“A Collective Dream”: Community, Countersocieties, & Counterpublics

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SQUAT, or the Radical Community Builders of Reunified Berlin

Maya Green

6 episodes

9 months ago

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is known around the world as marking the triumph of the West and the fall of communism. However, when we zoom into the neighborhoods surrounding this infamous concrete structure, we see a different story... of radical young people who squatted empty buildings to explore alternatives to capitalism, express queer identities, and claim agency in a time of massive global change. With the help of a dynamic cast of former squatters, punks, and dreamers, Maya Justine Green integrates academic theory and personal narrative to tell a story of what people built for themselves in a city's "empty" spaces — and what it might teach us about how to navigate the world’s current crises.

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“A Collective Dream”: Community, Countersocieties, & Counterpublics

SQUAT, or the Radical Community Builders of Reunified Berlin

57 minutes 49 seconds

1 year ago

“A Collective Dream”: Community, Countersocieties, & Counterpublics

What exactly was so radical about these squatters’ “radical communities”? In this episode, Maya offers a few frameworks to analyze the way life in Berlin’s squats diverged from the mainstream, in particular looking at the ways squatters thought about queer identity, anti-capitalist ideology, age, and art. She also examines the stories of the Black people that appeared in the margins of this historical narrative.

Citations:

Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement by Tiffany Florvil (2020)
Assorted images, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum Archives
“The Public Sphere: an Encyclopedia Article” by Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox (article in
New German Critique, 1974)
“Tuntenhaus Forellenhof 1990: Gay Communism’s Short Summer” curated by Bastian Krondorfer, Schwules Museum (https://www.schwulesmuseum.de/ausstellung/tuntenhaus-forellenhof-1990-gay-communisms-short-summer/?lang=en)
“Toward a Generic Concept of Counter-culture” by Keith A. Roberts (article in Sociological Focus, 1978)
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin by Alexander Vasudevan (2015)
Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner (2002)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.