Jake Smith’s The Ruin Dwellers is a sympathetic cultural history of young urban rebels and squatters from the aftermath of 1968 to the years shortly after the Wende. Smith argues that young rebels directly challenged two teleological narratives that had dominated postwar West Germany: the narrative of progress that sublimated the Nazi past under the amnesic pleasures of consumer culture and the leftist belief in progress toward a revolutionary future. Smith argues that 1968—and even more so, 1977—buried the allure of progress in either of these forms and left youth to create a postmodern bricolage of references to the past, present, and future that both challenged any naive belief in inevitable progress while also leaving room for the creation of temporary and contingent spaces of transcendence. Punks may have claimed that there was “no future,” but according to Smith, their actual cultural practices and rhetoric were more complex than simple nihilistic slogans could encompass. Furthermore, Smith notes the importance of the domestic sphere in postwar German cultural narratives. “The postwar home was a space of salvation, an almost magical realm in which pasts could be mastered, futures could be embraced and individuals could be reborn” (21). As such, the Hausbesetzungen of the 1980s and early 1990s were a particularly potent and pointed form of rebellion.

Smith focuses on how the 1980–81 youth revolts that exploded in squats and street demonstrations across West Germany (and beyond) were not only significant in their own right but also inspired a new generation of rebels in the ensuing decade. Unlike previous generations of youth activities, he notes that “the anarchist youth of the early 1980s were not interested in channeling negation into established developmental pathways leading to a prescribed vision of the utopian future,” rather their interest lay in “negat[ing] the present by consistently uncovering the presence of the past” (98). In the hodgepodge of objects collected in squats or displayed in the cultural projects of the movement—including zines, films, and music—the coexistence of signifiers of past, present, and future opened space for a new kind of resistance. Over the course of the 1980s, the 1980–81 protests were ritualized and memorialized. Meanwhile, in Hamburg, the Hafenstraße squat improbably survived years of government attempts to shut it down. The book concludes in the Berlin of the early 1990s, where the fall of the Berlin Wall opened literal and symbolic space for squatters and others on the left to occupy territory in the Eastern part of the city.

A tireless and inventive researcher, Smith tells this fascinating story largely using the capacious variety of texts produced by leftists themselves. This largely succeeds in allowing him to understand his historical subjects on their own terms, taking them seriously as cultural commentators and theoretical innovators. On the other hand, the text largely skips over a gendered or racial analysis since neither of these seemed to feature much in the texts that Smith has uncovered, itself an interesting fact. By focusing on these mostly West German squatters who moved to the East after the fall of the wall, Smith also does not pay much attention either to East Berlin’s homegrown squatting movement or to the complex and often vexed interactions between East and West Germans in Berlin in this era.

It is clear that the punks and squatters who are Smith’s primary subject of study were not alone in their critique of the relentless progressivism of the earlier post-World War II era. Smith cites a wide variety of mostly French philosophers and cultural critics who were also interested in the shattered nature of postmodern time and experience. It is fascinating to see how much resonance there is between the texts of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Frederic Jameson, Aleida Assmann, et al, and the slogans and lyrics of West German punks. At the same time, Smith’s theoretical citations beg the question of just how West German this story is. As Smith himself discusses, in addition to the theoretical armature he quotes, the squatting movement itself was international. Squatters of Swiss, Dutch, Danish, and other national origins were involved in this movement, and there were rich international ties between individuals and groups. For example, the Amsterdam Vondelstraat squat and Zürich youth riots in 1980 were important catalysts for West German activists. Given these international connections, Smith might have done more to analyze the specific place of West German dynamics. For example, were the relentless references to fascism in the past and present that he quotes particularly common in West Germany? Or were squatters across Europe similarly interested in this history?

Another point where this book might have gone into more detail is in the size of the movements it catalogs. This is, of course, notoriously difficult to do. As Smith notes, there were hardcore squatters who lived full-time in squats, occasional visitors, curious observers, and others with a variety of levels of connection to this scene. Furthermore, Smith demonstrates that the punks and squatters were experts at commanding media attention that reached far beyond their numeric strength. However, some idea as to this numeric strength might have been helpful. Reading the book, one might assume that the techno and squatting scene of the immediate post-Wende period in Berlin was larger and more mainstream than the numbers of the previous decade. Addressing whether the squatting and punk movements waxed, waned, or stayed roughly the same size might have helped Smith make an argument about how to read the significance of the subjects he studied.

In conclusion, this is a book that truly comes alive when it quotes the texts or shows the visual products of its restless and creative subjects. The images alone will make this book a fantastic tool for college instructors. Its call to take seriously the young rebels of the West German 1980s is well-taken and timely. As historians and others today face a new set of fractured narratives in the 2020s, Smith’s book is an instructive and inspiring account that is worth reading.