Even today, the inextricable link between the history of opposition in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the names Robert Havemann, Wolfgang Harich, and Rudolf Bahro is irrefutable. These individuals were more than just dissidents in a highly ideologised state who, using Marxist arguments, developed an immanent critique of the dogmatic rigidification of the German version of a Soviet-type system of domination. Indeed, one of the main reasons they were so well known was also due to the fact that they became victims of merciless persecution at the hands of the GDR government. Havemann was isolated from the outside world, placed under house arrest and Stasi surveillance, Harich was incarcerated for eight years and Bahro for one. These acts of repression attracted the attention of the Western media, particularly in West Germany during the Cold War, and brought these men international fame. Yet, this renown centred on the dissidents’ immanent criticism of the outdated GDR structures and largely overlooked the dimension of their arguments that was at least as important as the critique itself – the utopian alternative to the structures being criticised, as portrayed in Havemann’s novel Tomorrow, in Harich’s interview Communism without Growth? and in Bahro’s social science essay The Alternative in Eastern Europe.

Alexander Amberger can be credited with remedying this lack of comparative analysis by evaluating substantial print and non-print sources, including archive materials and Stasi documentation. In terms of methodology, as a paradigm for the analysis of his material, he chose to draw on Thomas More’s classical utopia. According to this concept, political utopias are imaginary projections of either an ideal or a frightening society. They can be interpreted as better or worse alternatives to the undesirable developments, identified and criticised in the author’s society of origin. This is a plausible approach insofar as the lines of argumentation pursued by all three dissidents followed this pattern. They not only criticised the GDR’s structural shortcomings but also showed how a society might look in which the root causes of the aberrations identified have been eliminated. It does not go without saying, however, that this concept of utopia will be used in the current study. In fact, the concept of the classical utopia is not entirely compatible with the theories of Marx and Engels or, drawing on the philosophy of praxis, their claim to validity in accordance with the 11th of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.

That said, Amberger is right to point out that there is a difference between Marx and Marxism. The founding fathers of historical materialism may have focused primarily on a critique of the capitalist political economy and marginalised the depictions of the classless society they strived to achieve. Yet, Marxism frequently flouted this Bilderverbot or ban on images. Typical examples of this are Bebel’s Woman and Socialism and Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian novels Red Star and Engineer Menni. If the concept of classical utopia can claim to be capable of adaptive flexibility, then, as Amberger points out, we can also say the same of Marxism. With regard to the claim to validity rooted in the philosophy of praxis, the three authors at the centre of this study invoke the concept of ‘concrete utopia’, first used by Ernst Bloch, with its emphasis on the utopian motivation to act.

In the context of the classical utopia, Amberger finds this assimilation perfectly acceptable, since even the claim to validity of More’s Utopia in the form of a regulative principle should not be misinterpreted as idealistic and non-committal. Even if he believed it would be impossible and indeed undesirable to translate this utopia into a social reality one-to-one, he certainly did not exclude the option of implementing, albeit with some caution, top-down reforms based on utopian ideals.

The classical utopia as defined by More can nevertheless help structure the present study. The basis of the present analysis is quite clear, given that the utopian phenomenon of a fictitious alternative image of society is always inextricably linked with the utopian author’s critique of discernible aberrations in his society of origin and that this quite frequently includes biographical elements. Amberger’s work pursues this approach rigorously. In his ‘Introduction’, he not only describes in detail the reasoning behind his choice of the classical model of utopia; but he also depicts the socioeconomic and structural ecological problems in the GDR criticised by all three authors. This critique was the starting point for Havemann’s, Bahro’s and Harich’s gradual distancing from the GDR regime, ultimately leading them to develop a fictitious alternative to the stagnation and ossification of the mechanisms of reproduction in ‘actually existing socialism’.

In the concluding part of the book, the author conducts a comparison of the utopian texts written by Havemann, Harich and Bahro. He sums up by stressing the importance of the challenge-response pattern or the notion of critique-alternative for the three authors. Within the concept of classical utopia, Amberger successfully manages to situate the fictitious alternatives to the GDR’s actually existing socialism between the two poles of the archistic (authority-driven) and the anarchistic (free from authority) approach. Harich’s eco-dictatorship clearly possesses archistic traits. In many respects, Havemann’s more libertarian construct is very much in accord with the anarchistic approach and Bahro’s Alternative in Eastern Europe constitutes a hybrid of archistic and anarchistic elements. Amberger, however, goes on to reduce the classical utopian approach to the hegemonic post-materialist interpretation, which has prevailed since the 1970s. This proved to be an essential step given the apparent overlap between Havemann, Harich and Bahro, in other words, their shared examination of the issue of ecology, something which has been subject to public debate ever since the publication of Meadows’s The Limits to Growth.

According to Amberger, however, this common feature should not be allowed to obscure one all-important difference. The distinguishing feature of post-materialist utopian discourse in the US context was the fact that it was highly self-reflexive. The positive utopian image of society was conceived in the knowledge that it could also fail and become the opposite of what was intended. There is no sign of this at all in Bahro, Havemann or Harich’s utopian texts. Drawing on Rousseau’s positive human image, Havemann and Bahro do not see positive utopia or eutopia as a fragile construct that departs from an altruistic image of a ‘New Man’; more to the point, man’s lust for power and his aggressiveness barely feature in their utopian works. Admittedly, some overlap between Harich’s approach and Arnold Gehlen’s anthropology can be seen. Harich’s vision of environmental communism, however, does not anticipate the development of self-destructive tendencies, for example when no mechanisms are in place to curb power.

There is also another difference. Given the fact that they focus more heavily on the issue of growth than post-materialist utopian authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach and Marge Piercy, it might be more accurate to describe Havemann, Bahro and Harich’s utopian antitheses as ‘post-growth utopias’. As such, once liberated from their GDR mantle, they could still claim to be of relevance today. Amberger summarises a key finding of his analysis:

Their utopias are both anachronistic and could not be more relevant today. They are anachronistic because the historical context in which they emerge has very little to do with the present. Yet they are relevant because of their relationship with critique of growth and the development of post-growth models.

At this juncture, we could add that Alexander Amberger has produced a study that enriches utopia research, bringing present and future ecological disasters and imagined alternatives into focus. But more than this, his work is also instrumental in giving us a better understanding of how oppositional thinking in the GDR emerged and of the restrictive conditions under which this thinking had to be verbalised.

Richard Saage

Berlin, April 2014