West German Student Movement Research Articles

Escape to the front: the strange radicalisation of the West German student movement

This article explores the reasons for the rapid radicalization of the West German student movement of the 1960s. Instead of referring to established theories on the radicalization of social movements, it focuses on the implications of the activists’ specific notion of "movement". It is argued that the pressure on the movement's protagonists to permanently unite theory and practice led to a tension that could only be maintained by a permanent orientation towards the next step. Keeping the “movement” in motion thus exerted a propulsive radicalizing pressure that was not directed toward a specific goal, but toward continuing to "keep going." "Movement" may thus be seen as the unifying element of theory, practice, organization, and habitus of the movement. From this perspective, it is also argued, the sudden transformation of the disintegrating movement into terrorist groups or ultra-authoritarian small parties becomes more understandable.

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

From Student Riots to Feminist Firebombs: Debates about "Counterviolence" in the West German Student Movement and Women's Movement

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the University of Nebraska Press via https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645995

From Student Riots to Feminist Firebombs: Debates about “Counterviolence” in the West German Student Movement and Women's Movement

From Student Riots to Feminist Firebombs: Debates about “Counterviolence” in the West German Student Movement and Women's Movement

Dissent in the Wirtschaftswunder: Historical Memory and the German Student Movement

This paper deals with the West German student movement, which, like most student movements, was active in the 1960s and focused primarily on social issues. It attempts to interpret the critiques levied by the movement in relation to those events and thoughts which precededit.The author argues that there was a distinct rhetorical and philosophical connection betweeen the 68er-<em>Bewegung</em> and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. This connection shapd the methods and goals of the student movement, which sought to integrate a process of comign to terms with the realities of Germany's fascist, anti-democratic past into the German mindset following the rich period of remarkable postwar economic development. These methods and influences, which are called "critical historical memory," are then argued to have been developed so as to bring to light the continued presence of fascistic tendencies in contemporary German politics, with the hope of coming to terms with the recent past.

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

ABSTRACTThis review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Drives in Dispute: The West German Student Movement, Psychoanalysis, and the Search for a New Emotional Order, 1967–1971

Summarizing the activities of the Sigmund-Freud-Institute (SFI) in Frankfurt am Main in 1969, its director Alexander Mitscherlich painted a bleak picture of recent events. Psychoanalysis had always faced opposition in Germany, he wrote, but of late Freudianism contended with several broadsides simultaneously: critics still maintained that it placed too much emphasis on sexuality; some added that behavioral therapy or sophisticated medication did a better job at treating patients than long-term analysis; yet others argued that Freud's teachings may have been relevant in 1900, but that society no longer resembled turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna. On top of all this, Mitscherlich complained, a new generation demanded that psychoanalysis figure as chief witness for an antiauthoritarian education that emphasized indulgence rather than sublimation. “Society” continued to make life difficult for psychoanalysis, then, and it was for this reason that the government needed to assist the SFI in its efforts to train a new generation of analysts in Germany.

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust Susanne Bressan Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust, by Hans Kundnani. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 374 pp. $27.50. As the German historian Norbert Frei puts it, 1968 is "over-commented and under-investigated." This particularly holds true for German publications dealing with the West-German student movement coping with the Nazi past. Whereas scientists are only beginning to pick out the 1968 activists' handling of the Nazi past as a central subject for investigation, the public debate on this topic is dominated by accusations, polemics, and self-justifications. Kundnani's journalist-style monograph is a refreshing and stimulating exception. He formulates a clear hypothesis and, based on two main currents and its ramifications, traces the 1968 generation's ambivalent handling of the role of their parents' generation in Nazi Germany up to the present. Most of Kundnani's sources are taken from secondary literature, which is only partially available in English. Supplemented with interviews he conducted with about 40 former student movement activists in Germany, Britain, and France, it is the well-contextualized, dense, and compelling way Kundnani presents these sources alongside the theoretical threads that makes the book interesting for experts, as well as for a general public. Revolutionaries of 1968 in many western states based their thinking and acting on a credo Kundnani calls the "provocation thesis": In acting against [End Page 193] the state in such a harsh manner that provoked even harsher reactions, the democratic system would show its authoritarian character. Only this exposure would make the mass follow the vanguard in its revolutionary struggle. The West German 1968 activists, however, differed from their "comrades" around the world in one crucial aspect: In other western states, accusations of the political system as "fascist" had a more or less metaphorical character, whereas in West Germany former Nazis in fact were members of the government, judges, university professors, and, above all, their parents. Not distinguishing between these personal and mental continuities on the one side, and the structural break in the political system of Germany on the other side, the protagonists of the West German student movement, or, more precisely, "extra-parliamentary opposition" (Außerparlamentarische Opposition—APO), conceived the Federal Republic as a still fascist state. Kundnani calls this the "continuity thesis." These two main theses were adopted by two conflicting groups. The first conceived of Germans as perpetrators, as deep-rooted Nazis. "Auschwitz" was the central point of reference in this national-skeptic concept. The second saw Germans as victims and sufferers. From this perspective, Germany only could evolve into a better society by being liberated from its "occupying powers", i.e., the United States and the Soviet Union. In both of these concepts, however, the main evil lay in imperialism and capitalism. Furthermore, up to the dissolution of the rebellion, both concepts lead to the same conclusion: The current society would inevitably end up in a new, worldwide fascism unless a global socialist revolution occurred. Either Utopia or Auschwitz. And a second "Auschwitz" would be worse than the first. Therefore, the APO activists had to organize themselves as "resistance." As members of the "resistance," they consequently would be persecuted by the state. Indeed, at the highpoint of the rebellion from 1967 to 1968, police officers, media, and the public in many cases reacted in such a physically or rhetorically violent manner that it could be easily taken as confirmation of the APO activists' view. Nazi analogies were used by all parties involved in the conflict. Some activists even perceived themselves as new "Jews." It was in the aftermath of "1968", that the pathologies of the APO activists' concept of resistance manifested themselves in attacks of physical violence aimed at Jews. Most strikingly these outputs of "exonerating projection" (Dan Diner) were exemplified by the planned bomb attack on a commemoration of the Kristallnacht at the Jewish community center in West Berlin on November 9, 1969—the bomb did not explode, but only due to a technical failure—and the hijacking of an airplane on its flight from Tel Aviv to Paris in 1976, when Wilfried Böse, a...

Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement

Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 generation and the Holocaust

One thing separated the left-wing students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts elsewhere around the world. The young Germans who became known as the 1968 generation or the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their parents were responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better world as some of their revolutionary contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. However, although many in the West German student movement imagined their struggle against capitalism as a kind of ex post facto resistance against Nazism, they also had a tendency to relativise the Holocaust. Others, meanwhile, wanted to draw a line under the Nazi past. In fact, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the Achtundsechziger, there were also nationalist and anti-Semitic currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement. In short, the 1968 generation had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past. Utopia or Auschwitz explores these contradictory currents as it traces the political journey of Germany's 1968 generation, via the left-wing terrorism of the seventies and the Social Democrats and Greens in the eighties, to political power in the nineties in the form of the first-ever red-green government in Germany. It examines the red-green government's foreign policy, in particular its response to the Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq crises, which reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past.

Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement

The legacy of the West German student movement continues to be a debated topic in Germany today: Did the call for political and social change bring about a new and truly democratic Germany or did it trigger a backlash that determined the politics of the 1980s and 1990s under conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl? Did the activists themselves “sell out” and betray their own ideals? How did the student movement influence the next generation growing up in Germany? These questions about the social and political effects of the student movement influence discussions about pedagogy, violence in schools, and about how young Germans today understand political change and social activism. Media often paint a simplistic picture of both, of what became of the generation of activists in 1968 and of their “children” who were born in the 1970s and came of age in the 1990s. Not only conservative voices since the late 1980s support the idea that members of the student movement of the 1960s brought up a generation of confused young people without clear values and moral guidance. The question of whether the ideals of liberal education failed led to heated debates within the Green Party in the 1990s. An article in the news magazine Der Spiegel cites Beate Scheffler, a forty-year-old teacher and Green Party delegate:

Humour as a Guerrilla Tactic: The West German Student Movement's Mockery of the Establishment

A small group within the German student movement of the 1960s expressed its critique of society in humorous protests that condensed the urge for a non-materialist, individualistic, and libertarian change. In the early phase of an emerging cycle of protest, Spassguerilla [fun guerrilla] contributed to shaping the face of the student movement, despite differences with the more traditional groups within that movement. In happenings, pamphlets, and judicial trials, humorous activists derided conventional ways of thinking and living. A responsive environment played a decisive role in shaping the image of the insurgents, thus reinforcing the impact of their actions and drawing in sympathizers.

Feminist Disability Studies

Feminist Disability Studies