The incredible story of a lived utopia in the middle of the GDR: the "crippled commune" of Hartroda

Arnstadt, Thuringia, at the end of the 70s. In a home for disabled young people, four friends who can barely move decide to break out: We're breaking out. They want to use their pensions and care allowance to pay for carers, and the church gives them a house - the old vicarage in Hartroda, in the Altenburger Land region. Thus begins the story of a community that has fallen out of time and out of the country. Some receive help, others asylum - from the drudgery of state-run businesses, from a life in a mindless cycle of working, drinking and sleeping. A community of equals in which everything is shared - money and books, records and beer, but also all infirmities. A community of the discarded that fights for the unthinkable with wit and chutzpah: a self-determined life, perhaps even freedom. Under the umbrella of the church, they are left alone by the GDR apparatus, or so it seems. Gruns is the intellectual head of the community. He is cared for by the taciturn Mozek, who plays international correspondence chess tournaments from the attic and keeps his past under wraps. Mozek, a former border guard, is on the run from his own guilt.
I've set my sights on nothing / nothing at all, nothing at all, goes a song by the band Mischpoke, who are friends of the commune. When the GDR collapses, it becomes clear that it was also the Wall that held the Hartroda community together.

Karsten Krampitz ( *1969 in Rüdersdorf) is an author, historian and journalist. He wrote for street newspapers, was involved in the occupation of luxury hotels and wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the church in the GDR. In 2009, he won the Audience Award at the Bachmann Competition. For his work on this novel, he received the Berlin Senate Scholarship for Literature, the Literature Scholarship of the Free State of Thuringia and a working scholarship from the German Literature Fund. Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Hoffnung was awarded the Matthias Vernaldi Prize for self-determined living by the Kaspar Hauser Foundation in 2025.