Utopia and liberation – all power to the mushrooms

Once the power goes out, chaos breaks out, civil war and sheer violence are the inevitable result. At least that’s how it’s usually explained in post-apocalyptic stories. This subgenre of science fiction literature is currently booming. For example, in Marc Elsberg’s bestseller “Blackout”, which was filmed as a series by RTL in 2023.

For many right-wingers, the idea of ​​a major power outage is a basic element of a fantasy of political overthrow, including for the Reich Citizen Network, which is on trial in Stuttgart. In this respect, it seems strange that frustrated leftists are supposed to be responsible for the blackout in Elsberg’s novel. In the “Jackpot” trilogy by SF veteran William Gibson, there is also a major power outage as the initial spark of an apocalyptic crisis, which is triggered by the right.

The major power outage in Luise Meier’s first novel “Hyphen” has a completely different effect. Instead of chaos and violence, in their utopian narrative, people suddenly find themselves in a situation in which they are forced to build solidarity care structures at the community level and, at the same time, overcome capitalism.

With this plot, Meier is currently not the only author who paints the supposed end of the world scenario of a society saying goodbye to technology as a utopia. While in the star-studded Netflix film “Leave the world behind” (2023) or in Don DeLillo’s novel “The Silence” (2020), the collapse of the technological infrastructure leads to the downfall of civilization and a lively everyone against everyone, Jonathan Lethem also tells the story in “The Standstill” (2024) about a rural community that is self-organized and entering a new era of communal life and practicing solidarity.

In Luise Meier’s novel, which is set in the near future and takes place primarily in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, even the Nazis are “turned around” – using the eponymous hyphae, the thread-like cells of fungi, which play an important role. Because here, in the second half of the 2020s, after the major power outages, mushrooms are not only an important foodstuff for decentralized and communal self-sufficiency based on subsistence farming. They are also used as medicine and as a drug and were also partly responsible for the power outages.

These will gradually end the current social system without a big bang. The “Spore Liberation Front” had already experimented with mushrooms beforehand. Among other things, psychogenic mushrooms were added to beer at a Nazi music festival, which had an enormous effect on consumers: “It was as if they had all just flowed out of their bodies, like when you break glass bottles or break open coconuts. (…) It wasn’t about their past and traumas and stuff like it was with my father and his friends, but they understood the universe, the connections,” says an enthusiastic ex-Antifa, as he and his comrades from one Nazi festival made a consciousness-expanding Woodstock 2.0.

At the center of the story is Maja, who thinks a lot about Marx’s concept of metabolism, Bogdanov’s Proletkult, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, travels across the country and writes an encyclopedia that essentially replaces the Internet and, among other things, makes mushroom knowledge accessible to everyone should. She has long conversations with people in rural Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, expanding on their biographies. It’s about life in the GDR, about the transition, the years in reunified Germany and finally about the deepening crisis that culminates in the failing power grid and a post-industrial, agrarian care society.

There is Tomasz, for example, who was addicted to gaming in front of the computer, started a relationship with his neighbor during a crisis and soon outgrew himself. Liv had previously treated guests on the Baltic Sea with yoga and massage, now she is part of the local community and everyone benefits from her skills. But where have all the capitalists gone? When a community comes into contact with a formerly wealthy family who is isolating themselves, it is primarily the ability to communicate in a de-escalating manner that prevents an impending confrontation.

The story also extends to the Kurdish socialist Rojava, where Zeyneb lived, who reports that, in addition to the mushroom revolution, “the all-pervasive self-government is simply more adaptable and resilient and can react more quickly to crises and major changes. But also because caring for each other requires less than maintaining a state apparatus, an abstract ideology or a dictatorial regime.

Or is that too simple? Would a utopia that recounts the contradictions and lines of conflict of the present and creates a new world based on this tension be more credible?

Luise Meier includes a secondary strand in her novel: It’s about the German energy supply through a huge hydrogen project in Namibia as the last lifeline of the failing Federal Republic capitalism, which is causing massacres there by the Bundeswehr when the population loots the solar panels. For as much as large parts of “Hyphen” read like a “make a wish” recipe, there is also a whole series of painful events in this great transformation into a post-capitalist era, which Meier surprisingly did very quickly, within a few years , happens.

The mushroom metaphor also stands for the new mycelium-like social structures that are emerging – beyond competition and hegemonic violence. People cooperate at the moment of disaster, when a realignment is needed, instead of fighting each other. In view of the prevailing capitalist logic that permeates all social relationships, this may seem euphemistic and has even disturbed one or two literary critics. But “Hyphen” must be read as a social utopia, as a novel of ideas that explores potentialities and ultimately in a tradition with books like William Morris’ “Knowledge of Nowhere” (1890) or, most recently, Yanis Varoufakis’ “Another Now” (2021). stands.

Luise Meier invents a different future and uses literary research to illuminate the possibilities of a solidarity-based care culture. A great adventure in the countryside, sometimes told in a very pointed and exciting way.

Luise Meier: “Hyphae”. Matthes and Seitz, 303 pages, hardcover, €25.