Community and Utopia: The Discourse of Gemeinschaft and the Search for a New Modernity in Germany

This dissertation examines the concept of Gemeinschaft (community) as a powerful ideal circulating in the German cultural imaginary in the early twentieth century. Abstracted from traditional associations with place and time, Gemeinschaft functioned as a particularly modern form of utopian thought, and numerous new forms of community were called upon to counter the dislocations of rapid social and economic change. The resulting discourse was more complex than has been previously noted; Gemeinschaft served both conservative and progressive ideals. The German fascination with Gemeinschaft fundamentally altered the imagined form of community as a social construct. Texts by Franz Kafka and Martin Buber illustrate the transition from traditional notions of Gemeinschaft to new ideals of community as a utopian social project, while an analysis of Ferdinand Tonnies' sociological theory reveals the increasing abstraction of the concept and the emergence of Gemeinschaft as an independent discourse. Popular and scholarly texts from the First World War and the Youth Movement, including Erich Ebermayer's Kampf um Odilienberg, reveal how Gemeinschaft framed new modes of social and economic organization. Texts from revolutionary and conservative writers after the war demonstrate the extraordinary popularity of Gemeinschaft as an ideal, while Ernst Toiler's Die Wandlung offers a radical example of the progressive utopia of Gemeinschaft in the literary imagination. On the other hand, F. W. Murnau's Der letzte Mann and Thomas Mann's Mario und der Zauberer offer subtle, critical interventions into the popular discourse during the Weimar Republic, while Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mo&huml;rder sind unter uns provides glimpses into the dystopia of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft seen after the fall of the fascist dictatorship. The ideal of Gemeinschaft may have often harkened back to pre-modern forms of social existence, but paradoxically, the discourse had the effect of differentiating the term, removing traditional requirements for spatial and temporal contiguity, and imbuing the word with highly self-referential characteristics, thus modernizing the very form of the concept. The discourse of Gemeinschaft thus reveals not only the conjunction of 'community' and 'utopia'; it also signals a radical break with the past, opening the way to the formation of new post-traditional conceptions of community.