From the 'death of literature' to the 'New Subjectivity': Examining the interaction of utopia and nostalgia in Peter Schneider's 'Lenz', Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 'Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie', and Bernward Vesper's 'Die Reise'

This project seeks to clarify the complex interrelation of utopia and nostalgia in post World War II German literature, as the nineteen sixties student protest movement develops into what has become known as the 'New Subjectivity' of the nineteen seventies. The introductory chapter frames the historical context of this development, problematizing the idea of '1968' as its climax or turning point, while establishing the interrelationship of the concepts of utopia and nostalgia as the principal methodological and interpretative foil for the literary readings that follow. In three subsequent chapters I propose close readings of this theme in Peter Schneider's Lenz (1973). Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie (1972), and Berward Vesper's Die Reise (1977). These, I argue, texts demonstrate a trajectory of utopian thinking toward nostalgic reflection that exposes a dialectical tension between utopia and nostalgia. Through their literary texts as well as their essays in one another's periodical publications, such as the Voltaire Flugschriften and Kursbuch, the three authors address this tension as a common experience of the transitional period between the sixties student protest movement and the dawn of the 'New Subjectivity' of the seventies. I read Lenz as road narrative that mobilizes the metaphor of the road as the locus of the utopia-nostalgia dynamic; the road is a transitional space that embodies the uncertainty of the post-revolutionary moment when reflective nostalgia seems to replace the disillusioned utopia. Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie engages the literary discourses of utopia and nostalgia via the documentary form, after its pre-1968 heyday, confronting nostalgia as a return to and a yearning for the forgotten history of the utopian revolutionary movement of the Spanish Civil War. In my final chapter, a reading of Die Reise, I argue that Vesper's vast, autobiographically inspired 'novel-essay' testifies to a profoundly nostalgic impulse always-already present in the utopian project of the left, thus begetting a new form of 'subjective' rebellion that informs his text as a constant process of (literary) resistance. This model of rebellion resonates with my more general theoretical framing of the dynamic of utopia and nostalgia as a 'dialectical' process wherein neither notion supplants the other, but rather---as with Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectic of enlightenment---ceaselessly engender one another.