Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany by Jennifer Allen (review)

Abstract

Rather than interpreting the 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany as a time of fear, neoliberal retrenchment, resurgent nationalism, collapsing leftist futures, or no-future nihilism, Jennifer Allen encourages us to view these years as a period of democratic awakenings and new utopian imaginaries, an era that witnessed “a reconceptualization of the idea of utopia itself” (28). No longer was utopia singular, totalizing, or abstracted from the present; rather, over the course of the 1980s, it became something towards which one could work, a set of sustainable, everyday strategies for building a better world. In making the case for this transformation and renaissance of utopian thought, Allen focuses on three different groups: site-specific performance artists, amateur historians associated with the Berlin History Workshop, and the political activists of the nascent Green Party, all of whom engaged in practices that democratized, decentralized, and normalized utopian practices, thus making utopia sustainable. Over the course of six chapters, Allen traces how these different groups imagined and actualized their sustainable utopian visions. She begins with an analysis of experimental artists such as Joseph Beuys and Gunter Demnig, who designed projects intended to actively intervene in and transform public space. With ventures such as Beuys’s “7000 Oaks,” in which thousands of oak trees were planted throughout the city of Kassel, these artists sought to decentralize and democratize the production of art and, in so doing, to encourage citizens to participate in the critical reconstitution of their everyday environments. The historians associated with the Berlin History Workshop sought to initiate similar changes in how people engaged with the past. Instead of simply producing written studies that challenged dominant and exclusionary interpretations of history, Workshop participants designed exhibits that allowed citizens to encounter the past in their everyday lives. For example, they organized walking tours that highlighted local resistance to Nazism, they worked to change street names, and they created the “Mobile Museum,” a bus that took historical exhibits (such as the T-4 exhibit on the Nazi euthanasia program) to neighborhoods throughout the city. By changing how people interacted with traces of the past in their everyday environments, members of the Workshop believed they could cultivate critical counter publics that would actively work towards creating utopian futures. Allen’s last example comes from the activists of the German Green Party, which emerged in the early 1980s as an