The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture [Hardcover]

Traces the shifting dynamics within leftist activism in 1970s and ’80s Europe and its experiments in art, life, and politics.

The Ruin Dwellerstakes readers into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and’80s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. Whereas earlier generations of leftist activists were primarily oriented toward the utopian future, participants in the youth movements of the 1970s and’80s developed a more complex set of temporal practices that sought to scramble the borders between the past, present, and future.
 
Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, historian Jake P. Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in social, cultural, and aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in squatted houses and street protests; in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political texts. In so doing, he offers an eye-opening look at anarchic world-making practices that found new ways of imagining an emancipated future through inhabiting the fractured past.Jake Smithis assistant professor of history at Colorado College.Introduction
1. The Allure of Progress in Postwar Germany
2. The Countercultural “Off-Modern”
3. The Youth Revolts of 1980–81 and the Radical Potential of the Present
4. Perpetual Motion: Ritualization and Rebirth in the 1980s
5. Insurgent Dwelling and the Cultivation of Place in Hamburg’s Hafenstraße
6. Carnival Time and Creative Destruction in the New Berlin
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index