Everyday life of the riot - The transnationality of French and West German rural communities in the 1960s

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The project investigates rural communities between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. This period stretches from the invention and popularization of rural communities until their progressive dissolution and replacement by socially more acceptable flat-sharing communities. Firstly, the project questions the interrelationship between political critique and innovative concepts of living communities. Why were the rural communities rather predecessors than results of political changes? Rural communities are analyzed as symptoms of anticipated social crisis and the project is interested in alternative practices and innovative cultural techniques that were triggered by expectations of crisis and hopes for reforms. Secondly, the project researches west German and French rural communities from a deliberately transnational perspective. Forms of interference, delimitation and cooperation are explicitly not restricted to the United States. The question is to what degree transnational transfers forged world views and lifestyles of the communards. Finally, the reception and production of media contents is another focus. Many communards made use of available media in order to inform themselves on rural communities and foreign lifestyles abroad. In distinction from existing research the project thus addresses rural communities as results of a dramatically changing media landscape during the long 1960s.