Over the last two decades, several historians have studied the New Left in West Germany (where it was often called alternative Linke). They have shown how, from the 1960s to the 1980s, this heterogeneous movement failed to usher in a radical social transformation, let alone global revolution, but still exerted significant cultural and political influence. Those who became involved in it were rethinking the very foundations of society, from labour productivity to the nuclear family. Many practised what they preached, exploring the possibility of ‘alternative’, often communal lives. These lives were led in rural settings, and indeed in India or Nicaragua, but mostly in West German cities and university towns, beginning in 1967 with the (in)famous Kommune I in West Berlin with its radical and media-savvy protagonists.
Jake P. Smith has now contributed a fine book to this growing literature. Whereas Joachim Häberlen, with whom he collaborated on a previous occasion, has stressed continuities of left-wing emotional politics from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, Smith’s emphasis is on rupture. He contends that, over the course of the 1970s, left-wing activists gave up on Marxist utopianism and edged away from supporting the terrorism of the Red Army Faction. Instead, they turned to more presentist temporal practices. The contribution of Smith’s book lies in the study of this new presentism in conjunction with spatial practices, such as squatting and neighbourhood protests, artistic practices, such as Punk music, graffiti or video-making, and reflections on an asynchronous political moment, paralleling contemporary French thinkers’ turn to the micropolitics of desire. It is also noteworthy that Smith does not limit his scope to West Germany but pursues, just like the radicals he studies, a transnational perspective with regard to Amsterdam and Zurich.
Given their presentist orientation and focus on concrete practices, it is little wonder that these radicals were galvanized by modernist planning, capitalist development and bourgeois staleness (the latter especially in the wealthy Swiss city of Zurich, as one would expect). They were bent on securing spaces of their own and claimed an ‘autonomous’ ethos. This encompassed squatting derelict houses or flats, renovating them themselves and founding Punk bands, which mushroomed in Düsseldorf and Wuppertal as well as in Hamburg and West Berlin. An important culmination was the youth riots of 1980–81 in Amsterdam, Zurich and various West German cities. Although the riots themselves proved short-lived, the merger of political radicalism with practices of bricolage, from DIY through experimental art to self-fashioning, outlasted them. And the ‘feeling of permanent breakthrough’ (p. 99) was kept alive in media narratives, self-made videos and the symbolism of the squatted house.
Therein lay a tension between, on the one hand, nostalgic commemoration and gradual integration and, on the other, the creative destruction practised in the subcultural art scene and the militant activism of the Autonomen. In the squatted houses on Hamburg’s riverbank, such militance was alive and (sometimes literally) kicking, defending a ‘free space’ that allowed for both individual and communal autonomy. A ‘further fragmentation of progress’ (p. 145) was also in evidence in the carnivalesque riots on 1 May in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district and the squatting of houses in East Berlin’s Friedrichshain district after German reunification, which entailed involving neighbours in pub quizzes, singing competitions and dance festivities. But how radical all this was or could be remained a matter of internal contestation.
Much of this has been studied before, and one might even ask whether the West German radicals of the 1970s and 1980s have, by now, not received more than their share of scholarly attention. That said, Smith goes beyond converting the existing knowledge into a crisp and coherent book. He is at his best when analysing practices around space and subjectivity in detail, including life in squatted houses and experimental artworks as well as militant violence. Often, his tone verges on admiration, and he could have taken more of an interest in the experiences and perceptions of the women involved. But Smith also assumes a theoretically informed perspective and contributes to the literature by focusing on the new radicals’ post-progressive understanding of time, their desire to experience asynchronous, even momentous liberation. Urban historians of the late twentieth century should take notice since they tend to highlight either the ‘collapse’ or ‘decline’ of the existing social fabric and way of planning or the new trend towards ‘neoliberal cities’. West German (and Dutch and Swiss) radicals do not fit into either narrative, and indeed embodied a very different temporal logic. The price for this might have been that their presence proved short-lived. The radicals were able to practise liberation in ‘autonomous’ spaces – but, almost by definition, this could not last.
