Tag: writing

Podcast Episode: John Cooper Clarke’s Have It: The bard of Salford tours a country in decline.

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Pip: A poet who once read between sets by the Fall and the Buzzcocks is now on a twenty-date arena tour. Britain contains multitudes — or at least, it contains one very well-packaged contradiction.

Mara: That contradiction is exactly what freerein61 is working through here — Clarke's new collection Have It, his tour, and what his elevation to cultural institution says about how Britain remembers its working class. Let's start with the bard himself.

John Cooper Clarke and the Packaging of Decline

Pip: The central tension in this piece is not really about poetry — it is about what happens when a working-class voice becomes a cultural product. Clarke spent decades describing a world official culture preferred to ignore, and now that culture is selling him back to the people he wrote about.

Mara: The post frames it precisely. Clarke is described as "both chronicler and exhibit, both witness to working-class life and participant in its commodification." His success is real, but so is the machinery around it.

Pip: Which means his talent is not in question — the reach is. "Beasley Street" from 1980 put rats with rickets and Friday-night drinking on the page and made it literature. Decades later he rewrote it as "Beasley Boulevard," a sardonic commentary on regeneration and property speculation. The slum gets revitalised; the underlying social reality does not.

Mara: Those two poems are described as a diptych — the industrial city as Thatcher left it, and the neighbourhood as Blair imagined it. "Evidently Chickentown" gets named alongside them as the third pillar: its relentless accumulation of grievances captures, in the post's words, "life in a society where everything is broken but nothing changes."

Pip: And yet some boxes on the current tour run close to fifty pounds a head. The poet of the bedsit is now marketed with the full apparatus of the entertainment industry. Nobody is accusing Clarke of selling out — the post is clear on that — but the apparatus does what apparatus does.

Mara: The formal argument goes deeper than ticket prices. Drawing on Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, the post argues that Clarke's rapid-fire rhyme and list-poem structure are "perfectly suited to depicting a static world" — detail accumulates, the punchline resets everything, and nothing develops. It is, the post argues, the form of political exhaustion.

Pip: A form shaped by a generation that watched the miners lose and never saw the working class rise again. Irony as a refuge — Clarke made brilliance out of resignation, and the culture rewarded him for it once the politics had safely drained away.

Mara: Which brings in Toria Garbutt, who shares the tour's spotlight. Born in Yorkshire's mining towns, her work confronts poverty, addiction, and deindustrialisation's long aftermath — the post describes it as writing "from within the social wreckage" rather than from cultural nostalgia. Her presence is called more than a support slot: a signal that the tradition Clarke helped build is being renewed by artists shaped by a harsher era.

Pip: The world Clarke described in Beasley Street has not gone away — it has deepened. Food banks, bankrupt councils, wages eroded by inflation. The post's closing question is whether Have It engages that accelerating crisis, or whether audiences and industry alike will preserve Clarke in cultural aspic.

Mara: The post leaves that genuinely open. Clarke's limitations are called historical, not personal — a reflection of his generation's moment, not a verdict on the man.

Pip: Whether the new collection answers the moment, or the moment simply outpaces it — that is the question the tour is quietly staging.

Pip: A poet who captured a static world now tours a world that is visibly moving. That gap is doing a lot of work.

Mara: And the tradition he helped build is being picked up by writers for whom the wreckage is not heritage — it is the present. Worth watching what form that produces next time.

John Cooper Clarke’s Have It: The bard of Salford tours a country in decline.

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

John Cooper Clarke has always seemed slightly out of time, a figure who emerged fully formed from the late 1970s, as though spat out by the collapsing industrial North with a pair of drainpipes, a shock of hair and a voice that could turn complaint into incantation. He arrived as Britain’s postwar industrial base began to disintegrate, as the mills and factories that had shaped whole cities closed their doors, and as the working class that sustained them entered a period of historic defeat. Clarke’s style rapid‑fire rhyme, deadpan delivery, the ability to turn squalor into something approaching music felt inseparable from that world. It still does.

Now 77, he’s back on the road. His 20‑date tour of Britain and Ireland, running through October and November, accompanies Have It, his new collection. It follows WHAT (2024), the surprise bestseller that confirmed Clarke’s unlikely status as a national treasure. In 2025, he became the first poet to headline a British arena, taking the stage at Manchester’s Co‑op Live. He received a Northern Music Award. His poems appear on the national curriculum. The man who once read between sets by the Fall and the Buzzcocks, a poet of pubs, bedsits and bus shelters, is now part of the cultural establishment.

This transformation is not merely biographical. It is historical. Clarke’s career spans the period in which the working class that produced him was first defeated, then sentimentalised, and finally repackaged as cultural heritage. His rise tells a story not only about poetry but about Britain itself, about what has been lost, what has been preserved, and what has been embalmed. The industrial North that shaped his voice has been hollowed out, its communities fragmented by deindustrialisation, austerity and decades of political betrayal. Yet its image has been revived as a marketable aesthetic: gritty authenticity, northern humour, the romance of decline.

Clarke stands at the centre of this contradiction. He is both chronicler and exhibit, both witness to working‑class life and participant in its commodification. His success reflects his talent, but it also reflects a culture that has learned to celebrate the working class only after stripping it of political content. To understand Clarke’s late career and the new collection he now tours is to understand the Britain that made him, and the Britain that now sells him back to itself.

The contradictions of success

Clarke’s popularity is real and, in many ways, deserved. Few living writers have captured the physical and moral texture of postwar working‑class life with such precision. “Beasley Street” (1980) remains one of the most vivid portraits of urban dereliction in late‑industrial Britain: a place where “the rats have all got rickets” and “the men get drunk on Friday / And go to church on Sunday.” The poem smells of damp brick, chip‑shop fat, and the hopelessness of a city abandoned by capital.

Decades later, Clarke rewrote it as “Beasley Boulevard,” a sardonic commentary on regeneration, property speculation and the hollow promises of the new urbanism. The slum has been “revitalised,” but the underlying social reality remains unchanged. Taken together, the two poems form a kind of diptych: the industrial city as Thatcher left it, and the “revitalised” neighbourhood as Blair imagined it. Clarke’s work records, with bitter humour, the passage from one form of decline to another.

“Evidently Chickentown,” his breathless catalogue of frustration, still resonates with anyone who has lived on a run‑down estate. Its relentless rhythm, the piling up of grievances until they become absurd, captures something essential about life in a society where everything is broken but nothing changes.

His audiences, many of them working people in their fifties and sixties alongside younger fans drawn in through the Arctic Monkeys or The Sopranos, do not come for nostalgia. They come because Clarke describes their world accurately and treats it as worth describing. In a culture dominated by middle‑class self‑absorption, that is no small thing.

Yet the circumstances of the current tour cannot be ignored. At some venues, boxes cost close to £50 a head. The poet of the bedsit and the bus shelter is now marketed with the full apparatus of the entertainment industry. That apparatus turns rebellion into a brand. Clarke’s “trademark look” becomes a fashion item; his history in the deindustrialised North becomes a heritage attraction. None of this is his fault. It does, however, say something about how far the cultural layers that once called themselves “punk” have come to terms with the existing order.

The politics of form

The deeper issue is one of outlook. Clarke’s comedy targets the grim surface of capitalist society: the decaying high street, the brutal landlord, the pretensions of the newly rich. It rarely asks why that surface exists, or what social force might change it. His characteristic attitude is a wry, sometimes affectionate disgust. The world is absurd and squalid, and the best one can do is name it brilliantly.

That attitude belongs to its period. It was formed in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the defeat of the miners, the betrayals of the Labour and trade‑union bureaucracies, and the collapse of any mass socialist perspective in the working class. Many artists of that generation responded by withdrawing into irony. Clarke, gifted as he is, was no exception.

Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution that an artist’s form cannot be separated from the social soil that produced it. Clarke’s form the rapid‑fire rhyming list, the deadpan turn, the punchline that resets everything is extraordinarily effective at depicting a static world. It is less effective at depicting a world in motion.

This is not a moral failing. It is a historical one. Clarke’s technique embodies the period’s political exhaustion that shaped him. The rapid‑fire rhyme reduces the world to surface impressions; the list‑poem structure accumulates detail without development; the punchline ending offers closure without resolution. Everything resets. Nothing changes. It is the perfect form for a society in which the working class has been defeated and the future cancelled.

A world in motion

But the world is now moving fast. It arrives in a Britain of food banks, collapsing public services and wages eroded by years of inflation. The new Labour government continues austerity in name only. Councils go bankrupt while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. Young workers in Salford today confront conditions that Clarke’s original Beasley Street would recognise all too well.

The question, then, is whether Clarke’s new collection engages seriously with this situation, or offers more of the beloved routines. The tour publicity promises new material “alongside” fan favourites, a pairing that hints at the risk any veteran performer faces: being preserved in aspic by an audience that expects him to remain unchanged.

The cultural establishment and its limits

Clarke’s elevation to establishment status is not merely a personal triumph. It reflects a broader cultural pattern. Over the past two decades, Britain has developed a taste for working‑class authenticity provided it is safely packaged, politically neutral and available for consumption. The “heritage” version of the industrial North, with its flat caps, brass bands and gritty humour, has become a staple of television, advertising and tourism.

Clarke fits this pattern uneasily. His work is too sharp, too bitter, too accurate to be fully assimilated. But the industry tries anyway. The result is a strange double image: Clarke as both chronicler of decline and symbol of cultural resilience; both outsider and institution; both rebel and brand.

This contradiction is not his doing. It reflects a society that has lost the ability to imagine working‑class life except as nostalgia or entertainment. Clarke’s success testifies to his talent. It also reflects a culture that celebrates the working class only after stripping it of political content.

What remains

John Cooper Clarke’s late career invites a kind of double vision. On the one hand, he remains what he always was: a poet of the streets, a chronicler of the derelict and the absurd, a performer whose voice still carries the rhythms of the industrial North, decades after the factories fell silent. On the other hand, he has become an institution — celebrated, packaged, and circulated through the cultural economy as a symbol of working‑class authenticity. The tension between these two identities is not a personal contradiction but a historical one. It reflects the fate of the class that produced him, and how its memory is now used.

Clarke’s achievement is undeniable. For half a century he has insisted, against the grain of literary fashion, that poetry belongs not in seminar rooms but in pubs, clubs, and the mouths of people who were never meant to read it. He has given form to experiences official culture prefers to ignore: the damp bedsit, the boarded‑up shopfront, the petty humiliations of poverty, and the bleak humour that helps people endure them. In a society that often pathologises or sentimentalises working-class life, Clarke’s refusal to prettify anything becomes a moral stance.

Yet the limits of his work are inseparable from its strengths. Clarke’s form — the rapid‑fire rhyme, the list that piles up grievances until they become comic, the punchline that resets everything — is perfectly suited to depicting a static world. It is less suited to depicting a world in motion. His characteristic attitude, a wry and sometimes affectionate disgust, arose in a period when the working class had suffered historic defeats and no longer saw itself as a force capable of changing society. Irony became a refuge, and Clarke, like many artists of his generation, made brilliance out of resignation.

The world that produced that resignation has changed. Britain today is not merely shabby; it is unstable. Food banks proliferate, councils go bankrupt, wages stagnate, and public services collapse. A Labour government administers austerity with technocratic efficiency while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. The conditions Clarke described in “Beasley Street” have not disappeared; they have deepened and spread. But they no longer appear as permanent features of a static landscape. They appear as symptoms of a widening, accelerating crisis.

Whether Clarke’s new collection, Have It, engages with this reality is an open question. The tour promises new material “alongside” fan favourites — a pairing that suggests both continuity and risk. Audiences often want their icons to remain unchanged, and the entertainment industry is adept at preserving artists in cultural aspic. Yet Clarke shares the spotlight with younger poets like Toria Garbutt, one of the most compelling working-class voices to emerge from the post-industrial North in recent years. Born and raised in Yorkshire’s mining towns, her poetry confronts poverty, addiction, domestic violence, and the long aftermath of deindustrialisation with an honesty that avoids both sentimentality and despair. Garbutt’s work carries the cadence of the communities she writes about — sharp, musical, often darkly funny, and rooted in lived experience rather than cultural nostalgia. While Clarke’s generation often turned to irony in response to political defeat, Garbutt writes from within the social wreckage it produced, giving form to realities official culture still prefers to ignore. Her presence on Clarke’s tour is more than a support slot: it signals that the tradition of working-class poetry he helped popularise has not only survived but is being renewed by artists shaped by a different, harsher era.

Clarke’s limitations are not personal but historical. They reflect the exhaustion of a generation that saw the working class defeated and never saw it rise again. The revival of class struggle now visible across Britain and Europe will produce new artists, new forms, and new perspectives. It may also reveal the limits of those who made resignation into an aesthetic. Clarke’s best work captured the world as it was. Artists today must capture the world as it is becoming—and the forces that might change it.

Bibliography

Books and Collections

  • Clarke, John Cooper. Have It. London: Picador, 2026.
  • Clarke, John Cooper. WHAT. London: Picador, 2024.
  • Clarke, John Cooper. Ten Years in an Open-Necked Shirt. London: Arena, 1983.
  • Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. London: Red Star Press, 1970.

Poems

  • Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Street.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.
  • Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Boulevard.” Zipcode. London: Vintage, 2013.
  • Clarke, John Cooper. “Evidently Chickentown.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.

Articles and Interviews

  • Brown, Helen. “John Cooper Clarke: The Bard of Salford Still Has It.” The Telegraph, 2025.
  • Simpson, Dave. “Punk’s Poet Laureate on Fame, Failure and the North.” The Guardian, 2024.
  • O’Hagan, Sean. “The Last of the Working‑Class Poets?” The Observer, 2023.

Context and History

  • Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1999.
  • Stewart, Paul. Deindustrialisation and the Working Class in Britain. Manchester: MUP, 2018.

Podcast Episode: The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class Struggle, Social Crisis, and the Limits

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Pip: When a book about seventeenth-century witch trials starts feeling uncomfortably relevant, that is either a triumph of scholarship or a very bad sign about the present — possibly both.

Mara: This episode covers freerein61's long review of Marion Gibson's Witchland, working through what the book gets right about the victims of the 1640s witch-hunt and where its explanatory framework falls short. Let's start with the history Gibson recovers — and the history the review argues she misreads.

The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class, Crisis, and the Limits of Witchland

Pip: The central tension here is between two things that can both be true: a book can restore dignity to people history erased and still fail to explain why they died. That is the argument the review makes about Gibson's Witchland — admirable reconstruction, inadequate framework.

Mara: The review opens by crediting Gibson's archival work seriously. She brings back into view the hundreds of people "wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history," reconstructing their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts from fragmentary parish registers and court documents.

Pip: So the recovery project is real. The problem is the explanation layered on top of it — specifically the American subtitle's framing of a "deadly moral panic," which the review treats as sociologically vague and historically evasive.

Mara: Right. The review argues that "moral panic" treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality without deeper cause, and crucially places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane — two hysterical factions in a culture war — rather than parties to a class struggle with a definite historical direction.

Pip: Which is where the argument gets genuinely interesting, because the review is not just complaining about framing. It is making a structural claim: the conditions that produced Matthew Hopkins were produced by the revolution itself.

Mara: Exactly. The collapse of the assize circuits, local Puritan elites freed from central oversight, freelance witch-finders operating with near impunity — these are consequences of a state apparatus fractured by civil war. The review puts it plainly: "the witch-hunt was a distorted expression of the revolution itself."

Pip: And the victims were not random. Overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal, economically dependent — gender shaped their vulnerability, the review says, but class determined it.

Mara: Gibson's microhistorical case studies actually support this. Her portraits of impoverished, often elderly or widowed women show how enclosure, inflation, and the erosion of customary relief turned the poor into objects of resentment. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.

Pip: The review also points outward — to the Levellers, the Diggers, Winstanley's attack on private land itself — as the plebeian wing of the same revolution. The witch-hunt and the most radical democratic currents of the age were happening simultaneously.

Mara: And the review draws a direct line to the present: ruling classes confronting economic crisis manufacture internal enemies. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers, cruelty legitimated in the name of public safety — are, the review argues, recognisable today.

Pip: Though the lesson offered is not simply "fear is dangerous." It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order finds no progressive resolution and the oppressed lack an independent political voice.

Mara: Gibson's book, the review concludes, restores its subjects' humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis connecting their fate to the revolutionary transformation Gibson's framework stops short of.

Pip: What stays with me is the double verdict — Gibson succeeds at restitution and falls short on explanation — and the implication that those two things require different tools entirely.

Mara: The review suggests the tools are still needed. Same mechanisms, different targets, same underlying dynamic. Worth sitting with.

The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class Struggle, Social Crisis, and the Limits of Marion Gibson’s Witchland

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Marion Gibson’s Witchland is a humane, meticulously researched, and often moving account of the largest witch-hunt in English history. At its heart is a powerful act of historical restitution: bringing back into view the hundreds of people “wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history” who were hunted down in the 1640s, when Britain was convulsed by civil war, economic breakdown, and the collapse of traditional authority. Gibson’s work to recover their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts is both real and substantial. With admirable patience and care, she restores the lives of people who appear in the archive, if at all, as little more than entries in a witch-finder’s tally, drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records.

Yet Gibson’s conceptual framework for situating this material does not adequately account for the historical forces at work. The witch-hunt cannot be explained by “moral panic,” free-floating misogyny, or a generalised climate of fear. These categories separate the witch-hunt from the revolutionary crisis in which it unfolded and reduce the political landscape to a timeless tableau of communal anxiety. The 1640s were not merely years of heightened emotion; they were the decisive decade of the English Revolution, a confrontation between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war shattered the machinery of justice, disrupted the assize circuits, empowered local Puritan elites, and created conditions in which freelance interrogators such as Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne could operate with near impunity. Their methods of “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, and template-driven interrogations produced confessions that reflected the interrogators’ own demonological assumptions rather than the accused’s lived experience.

The witch-hunt was no inexplicable eruption of mass hysteria. It was a distorted expression of the English Revolution itself: a class struggle refracted through Puritan providentialism and intensified by the collapse of the old social order. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. To understand why gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-1640s, we must look beyond village frictions to the deeper transformation underway: peasant dispossession, the erosion of customary relief, and a ruling class divided against itself.

The Strength of Gibson’s Reconstruction

Gibson’s method is microhistorical. Each chapter centres on a particular place — Manningtree, Chelmsford, the Suffolk villages, or the Scottish Lowlands — and rests on painstaking archival research. Drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records, often “incomplete or barely legible,” she reconstructs the lives of the accused. Her portraits of impoverished women, often elderly, widowed, or reliant on neighbours’ charity, give substance to the well-established thesis of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane: witchcraft accusations arose from the breakdown of traditional obligations of neighbourly charity. As enclosure, inflation, and the land market eroded the old village economy, poor people who still came to the doors of the better-off became objects of resentment and fear. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.

Gibson’s case studies show how war sharpened these frictions. The 1640s brought requisitioning, free quarter for soldiers, plundering, disrupted trade, harvest failure, and plague. The machinery of justice broke down. “Less qualified men sat in judgment.” Assize circuits collapsed. Local authorities, pressed by fearful parishioners, hired freelance witch-finders like Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Their methods — “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, interrogations shaped by template questions — produced confessions that mirrored the interrogators’ own demonological fantasies. Gibson identifies these template questions as a key reason why so many confessions sound alike.

She also incorporates the Scottish dimension, showing how trials under the Covenanting regime in the early 1640s were ideologically—and sometimes personally—connected to the English hunts. The 1604 Witchcraft Act, passed under James VI and I, provided the legal basis for prosecution. Together, these developments formed a transnational witch-hunting movement, shaped by shared religious and political anxieties. Gibson’s reconstruction is humane and conscientious, restoring dignity to people history tried to erase. But the question her book raises—and only partly answers—is a historical one: why did the largest witch-hunt in English history erupt in the midst of the English Revolution?

The Limits of “Moral Panic”

The American subtitle of Witchland invokes “a deadly moral panic,” and the publisher’s descriptions speak of polarisation, fanaticism and “a country ripped apart by fear.” This language is not entirely misplaced, but it is fundamentally insufficient. The term “moral panic” is a sociological category developed in the 1970s. It describes a pattern of exaggerated public alarm, but it offers little historical explanation. It treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality, a kind of cultural fever that swept across communities without deeper cause. It reduces the violence of the 1640s to a psychological pattern rather than a historically specific social crisis. Most importantly, it places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane, as two equally hysterical factions locked in a culture war, and it detaches the witch-hunt from the revolutionary transformation of English society that made such persecution possible.

The English Revolution was not a culture war but a historically progressive struggle that destroyed absolutism, executed a king, and opened the way for capitalism to develop in Britain. The conflict between Crown and Parliament reflected a deeper class struggle: an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order opposed a rising commercial gentry, merchants, and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war was fought not only over constitutional forms but also over the future of English society—the survival of feudal structures and the emergence of capitalist ones. This revolutionary confrontation created the conditions for witch-hunting to flourish.

The witch-hunt was not an inexplicable eruption of fear. It was the product of a definite social crisis, of a breakdown in the old structures of authority and of a state apparatus temporarily in the hands of local Puritan elites who saw in the war a struggle against the forces of the Antichrist. The collapse of the assize circuits, the absence of central oversight and the ideological fervour of Puritan magistrates created a vacuum. The witch hunters’ methods of enforced sleeplessness, “watching and walking,” and interrogations shaped by template questions produced confessions that reflected their own demonological assumptions rather than the lived experience of the accused. The machinery of justice had been fractured by war, and in that fractured space the most vulnerable members of society became targets of state-sanctioned violence.

The witch-hunt must therefore be understood as a distorted expression of the revolution itself. It arose from the collapse of the old social order, mounting class tensions and the ideological weapons of a rising bourgeoisie waging its struggle in the religious guise of Puritanism. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. Most of those accused were women living on the edge of subsistence, dependent on neighbours’ charity and exposed to the resentments and anxieties fueled by enclosure, inflation and the collapse of customary relief. The men accused were likewise poor and dependent. The trials reveal not a timeless misogyny, but the vulnerability of those shut out of property and political power.

To understand why the gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-seventeenth century, one must attend not only to village frictions but to the deeper social transformation under way. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of communal obligations, the fragmentation of state authority and the ideological fervour of a rising class all converged in the 1640s. The witch-hunt was not a cultural fever. It was a symptom of revolution.

The revolution was led by a bourgeoisie and gentry who fought in the religious garb of Puritanism. Their worldview fused a genuine hostility to arbitrary power with intense providentialism — a belief that God and the Devil intervened directly in human affairs. In the hands of local elites suddenly freed from royal and episcopal oversight, they could turn that ideology against the most defenceless. This is the key to understanding the witch-hunt. The victims were overwhelmingly poor. They were socially marginal, economically dependent, and politically powerless. Misogyny played a role, but it was not the root cause. The victims were not simply women; they were poor women, and the men accused were poor. The contemporary academic tendency to treat gender as a self-standing cause obscures what the trials actually show: the vulnerability of those excluded from property and dependent on others’ goodwill. The witch-hunt was a weapon of class power, wielded by local elites in a moment of revolutionary upheaval.

The same revolution that produced the witch-hunt also produced the age’s most advanced political currents. The Levellers demanded manhood suffrage and equality before the law. The Diggers, around Gerrard Winstanley, attacked private land ownership itself. Radical sectarians questioned the existence of a personal Devil. These movements represented the plebeian wing of the revolution — the embryonic political voice of those who would later form the working class.

As the revolution consolidated under the Commonwealth and the propertied classes reasserted control, the witch-hunt subsided. The Restoration of 1660 brought no revival on the same scale, and by 1736 the Witchcraft Act had been repealed. The witch-hunt was not a timeless expression of misogyny or fear. It was a product of a specific revolutionary conjuncture, and it disappeared when that conjuncture passed.

Lessons for Today

Gibson makes it clear that she wrote her book with the present in mind. She warns of a resurgence of political and religious hatreds, misogyny, nationalism, and persecution. She argues that remembering the victims of past injustice helps us recognise and resist such trends. Several reviewers have taken up the same theme.

The warning is justified. Across the world, ruling classes confronted by deepening economic crisis, war, and social inequality are turning to scapegoats: immigrants and refugees, Muslims, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. Governments and media manufacture internal enemies to divert mounting social anger away from those responsible. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of the outsider, official encouragement of informers, the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety — are recognisable.

But the lesson of the 1640s is not merely that “fear” and “polarisation” are dangerous, or that individuals should refuse to be swept along. Persecution of the vulnerable flourishes when the crisis of an old social order finds no progressive resolution, and when the oppressed are left without an independent political voice of their own. In the seventeenth century, Cromwell’s Grandees crushed the plebeian radicals who could have offered such a voice. Today, resisting the modern witch-hunt requires conscious, international political mobilisation of the working class against the social system that breeds it.

Witchland is a humane, carefully researched, and readable book that restores dignity to people history tried to erase. Marion Gibson succeeds in bringing back into view individuals who have survived in the record only as names in indictments or as victims in the ledgers of witch-finders. She reconstructs their lives with sympathy and care, and she shows how accusations grew out of the frictions of everyday existence in a world strained by war, dearth and the collapse of traditional obligations. Her work gives substance to the rural poor of the 1640s, people who lived precariously on the margins of subsistence and whose vulnerability made them targets of suspicion when the social fabric began to tear. For this achievement, the book deserves a wide readership.

Yet Gibson’s conceptual framework cannot capture the historical meaning of the witch-hunt. The language of moral panic, fear and fanaticism is not entirely misplaced, but it is too limited to account for the scale and timing of the events she describes. The witch-hunt did not erupt in a vacuum. It unfolded amid the English Revolution, when old structures of authority were breaking down, and new ones had not yet taken stable form. The war between Crown and Parliament expressed a deeper conflict between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests demanded the destruction of royal prerogative. This struggle fractured the machinery of justice. Local Puritan elites, freed from central oversight, exercised powers they had never possessed before

The witch-hunt was therefore not simply a psychological phenomenon. It was a distorted expression of revolutionary crisis. The victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. The trials reveal the anxieties of a society in transition, in which the old communal bonds were dissolving, and the emerging capitalist order had not yet established new forms of security. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of customary relief and the intensification of economic pressures created conditions in which the most defenceless members of society could be accused of consorting with the Devil. The witch-hunt was one way a ruling class divided against itself projected its fears onto those who had no means of resistance.

This history is not confined to the seventeenth century. Gibson is right to warn of contemporary scapegoating, of the persecution of immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. The mechanisms she documents, including suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers and the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety, are recognisable today. But the lesson of the 1640s is not only that fear is dangerous. It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order confronts crisis without progressive resolution and when the oppressed lack an independent political voice. In the seventeenth century, the plebeian radicals who might have provided such a voice were suppressed. Today, resisting new forms of witch-hunting requires the conscious mobilisation of the working class against the social system that produces them.

Witchland restores its subjects’ humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis that connects their fate to the revolutionary transformation of English society.

Bibliography

Books

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain. London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2026.

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. New York: Scribner, 2026.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge, 1970.

Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Hill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.

Articles, Reviews and Media

“Witchland.” Publishers Weekly, starred review, 2026.

“Witchland a Times Top 10 Bestseller.” Hardman & Swainson Literary Agency, 2026.

“Witchland.” Daily Mail, Book of the Week, 2026.

“The Thing About Witch Hunts.” Podcast interview with Marion Gibson, 2026.

“Witchland.” Kirkus Reviews, 2026.

“Witchland.” Witches Mass Bay Review, 2026.

Web Sources

Simon & Schuster UK. “Witchland.” Publisher’s catalogue entry, 2026.

Labyrinth Books. “Witchland.” US edition description, 2026.

Wikipedia contributors. “John Stearne (witch-hunter).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 2026.

Historical Context and Background

Capp, Bernard. England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Penguin, 1996.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Longman, 1987.

Podcast Episode: The Pornification of Everything: Patricia Nilsson’s Guilty Pleasure and the Limi

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Pip: Patricia Nilsson wrote a book about pornography for the Financial Times crowd, which means she found the crime scene, documented it meticulously, and then declined to name the suspect.

Mara: That tension is exactly what freerein61 works through in this episode — how platform capitalism's core techniques were incubated in the porn industry, who owns that industry now, and what the "online safety" response actually means for surveillance and dissent.

Pip: Let's start with the book itself and the argument Nilsson almost makes.

The Pornification of Everything: Nilsson's Evidence, and Its Limits

Mara: The central claim of Nilsson's Guilty Pleasure is that commercial pornography wasn't a sideshow to the internet's growth — it was the laboratory where platform capitalism's techniques were first developed and proven.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: the porn industry "wrote the code" for today's internet — recommendation algorithms, targeted ads, seamless payments, high-definition streaming, addictive engagement design, all of it road-tested on porn audiences before Silicon Valley inherited the results.

Mara: What this means in practice is that the attention economy isn't an accidental byproduct of digital culture. It was engineered, and the engineering happened somewhere most critics preferred not to look.

Pip: Nilsson traces this across three stages. The pre-internet era of Hefner and Flynt gets a surprisingly nostalgic treatment — as if coercive labor conditions in the seventies were more authentic than what followed. That's a familiar liberal move: romanticize the past to make the present look uniquely pathological.

Mara: The tube-site era is where the reporting sharpens. Those platforms — built on user-uploaded pirated content — perfected a business model that now runs the entire platform economy. Content creators were unpaid; their work was taken. A small group of anonymous owners, operating through offshore holding companies, collected the profits.

Pip: Which is to say: YouTube and TikTok didn't invent this. They inherited it.

Mara: The third stage is OnlyFans and the creator economy, which Nilsson calls "the commodification of the self." She identifies the trend correctly but doesn't fully follow it. Amid declining wages and eroded safety nets, millions are compelled to turn their personalities and private lives into revenue streams — the platform takes twenty percent as rent on that transaction.

Mara: Ownership has shifted too. The flamboyant showmen are gone, replaced by private equity, financiers, and what the post calls "tech nerds" with no particular interest in pornography. Porn is now an asset class — optimized, leveraged, traded — like care homes or water utilities.

Pip: The post's sharpest move is naming what Nilsson won't. Her critique stops exactly at the threshold of property relations. She sees the compulsive scrolling, the erosion of intimacy, the "weirdness" of online life — but frames these as psychological effects of technology rather than the lived experience of capitalist social relations extended into private life.

Mara: Smartphones aren't the cause of the alienation she describes. They're the channel through which it moves. And the "online safety" response — age verification, mass identity checks — doesn't challenge that logic. It transfers the surveillance architecture the porn industry perfected directly into the hands of the state.

Pip: Nilsson assembles the evidence. The post draws the conclusion she cannot: the problem isn't pornography. It's the system that made pornography its prototype.

Mara: The post closes by arguing that a genuine alternative requires socializing digital infrastructure and democratic working-class control of online platforms — not regulatory tinkering that adds surveillance without touching ownership.

Pip: The evidence is in the book. The verdict is in the review.

Mara: The through-line across all of it is the same: techniques developed to extract value from desire get universalized across the whole economy, and the "safety" response extends the infrastructure rather than challenging it.

Pip: Nilsson did the reporting. Someone else had to do the reading. More from A Trumpet of Sedition next time.

Engines of Memory Capitalism: How eBay, Etsy, and the Auction Houses Pillage the Past

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The Marketplace Devours Memory

From the outset, it’s important to clarify that the concern isn’t about historians or scholars buying ‘Historical Memorabilia’ on eBay or at auction. Many committed history professors, archivists, and collectors buy these items because they worry they might otherwise remain hidden in private safes or be discarded. Criticising or reporting a history professor for buying items like strike leaflets or soldiers’ letters is unjustified. Often, they serve as the final guardians in preserving vital historical documents.

However, the very phenomenon of turning the past into a marketplace holds significant historical and political importance. A historian’s need to use eBay to recover working-class history or compete with hedge-fund managers for political papers is not just a neutral cultural shift. It points to a deeper social problem: the ongoing, systematic loss of collective memory.

Visit eBay’s “Historical Memorabilia” section in the evening, and you’ll see a scene that would shock even the most sceptical chroniclers of bourgeois history. The remnants of human efforts- soldiers’ letters, strike pamphlets, migrant records, and working-class materials- are now just thumbnails, countdown timers, and “Buy It Now” options. The past isn’t just commercialised; it’s being extensively exploited.

But eBay represents just the base level of a larger system. Etsy, with its curated sense of nostalgia and boutique “vintage” style, carries out a more refined yet equally harmful process. Above both, the auction houses-Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams- stand as revered marketplaces where the elite buy the past as an investment.

Together, these platforms create a unified system of memory capitalism: a mechanism in which society’s collective past is appropriated, fragmented, aestheticised, and sold to private individuals. What should be a shared human heritage becomes private property, strengthening class dominance and diminishing working people’s ability to understand their own history. This is intentional, serving as the cultural superstructure of a social system that relies on turning everything, including memory, into a commodity.

Memory Capitalism: The Bourgeoisie’s New Frontier

Capitalism has historically been a system built on theft: labour, land, and lives have all been stolen. It is fundamentally an order of expropriation, extracting surplus from workers, taking land from indigenous peoples, and dismantling communities in pursuit of profit. In its later stages, capitalism has expanded its plundering to include stealing the past. This theft isn’t always overt; it often occurs subtly through the market’s mechanisms. Human records- letters, photographs, tools, diaries, records- are removed from their original social contexts and sold into private markets.

The past becomes inventory; memory turns into merchandise. This process, called memory capitalism, operates through three interconnected mechanisms. Historical materials are removed from public institutions, families, and communities and sold on private markets. Archives suffer from austerity, families sell documents to pay bills, local history collections close, and estate clearances sell off decades of working-class items. Instead of remaining in public trust, these items end up on eBay, Etsy, and at auction. The past is uprooted and placed under private control.

Once in the marketplace, items are fragmented, sold separately for profit. Collections are split; union records, soldiers’ letters, inspection reports are broken into multiple listings, dissolving their original context and meaning. This mirrors the fragmentation of labour under capitalism: workers are divided, and so are the records of their struggles.

The value of artefacts is dictated not by their social or historical importance but by scarcity, demand, and buyers’ purchasing power. A strike leaflet becomes a “rare collectable,” a soldier’s letter turns into “WWI ephemera,” a migrant’s ID becomes “vintage paper goods.” Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism is prophetic here: the social relations behind these artefacts appear as intrinsic qualities of the objects themselves.

The experiences of millions are reduced to isolated exchange values. Memory capitalism is the cultural wing of rentier capitalism, with platforms and auction houses generating fees without producing content. They act as landlords of the past: eBay charges transaction fees, Etsy monetises nostalgia through listings and algorithms, auction houses profit from selling manuscripts, letters, and archives, turning history into an asset class for the wealthy.

This isn’t preservation, but extraction. It isn’t curation, but expropriation. It isn’t democratisation, but privatisation. The theft of the past isn’t just metaphorical; it’s an ongoing material process happening daily in digital markets and elite auctions. Without resistance, it will erode the working class’s collective memory- the very foundation for future struggles.

eBay: The Digital Rag‑and‑Bone Shop of History

eBay stands as the largest marketplace ever for historical artefacts, an extensive, chaotic collection of working-class history. Its listings include union history, factory inspection reports, military letters, strike pamphlets, migrant documents, and domestic tools- everyday items that represent labour, struggle, and survival. This platform functions as an informal archive of the dispossessed, created not by professional curators or archivists but by economic hardship.

This “archive” is controlled by the harshest market forces: price, algorithms, and seller insecurity. The platform’s interface erases all distinctions, turning a Civil War muster roll, a suffragette pamphlet, and a novelty mug into the same basic items, each shown as a thumbnail with a “Buy It Now” button. In this way, the past loses its hierarchy, meaning, and context. Human struggle documents are reduced to mere kitsch, interchangeable and devalued. This levelling isn’t accidental; it reflects capitalism’s cultural logic: everything is a commodity, and all commodities are valued equally in the marketplace. The real experiences of workers, soldiers, migrants, and strikers are flattened into the same abstract exchange value as mass-produced junk. The past isn’t preserved; it’s priced.

eBay not only commodifies the past but also breaks it apart. The platform promotes fragmentation because it boosts profits. A collection of documents becomes more lucrative when divided into fifty individual listings. Union records generate more revenue when dispersed among many buyers. A soldier’s letters sell for higher prices when sold separately rather than as a complete correspondence. This approach undermines the integrity of historical materials. Collections lose their internal connections, making patterns of struggle invisible. The capacity to reconstruct experiences of workplaces, units, communities, or movements is compromised. This fragmentation reflects the atomisation of labour under capitalism. Just as workers are separated by workplace, contracts, location, and competition, the traces of their collective struggles are scattered into private ownership. The past, like the present, becomes fragmented.

Most eBay sellers are not professional dealers or collectors; they are individuals attempting to supplement stagnant wages through reselling, often under difficult conditions. People clear out attics, liquidate estates, and sell personal archives because their income doesn’t cover essentials like rent, food, or bills. The so-called “democratisation” of selling on the platform actually highlights economic insecurity. Sellers are not villains; they are victims of a system that compels them to monetise whatever they can. For example, a family sells their grandfather’s strike papers out of necessity, not greed. Similarly, a worker lists their father’s military letters not for profit, but to survive.

However, the outcome is the same: the documentation of working-class life becomes private inventory. The material of collective memory feeds the gig economy, where it is fragmented, repriced, and dispersed. eBay itself produces nothing. It does not create historical value, preserve archives, or safeguard collections. Instead, it extracts fees from every transaction- listing fees, final value fees, promoted listing fees- profitably siphoning money from the circulation of memory. Its interest in historical material extends only to the commissions it earns. Ethical questions about the sale of Holocaust artefacts, slavery records, and indigenous land deeds are addressed only when public outrage threatens the brand. Even then, changes are piecemeal, reactive, and subordinated to profit. The platform’s policies are not moral principles but risk‑management strategies. 

Etsy: The Boutique Sanitiser of History

Etsy specialises in curated nostalgia, a thoughtfully organised marketplace featuring vintage clothing, retro typography, handmade replicas, upcycled materials, and stylised historical motifs. It functions as capitalism’s boutique workshop where memory is sold not as evidence but as a matter of style. The past is stripped of its social context and reassembled as decoration. On Etsy, history is simplified into aesthetic categories like “mid-century,” “industrial,” “boho,” and “Victorian.” These labels capture consumer moods rather than accurately representing historical periods. They reduce complex eras marked by struggle, exploitation, and change into simple colour schemes and design elements. The Industrial Revolution appears as distressed metal lamps; the Victorian era is expressed through lace and sepia tones; the mid-century period, defined by Cold War fears, decolonisation, and labour movements, is reduced to teak furniture and geometric patterns.

Etsy reinterprets history as a mood board rather than a strict archive; it functions as a lifestyle catalogue. The past isn’t examined critically but carefully selected, with violence, conflict, and collective agency removed from the narrative. What remains is a sanitised, aestheticised version of history, free of contradictions, marketed as personal expression. Etsy’s core ideology centres on the “creative entrepreneur”, the small-scale craft seller who turns fragments of history into boutique products. Its marketing champions this archetype: the independent maker, artisan, or small business owner who “rescues’ and reimagines old objects. This portrayal romanticises small-scale production, positioning it as an alternative to mass consumerism.

This ideology is merely a façade. Etsy sellers are deeply embedded in capitalist production systems. They rely on platform fees, branding, algorithmic visibility, and the continuous need to distinguish their products in a saturated market. Their claim of independence is a myth; they experience the same competitive pressures as other small businesses in capitalism.

The micro-narratives crafted by sellers such as ‘rescued from a 1950s factory,” “inspired by suffragette banners,’ or ‘found in an old workshop in Detroit’are not genuine historical stories but marketing strategies. They create a facade of authenticity that justifies higher prices. These stories become part of the product, serving as selling points rather than historical truths. This petty-bourgeois craft ideology behind them plays a political role by concealing the economic forces pushing people into unstable entrepreneurial work. It portrays Etsy as a hub of creativity and independence, but in reality, it profits from sellers through fees, commissions, and algorithmic controls. Etsy isn’t an alternative to capitalism; it is capitalism dressed up in artisan terms.

Etsy’s most harmful role is transforming political activism into aesthetic and commercial objects. Union symbols, protest chants, and radical icons become fashion items. The clenched fist appears on tote bags, the red flag as a design motif, and suffragette colours appear in jewellery, stripping away their political significance. These symbols become commodities, exemplifying capitalism’s tendency to co-opt dissent, absorb radical imagery, dilute its meaning, and resell it as lifestyle choices. As a result, collective struggle shifts to personal taste, and resistance history gets reduced to decorative elements. Etsy doesn’t honour political memory; it sanitises it, turning activism into sentiment, militancy into style, and radical ideas into nostalgic fashion, making history a safe, consumable object that no longer inspires or educates.

Where eBay fragments history through mass resale, Etsy fragments it through stylisation. Historical artefacts are detached from their contexts and reassembled into new aesthetic forms. A factory tool becomes a “rustic décor item.” A union badge becomes “vintage enamel jewellery.” A protest banner becomes “retro textile art.”

The past is repurposed for lifestyle creation, stripping away its social, political, and collective meanings, replacing them with individual consumption. Etsy doesn’t destroy historical artefacts; it transforms them into commodities that barely retain their original significance. This fragmentation of history is as destructive as eBay’s mass atomization, both disconnecting historical material from its context, reducing the past to mere exchange value, and limiting working people’s access to their history. Etsy isn’t just a marketplace for handmade items; it functions as a cultural force of memory capitalism, sanitising, aestheticising, and commodifying the past, turning traces of struggle into lifestyle accessories for the petty bourgeoisie.

Auction Houses: The Aristocracy of Memory Theft

Auction houses embody the peak of memory capitalism, its most aristocratic and sophisticated form. If eBay functions as a marketplace for scattered struggles and Etsy acts as a nostalgic boutique, then Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams serve as revered temples where the elite buy the past as an investment. These institutions curate what they label as “important” archives: manuscripts, political papers, rare photographs, and artefacts linked to notable figures or events. Their catalogues establish hierarchies of historical significance, promoting elite narratives while sidelining working-class history. For example, a prime minister’s papers are depicted as globally significant, whereas records from a strike committee rarely appear in such circuits. The documentary traces of power are consecrated, while those of resistance are often ignored, undervalued, or fragmented.

Auction houses do more than sell artefacts; they shape what counts as history. They craft the memory canon based on the preferences of the wealthy, reinforcing the ideological priorities of the ruling class. This includes highlighting politicians, generals, industrialists, and cultural icons while sidelining workers, migrants, ordinary soldiers, and radical movements. 

These houses rely on specialist cataloguers, curators, historians, and archivists who authenticate, contextualise, and market historical items. However, their expertise is not neutral; it acts as a form of class gatekeeping, deciding which artefacts deserve preservation, investment, and attention.

The vocabulary of expertise- terms like “significant provenance,” “important manuscript,” and “major archive” operates as a coded value system that favours elite figures. For example, a letter from a cabinet minister is deemed “significant,” whereas one from a factory worker is considered “of minor interest.” Similarly, a colonial administrator’s diary is “important,” while a migrant labourer’s is labelled “ephemera.” This creates a canon of memory shaped by elite interests. Auction houses do more than reflect class power; they actively produce it, reinforcing the notion that history centres on the powerful and that ordinary people’s material remnants are peripheral, fleeting, or disposable. This gatekeeping is deliberate and structural, forming part of a cultural superstructure that elevates capital while diminishing labour.

Buyers at auction houses are usually wealthy collectors, corporations, or institutions. They acquire historical materials not for study, preservation, or public access, but as an asset class. Manuscripts, letters, and artefacts are kept in private vaults, out of public reach. Memory turns into capital. Auction houses promote this shift, highlighting rarity, exclusivity, and investment value. A manuscript is not seen as a window to the past but as a “unique opportunity,” and a political archive is not for research but as a “major acquisition for the discerning collector.” The past becomes a speculative commodity, history turns into a financial tool, and the documentary record of human experience becomes part of an investment portfolio. This exemplifies memory capitalism: transforming collective inheritance into private wealth.

Auction houses frequently acquire items that rightfully belong in public archives. Underfunded institutions struggle to compete with private collectors, leaving libraries, museums, and local history centres, already damaged by austerity, unable to afford these materials. As a result, collections often end up in private hands, sometimes forever lost. This loss isn’t merely cultural; it’s political, too. When documents from strike committees, mutual aid societies, rank-and-file soldiers, or migrant workers enter private vaults, the working class loses access to essential records for shaping its history. The foundational materials for class awareness are taken out of public reach.

Auction houses don’t just sell artefacts; they remove them from public view, hastening the loss of collective memory and strengthening the ruling class’s control over historical narrative. This illustrates the aristocratic aspect of memory capitalism: those who already hold the present steal the past.

A Socialist Programme for Reclaiming the Past

A socialist outlook starts from a fundamental idea: history belongs to those who created it. Documents like workers’ letters, strikers’ pamphlets, migrants’ records, soldiers’ diaries, and political movement ephemera are not merely personal curiosities or assets to speculate on. Instead, they constitute humanity’s shared heritage. These materials are not for collectors, investors, or digital platforms, but for the working class whose struggles gave rise to them. The market cannot be relied upon to preserve such historical records, as it has no interest in their context, coherence, or collective significance. Protecting the past requires a strategy that directly opposes the principles of memory capitalism.

It calls for substantial public investment in archives and libraries, reversing years of austerity and restoring these institutions responsible for preserving collective memory. It also advocates comprehensive digitisation initiatives to make the documented record of human struggles accessible to everyone, rather than hiding it behind paywalls or auction listings. The approach emphasises democratic control of cultural institutions, shifting power from elite gatekeeping to active participation by workers, scholars, archivists, and communities. Additionally, it supports public ownership of major technology platforms, transforming digital memory infrastructure from profit-driven corporations into publicly accountable utilities. International collaboration is essential to repatriate stolen or dispersed materials, returning archives looted through colonialism, war, or market extraction to their original communities.

None of this can be achieved through appeals to corporate responsibility or charitable acts alone. Instead, it demands the political action of the working class, who must actively work to reclaim their own historical records. Only through collective effort can the past be removed from commercial interests and returned to public guardianship. Memory is inherently political; it is a battleground of class interests. The ruling class recognises this deeply, which is why it invests in auction houses, private collectors, and elite cultural institutions. It also allows public archives to deteriorate and treats the past as private property. Controlling memory means controlling the narrative; controlling the narrative means shaping legitimacy; and shaping legitimacy grants power.

A socialist movement must therefore advocate not only for wages, housing, healthcare, and democratic rights, but also for the right to history: the ability to access, preserve, interpret, and mobilise the documentary record of human experience. Without this, the working class risks political amnesia, lacking the tools to understand its history and shape its future.

The Past Is Not for Sale

eBay, Etsy, and auction houses create a layered system of memory capitalism. They extract, fragment, and profit from the collective past, turning historical artefacts into commodities and reinforcing social inequality. This creates a society where the record of struggle is dispersed, aestheticised, or hidden away. The past becomes just inventory, memory turns into merchandise, and history becomes a speculative asset. To reclaim history is to regain agency; to preserve the documentary record of struggle is to keep alive the chance for future resistance. The past should not be sold to the highest bidder but kept in common, studied collectively, and used to guide the future. The past is not for sale; it is a weapon that belongs to the working class.

Podcast Episode: The Political Songs of Iyah May: Pop Music in a Disoriented Moment

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Pip: A pop doctor walks out of a pandemic, writes a three-minute list of everything wrong with the world, and somehow ends up being shared by Students for Trump. Welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mara: freerein61 has been looking closely at Iyah May — the artist, the song, the contradiction — asking what it means when genuine anger gets picked up by exactly the wrong hands.

Pip: Let's start with the song itself, and why its structure might be the whole story.

Karmageddon and the Politics of the Scroll

Mara: The question this post opens with is a structural one: not whether Karmageddon is sincere, but whether sincerity without analysis can do political work — or whether it just becomes available to whoever finds it useful.

Pip: And the post locates the problem early. The song is described as a list — a scroll-song — where, as the post puts it, "Gaza is placed next to celebrity gossip; inflation beside misogynistic violence; pandemic profiteering alongside online outrage."

Mara: That flattening is the argument's spine. Each item gets equal weight, no causality, no connection. The post calls it a reproduction of the social media environment the song is supposedly criticising.

Pip: So the form undermines the content. The scroll isn't examined — it's re-enacted.

Mara: Right, and that's what makes the political co-option legible. Ryan Fournier of Students for Trump shared the video; Newsweek called her "the new darling of the political right"; the Epoch Times and ZeroHedge picked it up. A song naming the Gaza genocide was being circulated by people financing that genocide.

Pip: Which the post insists is not a paradox. It's a symptom.

Mara: Exactly. "Without a large socialist movement to address social collapse, right-wing groups fill the void, co-opting any discontent that can be framed as anti-elite, anti-establishment, or anti-media." The mood is appropriable because the analysis is absent.

Pip: The post also traces her earlier Island Records output — XO Girl, MF ILY — polished pop, politically disengaged. Karmageddon, self-released November 13, 2024, produced by Danny Duke, is a real break.

Mara: And she paid for that break. Her manager pushed her to remove references to Big Pharma and genocide. She refused, parted ways with the label. The post, drawing on coverage from Northern Exposure and a Grokipedia profile, frames that refusal as a small but genuine act of defiance in an industry built to discipline exactly that kind of impulse.

Pip: The Nordic Times piece calls her "fearless social commentary." The post is more precise: it's sincere, and sincerity isn't nothing, but it stops short of the analysis that would give it direction.

Mara: The post draws the Sheeran comparison to sharpen this. When Macklemore was quietly dropped from Sheeran's Loop Tour after expressing Palestinian solidarity, Sheeran retreated into language about "different approaches to advocating for peace" — treating genocide, the post notes, as a matter of tone rather than fact.

Pip: May lost a manager. Sheeran preserved a nine-figure production apparatus. The post is clear that this isn't primarily about personal courage — it's about where each artist sits inside the machinery.

Mara: And the post's cover note on her version of Wish You Were Here makes this concrete. Where Karmageddon is frantic and breathless, that performance is still, almost paralysed — mourning the absence of collective meaning rather than cataloguing its loss. Together the post calls them "a dialectic of contemporary despair: the scroll and the silence."

Pip: Which is a genuinely useful frame. The scroll reproduces fragmentation; the silence laments it. Neither overcomes it.

Mara: The post ends by asking what a critical art that did overcome it might look like — one oriented not toward mood but toward the working-class struggles it argues are the only force capable of addressing the crises May describes. Sincerity is the starting point, not the destination.

Pip: The question underneath all of it: what do you do with real anger when there's no political home for it yet?

Mara: That's the live wire running through everything here — genuine distress, no outlet, and a cultural industry that profits from keeping it that way.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else on the site is asking where that outlet might come from.

The Political Songs of Iyah May: Pop Music in a Disoriented Moment

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Iyah May’s late-2024 single Karmageddon didn’t become an instant hit because of its musical originality. Instead, it resonated because it encapsulated, in just three minutes, the chaos an entire social stratum experienced. The song features a rapid succession of modern horrors: COVID-19, “Big Pharma,” Gaza, inflation, misogynistic violence, celebrity foolishness, and the ceaseless conflicts on social media. May (Marguerite Clark), who served as a hospital doctor during the pandemic, presents the track as a cry from someone overwhelmed by their experiences, a lament from someone who has witnessed institutions fail and people suffer. Its power comes less from technical mastery and more from its reflection of society’s fractured consciousness amid crises.

The way her song circulated reveals m middle-class frustrations rather than working-class ones from her manager and label, which is unusual in an industry that often censors political content. Ryan Fournier of Students for Trump then shared the music video and promoted it to his large following. Newsweek quickly called her “the new darling of the political right,” and outlets like the Epoch Times and ZeroHedge also picked up the story. Within days, her song criticising corporate greed and labelling Israel’s destruction of Gaza as genocide was being spread by political groups directly involved in those issues.

This is not a paradox, but a symptom of confusion when true anger lacks a political outlet. Without a large socialist movement to address social collapse, right-wing groups fill the void, co-opting any discontent that can be framed as “anti-elite,” “anti-establishment,” or “anti-media.” The political right didn’t support Karmageddon because they agree with it, but because they can weaponise its mood. A song that hints at corruption and institutional failure can easily fit into the right’s narrative of cultural decline and moral decay, even if its lyrics criticise governments and billionaires those outlets defend.

The song’s structure enhances its message of ideological flexibility. Karmageddon functions as a list or scroll-song, presenting a catalogue of disjointed horrors. Each item is given equal prominence: Gaza is placed next to celebrity gossip; inflation beside misogynistic violence; pandemic profiteering alongside online outrage. The song offers no analysis, context, or explanation. The scroll reproduces it without questioning. This flattening of experience reflects the social media environment the song criticises: a realm where crises become interchangeable content, lacking causality and historical depth.

May’s account contains some truth: pharmaceutical monopolies profited immensely during the pandemic, millions died, working people bore the economic burden through inflation while billionaires’ wealth increased, and Israel’s attack on Gaza, supported by Washington, London, and Canberra, qualifies as genocide. However, the framework reflects a disoriented middle class, not the working class. It recognises corruption but not capitalism; suffering but not the social systems that cause it. The enemies are portrayed as “elites,” “the media,” and vague institutions, with the pandemic seen as a conspiracy rather than the consequence of deliberate state policies that prioritise profit over human life. This is why the right accepts it: critique without class analysis lacks direction, and despairing politics can shift toward resentment, conspiracy theories, and reaction.

Karmageddon’s popularity should not be dismissed, as it reflects a genuine mood of exhaustion, isolation, distrust, and powerlessness driven by collapsing health systems, falling wages, endless war, and austerity-driven politics. Iyah May deserves recognition for speaking out against censorship and addressing the Gaza genocide, unlike many in the music industry who remain silent. However, sincerity alone is insufficient. Critical art must align with social forces capable of meaningful change, and today, the working class, increasingly organised worldwide, represents that force. Artists aiming to address these dark times truthfully should look beyond social media and the confusing populism that Karmageddon both symbolises and perpetuates, toward this emerging power.

The songs

Currently, May’s musical output revolves around a single theme. Her earlier works on Island Records, including XO Girl (2021), MF ILY, and others, primarily featured typical pop anthems centred on self-empowerment, friendship, and resilience. These tracks fit well within mainstream pop: vibrant, polished, emotionally straightforward, and somewhat politically disengaged. The only exception was her 2019 debut, Pray, which hinted at social issues, especially reflecting on the pressures of constant online scrolling and the suffocating feedback loop of digital life. However, even this piece’s critique was mostly personal, focusing on internal struggles rather than broader social commentary.

Karmageddon, self-released on November 13, 2024, and produced by Danny Duke, represents a distinct shift. It is a list song akin to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire but updated for a digital age where scrolls replace newspapers and feeds replace the world. The narrator wakes up, picks up her phone, and is immediately bombarded with headlines: Elon Musk’s latest stunt, outrage from “the left,” the Gaza genocide, celebrity antics, tax demands, and society’s overall chaos. The chorus shifts to critique the pandemic, accusing pharmaceutical giants of profiting from an artificial virus while ordinary people contend with inflation and declining living standards.

May described the track as an anthem for turbulent times, born of despair at “a divided world and deceitful corporations.” Musically, it is competent and catchy, built around a glossy alternative-pop arrangement that makes its political message accessible to mainstream audiences. Structurally, however, the song reflects the chaotic experience it criticises. Items flash past in quick succession, each given the same weight, with no real connection. Gaza sits alongside celebrity gossip; inflation next to misogynistic violence; pandemic profiteering beside online outrage. The scroll isn’t analysed; it is reproduced.

This simplification of experience is deliberate, highlighting the ideological boundaries of the social layer behind the song. Karmageddon conveys the feeling of living amid crises without understanding the forces behind them. The villains are portrayed as “elites,” “the media,” and corrupt institutions, with the pandemic depicted as a conspiracy rather than a result of deliberate state policies that prioritise profit over life. The listed catastrophes- war, disease, inflation, social atomization- are presented as separate symptoms rather than interconnected parts of a single social system driven by private profit.

This is why the song appeals to the political right even as it criticises crimes they support. A critique lacking class analysis loses direction. A politics of despair becomes easy to manipulate and reframe. Armageddon’s structure- its rapid succession of horrors and lack of connection- makes it ideologically vulnerable. It captures a real sense of exhaustion and distrust but cannot fully explain this mood, leaving it open to exploitation. Thus, the song is both a sincere cry of distress and limited, shaped by the confusion it aims to express.

What the song sees  and what it cannot

Karmageddon contains some truths. Pharmaceutical monopolies earned huge profits during the pandemic. Millions lost their lives. Working people bore the cost of inflation while billionaires’ wealth increased. Israel’s attack on Gaza, supported by Washington, London, and Canberra, is a clear genocide. A pop song referencing this is significant.

However, the song’s structure centres on the frustrations of the middle class rather than the working class. It never mentions ‘class,’ ‘capitalism,’ or suggests that the listed catastrophes have a common origin in a social system driven by private profit. Instead, it blames a changing group of “elites,” “the media,” and corrupt institutions, framing the problem as a simple plot.

This is crucial. Laboratories or vaccines did not mainly cause the pandemic’s widespread fatalities. Instead, they resulted from a calculated strategy embraced by governments across the spectrum: reopening workplaces and schools to let the virus spread so profits could continue. The anti-mandate and anti-vaccine movement that Karmageddon highlights did not oppose this strategy; rather, it vocally supported it on the streets, calling for the termination of all public health measures in the name of “freedom.”

The song’s professed even‑handedness between “left” and “right” serves the same function. To treat the official liberal establishment and the extreme right as two equal irritants on a phone screen is to leave the field open to the latter. Hence the spectacle of Students for Trump circulating a song denouncing a genocide their own patrons are financing.

Why it resonates

The popularity of Karmageddon should not be dismissed. It reportedly reached the UK singles sales chart, and its clips drew millions of views. It speaks to a real and widespread mood: exhaustion, isolation, distrust of official institutions, and a sense that nothing can be done.

This mood is objective, not psychological. Inflation has eroded wages, and the pandemic shattered health systems. Across political parties- Labour in Australia, the Democrats in the U.S., Tories and Labour in Britain- there has been oversight of war, austerity, and neglect of public health. In the void left by the lack of a strong socialist alternative, right-wing demagogues fill the space with resentment instead of explanations. May’s response to the controversy, claiming “God has a plan,” highlights her limited perspective. She turns despair into resignation and faith. The narrative ends where it started: alone, scrolling, waiting.

Toward a genuinely critical art

Iyah May deserves credit for refusing to bow to her management and for naming the Gaza genocide when much of the music industry remains silent. In an environment where major labels, PR teams, and corporate sponsors exert enormous pressure to keep artists politically neutral, her insistence on retaining a single lyric is not trivial. It represents a small but real act of resistance against an industry that has spent decades depoliticising popular music and disciplining artists who step outside the narrow bounds of marketable sentiment. Artists should be free to write what they please, and the pressure brought to bear on her from managers, labels, and the right‑wing outlets that sought to appropriate her work should be opposed without qualification.

But sincerity is not enough. The great protest music of the past, from Woody Guthrie’s ballads of working-class struggle to the anti-war songs of the 1960s, drew its power from an orientation toward social forces that could change the world. Guthrie’s “union songs” were not simply expressions of outrage; they were tied to the organised movement of millions of workers fighting for wages, dignity, and democratic rights. The folk revival of the early 1960s gained its force from the civil‑rights movement, from sit‑ins, strikes, and mass demonstrations. Even the more ambivalent figures of that era, such as Bob Dylan, were shaped by a political landscape in which collective action was visible, tangible, and capable of altering the course of events. Protest music mattered because it was connected to a living struggle.

Iyah May’s refusal to alter a lyric in Karmageddon and her decision to part ways with her manager and label have been widely interpreted as an act of artistic integrity. In a music industry where political content is routinely softened, depoliticised, or buried under euphemism, her insistence on naming the Gaza genocide stands out. It is a small but genuine act of defiance: a young artist, without the protection of a major label, choosing to hold on to a political truth rather than submit to commercial pressure. Her stance is not programmatic or rooted in a coherent political worldview. Still, it is nonetheless a refusal- a moment in which an artist declines to participate in the sanitisation of reality.

Ed Sheeran’s conduct in the Macklemore affair reveals the opposite trajectory. When Macklemore was quietly dropped from Sheeran’s Loop Tour after expressing solidarity with Palestinians, Sheeran did not defend him. Instead, he retreated into the language of “inclusivity” and “different approaches to advocating for peace,” a formulation that treats genocide as a matter of tone rather than fact. His subsequent partnership with billionaire NFL owner Robert Kraft to fund a Gaza relief initiative was widely read as an attempt to launder the incident’s optics without altering its political substance. Sheeran’s camp includes figures such as Casey Wasserman, whose name has resurfaced in Epstein‑related disclosures, and whose proximity to the entertainment‑industrial complex exemplifies the dense web of corporate, political, and financial interests surrounding global pop stardom.

The contrast between May and Sheeran is not primarily one of personal courage. It is a contrast between two positions within the cultural economy. May is a marginal figure, operating without the protective scaffolding of corporate sponsorships, stadium tours, and billion‑dollar intermediaries. Her refusal cost her a manager and a label, but she had little to lose beyond that. Sheeran, by contrast, sits atop a vast commercial apparatus. His tours are financed through sponsorship webs, insurance structures, and venue contracts whose ownership interlocks with the same financial interests underwriting arms manufacturers and occupation‑linked industries. An act of conscience from an artist at that level does not merely risk a cancelled broadcast; it risks the entire machinery that a nine-figure production depends on.

This is why Sheeran behaved exactly as the apparatus around him was built to ensure he would behave. His “stand” was not a stand at all, but a performance of neutrality designed to preserve commercial relationships. May’s stand, however limited, was a genuine refusal not because she is more virtuous, but because she is less integrated into the machinery that disciplines artists into silence.

The deeper comparison lies in what each act reveals about the era. Sheeran’s capitulation expresses mainstream pop’s near-total integration into corporate and geopolitical interests. May’s refusal expresses the confused but real anger of a social layer that senses catastrophe but lacks a political outlet. One reveals the apparatus; the other reveals the vacuum.

In that sense, May’s stand, however modest, points toward the possibility of a critical art aligned with emerging working‑class struggle. Sheeran’s reveals the cultural dead end of celebrity liberalism under late capitalism.

Today, the working class is once again entering struggle internationally, from strikes across Europe and North America to mass protests against war and austerity. But this movement has not yet found clear artistic expression. Much contemporary “political” music, including Karmageddon, reflects the confusion of a social layer that senses catastrophe but cannot locate its source. It catalogues horrors without connecting them, expresses despair without pointing to agency, and gestures toward corruption without identifying capitalism as the organising principle behind the crises it describes. The result is a politics of mood rather than analysis, a protest the right can easily appropriate because it lacks a coherent orientation toward the forces capable of transforming society.

Artists who wish to speak truth about these dark times will need to look beyond the phone screen, and beyond the confused populism that Karmageddon both expresses and reinforces. The scroll, that endless stream of disconnected outrage, is itself a mechanism of political disorientation. To reproduce it is to remain trapped within it. The task of critical art is not to mirror fragmentation but to overcome it, to reveal the underlying social relations that produce war, inequality, and despair.

This requires an orientation toward the working class, the only force capable of confronting the capitalist system that generates the crises May describes. A genuinely critical art today would not simply list horrors; it would illuminate their common root and point toward collective action. It would reject the false equivalence of “left” and “right,” refuse the conspiratorial shortcuts of anti‑mandate populism, and insist that the suffering of millions is not the result of plots but of policies.

Iyah May’s defiance deserves recognition. But the path toward meaningful protest art lies not in isolated cries of distress but in aligning artistic expression with the emerging struggles of workers around the world the only ground on which despair can be transformed into clarity, and clarity into power.

Post Script

Iyah May’s Version of Wish You Were Here

Iyah May’s reinterpretation of Wish You Were Here is not simply a cover of a canonical rock lament. It translates Pink Floyd’s meditation on alienation into the fractured, crisis‑ridden landscape that shapes her own work. Where the original song mourned the psychic dislocation of the 1970s, the commodification of art, the pressures of fame, the loss of authenticity, May’s version speaks from within a world in which alienation has become total. Her performance is quieter, more intimate, and more exposed, as though she is singing not to an absent friend but to a society that has stopped recognising itself.

The most striking feature of May’s version is its emotional framing. Pink Floyd’s recording is spacious, almost resigned, its acoustic guitar lines drifting through a haze of studio ambience. May strips the song down further, reducing it to voice and minimal accompaniment. The effect is claustrophobic rather than expansive. She does not inhabit the song as a nostalgic reflection on a lost era of authenticity; she inhabits it as someone living through a present defined by fragmentation, misinformation, and political despair. The line “We’re just two lost souls…”  one of the few phrases she retains verbatim becomes less a poetic metaphor than a literal description of the social condition.

Her vocal delivery underscores this shift. Roger Waters sang the original with bitterness and weary detachment. May sings it with a tremor of exhaustion, as though the alienation described in the song is not a philosophical problem but a lived experience of scrolling through catastrophe. The emotional centre of her version is not the loss of artistic integrity but the loss of collective meaning. The “wish” in Wish You Were Here becomes a longing for clarity, solidarity, and connection in a world that has replaced all three with algorithmic noise.

This is where May’s political sensibility enters. Her version is not overtly political; she does not alter the lyrics to reference Gaza, Big Pharma, or the pandemic, but the context of her work infuses the performance. The alienation Pink Floyd described was artists’ alienation within the culture industry. The alienation May expresses is the alienation of ordinary people living through overlapping crises: war, inflation, social atomisation, and the collapse of public trust. Her delivery suggests that the missing “you” is not a person but a political horizon, a sense of collective agency eroded by decades of neoliberalism and intensified by the pandemic.

In this sense, May’s version is a companion piece to Karmageddon. The latter catalogues horrors without connecting them; the former mourns the absence of connection itself. Karmageddon is frantic, breathless, overwhelmed. Wish You Were Here is still, suspended, almost paralysed. Together they form a dialectic of contemporary despair: the scroll and the silence, the noise of crisis and the numbness that follows.

Yet May’s interpretation also reveals the limits of her outlook. Her performance is sincere, vulnerable, and politically charged by implication, but it remains trapped within the framework of individual lament. The song becomes a personal expression of disorientation rather than a bridge toward collective understanding. Where Pink Floyd’s original hinted at the possibility of artistic rebellion against commodification, May’s version hints at resignation, a longing for someone, or something, that is not coming.

Still, her rendition matters. It shows how a younger artist, shaped by pandemic trauma and political confusion, hears one of the great songs of alienation. It is not a reinvention but a reframing: Wish You Were Here as sung from inside the crisis rather than after it. In doing so, May reveals both the depth of contemporary despair and the need for an artistic orientation that moves beyond lament toward clarity and struggle.

1. Northern Exposure: “Iyah May, When a Reel Becomes a Reckoning”

Core argument

This article presents Iyah May’s viral Instagram reel in which she explains that her manager tried to censor references to Big Pharma, genocide, and cancel culture as a moment of political rupture. The author frames May’s refusal not merely as a personal stand but as a movement, a disruption of the culture industry’s demand for silence and compliance.

Political framing

  • May’s art is described as diagnostic: a reading of a world afflicted by misinformation, distraction, and systemic rot.
  • Her refusal to “water down” her lyrics is treated as a manifesto against censorship and corporate control.
  • The article emphasises her background as a frontline doctor, arguing that her political clarity comes from lived experience rather than ideology.

Significance

The piece positions May as a figure whose authenticity and refusal to self‑censor resonate with audiences disillusioned by institutional dishonesty. It is her most explicitly political profile to date.

2. Grokipedia: “Iyah May” (Fact‑checked profile)

Core argument

This encyclopaedic entry situates May’s politics within her dual identity as a doctor and independent musician. It emphasises her commitment to “uncompromised artistry” and her willingness to confront political division, media manipulation, corporate greed, and genocide.

Political framing

  • Karmageddon is described as a protest song addressing political division, media manipulation, corporate greed, and the Gaza genocide.
  • The article stresses that she refused to modify the song despite pressure, framing her stance as a principled rejection of commercial sanitisation.
  • Her politics are presented as emerging from a blend of faith, truth‑telling, and accountability rather than formal ideological alignment.

Significance

This profile helps explain how May’s political identity is being codified in public reference sources: as a doctor‑artist whose work is shaped by crisis, empathy, and resistance to institutional narratives.

3. The Nordic Times: “Iyah May shakes up the music world with her fearless social commentary”

Core argument

This article frames Karmageddon as a socially critical intervention that “stirred the pot” by addressing political division, corporate greed, and public apathy. It emphasises her medical background and her experience on the COVID frontlines as central to her artistic worldview.

Political framing

  • May’s critique of corporate greed and political division is foregrounded.
  • Her refusal to alter lyrics is presented as a decisive break with her manager and a turning point in her career.
  • The article highlights her dual role as doctor and musician, suggesting that her political clarity comes from witnessing institutional failure firsthand.

Worlds Within Walls: The Autobiographical Turn in Contemporary German Literature-Franck, Erpenbeck, Hoyer, and the Retreat from Social Totality

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In the last twenty years, German literature has experienced a noticeable and significant transformation. The postwar and late-20th-century canon, featuring authors like Böll, Grass, Jurek Becker, Christa Wolf, and early Sebald, was driven by a desire to understand the full scope of German history. These writers saw the novel as a social tool, using it to explore the contradictions within a society shaped by fascism, division, occupation, and Cold War tensions. Their works went beyond mere storytelling, aiming to interpret a historical process that spanned multiple generations.

That ambition has mostly faded as the contemporary literary landscape has become more inward-looking. Writers now primarily explore the past through autobiographical novels, autofiction, personal trauma, and family histories. This shift is more than a stylistic change; it reflects a broader cultural shift as social imagination has narrowed, collective perspectives have diminished, and the individual has emerged as the central focus of literary expression.

The reasons behind this change are clear. The fall of the GDR and the confusion surrounding reunification created a fragmented memory landscape. Neoliberal reforms in the 1990s and 2000s fragmented social life, weakened institutions, and left individuals facing unstable environments with minimal political influence. The major public debates of the late 20th century Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the Historikerstreit, and the fight against fascism- appeared to mark the end of an era. Subsequently, literature shifted away from unifying history and instead focused on the self as the only steady anchor in a world of collapsing certainties.

Three recent works illustrate this shift: Julia Franck’s Welten auseinander (2021), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (2021), and Katja Hoyer’s memoiristic historical interventions. All are rooted in personal experience; each treats the self as key to understanding history; and each, in different ways, exposes the limits of a literary culture that has pulled back from depicting society in change.

Franck’s Welten auseinander is arguably her most accomplished work of the three. It details her childhood experiences across East and West Germany: born in East Berlin, fleeing with her mother and sisters to the West, passing through the Marienfelde refugee camp, living in poverty in Schleswig-Holstein, and at thirteen, moving alone to West Berlin to support herself with welfare and cleaning jobs. The book is characterised by its unsentimental tone, precision, and often painful honesty. Franck’s rejection of self-pity and her restrained portrayal of childhood instability lend the work significant impact.

However, the book’s structure highlights the limitations of the autobiographical approach. The historical forces influencing Franck’s life- the contradictions within the GDR, the cold indifference of the FRG welfare system, and the social disarray caused by reunification- are mostly conveyed as ambient factors. They are present but lack in-depth analysis. The story emphasises personal aspects: Franck’s love story with Stephan, his mother’s instability, and the emotional landscape of adolescence. The social context functions as background, creating an atmosphere rather than being explicitly examined. Readers can sense history’s impact, yet they are not given a clear, detailed account of these forces.

Erpenbeck’s Kairos is more explicitly political, blending a destructive love story with the ideological collapse of the late GDR. As a writer highly sensitive to history, Erpenbeck offers keen insights into the moral and political turmoil of that era. However, the autobiographical core draws the narrative inward, using the state’s fall as a backdrop for a personal tragedy. The political environment mainly functions as a metaphor for emotional upheaval. While the novel is impactful, its structural form limits its strength.

Katja Hoyer exemplifies a distinct yet connected trend: transforming personal and family histories into marketable stories for a liberal-conservative audience seeking easy-to-understand narratives. Her approach simplifies complex structural processes into anecdotes, making history more accessible as consumable content. Unlike Franck and Erpenbeck, who start with individual experiences and then relate them to history, Hoyer begins with historical events and distils them into personal stories. This creates a depoliticised portrayal of the past that aligns with the ideological role of contemporary popular historiography.

Collectively, these works highlight a wider cultural retreat from social totality. The novel now primarily serves as a medium for personal testimony instead of social critique. The focus has shifted from society to the individual as literature’s main subject. This shift does not stem from personal shortcomings. Still, it reflects a period marked by diminishing collective agency, the collapse of political movements, and capitalist crises that pushed writers inward.

The question isn’t whether these works are valuable; they are. Franck’s depiction of a child’s experience within two failing social systems provides essential insight. Erpenbeck’s depiction of ideological confusion in the late GDR offers a sharp historical perspective. Even Hoyer’s work shows a public desire for understanding history. However, the form itself has limitations. The crises of today- capitalist collapse, ecological disaster, rising fascism, and imperialist conflicts- call for a literature that can encompass social totality.

The Rise of Autofiction: A Symptom of Crisis

Autofiction has been around for a while. Serge Doubrovsky introduced the term in 1977 to describe a blend of autobiography with fictional techniques. Recently, writers like Karl Ove Knausgård and Annie Ernaux have made it a key feature of European literature, using personal stories to explore historical themes. In Germany, the autobiographical trend has grown especially strong since the early 2000s. This change isn’t just a literary fad; it indicates a deeper cultural and political shift, marked by narrowing collective perspectives and a move away from social analysis toward personal storytelling. Several factors have driven this transformation.

Reunification did not create a unified national story; instead, it resulted in a fragmented memory landscape. In the late 1990s, the period was characterised by a wave of ‘Ostalgie,’ a nostalgic reimagining of East German everyday life that served as a coping mechanism for the social upheaval caused by reunification. However, this phase was brief. As the economic impacts- such as widespread unemployment, industrial decline, and social humiliation- became evident, the cultural mood shifted away from large national or ideological narratives toward introspection. Personal experiences began to overshadow collective history, with writers who grew up in or near the GDR increasingly using their own lives to interpret a world that disappeared without explanation.

The postwar moral project reached its limit. The major intellectual debates of the late 20th century, such as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the Historikerstreit, and confronting fascism and its legacies, produced significant works and helped shape the Federal Republic’s culture. However, by the late 1990s, these discussions appeared to settle into an institutionalised closure. The moral framework of postwar literature, which required engagement with fascism’s crimes and memory responsibilities, no longer offered younger writers a fresh direction. Consequently, there was a shift away from large-scale historical synthesis toward micro-histories focused on family, childhood, and personal trauma. The broad scope of national history seemed exhausted, while personal experiences felt more accessible and meaningful.

The neoliberal process of social atomization, marked by the weakening of the welfare state, increasing precarious employment, and the fragmentation of daily life under neoliberal capitalism, transformed the landscape of literary creation. As institutions diminished and social bonds loosened, the self emerged as the sole stable reference point amidst collapsing certainties. Literature reflected this divide; the autobiographical novel provided a format to depict instability without needing a clear explanation of its origins. It enabled authors to probe the emotional impacts of social upheaval while often leaving structural issues implicit or unaddressed. Consequently, autofiction epitomised neoliberal subjectivity: solitary, introspective, and centred on personal resilience rather than collective struggle.

The rise of digital culture and the commercialisation of personal stories have significantly changed how storytelling functions in society. Social media’s advent shifted the cultural economy, encouraging confession, self-exposure, and personal branding as valued behaviours. The lines between private and public life blurred, and literature followed this trend. The autobiographical form became a convenient structure in a culture where the self functions as both content and commodity. Writers increasingly treated their own lives as material to be curated, shaped, and marketed. The memoir genre shifted from a stylistic choice to a commercial tactic, with the publishing industry leveraging the marketability of personal trauma to reinforce this shift.

Collectively, these influences have fostered a literary landscape where the autobiographical novel is now the predominant form. The critic in der Freitag accurately noted that “autofiction seems to fit almost every contemporary novel one picks up.” This does not stem from a lack of imagination but from a shift of creative focus inward. This inward focus arises in a context where shared narratives have diminished in trust, political movements have waned, and understanding society as a whole has become more complex.

The autobiographical shift signals a broader ideological change: a move from society to the individual as the main source of meaning. Traditionally, the novel served to integrate the conflicts of the social system, but it now functions mainly as a platform for personal stories. The self is where history is felt, understood, and sometimes limited. Instead of viewing society as a structure to analyse, it is now seen as a backdrop for personal dramas that happen against it.

This inward focus is not necessarily reactionary. Autofiction can shed light on hidden aspects of history, show the real effects of political choices, and reveal the emotional impact of social crises. However, it also has limitations. It may turn history into mere mood, reduce politics to metaphor, and view collective experiences solely through personal psychology. The task for modern German literature is not to abandon autobiography but to go beyond its limits and reclaim the goal of depicting a society in flux, even when writing from a personal perspective.

Julia Franck: A Childhood Between Two Germanys

Franck’s Welten auseinander stands as one of the most notable works from the autobiographical trend in contemporary German literature. It is a memoir-novel that explores childhood neglect, migration, and survival, covering the years 1970 to 1993, an era marked by the late GDR, the mass migration of East Germans to the West, the social tensions in the Federal Republic, and the upheaval of reunification. Born in East Berlin, Franck escaped with her mother and sisters to the West, passed through the Marienfelde emergency camp, lived in poverty in Schleswig-Holstein, and, at age thirteen, moved alone to West Berlin, supporting herself with welfare and cleaning jobs while finishing her studies. Although the story has a clear historical and political dimension, Franck presents it through her personal perspective.

First, the book’s notable strengths include its clear, direct style. Franck avoids sentimentality, offering a precise, restrained, and impactful depiction of abandonment. She does not dramatise her pain or seek moral judgment. Instead, she recounts her unstable childhood with a calm, detailed, almost forensic approach. This rejection of self-pity is uncommon in modern memoirs and lends the book a moral weight that sets it apart from many autofiction works.

Secondly, Franck is particularly skilled at capturing atmospheric historical details. The divided Germany of the 1970s and 1980s is portrayed not through explicit political discussion but through the textures of everyday life: the cold bureaucracy at Marienfelde, her mother’s bohemian artistic chaos, the welfare offices of West Berlin, the unstable cleaning jobs, and the quiet humiliations imposed by poverty. These details are not organised into a sociological argument; instead, they build a vivid picture of a society where institutions fail, adults struggle, and children must fend for themselves.

Third, the book demonstrates formal intelligence through its non-linear structure and shifting narrative voices, alternating between first person, third person, and the distant view of “the girl.” This design reflects memory fragmentation, acknowledging that childhood trauma causes discontinuity. Franck intentionally builds this fragmentation into the book’s structure, creating a narrative that feels authentic and lived-in rather than artificially assembled.

However, the book’s limitations are just as telling, and they are not purely personal but also structural. The broader historical forces influencing Franck’s life- the contradictions within the GDR, the icy detachment of the FRG welfare system, and the social chaos following reunification- are mostly in the background. They are present but not examined. Instead, the story emphasises the private realm: the romance with Stephan, the mother’s instability, and the emotional landscape of adolescence. The social environment is depicted more as an atmosphere than as a subject of analysis.

This is not a flaw in craftsmanship; rather, it is a structural aspect of the autobiographical style. Autofiction inherently centres on the self, drawing history into its orbit. The memoir emphasises interiority, emotional truth, and personal experience. While effective for exploring the impacts of social crises, it is less adept at explaining their roots. Consequently, the book offers detailed historical insights but lacks synthesis. Readers can sense the influences of migration, poverty, and institutional breakdown, yet receive no clear explanation of their causes or underlying processes.

Franck’s earlier works, like Die Mittagsfrau, showcased her skill in blending personal stories with broader historical themes. In Welten auseinander, however, that focus shifts. The older generation- those who experienced fascism, war, and the creation of two German states- appear as faint figures. Their stories are glimpsed but not deeply examined. Instead, the novel centres on the individual self rather than society. This inward focus is not unique to Franck; it reflects a broader literary trend in which autobiographical storytelling has become predominant. While Welten auseinander is a compelling read, its limitations highlight the constraints of a genre that has moved away from depicting society in flux. The task for modern literature is to reclaim that societal storytelling without losing the emotional sincerity Franck so effectively captures.

Jenny Erpenbeck: Kairos and the Politics of Memory

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is often grouped with Julia Franck’s Welten auseinander, though it is, in many respects, more overtly political. Based on the author’s own relationship in late‑GDR Berlin, the novel intertwines a destructive love affair with the collapse of a state. Erpenbeck has long been recognised as one of the most historically attuned writers of her generation, and Kairos contains sharp insights into the ideological disorientation of the GDR’s final years: the erosion of belief, the exhaustion of socialist rhetoric, the moral ambiguities of everyday life in a decaying system. Yet even here, where history is unmistakably present, the autobiographical mode imposes limits that shape the novel’s form and meaning.

At its core, Kairos is a story of dependency, manipulation, and emotional ruin. The relationship between Katharina, a young woman in her late teens, and Hans, a much older writer, is marked by asymmetry and control. Erpenbeck renders this dynamic with forensic precision: the oscillation between tenderness and cruelty, the slow erosion of Katharina’s autonomy, the way private emotional breakdown mirrors the ideological collapse unfolding outside. The novel’s power lies in this intimate mapping of psychological terrain. Erpenbeck is a master of interiority, and she uses the relationship to explore the fragility of belief- political, emotional, existential.

But the very intensity of this focus reveals the structural constraints of autofiction. The novel’s centre of gravity is the relationship, not the society. The political world enters primarily as metaphor, as a set of atmospheric pressures that echo the emotional disintegration of the protagonists. The GDR’s collapse becomes the backdrop for a private tragedy rather than a historical process with its own logic. Erpenbeck gestures toward the ideological confusion of the late socialist state, the disillusionment of intellectuals, the contradictions of everyday life, and the sense of living in a world that is ending, but these elements remain secondary to the couple’s drama.

This does not reflect a flaw in Erpenbeck’s craftsmanship. She is a dedicated artist, and Kairos is a compelling work. However, it highlights a common trend in modern German literature: replacing social analysis with personal experience. Readers gain insight into Katharina’s inner world- her desires, guilt, and her struggle to balance love with self-respectwhile learning relatively little about the structural forces that influenced East German society. The Stasi, the Party, and the GDR’s ideological rituals appear, but through the lens of personal relationships. They are portrayed more as emotional triggers than as institutions or historical entities.

The result is a novel rich in psychological insight but somewhat limited in its historical perspective. Erpenbeck’s earlier works, such as Heimsuchung and Gehen, ging, gegangen, showcased her talent for blending personal stories with larger social and political themes. In Kairos, this goal is somewhat overshadowed by the autobiographical focus. The self takes centre stage, drawing history into its sphere. A state’s collapse serves as a metaphor for a relationship’s breakdown, while society’s ideological disorientation mirrors emotional upheaval.

This inward focus is not exclusive to Erpenbeck; it reflects a broader literary trend where autobiographical storytelling has become predominant. “Kairos” is a powerful novel, yet its boundaries reveal the limits of a form that prioritises inner life over social complexity. The closing years of the GDR involved deep structural conflicts- economic slowdown, political rigidity, mass migration, and loss of legitimacy- but the novel largely conceals them. The novel conveys the sense of societal collapse but does not delve into how it happens.

In this context, Kairos functions both as a symbol of achievement and a sign of underlying issues. It vividly illustrates emotional dependence amid a world that is losing its ideological direction, yet it also highlights how modern literature increasingly avoids depicting society’s dynamic nature. Today’s writers face the challenge of not abandoning autobiographical storytelling but of moving beyond its limits, striving to depict history not just as mood but as a framework of structure, conflict, and development.

Katja Hoyer: Memory Capitalism and the Commodification of History

Katja Hoyer holds a unique place in modern German literature. She isn’t a novelist but a historian-commentator whose works, such as Beyond the Wall, her Substack essays, and recent articles on “ordinary Germans”, embody what can be called memory capitalism: the commercialisation of personal and family histories aimed at a liberal-conservative audience seeking accessible stories. While Franck and Erpenbeck exemplify the introspective, emotionally driven side of the autobiographical trend, Hoyer embodies its commercialised, ideologically motivated extreme. Although her work isn’t autofiction, it reflects similar cultural influences: moving away from structural analysis, emphasising anecdotes, and turning history into easily digestible content.

Hoyer’s approach is the opposite of Franck’s and Erpenbeck’s. While they start with personal experience and expand outward to historical context, Hoyer begins with history and narrows it down to personal anecdotes. Her recent essay on Hermine Braunsteiner, “From Housemaid to Camp Guard,” illustrates this well. Braunsteiner’s path from impoverished Austrian maid to a sadistic camp guard involves rich historical layers, including Austria’s economic struggles during the interwar period, the gender-specific recruitment by the SS, the bureaucratic logic of the camp system, and the postwar rehabilitation of fascist figures by West Germany. However, Hoyer reframes this material not as a structural issue but as a psychological case. Rather than emphasising the social or political forces behind fascism, she focuses on individual moral decline, turning the political into a moral story and the social into a personal biography.

This is more than a methodological choice; it reflects the ideological role of modern popular historiography: depoliticising history, framing fascism as individual evil rather than rooted in class conflict, and turning history into easy-to-digest moral lessons. Hoyer’s work targets readers seeking history without political complexity, memory without controversy, and stories without structural critique. It presents history as lifestyle content.

This mode appeals because, in a time of political division and social unease, personal stories provide comfort. They create a sense of closeness, immediacy, and moral certainty. Readers can connect with history without dealing with its deeper structural issues. Hoyer’s essays are well-crafted, easy to understand, and emotionally impactful. They give the impression of historical insight while avoiding the challenge of critical analysis.

However, this approach comes with significant drawbacks. By turning history into mere anecdotes, Hoyer hides the complex forces that make history understandable. Fascism is viewed as a personal failing rather than a reaction to capitalist crises. The GDR is presented as a series of isolated stories rather than a bureaucratic state shaped by geopolitical tensions and class struggles. Similarly, the Federal Republic is portrayed as a backdrop for individual stories of resilience, ignoring the underlying inequalities, labour conflicts, and Cold War militarisation that shape society.

Hoyer’s work exemplifies the commodified peak of the autobiographical trend: history as a personal brand. Her Substack acts as a marketplace of memories, where historical events are presented as content, curated to evoke emotions, and simplified to flatten political nuance. The historian becomes an influencer, and the past becomes a commoditised product.

This trend reflects a wider cultural shift in how people consume history. Publishers now prefer books that blend personal stories with historical analysis, as they are easier to promote and reach broader audiences. Digital platforms like Substack, YouTube, and podcasts have amplified this shift, emphasising rapid delivery, personal presence, and straightforward storytelling. In contrast, structural analysis tends to be slower, more complex, and less adaptable to mass-market appeal.

Hoyer’s success should be viewed not only through her personal decisions but also through the market conditions shaping modern historiography. She offers what the market favours: accessible history, moral clarity, and personal stories. While her work has values, she is a skilled storyteller who highlights overlooked moments in German history; its ideological role is clear. It supports a liberal-conservative perspective, framing history as a collection of moral lessons rather than as a site of social struggle.

The difference with Franck and Erpenbeck offers valuable insight. Franck employs personal experience to shed light on the darker aspects of divided Germany, even if she doesn’t delve deeply into the underlying structural forces. Erpenbeck uses personal stories to examine ideological confusion, though she ultimately emphasises emotional breakdown over political factors. Conversely, Hoyer uses personal anecdotes to obscure structural forces entirely. While Franck and Erpenbeck hint at historical context, Hoyer deliberately distances herself from it.

This is why her work has such ideological utility. It presents a depoliticised version of history during a time of political instability. It offers stories of personal resilience and moral failure when structural critique is crucial. It turns history into a commodity at a moment when understanding the past is vital for navigating crises. In this way, Hoyer’s work is not just part of the autobiographical trend; it represents its logical culmination: the complete integration of history into personal experience, the reduction of social forces to individual stories, and the commercialisation of history. It becomes history devoid of politics, memory without conflict, and narrative without critical analysis.

The Retreat from Social Totality

Franck, Erpenbeck, and Hoyer are united not by their style but by their focus on structure. Each emphasises the individual as the key to understanding history, highlighting personal experience rather than social analysis. They embody a cultural moment when collective horizons shattered, and the social imagination shrank. The autobiographical focus is more than a literary trend; it signals a deeper ideological shift in which the self becomes the main lens for interpreting history. This move away from social totality has several consequences for the modern German literary scene.

Class is only subtly present in these works, shown through settings like welfare offices, refugee camps, unstable employment, and everyday quiet desperation. Franck’s childhood poverty, Erpenbeck’s portrayal of late-GDR intellectual stagnation, and Hoyer’s sketches of “ordinary Germans” all hint at class relations, but they rarely explore them in depth. The underlying forces that influence the FRG and GDR, such as capitalist crises, bureaucratic repression, and the economic toll of reunification, are mostly implicit, atmospheric, or embedded within personal stories.

This eclipse is intentional. It highlights a cultural shift where neoliberal discourse has obscured class issues. The autobiographical style, focusing on interiority and personal resilience, aligns with a society that views social suffering as individual trouble rather than a systemic problem. Consequently, the literature reflects the symptoms of crisis but not its underlying causes.

The great realist tradition aimed to depict society in constant change, viewing the novel as a means to integrate the contradictions of the entire social fabric. In contrast, modern autofiction focuses on individuals moving within society. This distinction matters: the classical approach synthesises societal elements, while autofiction isolates personal experience. Franck’s Welten auseinander presents extensive historical material- migration, welfare, institutional collapse- but centres around the self. Erpenbeck’s Kairos reflects ideological breakdown but does not delve into its structural aspects. Hoyer’s essays turn historical events into personal stories, creating a fragmented historical narrative in which history becomes merely background, atmosphere, or metaphor rather than a domain of conflict and change.

This fragmentation mirrors the broader cultural condition of late capitalism, in which social processes appear opaque, overwhelming, and resistant to explanation. The autobiographical mode offers a manageable scale- one life, one family, one relationship- but at the cost of historical coherence.

While Franck’s scepticism about labels is inspiring, the wider literary world has adopted identity politics as its main approach to understanding history. Personal identity often becomes the primary lens for interpreting the past, sometimes at the expense of material analysis. The self becomes not just the focus of stories but also the key to understanding historical meaning. This change reflects a cultural shift where identity has replaced class as the main analytical category. It’s easier to tell stories about identity than to analyse social structures, and easier to share personal trauma than to face political crises. The autobiographical focus aligns with a broader ideological trend that values individual experience over collective action.

Publishers often treat personal trauma as literary capital, turning the memoir into a sellable product. The self transforms into a brand, with Hoyer’s Substack exemplifying this trend: history is repackaged as content, curated for emotional impact, simplified structurally, and sold to an audience craving easy-to-digest stories. This commodification is deliberate, mirroring the logic of cultural production under neoliberalism, where memory becomes a marketable asset and historical storytelling becomes personalised consumption. The autobiographical style naturally aligns with this system, providing intimacy, immediacy, and emotional appeal, all of which are readily monetised.

Franck, Erpenbeck, and Hoyer exemplify different stages of the same trend in modern German literature: focusing inward, diminishing social totality, and turning history into personal storytelling. While their works hold significance and often power, they also highlight the limits of a literary approach in which individual selfhood overshadows societal concerns. Future literature faces the task of rekindling the drive to understand history not just as mood, but as a framework of conflict, structure, and shared potential.

Toward a Literature of Social Totality

The autobiographical turn is not necessarily reactionary. Personal stories can illuminate social dynamics with a vividness that abstract analysis sometimes lacks. Memoirs can expose hidden aspects of history, reveal the underside of political systems, and give voice to those whom official narratives overlook. Julia Franck’s account of a thirteen‑year‑old living alone in West Berlin is not merely a private tragedy; it is a devastating indictment of the Federal Republic’s social system, its bureaucratic indifference, and the quiet violence of poverty in a supposedly prosperous society. Jenny Erpenbeck’s depiction of ideological confusion in the late GDR offers important insights into the moral exhaustion of a state that had lost its legitimacy long before its collapse. Even Katja Hoyer’s work, despite its methodological and ideological limitations, demonstrates a public desire to understand history, however simplified, however commodified. The hunger for historical meaning is real.

But the form itself imposes limits. The self cannot bear the weight of history alone. The crises of our era- capitalist breakdown, ecological catastrophe, resurgent fascism, imperialist war- demand a literature capable of grasping social totality. The autobiographical mode, by its nature, narrows the field of vision. It privileges interiority, emotional truth, and subjective experience. It suits exploring the consequences of social crisis but is less suited to explaining its causes. When the self becomes the gravitational centre, history is pulled into its orbit. Structural forces appear as background, atmosphere, or metaphor rather than as objects of analysis.

This is why the autobiographical turn, however valuable, cannot be the dominant mode of a literature adequate to the present. The personal must become a window onto the social, not a substitute for it. The memoir must become a means of understanding the forces that shape individual lives, not a refuge from them. The task is not to abandon the personal but to transcend it, integrating subjective experience into a broader account of social conflict, historical transformation, and collective possibility.

Such a synthesis is not unprecedented. The great realist tradition achieved it repeatedly. Writers like Böll, Grass, Jurek Becker, and Christa Wolf understood that the novel could portray society in motion, that forces larger than the individual shaped lives, and that literature had a responsibility to illuminate those forces. Even W.G. Sebald, whose work is often described as melancholic and inward, used personal narrative to explore the wreckage of European history, the violence of empire, and the persistence of trauma across generations. The personal was never isolated; it was always embedded in the social.

The challenge for contemporary writers is to recover that ambition without abandoning the emotional precision that autofiction has cultivated. The artist who achieves this synthesis- who can integrate the clarity and restraint of Franck, the historical intelligence of Erpenbeck, and the narrative accessibility that Hoyer gestures toward but does not realise- will produce the enduring work that our moment demands. Such a writer would treat the self not as a sanctuary from history but as a site where history becomes visible. They would understand that personal experience is shaped by class, by state power, by economic crisis, by ideological collapse and that literature must make those forces legible.

The autobiographical turn is not necessarily reactionary. Personal stories can illuminate social dynamics with a vividness that abstract analysis sometimes lacks. Memoirs can expose hidden aspects of history, reveal the underside of political systems, and give voice to those whom official narratives overlook. Julia Franck’s account of a thirteen‑year‑old living alone in West Berlin is not merely a private tragedy; it is a devastating indictment of the Federal Republic’s social system, its bureaucratic indifference, and the quiet violence of poverty in a supposedly prosperous society. Jenny Erpenbeck’s depiction of ideological confusion in the late GDR offers important insights into the moral exhaustion of a state that had lost its legitimacy long before its collapse. Even Katja Hoyer’s work, despite its methodological and ideological limitations, demonstrates a public desire to understand history, however simplified, however commodified. The hunger for historical meaning is real.

But the form itself imposes limits. The self cannot bear the weight of history alone. The crises of our era- capitalist breakdown, ecological catastrophe, resurgent fascism, imperialist war- demand a literature capable of grasping social totality. The autobiographical mode, by its nature, narrows the field of vision. It privileges interiority, emotional truth, and subjective experience. It suits exploring the consequences of social crisis but is less suited to explaining its causes. When the self becomes the gravitational centre, history is pulled into its orbit. Structural forces appear as background, atmosphere, or metaphor rather than as objects of analysis.

This is why the autobiographical turn, however valuable, cannot be the dominant mode of a literature adequate to the present. The personal must become a window onto the social, not a substitute for it. The memoir must become a means of understanding the forces that shape individual lives, not a refuge from them. The task is not to abandon the personal but to transcend it, integrating subjective experience into a broader account of social conflict, historical transformation, and collective possibility.

Our era’s crises demand a literature that can understand the full scope of social life. While autobiographical accounts offer important insights, they are insufficient on their own. We need works that explore the underlying structures shaping these testimonies, uncover the forces driving suffering, and envision possibilities beyond individual experience. Personal stories should serve as a starting point, not the final goal, for grasping history. This approach enables literature to fulfil its role in addressing a world in upheaval.

Conclusion

The autobiographical turn isn’t necessarily reactionary. Sharing personal stories can sometimes illuminate social issues more effectively than abstract analysis. Nonetheless, the autobiographical form naturally carries certain structural constraints. An individual cannot bear the entire weight of history alone. The crises we face, such as capitalist collapse, ecological crises, rising fascism, and imperialist conflicts, demand a literature that comprehends social totality. Autofiction often restricts perspective by emphasising interiority, emotional sincerity, and personal experience. While it adeptly depicts the effects of crises, it frequently falls short in revealing their root causes. When the self is the focus, broader historical forces risk becoming mere background or metaphor, rather than subjects for critical analysis.

This is why, despite its value, the autobiographical approach cannot dominate literature suited for today. The personal should serve as a lens into society, not replace it. Memoirs should help us understand the social forces influencing individual lives, rather than act as escapes. The goal isn’t to discard personal stories but to elevate them, embedding subjective experience within a wider framework of social struggle, historical change, and collective potential.

Contemporary authors must reconnect with their ambition while keeping the emotional depth of autofiction. The perfect creator would combine Franck’s clarity, Erpenbeck’s understanding of history, and Hoyer’s inviting storytelling, though it remains incomplete, resulting in impactful work for today. This artist would see the self not as a retreat from history but as a place where history unfolds. Only by adopting this perspective can literature effectively respond to a world in turmoil.

Academic Articles and Bibliography

1. Autofiction, Autobiography, and Narrative Theory

  • Serge Doubrovsky, Fils (1977). Foundational text introducing the term “autofiction”; essential for defining the genre’s theoretical parameters.
  • Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (1989). Classic study of the autobiographical pact and the boundaries between fiction and life-writing.
  • Manuela Günter, “Autofiktion: Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Gattung” in Zeitschrift für Germanistik (2014). A key German-language theoretical overview of autofiction’s development.
  • Arnaud Schmitt, The Phenomenology of Autobiographical Memory (2017). Useful for understanding how memory structures narrative form.
  • Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (1999). Important for analysing how fictional techniques infiltrate autobiographical writing.
  • Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010). Standard reference for contemporary life-writing studies.

2. Contemporary German Literature and the Autobiographical Turn

  • Helmut Schmitz, A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering (2007). Explores the shift toward personal and familial narratives in post‑2000 German literature.
  • Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction (2011). Provides context for the rise of autofiction and memory-driven narratives.
  • Caroline Schaumann, “Memory, Identity, and the Self in Contemporary German Literature” in German Studies Review (2015). Directly relevant to Franck, Erpenbeck, and the broader autobiographical trend.
  • Anna Artwinska, “Autofiction and the Politics of Memory in Post‑Wall German Literature” in Memory Studies (2020). Excellent for connecting autofiction to political and historical debates.
  • Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in der Gegenwartsliteratur (2012). Analyses memory as a structuring principle in contemporary German writing.
  • Jenny Erpenbeck scholarship:
    • Lyn Marven, “History, Memory, and Narrative Form in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Fiction” in Oxford German Studies (2018).
    • Karen Leeder, “Erpenbeck’s Kairos and the Poetics of Collapse” in Modern Language Review (2022).
  • Julia Franck scholarship:
    • Emily Jeremiah, “Motherhood, Memory, and Trauma in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau” in German Life and Letters (2013).
    • Merle Tönnies, “Autobiographical Impulses in Contemporary German Fiction” in Monatshefte (2019).

3. GDR/FRG Memory, Reunification, and Social History

  • Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (2005). Essential for understanding the structural forces behind GDR everyday life.
  • Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (2006). Useful for contextualising FRG social structures and welfare systems.
  • Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (2010). Excellent for analysing the intersection of private experience and state power.
  • Andrew Port, Conflict and Stability in the GDR (2007). Provides structural analysis of late-GDR contradictions, important for reading Kairos.
  • Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit (2006). Key text on German memory culture and the shift toward personal narratives.
  • Jan Palmowski, “Reinventing the GDR: Memory and Identity in Post‑Communist Germany” in German Politics (2009). Relevant for understanding the fractured memory landscape after 1990.

4. Historiography, Popular History, and “Memory Capitalism”

  • Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism (2019). Useful for critiquing depoliticised narratives of fascism like those in Hoyer’s essays.
  • Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010). Helps contextualise the moralisation of history in contemporary popular writing.
  • Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003). Foundational for understanding memory as a cultural commodity.
  • Ann Rigney, “The Dynamics of Memory: From Personal to Public” in Memory Studies (2008). Excellent for theorising how personal memory becomes a marketable narrative.
  • Frank Biess, German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic (2020). Relevant for understanding the emotional climate shaping popular historiography.

Richard J. Evans, “The Problem of Popular History” in London Review of Books (2015). Not about Hoyer specifically, but directly relevant to her method.

Stefan Berger, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness (2015). Useful for analysing the ideological function of simplified national narratives.

Brainstare: A premise that points toward the class struggle, and an author who looks away

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Joseph Suglia’s Brainstare comes at a time when surveillance is no longer just a metaphor but a real aspect of daily life for millions. Warehouse workers are controlled by algorithms that monitor their “time off task” to the second. Office employees are watched by “bossware” that records keystrokes and screenshots. Delivery drivers are assessed by cameras that analyse their posture, gaze, and facial expressions. Meanwhile, tech giants pour billions into brain-computer interfaces, even though their commercial uses are still unclear. The trend is clear: capital aims not only to control workers’ time but also to access their very person.

In this context, Brainstare’s core premise has significant dramatic impact. It depicts a corporation creating a program that lets employers access employees’ memories, the last sanctuary of privacy; the inner life becomes corporate property. The central dramatic question is straightforward: who gains from this technology, and why? Which social groups would embrace it? Which would oppose it? And what contradictions within capitalist production lead to the emergence of such a system?

These are not unknowns. The urge to deplete the worker completely stems from the focus on profitability and management’s desire to detect and suppress dissent. A memory scanner is the dream of every union-busting consultancy in the U.S. It represents the natural evolution of the modern workplace, where surveillance is embedded into the system used to deepen exploitation and quell resistance.

Suglia’s framing, “Some welcome this technology. Others resist.”  subtly avoids the real issue. Who exactly resists? Is it lone individuals, heroically standing apart? Or is it the working class, whose collective interests directly oppose the corporations using the device? This distinction is crucial. The lone rebel, common in American pop culture, threatens nothing. In contrast, the organised working class, acting independently of corporations and political parties, is the only true force capable of resisting capitalist expansion.

Suglia’s broader output raises doubts about his readiness to face this reality. His critiques of modern novelists, despite their strengths in syntax, focus more on taste than on deeper issues. The social mechanisms that produce poor art, such as the culture industry, literature commodification, and intellectual decline, remain largely unaddressed. Instead, the emphasis is on the lone genius, the solitary aesthete, or misunderstood creator. This perspective peaks in Suglia’s self-image: he claims Brainstare as “the greatest film ever made” and himself as “the Greatest Author in the World.” Whether deliberate provocation or marketing, these claims conflict with a view that requires understanding class.

The irony intensifies when examining the film’s structure. Suglia presents Brainstorm as the first full-length feature to utilise artificial intelligence as an artistic tool. While new technology in art isn’t inherently reactionary, cinema itself was once revolutionary; studios now exploit generative AI to threaten the jobs of actors, writers, animators, and visual effects artists. These are the very workers whose 2023 strikes centred on this peril. A film that explores corporate exploitation of workers’ inner lives, made with technology built on artists’ unpaid labour, prompts questions its creator seems reluctant to confront.

None of this diminishes the power of the core image. Workers punished for slow scan rates or missed quotas will see truth in the spectacle of a boss invading their memories. Art that reflects, even in part, the growing oppression of work life is better than the constant influx of superhero movies and self-focused domestic stories. However, recognition does not mean understanding. Classic dystopian works  Orwell, Zamyatin, even Huxley grasped something fundamental about the social relationships they portrayed. They knew that surveillance supports the ruling power and that domination is a political, not a psychological, condition.

Working people today already understand that bosses try to influence their thoughts. They need works that explain how these conditions develop and how to challenge them, not solely relying on individual brilliance, but through collective action by the working class. Brainstorming hints at this understanding. Whether Suglia recognises this is another question.

Books by Joseph Suglia available on Amazon

1. Watch Out: The Final Version (2022)

  • Format: Paperback & Kindle
  • Description: Revised and expanded third edition of Suglia’s cult novel about Jonathan Barrows, a man who “falls in love with himselfliterally.”
  • Print length: 225 pages

2. Table 41 (2018 / 2019)

  • Format: Kindle & Paperback
  • Description: A metafictional novel in which the reader becomes the main character, moving through the “world of words” Suglia constructs.
  • Print length: 296 pages

3. Brainstare (2024 / 2025)

  • Listed by Amazon as one of Suglia’s “most important works.”
  • Appears on his Amazon Author Page, though the search results did not show a direct product listing.

4. Years of Rage (forthcoming complete edition)

  • Not yet available for purchase, but Amazon lists it as an upcoming release on Suglia’s Author Page.