Utopia Becomes Dystopia: Imperium by Christian Kracht

In ironic and often scandalous formulations, Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium describes the attempt to realise the religious and social revolutionary ideal of August Engelhardt’s nudist and vegan utopia in a ‘new world’, namely on the island of Kabakon in the German colony of Neupommern (today New Britain, Papua New Guinea). Particularly noteworthy is the sharply ironic portrayal of alterity, which, although based on prejudice and incorporating the usual colonial practices, does not show the conventional division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between Europeans and natives. On the contrary, the protagonist, who has fled the technological modernity of Europe to create his own alternative society, despises both the ‘loutish’ meat-eating Europeans and the ‘primitive’ natives. Nevertheless, August Engelhardt’s actions prove to be a genuine colonial act based on the asymmetric distribution of power, as Engelhardt appropriates the land of the natives without their consent. The main distinction between him and the other colonisers is his objective: while the latter try to create a representation of Europe in the South Seas ( for example, the choice of place names such as ‘New Pomerania’), Engelhardt tries to find an alternative to both European and indigenous societies, but tragically fails with his community, creating a small form of society whose failure will give rise to a dystopia from which he will himself escape. The chapter aims to describe the transition from an idea of utopia aimed at the betterment of humanity to the actual realisation of a dystopia, with often macabre details and frequent but veiled parallels between the figures of August Engelhardt and the never directly mentioned but clearly recognisable Adolf Hitler.