The Other 68ers

This is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective-that of center-right student activists in West Germany. Based on oral history interviews and new archival sources, it examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of center-right students in this age of protest. Writing these activists back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives -including student protest, cultural revolt, internationalism, debates about left-wing violence and the terror of the Red Army Faction, the memory wars of the 1980s and beyond - reveals that this was a broader, more versatile, and, ultimately, more consequential phenomenon than the traditionally narrower focus on a left-wing minority allows. Other '68ers demonstrates that we need a more nuanced history of the 1968 generation and of generational conflict during these years. Student activists comprised individuals from across the political spectrum, who often had very different ideas about what kind of a society they envisaged and how to address the shortcomings of West German democracy. 1968 was a moment of intense political conflict, but it also played out within the student body and nurtured contrasting identities. This book shows that the center-right involvement in 1968 had real consequences. Many of the protagonists of this book would go on to pursue high-profile political careers and leave their mark on West German political culturey. Other '68ers therefore sheds fresh light on how West Germany's center-right dealt with the crisis of hegemony and political identity it experienced in the wake of 1968, how it coped with generational change, how it transformed and modernized after losing power at the national level for the first time in 1969, and how it managed to re-emerge so successfully in the 1980s.

This is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective-that of center-right student activists in West Germany. Based on oral history interviews and new archival sources, it examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of center-right students in this age of protest. Writing these activists back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives -including student protest, cultural revolt, internationalism, debates about left-wing violence and the terror of the Red Army Faction, the memory wars of the 1980s and beyond - reveals that this was a broader, more versatile, and, ultimately, more consequential phenomenon than the traditionally narrower focus on a left-wing minority allows. Other '68ers demonstrates that we need a more nuanced history of the 1968 generation and of generational conflict during these years. Student activists comprised individuals from across the political spectrum, who often had very different ideas about what kind of a society they envisaged and how to address the shortcomings of West German democracy. 1968 was a moment of intense political conflict, but it also played out within the student body and nurtured contrasting identities. This book shows that the center-right involvement in 1968 had real consequences. Many of the protagonists of this book would go on to pursue high-profile political careers and leave their mark on West German political culturey. Other '68ers therefore sheds fresh light on how West Germany's center-right dealt with the crisis of hegemony and political identity it experienced in the wake of 1968, how it coped with generational change, how it transformed and modernized after losing power at the national level for the first time in 1969, and how it managed to re-emerge so successfully in the 1980s.

The book is a new, revisionist account of Sixties protest movements in West Germany. It challenges established narratives centring male intellectuals by foregrounding families, private lives, women, and old people. Worked from a wealth of new archival sources, the book argues that '1968' was just as much about gender conflict as it was about generational conflict--even if the former was often erased from public memory. The narrative follows three generations of Germans living in the provincial town of Bonn through the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It offers a genuine social history of the period, decentring the story of West Germany's 68 socially, geographically, and generationally. The five chapters cover the Shah of Iran's visit to Bonn and Berlin, the role of the Nazi past in framing generational differences, experiences of old people around '1968', the female dimension of the protests, and the sexual revolution. The book situates the West German case within the global and West European Sixties and engages with recent controversies on the role of female '68ers, the origins of new feminist movements, and the sexual revolution. Originally published in German in 2018 by C. H. Beck (titled Das andere Achtundsechzig: Gesellschaftsgeschichte einer Revolte, 978-3406719714), it has been translated into English by Rachel Ward.

Using previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Klimke shows that the cold war partnership of the American and German governments was mirrored by a coalition of rebelling counterelites, whose common political origins and opposition to the Vietnam War played a vital role in generating dissent in the United States and Europe. American protest techniques such as the "sit-in" or "teach-in" became crucial components of the main organization driving student activism in West Germany--the German Socialist Student League--and motivated American and German student activists to construct networks against global imperialism. Klimke traces the impact that Black Power and Germany's unresolved National Socialist past had on the German student movement; he investigates how U.S. government agencies, such as the State Department's Interagency Youth Committee, advised American policymakers on confrontations with student unrest abroad; and he highlights the challenges student protesters posed to cold war alliances. Exploring the catalysts of cross-pollination between student protest movements on two continents, The Other Alliance is a pioneering work of transnational history.

The author of the best-selling Terror and Liberalism on the rise to power of the generation of 1968. The student uprisings of 1968 erupted not only in America but also across Europe, expressing a distinct generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism, and the evil of military interventions. Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans. Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.

The denial of the European peoples' right to their own heritage, history and even their physical homelands has become part of the cultural fundament of the modern West. Mass immigration, selective and vilifying propaganda, and a constant barrage of perverse or, at best, pointless consumer culture all contribute to the transformation of Europe into a non-entity. Her native population consists mostly of atomistic individuals, lacking any semblance of purpose or direction, increasingly victimised by a political system with no interest in the people it governs. There are many views on how this came to be, but the revolt of May 1968 was certainly of singular importance in creating the apolitical, self-destructive situation that postmodern Europe is in today. This book presents the author's take on the ideology of the budding identitarian movement. Willinger presents a crystal-clear image of what has gone wrong, and indicates the direction in which we should look for our solutions. Moving seamlessly between the spheres of radical politics and existential philosophy, Generation Identity explains in a succinct, yet poetic fashion what young Europeans must say - or should say - to the corrupt representatives of the decrepit social structures dominating our continent. This is not a manifesto, it is a declaration of war.

Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory," Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

A groundbreaking history of Europe's "new lefts," from the antifascist 1920s to the anti-establishment 1960s In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe's New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents' antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. This book traces the history of neoleftism from its antifascist roots in the first half of the twentieth century, to its postwar reconstruction in the 1950s, to its explosive reinvention by the 1960s counterculture. Terence Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth. Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times.