Joined at the Hip? The Representation of the German Student Movement and Left-Wing Terrorism in Recent Literature

This chapter analyzes the impact of the West German student movement on the history of fear and on emotional culture more generally. The “68ers” propagated an expressive emotional culture that partly displaced the older repressive emotional culture. The student movement celebrated the public display of emotions and enabled a new significance of emotions within political activism and for individual subjectivities. The chapter brings into focus the specific role that fear and anxiety played in shaping the political outlooks and subjectivities of student activities. While historians have often emphasized the optimism that drove the student movement, activists’ fears and disappointments resulted, in part, from their far-reaching, even utopian, ambitions. Fears also resulted from student activists’ confrontation with police and popular violence. Students’ politicization of sexuality turned personal relationships into a source of anxiety because many activists found it difficult to reconcile their political views with their private lives. Finally, the chapter analyzes conservative fears of revolution, as they were expressed by the conservative Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft that sought to contain the influence of left-wing forces within the universities. The dialectic of fear that had already shaped the interplay between democratic fears and fears of democracy in the earlier period intensified further. Revolutionary fears and fears of revolution structured the political debate in the West German 1960s and beyond.

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Introduction

The Other '68ers ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198849520.003.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Anna von der Goltz

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Left Wing ◽

Postwar Germany ◽

Life Paths ◽

Career Trajectories ◽

German Student ◽

History Of ◽

1960S And 1970S ◽

Long Term Impact

This chapter introduces the book’s protagonists and main subject: the other ‘68ers, a group of centre-right activists who had participated in the West German student movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and later commemorated their efforts as a form of democratic resistance against left-wing radicals. It argues that a close examination of the other ‘68ers’ ideas, experiences, repertoires, and remarkable career trajectories enables us to rethink the history of 1968 and its afterlives in important ways. Studying the hitherto neglected role these individuals played at the time, as well as their life paths and long-term impact on West German political culture, opens up new vistas for understanding the history of protest in 1968, the late Federal Republic, and the role that generation played in postwar Germany. The Introduction also discusses the different sources used for this study, including the oral history methodology on which parts of the book are based.

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