SOZIALDEMOKRATISCHE ZUKUNFTSBILDER. FREI NACH BEBEL. Berlin: Verlag "Fortschritt" Aktiengesellschaft, November 1891. Octavo, pp. [1-2] 1-48, original green wrappers printed in black. First edition, first printing. A variant issue with a title/contents leaf added, but still dated November 1891 on the front cover and the title page. This anti-Bellamy anti-utopia satire, written by the most famous German liberal politician of the Bismarck era, was a bestseller in the years before World War I. Richter describes an initially enthusiastic response to a Social Democrat victory in Berlin and the subsequent transformation of society (nationalization, resolution of the family, creation of social equality, the organization of work and consumption) in the form of a fictional diary which records the experiences a family whose fortune is destroyed by arbitrary state power. "Richter's anti-utopia was widely circulated: a quarter of a million copies were printed between 1891 and 1893; it was serialized in over forty bourgeois newspapers, and certain trade and agrarian groups arranged for its distribution in pamphlet form among the workers ... Richter's anti-utopia figured in and perhaps helped inspire the 'Zukunftsstaat' debate which took place in the Reichstag in February, 1893." - William S. Lewis, Catastrophist/Eschatological Motifs in German Speculative Fiction, 1895-1925, p. 28. First published in English in 1893 as PICTURES OF THE SOCIALISTIC FUTURE (FREELY ADAPTED FROM BEBEL). Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 20. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 164. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 183. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 972. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, p. 54. Bleiler (1978), p. 167. Reginald 12235. Bloch (2002) 2573. Kretzmann, The Pre-War German Utopian Novel (1890-1914), Ph.D. diss., Brown University, May, 1936, pp. 76-8, 214. Lexikon I, pp. 219-20. Rear cover missing, front cover tanned, printed on pulpy paper, internally very good. Rare. (#152282).
Price: $750.00
No statement of printing.