West German Student Research Articles

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

Pippi och utopin: En omslagsbild i den västtyska studentrevoltens kölvatten

Title: Pippi and Utopia. A Cover Illustration in the Wake of the West German Student RevolutionThe cover of the West German collection of Pippi Longstocking stories Pippi Langstrumpf (1967) shows a girl standing upside down. The image was drafted by the renowned illustrator Rolf Rettich. This exclusive edition, featuring an additional 200 illustrations by Rettich inside the book, was released in connection with Astrid Lindgren's 60th birthday. The edition positioned Lindgren as an author of ambitious children's literature and established Oetinger’s standing as a successful publisher. Rettich’s cover image is my starting point for discussing the idea of the liberating capacity of the Pippi stories. In the light of the political turmoil of this period, Pippi was both hailed as a representative of fantastic literature and criticized for being pseudo-revolutionary, ensnaring children in daydreaming about a good world, when instead they should learn how to deal with everyday life from realistic literature. In order to analyze the visual rhetoric in its historical context, I choose an approach that in my case unfolds the well-known Pippi figure as a generative ”utopian principle”.

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

Wounds That Never Heal: On Anselm Kiefer and the Moral Innocence of the West German Student Movements and the West German New Left

The West German student movements, the student generation of Anselm Kiefer, were a part of the West German awakening as to their collective guilt for the atrocities committed in the Second World War – the Germans-as-perpetrators debate. They entered this debate with a proclamation of innocence, which Anselm Kiefer did not share. In this article I use the empirical lens of biography and the artistic performances of moral self-incrimination in order to understand the collective moral dilemmas posited by the West German students’ proclamation of innocence, their position to maintain a moral high ground in their struggle. Kiefer provoked the German Left by recovering the horror of the Holocaust that the Germans in the post-war period (the 1968 students included) mostly wanted just to go away. Movement artist scholars not only challenge the wider society with their truth-claims, they challenge the movement itself, extending the cognitive boundaries for what can be acknowledged at a given moment in the movement’s history.

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.

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

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

Academic Study and Prospects for Life: Observations and Reflections on the Contemporary Situation of West German Students

When people talk or write about students' problems in the Federal Republic of Germany today they are usually concerned with the crisis in the graduate employment market. Public attention is directed more towards the occupational problems of graduates than the problems experienced by students with their academic study. This restricted view implies that students' problems ensue from the employment crisis alone and can therefore, in the last resort, only be solved by employment policies or by reducing the numbers of students entering universities and colleges. The inevitable and potentially fatal result of such a restricted view is that problems relating to student life and the learning process are not taken into consideration. By contrast, the objective of this paper is to present these very problems. When considering the prospects opened up by academic study it is essential to reconstruct the consequences which the expansion of higher education and the changes in the graduate employment situation have had for the subjective approach of students towards living and learning during their period of study. For this reason I shall begin by noting briefly the objective data (quantitative developments in the West German student body since the 1950s; contemporary structure of social recruitment) and then examine the data in more detail with regard to the consequences for the development of student life and the learning process. The end of the paper deals with the question of the potential for progress inherent in the situation of students today.