Spaces for feeling differently: Emotional experiments in the alternative left in West Germany during the 1970s

The article explores emotional practices amongst West German alternative leftists during the 1970s. It argues that leftists engaged in various forms of emotional practices that would allow them to produce feelings they missed in capitalist society. The article interprets these feelings as emotional experiments to feel differently that sometimes succeeded in the sense that they produced the desired feelings, but could also fail. These attempts to produce different feelings were based on a specific emotional knowledge about capitalism, that is an understanding of how capitalism, and specifically capitalist spatial arrangements, produced, regulated and restricted feelings. The emotional knowledge facilitated a variety of experiments that would yield the feelings that leftists missed so dearly under capitalism. The article focuses, first, on a variety of consciousness-raising and therapy groups where people tried to build new intimate relationships, and, second, on demonstrations and festivities that constituted temporal zones of exuberance. In both cases, changing spatial settings was a crucial element for producing different feelings.