The Utopian Potential in Hannes Stein’s Novel Der Komet (2014)

In his essay entitled “Future City”, Fredric Jameson challenges the assumption that it would be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, by asserting that writing can be utilized to construe “feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia” (Jameson 2003: 76). One such signal emanates from the parahistoric novel Der Komet (2014) by Hannes Stein, a rare case of utopia in contemporary German literature, in which Franz Ferdinand not only survives his 1914 visit to Sarajevo, but also saves the Habsburg Monarchy from collapse, thus divesting the twentieth century of war and genocide, as well as of the exponential growth of the capitalist economy after WWII. However, Stein’s Habsburg uchronia is fatally undermined not only by the imminent danger of apocalypse in the form of a comet plummeting towards the pacifist population of the modern-day Danube Monarchy, but also by the novel’s dual structure, which precludes any possibility of historical otherness. Given the chasm at the very heart of this structure, the article addresses the question of whether the novel shows any utopian potential at all.