It is perhaps unsurprising that this age of neoliberal market logic, digitally facilitated social alienation, and political polarization has produced a burst of scholarship invested in studying both worlds that might have been and how those who imagined those worlds also imagined realizing them. The past decade has yielded considerable literature on German alternative cultures and subcultures of the late twentieth century, touching on, among other topics, punk (Jeffrey Hayton), heavy metal (Nikolai Okunew), squatting (Alex Vasudevan), queer activism (Samuel Huneke), Black activism (Tiffany Florvil), civic activism (Jenny Wüstenberg, Jennifer Allen), environmentalism (Julie Ault, Stephen Milder), and anti-consumerism (Alexander Sedlmaier). Briana J. Smith's Free Berlin fits nicely into this historiography.

Smith set out to uncover how visual artists in late twentieth-century Berlin – divided and reunified – attempted to create artworks that would serve as both catechisms for and tools of democratization. She foregrounds artists who situated their work within the spaces of everyday life, sometimes as site, sometimes as medium, always as a means to prompt participation in the enterprise of imagining new ways of inhabiting the world. Positioned against the hegemony of the market and exclusionary infrastructures of power, this visual culture, Smith argues, became an essential building block of Berlin's strong tradition of civic activism and popular protest. Her book presents this argument across two parts. The first, which spans the late Cold War, examines the rise of a style of art that invited its audience “to participate in the art's genesis” (78). After offering an overview of the 1970s art scenes in both Berlins, Smith devotes a chapter each to the particularity of experimental art in West and East Berlin. Despite different funding opportunities, different kinds of spaces in which they could work, and different constraints imposed by the state, artists in both Berlins used their art as an occasion to collaborate with their publics “to remake the shared space according to their own needs, interests, and fantasies” (140). They hoped that, by changing the contours of local spaces, they could also open up social and political possibilities within those spaces. The fourth chapter traces the evolution of participatory art in that interstitial period between the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification a scant year later. The book's second half takes up the fate of participatory art after the Wall. Chapter 5 follows artists’ resistance to an increasingly commercialized Berlin that emerged after reunification, while chapter 6 reveals the ongoing relevance of the ambitions of these artists in the twenty-first century by following a series of adjacent citizens’ initiatives and referenda to shore up popular agency over public space.

The book's strengths are multiple. Although Smith offers the volume as a project in Verflechtungsgeschichte – an intertwined German-German history that refuses the knee-jerk reinforcement of Cold War borders – its greatest value lies in its treatment of East German alternative artists. Using a novel cache of oral histories and private archival collections, Smith has uncovered a community of artists, largely forgotten or ignored by historians, whose work played a role in helping East German citizens imagine more just, more responsive, more open expressions of socialism. Importantly, as Smith highlights, in this enterprise, these artists did not hide from the state. They did not form an underground movement or withdraw into what the West German journalist Günter Gaus famously described as the GDR's “niche society.” Instead, pushing the bounds of scholarship on East German private life, Smith describes these artists as having “retreated from the private” (6) rather than into it.

Smith also excels in her analysis of efforts to extract art from the clutches of the market. Criticism of the constraints imposed by the gallery space on art and its viewers has occupied art critics and historians since Brian O'Doherty's 1976 essays took a hatchet to the practices of the “white cube.” Though O'Doherty himself is strangely absent from Smith's discussion, she nevertheless persuasively outlines the many ways artists resisted the rules not only of galleries but also of art curators, art collectors, and art critics, by choosing techniques and display spaces that evaded easy control. Through this circumvention, artists demanded the valuation of art's social contributions, not just commercial ones.

Offsetting the book's strengths, however, are a handful of deficiencies. Most conspicuous is the thinness of Smith's citations. That whole paragraphs – often full of robust evidence – pass without attribution considerably tempers the study's utility for scholars interested in following Smith's lead. So too does her weak engagement with the historiographical context necessary to ground the book's analysis. Major works on the dissolution of the East German state, on the peculiarity of Berlin's scarred topography, or on West Germany's persistent culture of localism in the late twentieth century, for example, are missing from her notes. She thus leaves the reader uncertain where the book's precise intervention lies. This remove from the existing historiography also leads Smith to overstate her argument at important junctures. She claims, in one instance, that a series of grassroots urban development campaigns in the late 1990s “marked a departure from the socially engaged work of the 1980s, which was largely limited to artist circles” (219). Here, Smith ignores the contributions of that broad swath of activism since the 1970s subsumed under the banner of the “new social movements.” The peace movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement (including the Afro-German women's movement), and the queer movement, among others, each expressed similar social investments and engaged both similar publics and similar methods to the artists whose work Smith analyzes. Smith missed an important opportunity to contextualize those similarities and to assess the degree to which these artists simply participated in larger trends or, rather, played an instrumental role in creating the vernaculars, imaginaries, and conditions of possibility that structured the activism of the late twentieth century and, indeed, the new Germany that emerged from it.