Ütopyanın Sonu: Hindistancevizi İmparatorluğu - Christian Kracht’ın Imperium Romanında Ütopyacı Dürtüler

Year 2015, Volume: 2 Issue: 34, 73 - 84, 01.10.2015

İrem Atasoy

Abstract

Ütopyanın Sonu: Hindistancevizi İmparatorluğu - Christian Kracht’ın Imperium Romanında Ütopyacı Dürtüler

Keywords

Ütopya, Hindistancevizi İmparatorluğu

The End of Utopia: Empire of Coconuts - Utopian Impulses in Christian Kracht’s Novel Imperium

Abstract

Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium (2012) is based upon the life of August Engelhardt, a
radical cocovore and nudist, who decides to establish a colony of coconuts in
German New Guinea before World War I. In the form of a utopia, the novel
contains a sharp criticism of German colonial history. In modernism, utopias
are representations of paradisiacal places and identified with alternative ways
of organizing better societies. Actually, they are improved by the existence of
reality itself, which builds the fundamental source of utopias. Thus, they
always end up with corruption. This paper focuses on Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium (2012) and aims to analyze the
novel within the concept of utopian impulses as constitutive elements of
utopias. Referring to Fredric Jameson, this study examines the challenge
between reality and utopian thinking. This article also shows how utopias end
up in destruction.

Keywords

utopia, utopian impulse, colonialism, Christian Kracht, Imperium, cocovore

References

• Valdez Damian (2014): German Philhellinism. The Pathos of the Historical Imagination form Winckelmann to Goethe, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.