This is a book about hope. It’s about the resilient and adaptable human capacity to imagine a superlative future, even when official discourses insisted on its impossibility. It’s about who conceived these radical alternatives and how they tried to realize them.Although one could tell a version of this history for many places around the world, a coincidence of conditions in the late twentieth century made West Germany fertile ground for imagining new utopian possibilities. By the late 1970s, West Germany faced an uninspiring set of circumstances. The country was shaken by oil crises that ended the economic miracle that rebuilt Germany after World War II. It was unsettled by a wave of domestic terrorism. New science warned of imminent threats to the environment. Cold War military strategy continued to leave people on edge. And many West Germans felt that domestic politics had stagnated. These circumstances didn’t seem conducive to innovation.And yet this was the same moment when groups of intellectuals, activists, artists, and ordinary people began to insist that society develop new and ambitious visions for the future. They were inspired by the incremental successes of the New Social Movements—the environmental movement, women’s movement, peace movement, and anti-nuclear movement, among others. They drew momentum from Germany’s new attempts to work through the legacies of its Nazi past. They rallied alongside the opponents of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative administration. But they wanted more.The book follows three networks of activists who responded to this sense of political disenfranchisement, social alienation, and cultural impotence with radical proposals. The collection of mostly amateur historians that populated the Berlin History Workshop used historical methodology to overturn undemocratic hierarchies of knowledge. By giving ordinary Germans both tools and opportunities to narrate their own histories, these historians sought to broker more ethical power relations. At the same time, Germany’s newest political party, the Green Party, brought politics out of parliament and into residential communities. The Greens hoped to cultivate a truly democratic society by saturating everyday life with meaningful opportunities to practice democracy. Parallel to these initiatives, a loose collection of artists of public space set out to use their art to change the ways people thought and acted. Their artworks nudged viewers to understand themselves as bearing responsibility for current issues. Importantly, these activists didn’t just traffic in ideas. They also created infrastructures in which Germans could test out and adopt new behaviors. And they refused to understand their work as short-lived. Instead, they borrowed from the environmental movement’s concept of sustainability and insisted that any alternative to society must be enduring and adaptable.The impact of these groups reveals that interest in radical alternatives to existing society had hardly evaporated. Instead, West Germans embraced qualitatively new kinds of utopian practices that pursued a radically democratic, socially integrated, socially conscious, just, and peaceful Germany. They also attempted to enact that vision via the practices of everyday life. In doing so, they reclaimed utopian hope from the dustbin of historical ideas.