Abstract:

Christian Kracht’s influential novel Imperium, located between story and history, follows the life of August Engelhardt, a German life-reforming nudist and cocovore at the fin de siècle, who in 1902 established a cocovore colony in German New Guinea, a part of the German Empire before World War I. This article will trace the interaction of the fictional world in Kracht’s novels (especially in Imperium, but also in 1979, Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten, Faserland), and the historic life reform utopias. In a first part the comparison of story and history is at stake. It will show how the politics of the German Empire, and that of the life reform utopian, are converted into Kracht’s fictional world. The second part will elaborate the circularity in Kracht’s novels, and discuss the question of how the circularity of Kracht’s fiction radicalizes the utopia towards a dystopia. The third section will focus on the question of the realization of utopia, and whether a realization of utopia will erase the advancing character of the utopian thinking. It will show that a realization of utopia is only possible in a fictional world.   

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