“Real-Existing” Utopia
Book-Project

The book explores how the German Democratic Republic sought to create a socio-technical imaginary of a future free from the exhausting, repetitive labor of factories and agriculture (Routinearbeit) in order to legitimate “real-existing” socialism: state socialism not as mere stepping stone to full communism, but as the goal itself. Technological utopianism was meant to be a solution to all of the most fundamental problems of the GDR: the collective lack of domestic legitimacy, distinct national identity, and natural resources. State institutions such as the Ministry of Education and the Academy of Science therefore jointly articulated a promise of a coming socialist “scientific-technological revolution” in order to unify the population behind a singular goal, to self-define the GDR as a nation of scientists, and to educate a workforce capable of producing exportable technologies. Maintaining such a promise was a delicate endeavor: it required, wherever possible, the careful management of East German everyday life.
The core of the book, then, revolves around three case studies – education, hobbies, and sports – each a primary locus of institutional efforts to both inspire the future and impart the technical skills to actually bring it about. In relying on this promise, however, the GDR produced an even more intractable problem: it raised expectations that the it could not meet and thereby contributed to its collapse. Thus, his work excavates an otherwise unexplored but key explanation for the ultimate downfall of the GDR, and offers some important lessons for the academy and beyond: a better understanding of how technology shapes politics, how concepts of the future can be used to manage the present, and, perhaps most importantly in a world threatened by looming environmental catastrophe, how promises of an undefined future redemptive technology are used to excuse action in the present.
 

Mario Bianchini holds a PhD in the History and Sociology of Technology and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. While a visiting scholar at the ZZF, he is currently completing his first book. At the ZZF he researches in Dep. II: Knowledge – Economy – Politics.