Interview with Jennifer Allen on the Junior Faculty Manuscript and Research Colloquium

Interview by Anima Gebele von Waldstein, FAS Graduate Communications Fellow, 2021

Jennifer Allen is a historian of modern Germany with a particular interest in late twentieth-century cultural practices. Her first book, Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) documents the history of relatively recent German efforts to revitalize the concept of utopia after the wholesale collapse of Europe’s violent utopian social engineering projects by the end of the twentieth century. She argues that, contrary to popular accounts, German interest in radical alternatives to existing society did not diminish. By braiding together case studies from three different milieux—the Berlin History Workshop, the German Green Party, and a loose collection of artists of public space—Allen demonstrates that Germans chose to resist an increasing sense of political disenfranchisement, social alienation, and cultural impotence in the 1980s and ’90s. Instead, they pursued the radical democratization of politics and culture in everyday life through a series of grassroots cultural projects. These groups not only envisioned a new German utopia but attempted to enact their vision. In doing so, they reclaimed utopian hope from the dustbin of historical ideas.

Professor Allen used the Junior Faculty Manuscript and Research Colloquium to prepare her book for publication. Now, with her book forthcoming, she took the time to talk to us about her research and aspirations and what she wants to look into in the future.

You write that your book Sustainable Utopias “charts the history of Germany’s efforts to revitalize the concept of utopia after the wholesale collapse of Europe’s violent utopian social engineering projects by the end of the twentieth century.” Could you explain what you mean by “revitalizing the concept of utopia”?

In contrast to a range of scholars writing in the late twentieth century, like Francis Fukuyama, who argued that we have reached the end-point of humanity’s political and economic evolution, my book contests the idea that capitalism and Western liberal democracy represent society’s final form. Instead, I explore how people have resisted the idea that there are no alternatives to these systems and offered their own proposals for building a superlative world.

Germany is a great case study for this phenomenon. At the end of the twentieth century, it confronted this reality, first, with the increasing entrenchment of liberal democracy and capitalism in the West and, second, when the experiment in state socialism collapsed in the East. All this seemed to endorse the claims of intellectuals like Fukuyama and others. But when we look on the ground across political, aesthetic, and intellectual culture in West Germany from the late 1970s onward, we observe that Germans hardly gave up on imagining—and demanding—radical improvements to society.

You take the stance that radical alternatives to existing society have not lost their appeal to Germany. Why do you think they hold appeal in Germany in particular?

These observations are certainly not limited to Germany. Analogous cultural phenomena have cropped up from the outer reaches of South America to the furthest flung corners of Eurasia. But Germany, with its dramatic twentieth-century history—from the depths of genocide to global leadership—offers a special case. The Second World War destroyed not only Germany’s physical landscape, but also its intellectual, cultural, and political milieus. The need to rebuild those landscapes opened up unique opportunities to reimagine the form and function of society in comprehensive ways. I would not go as far as to suggest that Germans are, in general, more concerned with the past than other national communities. But the complex, rich, and widespread debates about Germany’s history and memory politics suggest that Germans might be more willing to participate in open discourse surrounding the consequences of their difficult past.

This new utopian hope you speak of, what do you mean by that? What does that entail?

The concept of utopia has not always meant the same thing. It was only in the Enlightenment era, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that people slowly came to understand the idea of utopia as emerging in time, rather than as tied to physical spaces that exist now but somewhere that is not here. I argue that the late twentieth century witnessed another significant change in the meaning of utopia. We have learned that pursuing utopias conceived as absolute and all-encompassing doesn’t end well. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon the idea of a superlative world entirely. Instead, I want to suggest society has begun to imagine that utopias can be small. These micro-utopias retain the element of radical hope for the future but not on a scale that leads to mass murder. The grassroot projects I present in my book are all examples of these micro-utopias.

What inspired you and motivated you to write your first book on this particular topic?

As with most research, the original enterprise was oriented around a slightly different topic: a peculiar Holocaust monument in Germany. But as I tried to understand that monument, I realized that the artist who designed it was part of a much larger community of activists all trying to remake a better Germany via these strange, small utopian practices. The book became an attempt to make sense of their work. The monument is now just one of several case studies I explore in the text.

How did you make use of the Junior Faculty Manuscript and Research Colloquium?

I used the manuscript colloquium to prepare my book manuscript for publication. The colloquium offered an extended opportunity to engage with several senior members of my field. I found our conversation particularly rewarding as I considered how to revise my manuscript. My experience was, unfortunately, considerably impacted by the outbreak of the COVID pandemic; the colloquium participants and I could no longer meet in person and had to switch to an online format before everyone had grown more comfortable with that venue. That meant that opportunities for more informal exchanges — over lunch or dinner, for example - were effectively eliminated. But the experience still opened up important avenues of communication with those who participated in my colloquium. I have remained in contact with all of them, and our subsequent exchanges have continued to be rewarding.

Who do you think will be most interested in your book?

That is a difficult question. I hope it will have a diverse audience, ranging from former participants of the Student Movement in the 1960s to frustrated intellectuals who demand change but aren’t convinced we can bring it about. The book is really for anyone dissatisfied with the continuous narrative of crisis and pessimism.

What kind of impact do you think will your publication have in the field and also to the broader public?

First of all, it is no handbook. It does not offer a concrete methodology for implementing these new utopian programs, but I hope that it might serve as a spur to rethink the discourse on utopias in our post-war world. And hopefully, it can also help scholars to overcome our reluctance to embrace the promise of radical ideas.

What are you excited about working on next?

I am interested in people’s fear of destruction and how people hedge against this possibility by trying to preserve knowledge and cultural artifacts. I plan to spend some time studying two different German case studies dealing with preservation of cultural heritage. In the wake of the Second World War, West Germany began to preserve objects of cultural heritage by creating copies on microfilm and storing them in a massive underground archive in the south of Germany. Having assembled more than a billion images, today it has become something of a backup archive for the German state. Interestingly, East Germany chose to focus on preserving a different aspect of heritage, namely agricultural biodiversity in Central Europe. Over the postwar period, East Germany created a seed bank that has become one of the largest of its type in the world. Ultimately, I’m interested in using these examples to understand how Germany rethought its position in the world after the Nazi period, what counts as features of humanity worth preserving after catastrophe, and how it could contribute to this project.