On Democracy

Utopian and dystopian past
and present prognoses about the
future of democracy
read by Johanna Wokalek
and Ulrich Matthes

Texts by Karl August von Hardenberg, Louis Sebastien Mercier, Immanuel Kant, Theodor W. Adorno, Winston Churchill, Sinclair Lewis, Hannah Ahrendt, Joseph Vogl / Alexander Kluge, Heinrich von Kleist and Eric Hobsbawm

arranged by Gerhard Ahrens

'All state authority is derived from the people – but where will it arrive?'
Bertolt Brecht, Paragraph I

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 20th century, the future of democracy seemed certain. The western countries assumed that it would steadily gain a foothold and spread inexorably around the globe. After the millennium, this assumption turned out to have been an illusion. There is now talk of a crisis of representative democracy or even a post-democracy. In view of this, the literary representations of utopias and dystopias that describe the rise, troubles or downfall of democracy, usually as a warning and an appeal against the abandonment of a state system that is, according to Winston Churchill, 'the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried', become relevant again.