Please join the German Studies Lecture Series talk entitled, Light in Dark Times: Historical Lessons on Hope after Authoritarianism by Jennifer Allen (Associate Professor of Modern European History, Yale University). 

Abstract
By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. Saturated by the violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock, hope for a superlative future seemed to wane. Though the ostensible victory of capitalism and liberal democracy at the end of the century offered a moment of triumph for some, for many it seemed only to yield complacency and cynicism. Using West Germany as its central case study, this talk reassesses this narrative about the fate of hope at the end of the twentieth century. It argues that, in fact, West Germans remained remarkably committed both to imagining and to pursuing superlative futures and charts the mechanisms by which they bolstered this stance. Though the enterprise of realizing a better tomorrow conventionally appears as a project of the left, this talk also discusses the ways the right have employed the same devices to analogous ends. 

RSVP for talk by Jennifer Allen

The German Studies Lecture Series is hosted by the Department of German Studies, Stanford University.