Ruin Dwellers - Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture

"The Ruin Dwellers takes us into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and 1980s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. These activists have been seen as striving for a utopian future, but as historian Jake Smith shows, this view is inaccurate. Rather, the author argues, they were committed to a much more unique sensibility: one that sought to subvert progressive temporal frameworks and, instead, dwell in the ruins of the past. Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in countercultural aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in abandoned, run-down buildings and in reinvented city spaces; through the off-modern punk style in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political writing. 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"--

About the author

Jake Smith is assistant professor of history at Colorado College.

Product details

• Authors: Jake P. Smith
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 29.08.2025
• EAN: 9780226823591
• ISBN: 978-0-226-82359-1
• No. of pages: 272
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; HISTORY / Europe / Germany, Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, European History, Germany, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban, Urban communities, The Cold War, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period), c 1945 to c 1990 (the Cold War period), Cold wars and proxy conflicts, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Cold War