“A Collective Dream”: Community, Countersocieties, & Counterpublics

What exactly was so radical about these squatters’ “radical communities”? In this episode, Maya offers a few frameworks to analyze the way life in Berlin’s squats diverged from the mainstream, in particular looking at the ways squatters thought about queer identity, anti-capitalist ideology, age, and art. She also examines the stories of the Black people that appeared in the margins of this historical narrative.

Citations:

• Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement by Tiffany Florvil (2020)
• Assorted images, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum Archives
• “The Public Sphere: an Encyclopedia Article” by Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox (article in
• New German Critique, 1974)
• “Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism’s Short Summer” curated by Bastian Krondorfer, Schwules Museum (https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellung/tuntenhaus-forellenhof-1990-gay-communisms-short-summer/?lang=en)
• “Toward a Generic Concept of Counter-culture” by Keith A. Roberts (article in Sociological Focus, 1978)
• Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin by Alexander Vasudevan (2015)
• Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner (2002)

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