THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 612
itself in a group and subsequently for it. If a tomorrow is pictured as a whole however, then this mostly becomes deceit in late bourgeois terms, and at best it becomes a
game, or romantic. We shall possibly have to speak about these last two varieties later, at least they kept utopian inclination afloat. The prophetic light novel provided
this kind of thing among non­proletarian strata, in the inquisitive petit bourgeoisie. Hertzka's ‘A Journey to Freeland’, 1889, belongs here, with a girl from Freeland in it,
mildly advocating agrarian reform. Even a private­capitalist fairytale of an ideal state ventured forward, rare even in ancient times, and bold so to speak today: Thirion's
‘Neustria’, 1901, devoted to a new Gironde. The capitalist future was seen in a better light in Tarde's ‘Underground Man’, 1905: images of attempted restoration arise
where the past is concerned, but solely those of underground escape where the future is concerned. Air, light and sunshine, however, are to cure the defects at home in
Ebenezer Howard's ‘Tomorrow’, 1898, and also in his ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’, 1902. The first garden city is pictured in the latter, organized according to
nothing but ‘social functions’; what keeps the chimneys burning* is rather less clear. Weak in insight, rich in ideas, such an organization is to be established and to
succeed.
And as usual it is not at all clear by what means life is radically changed into something better. The American Bellamy still appears the most sympathetic of all here with
his once famous book ‘Looking Backward’, 1888, published in German by Dietz as ‘Ein Rfickblick aus dem Jahr 2000’. The story in which it is cloaked is well­tested
colportage: a rich Bostonian, Mr Julius West, is buried shortly before his wedding, after he had sunk into a magnetic sleep; he is dug up in the year 2000, the magnetic
sleep has conserved his body, and Mr West becomes a citizen of the American ideal state which has arisen in the meantime. The reader can now inspect this construct
of the future as if through opera glasses; more than in any previous utopia that which is dreamed appears as a fabulous present. Thus Bellamy satisfies the demand
rejected by Marxists to give a picture of future society; his sensational novel, for all its shallowness and the superficiality of its civilization, is not without agile socialist
imagination. It hallucinates, knowing Marx at best by hearsay, an egalitarian organization of economic life, without slums, banks, stock markets, and courts; America (!)
is regarded here as a ‘pioneer of general radical change’. There is no money
* The general meaning of the German phrase alluded to here, ‘damit der Schornstein raucht’, is ‘to keep body and soul together’.