Peter Neumann, philosopher: Without the idea of progress, only resignation remains'

"In his latest book, which, in English, would translate as The Long Century of Utopias (2025), German philosopher Peter Neumann, 38, explores the dreams and disappointments of the political projects that aspired to reinvent society in the 20th century; he also looks at their usefulness despite their inevitable failures. In his previous book, Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits (2022), the Neubrandenburg-born writer focused on the philosophical ferment of 19th-century Germany, which was marked by a climate of intellectual optimism."

"However, in his latest work, the guiding thread is the sense of catastrophe that permeated the entire last century, but also the insistence on imagining solutions. This leads the author to traverse the temporal arc from Nietzsche to Susan Sontag, by way of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Salvador Dali. This young and brilliant thinker who is also a cultural journalist for the newspaper Die Zeit referred to this back-and-forth between disaster and hope,"

The twentieth century combined catastrophic events with ambitious utopian political projects that sought to reinvent society, producing both inspirations and failures. Intellectual currents linked figures from Nietzsche through Freud, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Salvador Dali, revealing a persistent tension between catastrophe and imaginative solutions. Unconventional chronological frames, from Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption to the emergence of COVID-19 in 2019, foreground the interplay between culture and nature. The period encompassed the rise and fall of liberal society, precursors to fascism, environmental degradation, and continued efforts to imagine useful political and cultural alternatives despite repeated disappointments.

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