The following study investigates German dystopian literature. Until now, such literature has been subsumed under the much broader and poorly defined utopian genre. As a result, German dystopianism has not yet been identified as a coherent cultural phenomenon. A primary aim of the project is therefore to establish the field of dystopian research in the German context. At the heart of the dissertation are four works, which I consider representative of the genre: Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Der Tunnel (1913), Georg Kaiser’s Gas plays (1917–1920), and two works by Ernst Jünger: Der Arbeiter (1932) and Gläserne Bienen (1957).

Besides novelists and playwrights, close attention is paid to various contemporary thinkers, from the industrialist Walther Rathenau and the anarchist Gustav Landauer to the conservative philosophers Friedrich Georg Jünger and Martin Heidegger. In many cases, such figures were in direct contact with my primary authors. Georg Kaiser routinely ran his manuscripts past Landauer, while the work of Heidegger and the Jünger brothers is closely interrelated. The latter two were both in the audience when Heidegger first presented his ‘Frage nach der Technik’ in Munich in 1953. Following this interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation also contains 35 images, including contemporary stage designs and examples from Jünger’s numerous photo anthologies.

As my research shows, German dystopias are characterised by a set of recurring themes: massification and the end of the individual, the (social) engineer or technocrat, anti-rationalism, and technology. The genre turns against the progressivist optimism of the nineteenth century and takes inspiration from both Rathenau’s notion of the “mechanization of the world” (coined in 1912) and the contemporary reception of America (“Americanism”). The latter phenomenon turns out to be central to the development of dystopian literature across Europe. A further, defining characteristic of the genre is a widely denied anti-utopianism. The reflexive denial of this characteristic in the scholarship points, not least, towards a sloppy understanding of utopia as a concept. Far from a benign longing for a better world, the term denotes the desire to re-engineer humanity, which is conceived as dangerously deficient in the utopian imagination. The thesis thus challenges prevailing conceptions of utopia, which is revealed as fundamentally misanthropic.