A key component of the book’s argument is that both efforts to reimagine the parameters of what “utopia” could mean and efforts to pursue those possibilities in practice could be found throughout German society in the late twentieth century. I defend this claim with a diverse collection of evidence: I talk about politics; I talk about art; I talk about intellectual life. The book is written to enable readers to excerpt these individual cases studies based on their interests. But when readers zoom in on specific examples, they risk missing the point that the transformations I describe in any individual section of the book had analogies across society. Changes in the way people conceived the scale, temporality, and agents of utopia were sweeping, not isolated phenomena.Among the most accessible illustrations of my argument, though, is a peculiar Holocaust memorial initiative that cropped up in the early 1990s called the Stumbling Stones (Stolpersteine). I’m reluctant to describe the Stumbling Stones as a monument because the project features not a single commemorative site, but rather a network of tens of thousands of micro-sites scattered throughout Europe. Each mini-monument consists of a brass-covered cobblestone roughly three inches cubed, engraved with the name, date of birth, date of death, and place of death of a single victim of Nazi persecution. The text on each stone begins the same: “Here lived…,” and they lie flush with the sidewalk in front of the victim’s last freely chosen residence. They are called Stumbling Stones not because one actually stumbles over them but because one stumbles over a memory whose unanticipated discovery invites a moment of reflection and participation. Identifying victims by name, the stones cement the occurrence of each individual existence into the topography of everyday life. Since the project’s formal initiation in 1994, more than eighty thousand of these micro-memorials have been installed in twenty-six European countries.The number of individual memorials alone, however, is not the Stumbling Stones’ most significant feature. Instead, I highlight the number and nature of participants in their creation. The project operates via a massive, decentralized, grassroots network. Behind each mini-monument are scores of ordinary people who have initiated, funded, researched, built, installed, and maintained it. The utopian ambition of the Stumbling Stones is both to envision and then to attempt to enact a future in which German citizens engage actively with Germany’s difficult past. The project serves not simply as an act of justice for the memory of the dead. It also operates, simultaneously, as an instrument in the battle against violence, antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia in the world today. The commemorative initiative becomes a very public stage upon which large, diverse, often international communities join together to critique the failures of contemporary society. That capacity won the Stumbling Stones attention internationally, generating a series of spin-offs in places as distant as Buenos Aires and Moscow. This global web of micro-commemoration demonstrates the allure of what some activists have described as a politics of small steps motivated by great visions.This book was conceived at a moment of optimism, when the mantra “Yes, we can!” was emblazoned on bumper stickers and T-shirts and echoed across news headlines and radio stations around the United States. On January 8, 2008, then Senator Barack Obama warned us that “the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.” And many of us believed him. To study hope in this context made sense.But the book was born at a moment of despair, when police brutality toward Black and Brown bodies grew increasingly brazen but also when the mantra “Black Lives Matter” remained deeply controversial; when a devastating pandemic claimed millions of lives around the globe but the freedom not to wear a mask took precedence over protecting one’s neighbors; when climate change ravaged some of the planet’s most historic, stunning, and valuable landscapes and set up populations across the world for generations of immiseration; when reason and research were cast aside by charges of “fake news;” and when the outbreak of a major war on the European continent shattered any remaining illusions that a post-Cold War peace might be durable. For a good portion of this book’s development, hope seemed far away.But that’s the thing about hope: any time its fire might be extinguished, someone always manages to secret away an ember. However small, it still burns, ever ready to be stoked into something brighter when we are ready to do the work of kindling.This book offers evidence of that resilience. It gives us real examples drawn from our recent past of individuals and groups who responded to profound obstacles with profound creativity. It shows us the spectrum of real possibilities when ordinary people are willing to put that creativity in the service of realizing a better future. And it reminds us that failure is hardly the only possible outcome.