2 - “Maybe the Genuine Utopia”: Uwe Timm's Vision of a “Postsocialist” Society in the Novel Rot

Summary

SINCE 1968, THE WORLD HAS KEPT ON TURNING, and has changed considerably— and critical observers of contemporary history like Uwe Timm know this only too well. In his 2001 novel Rot (Red), he illustrates how people nowadays tend not to understand how someone can still talk about “a different world” (79). Deploring the global escalation of consumption and the rising demand for consumer goods or dropping keywords such as “protests,” “boycotts,” or “anti-consumerism” takes people aback: “‘Oh, my goodness!,’ said someone at the next table who had been listening in” on his protagonist discussing politics over lunch at a beer garden in Berlin (Rot 331, 151). Nevertheless, as also discussed in the previous chapter of this volume, Timm maintains that the core values and goals of the ‘68 movement are, undoubtedly, still worth striving for: “more freedom and equality,” “more social justice” (Von Anfang und Ende 41, 99), and “solidarity” (“Gesellschaft und Gerechtigkeit,” n.p.). Holding firm against numerous attempts over the years to make him concede that these ideas might appear anachronistic today, Timm continues to insist that a world full of injustice and inequality is unacceptable. Consequently, “alternative models” to the status quo must be developed (“Gesellschaft und Gerechtigkeit”) and “utopian ideas” must be imagined and formulated (quoted in Hamann 457). In his literary works and theoretical writings, to this day and against the backdrop of changing historical contexts, he puts these pivotal ideas of the 1960s movements to the test, and time and again he asks how much room they might still have in the world today (Cornils 297; A. Albrecht 46; M. Albrecht, “Das Beispiel Kropotkin” 79; M. Albrecht, “Absoluteness of the Knowledge” 14).

“Owing to 68, I am certainly well grounded in one way,” Timm said in a 2010 interview, “I have a good eye for social inequality, for injustice, for certain economic contexts, which I did not have before. The anger, the fury, the outrage about these conditions, this is still an impetus, these things are still with me” (Kammler 15). In line with a doctrine of the student movement that conceives of social reality as fundamentally alterable, one of the most important premises Timm maintains is the refusal to accept inequality and injustice as immutable.