The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. By Martin Klimke. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xviii, 346 pp. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-691-13127-6.)

Abstract

A notable shortcoming of the historical literature on the “global sixties” has been the failure to find satisfying ways of relating individual national case studies to the larger global metaevent of 1968. Martin Klimke's study, The Other Alliance, represents an important attempt to go beyond vague generalizations about the “global” to find ways of accessing and analyzing the pronounced interconnectedness that characterized the rebellion of the 1960s. “Most works,” writes Klimke in the introduction, “fail to analyze how activists from different geographical, economic, political, and cultural frameworks imagined themselves as part of a global revolutionary movement” (p. 2). Klimke's study deals admirably with some of these imaginings, but its greater contribution lies in its attempt to trace out the transnational connections that helped fuel them. Demonstrating that alongside the official German-American Cold War alliance there existed a parallel alliance linking two student movements—the Students for a Democratic Society (sds) in the United States and the German Socialist Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, [sds]) in West Germany—Klimke illustrates some of the many ways the two movements directly and indirectly influenced each other. Particularly instructive is the little-known case of Mike Vester, a West German sds member, active on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, who (among other things) contributed to the writing of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the American sds. More interesting still is what Klimke has to say about the influence of the Black Panthers, an American group that became the subject of a robust solidarity campaign in West Germany. In what will surely be a controversial assertion, Klimke argues that the West German embrace of the iconography and militant self-image of black power helped provide the cognitive underpinnings of the terrorist groups that formed at the end of the 1960s. Klimke makes excellent use of a range of sources, including classified U.S. government documents that open up a fascinating perspective on how intelligence agencies viewed the threat of student unrest.