Utopia and Dissent in West Germany

For the force of their convictions that they could remake society in revolutionary ways, activists of the 1960s have continued to pique the curiosity of scholars. Their unexpected optimism invites us to question its origins. Their radicalism invites us to analyse their methods. And after many of their efforts fizzled out unspectacularly, those collapses invite us to investigate their legacies. The 50th anniversary of 1968 prompted a wave of renewed interest in all of these themes. Mia Lee’s Utopia and Dissent in West Germany fits under this umbrella. Lee sets out to establish that West German artists played a central role in efforts to challenge the postwar order. She highlights a collection of individuals and organizations that lamented what they saw as society’s prophylactic separation of labour and ‘life’, under the banner of which they included creative enterprises like art. This compartmentalization of art—also represented variously as play, leisure, liberation, sex, and provocation—had the unwanted effect of stripping society of its ability to imagine a superlative future, they claimed. Undoing that compartmentalization by reintegrating art back into society would enable the pursuit of a better world. Art, after all, offered ‘the portal to a future utopia’ (p. 9).

Aesthetics · Art · Dissent · Media studies · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Utopia · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German History and Society · Law