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Taught in German. This course will explore the vision in German romantic and modern literature of ideal communities. We will examine the relation of past and to future in these works as well as the way they conceive humans and nature, earth and heavens, bodies and machines. To what extent is a utopia something crafted? To what degree is it presented as a fashioned setting like a work of art? What does the image of utopia tell us about the act of imagining at the heart of literature? To what extent does envisioning a utopia amount to inhabiting one? Why is a utopia at once every place and no place (u-topos)? Reading to include works by Klopstock, Novalis, Hoffmann, Kleist, Nietzsche, Scheerbart, Walser and Jünger.