Introduction

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, grand utopian thinking seems to have lost much of the cachet it once had. During the last two decades, intellectuals have repeatedly declared utopian thought and its impact on political, social, and economic discourses as feeble, misguided, or even irrelevant. Russell Jacoby for example diagnoses in his analysis of intellectual culture a departure from utopian thinking and a loss of radicalism, and he insists that the world’s sociopolitical climate at present renders any arguments for the utopian projects of the twentieth century unconvincing and outdated. In political terms, this “end of utopia” discourse is generally associated with the political shifts at the end of the last century, particularly the collapse of the socialist countries in Europe. Indeed, the disappearance and discrediting of the elusive ideal of a classless society free of exploitation has dealt a serious blow to the ability to imagine alternatives to the prevailing capitalist order.

In Europe especially, utopia’s seeming loss of purchase after 1989 is likewise fuelled by generational shifts and economic globalization (including phenomena such as migration). This is also true for Germany where the “end of utopia” discourse shares many angles and ideological tenets with debates in other European countries and has to be understood as part of global developments. Just as in France for example, the declared skepticism towards utopian ideals is intrinsically tied to a radical reassessment of the 1968 movement and an “überfällige Abrechnung” with its utopian impulses (see e.g. Cornils). Similar to other European countries, many German politicians and public intellectuals have also questioned or dismissed other ideals such as the project of multiculturalism or the visionary attempt at European integration as utopian, i.e. not achievable, in nature. Across Europe, changing historical sensibilities and economic conditions have contributed to what Fredric Jameson has called the waning of the utopian idea (23–24).

Yet as Lyman Tower Sargent has pointed out, Germany also figured as an important contributor to the “end of utopia” discourse after the fall of the Wall for specifically German reasons (Sargent). Receptivity to the tendency in the 1990s for some to see the globalized free-market as perhaps one remaining source of utopian inspiration was no doubt muted by the pain involved with unification and the shift to a capitalist society. At the same time, the end of the GDR impacted intellectual life in profound and particularly German fashion. While the failure of the GDR seemed to reveal with particular poignancy just how much of a nightmare real-existing socialism had become, the relationship to political utopia had been complicated for writers and intellectuals in East and West even before the fall of the Wall. At stake was not only East German writers’ taking a stance with respect to GDR utopia – a process that, as Gabriele Eckart has recently shown, became more complicated for each successive generation of East German writers and has not prevented some East German writers such as the late Wolfgang Hilbig from engaging topoi of political utopia/dystopia even after the fall of the Wall. Rather, the role of the once highly valorized category of the public intellectual had depended on the GDR even in the West in ways that became clear only with its demise, as Wolfgang Emmerich has recently argued. For writers such as Ingo Schulze, Durs Grünbein, and Thomas Brussig, writing that sets out to make grand pronouncements, especially with respect to the future, has held little appeal (Emmerich; Neubauer). This is not to say that these writers do not in fact retain some notion that their writing can and should perform important imaginative and moral functions with respect to issues such as social justice (Neubauer). But even in these writings, the goal would seem to fall short of envisioning radical alternatives to the prevailing social, economic, and political order.

However, the proclamations of the end of utopia by (German) intellectuals stand in stark contrast to the renewed and vigorous attention to utopian thought in literature and cinema. In response to these developments, scholars working to illuminate the “end of utopia...