Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that it won’t all become even worse than it already is.
This book claims that each period of...
Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that it won’t all become even worse than it already is.
This book claims that each period of time, each act, and each thought actually contain more possibilities for self-improvement than is obvious on first glance. The internal connection between the hidden degrees of freedom is what the book calls »pedigree collapse«. The term denotes a model with which one may explain how progress is realised in the efforts of actual people. It makes understandable why only eras that allow for certain fallacies are able to find certain truths, and it shows that the Enlightenment has bequeathed tools for emancipation, unknown even to itself, to present times. And finally, it illustrates what it is that remains valuable about this theory and other practical and theoretical legacies of the historical left until today.
En route to these findings, the book undertakes journeys into realistic research and fantastical art, introduces known and unknown revolutions, wars, types of injustice and of resistance, and sheds light onto periods of time for which it is not easy to discern whether they are future, past, or present.
Persons
Barbara Kirchner
Barbara Kirchner studied chemistry in Freiburg, Mainz and Chemnitz and obtained her PhD at the University of Basel. Before she accepted the professorship for theoretical chemistry at the University of Leipzig, she conducted research in Germany, Switzerland and Australia. Her field of activity spans from examining solvents and reactions, intermolecular forces and molecular quantum mechanical calculations of interesting molecules to programme development. She is the editor of the volumes Ionic Liquids and Multiscale Molecular Methods in Applied Chemistry in the series Topics in Current Chemistry, for which she also works on Electronic Effects in Organic Chemistry. She is co-editor of the book series Lecture Notes in Chemistry. In addition to that,...
Barbara Kirchner studied chemistry in Freiburg, Mainz and Chemnitz and obtained her PhD at the University of Basel. Before she accepted the...
OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Unfortunately, I’m Dead
Maybe there is a god after all. What if he doesn’t like us?
A German movie director flees from an exhausting love affair. His sister is suspected by the government of being a radical Islamist planning an attack. His best friend from childhood days is a priest fighting the devil. And a woman who knows all three of them, but is more than a mere human, opens the door to the...

Feldeváye
It has been relegated to the past – made obsolete by technologies of possibility that people could not imagine when they still lived on Earth. Now they have settled many worlds and encountered many intelligent life forms.
But on the remote planet of Feldeváye art comes back – in the form of a gift from an alien species. A young girl, Kathrin...

Rosa Luxemburg
Dietmar Dath, »the most productive and most radical writer in Germany« (Thomas Lindemann, Die Welt) on the revolutionary democrat Rosa Luxemburg.
Denmark (Rosenkilde)

Collected Poems
The hero of...

Winter of Machines
Turkey (Yazilama Yayinevi)

The Abolition of Species
US paperback edition (DoppelHouse), Italy (Nero Editions), Serbia (VBZ), Turkey (Is Kültür)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Seagull)

Weapon Weather
Russia (Text)

No Conference Today
»I only produce shit nowadays,« reads a diary entry by Arno Schmidt, meaning: journalistic texts for newspapers. Since 1990, Dietmar Dath has published heaps of – well: journalistic, satirical, and essayistic texts and by doing so has created his very own fan base.
Like very few others, he manages to connect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Bourdieu, pop culture to...

Dirac
Greece (Melani)

Saltwhite Eyes
»Dear Sonja,« David writes in these enlightening and desperate letters to a revered classmate from days long gone, »looking back isn’t always the best idea: Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s...