Why am I passionate about this?
Iâm a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, Iâve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, Iâm now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimentingâand continuing to do so despite failures.
Joachim's book list on protesting in post-war Europe hope and inspiration
Why did Joachim love this book?
I hardly imagined the Soviet Union, a place of grey and black, with the only sparks of color being red, to be a place for hippie culture to flourish. Juliane FĂźrstâs book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like âangels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.â
The book traces how these hippies, against all odds, found ways to distance themselves from the Soviet System, not through open opposition but through dreaming of and living a different life, communally, spiritually, and often on the road. And FĂźrstâs book does more than merely portray Soviet hippies in a fundamentally sympathetic way: It also reveals what we can learn about a larger society by studying those at the margins. It is an unusual but highly illuminating perspective on the late Soviet Union.
1 author picked Flowers Through Concrete as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization.
Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundredâŚ