Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Ideology and Utopia
IT WAS IN 1929, sixty years before the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, when the world economic crisis was picking up momentum and social and political tensions in Germany were rising fast, that the sociologist Karl Mannheim published his seminal work Ideologie und Utopie. Here Mannheim explores the significance of the utopian elements in our thinking and our experience, attributing to them a real impact on people's actions and on social reality. Talking about his own time, he notes a disappearance of the utopian element, an absence of suspense, as politics is reduced to economics, our view of the world ceases to be holistic and is broken up into technical fragments, and creativity is replaced by mere repetition. His treatise ends with a nightmarish vision of a future world without utopias, “eine Welt, die gleichsam mit sich fertig geworden ist und sich stets nur reproduziert” (249):
Das Verschwinden der Utopie bringt eine statische Sachlichkeit zustande, in der der Mensch selbst zur Sache wird. Es entstünde die größte Paradoxie, die denkbar ist, daß nämlich der Mensch der rationalsten Sachbeherrschung zum Menschen der Triebe wird, daß der Mensch, der nach einer so langen opfervollen und heroischen Entwicklung die höchste Stufe der Bewußtheit erreicht hat — in der bereits Geschichte nicht blindes Schicksal, sondern eigene Schöpfung wird —, mit dem Aufgeben der verschiedenen Gestalten der Utopie den Willen zur Geschichte und damit den Blick in die Geschichte verliert.
(249-50)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany , pp. 163 - 184Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003