The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture

Traces the shifting dynamics within leftist activism in 1970s and ’80s Europe and its experiments in art, life, and politics.

The Ruin Dwellers takes readers into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and ’80s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. Whereas earlier generations of leftist activists were primarily oriented toward the utopian future, participants in the youth movements of the 1970s and ’80s developed a more complex set of temporal practices that sought to scramble the borders between the past, present, and future.

Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, historian Jake P. Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in social, cultural, and aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in squatted houses and street protests; in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political texts. 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.

Jake Smith is assistant professor of history at Colorado College.