. It is highly focused departing from the usual “histories” of a single country arguing for the “two German states”, and the three political systems.”- Prof. Dr. László Kürti, Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Miskolc, Hungary This book contrasts three very different incarnations of Germany – the totalitarian Third Reich, the communist German Democratic Republic, and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany up to 1990 – in terms of their experiences with and responses to nonconformity, dissent, opposition, and resistance and the role played by those factors in each case. Although even innocent nonconformity came with a price in all three systems and in the post-war occupation zones, the price was the highest in Nazi Germany. . It is worth stressing that what qualifies as nonconformity and dissent depends on the social and political context and, thus, changes over time. Like those in active dissent, opposition, or resistance, nonconformists are rebels (whether they are conscious of it or not), and have repeatedly played a role in pushing for change, whether through reform of legislation, transformation of the public’s attitudes, or even regime change.

To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement. By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politics—a society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. Berlin’s History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.

Develops the first full-scale sociological analysis of the movement which seized public attention in the dramatic days of 1969. The author examines the situation of students in modern industrial society and sets forth the features of modern utopian ideology which moved them to action.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Rudolf Bahro, Wolfgang Harich and Robert Havemann were probably the best-known critics of the DDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Yet they saw themselves as Marxists, and their demands extended far beyond a democratisation of real socialism. When environmental issues became more important in the West in the 1970s, the Party treated it as an ideological manoeuvre of the class enemy. The three dissidents saw things differently: they combined socialism and ecology, adopting a utopian perspective frowned upon by the state. In doing so, they created political concepts that were unique for the Eastern Bloc. Alexander Amberger introduces them, relates them to each other, and poses the question of their relevance then and now.

One thing above all separated the radical students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts in Berkeley or New York. In the US, the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation. In its place, Germany had the so-called Auschwitz generation. What became known in Germany as the '68 generation' or just the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their mothers and fathers were directly or indirectly responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better world as some of their contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. Kundnani shows that the struggle of Germany's '68 generation also had a darker side. Although the 'Achtundsechziger' imagined their struggle against capitalism in West Germany as 'resistance' against Nazism, they also had a tendency to see Auschwitz everywhere and, by using images and metaphors connected with Nazism to describe events in other parts of the world, they relativized Nazism and in particular the Holocaust. Even more disturbingly, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the 'Achtundsechziger', there were also anti-Semitic and nationalist currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement. "Utopia or Auschwitz" traces the political journey of Germany's post-war generation and examines the influence that its ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past had on the foreign policy of the 'red-green' government between 1998 and 2005, which included several former members of the student movement like Joschka Fischer. The red-green government's schizophrenic foreign policy, manifested its response to the crises in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past.