ABSTRACT
Utopia and Dissent in West Germany concludes with a return to Peter Bürger’s dismissal of the postwar avant-garde as a neo-avant-garde and argues that “the dialectical nature of art” persisted after the war. First, the groups examined in this book were more than a simple revival of the turn-of-the-century avant-garde. Second, art was neither beholden to the market nor did it merely oil the wheels of capitalism. The networks and groups examined in this book grappled with their mixed fortunes in a climate that valued art as a symbol of political progress but ignored its critical content. In the alternatives they put forward, they demonstrated that culture and politics were inseparable. Artists pushed against the momentum to move forward and in doing so shaped social values. Moreover, art could not be constrained by either political purposes or a broader notion of beautification. By tracing artists’ commitments, Utopia and Dissent in West Germany locates the cultural origins of 1968 within the avant-garde’s mission to restore the dignity of human existence through art.
