"1968" in Germany

Rudi Dutschke, the most famous leader of the German student movement in 1968

Der diskrete Charme der Rebellion: Ein Leben mit den 68ern (2008) von Reinhard Mohr

Unser Kampf: 1968 - ein irritierter Blick zurück (2008) von Götz Aly

The now-departed year 2008 was the fortieth anniversary of the legendary "1968", which has become a symbol for the political and cultural upheavals that affected much of the world during that time. I've made a few "anniversary" type posts myself, including a review of German historian Norbert Frei's book 1968 (2008), which gives special attention to the German experience but also explains those events in the larger world context of "the 1960s".

Both books discussed here focus more particularly on events in Germany. And both involve some autobiography. Reinhard Mohr's book title, The Discrete Charm of the Rebellion in English, captures the perspective of his book well. Mohr relates some his experiences in the alternative scene in Frankfurt in the 1970s, where he knew some stars of the "68ers" like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka, Dany the Red, and Joschka Fischer. From Mohr's perspective as a young man in the Frankfurt scene, the experiences of what in America we call "the Sixties" were already something of a mythical past. His book doesn't sentimentalize that period. But his focus is on showing to readers of today why so many people found the experiences of that time charming and appealing to their sentiments and passions. That part of the story can get lost.

Götz Aly is one of Germany's leading historians, known in particular for his histories of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. His book focuses on both the key events that were most politically significant in that period and also is a kind of personal reckoning. Aly relates having been a leftwing activist of college age during that time. At times his book almost sounds like an American neoconservative villifying "the Sixties" while trying not to sound like a Christian fundamentalist or holy-roller. But that's not what he's doing.

Still, Aly's account does have some of the feel of a "god that failed" story. And self-analysis is certainly not a bad thing. As another one-time leftwing activist, Spain's Javier Solano, once put it, only idiots never change their minds. Yet it does seems to me at places in the book that Aly is a bit too hard on himself for once having been young.

The events that have come to symbolize "1968" in Germany are generally agreed upon: the anti-Shah protests of 1967 that included the police murder of a young protester named Benno Ohnesorg; the political role of groups like the German student organization SDS and its most famous leader Rudi Dutschke; the attempted assassination of Dutschke in 1968 by a young nationalist fanatic; the Grand Coalition (SPD and CDU/CSU) government of 1966-69; the Notstandsgesetz (emergency law) and the protests against it; the outrage of the now-adult children of those who were adults during the Nazi period at the failures of their parents and their parents' generation; the 1968 bombing of a department store in Frankfurt that first made two young revolutionaries named Andreas Baader and Gundrin Ensslin famous, the pair who along with Ulrike Meinhof and a few others would found the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), aka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang; the practice of terrorism in various forms mostly notoriously that of the RAF but also others like the Tupamaros Westberlin and the Bewegung 2.Juni; protests nonviolent and otherwise against the Axel Springer press empire; the sexual revolution and the appearance of alternative lifestyles scenes, such as the legendary Kommune 1 in Berlin.

Shocking the comfortable: the most popular German SDS poster, showing Marx, Engels and Lenin with the slogan, "Everybody talks about the weather. Not us."

It strikes me from today's perspective that one advantage that the 68er movement bequeathed to later decades was the fact that directly protesting against the press, particularly the Axel Springer papers of which the Bild-Zeitung was the most significant. The Bild-Zeitung was and is more of a sensational tabloid than part of the "quality press".

But while there was certainly a fourishing "underground" press in the United States, there was not the broad perception in America that there was among the German movement that the press itself was seriously flawed in a way that was a menace to freedom. Southern segregationists' railed against the alleged failure of the Yankee press to report how well the whites and the "nigras" got along with each other in the segregated South. The Republican Party under Nixon and Spiro Agnew picked up that theme and broaden it to accuse the press of being unpatriotic in its reporting on the Vietnam War and domestic protests, to the point where complaining about the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! has beome part of the Party's DNA. With Nixon and Agnew on the warpath against the press, and with a mainstream press that still practiced actual journalism as with the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and the Washington Post with the Watergate scandal, leftwing dissident groups were more likely to look on the Establishment press as at least a sometime ally.

Sexual revolution in Germany

That experience partially explains the fact that so many Democrats, both former "68ers" as well as others, failed to recognize for years how badly the national political press had begun to malfunction by 1992 with the Whitewater pseudo-scandals. Even today, it can be like pulling teeth to get liberal Dems to acknowledge that the national press is a serious, big-time mess.

Part of the challenge for anyone writing about a series of events as vaguely defined as "1968" or "the Sixties" is determining a focus. When people talk about "1968" in Germany, it's largely events and trends like those described above that come to mind. But one could make an argument that the birth control pill, the widespread diffusion of television sets, and the "economic miracle" in western Germany in the 1950s were more important in determining the direction of German society. Even more strictly in the realm of politics, it can certainly be plausibly argued that the beginning of Willi Brandt's Ostpolitik to ease tensions with the eastern European Communist bloc and the SPD leading a government under Brandt's Chancellorship were more significant events.

And the latter was not a direct result of the activism of the "68ers", though most of them presumably marginally preferred an SPD government to a hidebound conservative one. But the Social Democrats were attacked by many New Left activists as no longer being a revolutionary party, something which the SPD hadn't much pretended to be since 1918, at the latest.

But the activists of the 1960s challenged aspects of German society - such as authoritarian university practices, the excessive influence of ex-Nazi jurists in the judicial system, sexual practices, gender roles, reflexive support of American policies like the Vietnam War, passive attitudes toward politics, the ham-handed brutality that municipal police often displayed - that needed to be challenged. Ther ewas no New Left party at the time that was able to take any kind of direct political power, by electoral means or otherwise. But it can scarcely be said that the protests had no effect on the mainstream parties, on lifestyles, and even churches.

One characteristic of the youth movements of the German New Left and alternative-lifestyle movements was that they were largely youth movements. Certainly there were older people like the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse who were well-regarded by the movement. But even so, the influence of older and more experienced politicians on the Movement of the late 1960s was very limited. The German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentendbund) was orginally the student group of the SDS. It eventually broke with the SPD altogether because the SDS assumed a more militant ideology and was highly critical of the political course the SPD had assumed with the Godesburg Program of 1959. Even Marcuse's Frankfurt School collaborator Max Horkheimer became a bogey-man of the young militants for his criticism of their dogmatic revolutionary rhetoric.

There were several effects of this youth focus. One is that they often placed too high a value on the essentially adolescent joys of shocking the stereotypical good solid citizens for the sake of shocking them. Now, protest movements are, well, protest movements. It's almost by definition their role to shock or at least annoy people into thinking differently about the aim of the protest. But when protesters adopted popular slogans like "Frei sein, high sein, Terror muss dabei sein" (be free, get high, and you have to have terrorism along with it"; it rhymes in German and doesn't sound so clunky), it mostly sounded charmingly shocking only to those using it. To others it was more likely just disgusting.

"Gewalt gegen Sachen" (Violence Against Things) by Kai Uwe Niephaus

And terrorism is inevitably part of the story. It would be false to see the terrorism of the RAF, which created a genuine political crisis in Germany in 1977, as some inevitable, teleological product of the protest movements of the 1960s. But it's also a fact that the terrorist groups did emerge from the "68er" scene. It's part of the story. And both Aly and Mohr include that aspect in their accounts. Mohr provides a bit more insight into the tragic aspects of it, Aly focuses more on the grim aspects of it. But with a fairly narrow definition of who the "68ers" were, any meaningful look at the terrorist phenomenon in Germany in the 1970s would have to recognize that it drew sympathy only from a limited segment of even those who considered themselves radical, although the RAF in particular has to be counted as group that made a significant mark on German history.

Aly focuses more on some of the questions that would particularly concern professional historians. And he makes some very thought-provoking observations about the 68er movement and its notions about existing Marxist governments, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the continuing historical burden of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. On these subjects, he sometimes sounds like a grumpy neoconservative wagging his finger at the alleged shameful hypocrisy of the Left. But, for the most part, he raises some valid issues, though his particular analysis isn't always convincing.

For instance, he takes himself and other young "rebels" to tasks for being naive about the Great Chinese Culture Revolution. As presented by Chinese propaganda, the Cultural Revolution was a process by which the Chinese Revolution was breaking new ground, fighting against the kind of bureacratic socialism which the Western New Left tended to see in the Soviet Union. In reality, it was a mass movement that Mao promoted to tighten his control over the Chinese Communist Party. And there's the body count, which Aly puts at a minimum of three million people dying between 1966 and 1976 as a result of the Cultural Revolution. And Aly argues that based on reliable information available in Germany at the time, the young German radicals could have known this.

There are a couple of problems, though, with his argument as presented in Unser Kampf. One is that it's not at all clear just how widespread this alleged admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution was among German activists. He cites some who were. And here's where the vagueness of an historical concept like "the Sixties" becomes an issue. If you define the 68ers as those who adhered to some full-blown revolutionary ideology, it's easy to imagine (though even then he doesn't really demonstrate) that admiration for the Cultural Revolution was typical. If you define the Movement in broader terms, it becomes more doubtful.

And he also plays a bit of a rhetorical trick here. It's one thing to criticize someone who's writing history for failing to appreciate the significance of the best German sources on the Cultural Revolution. It's another to look at what the Cultural Revolution symbolized in the minds of those German activists who did find it attractive in some way. Very few of the young people today who wear some kind of Che Guevara logo are likely to be able to give you an exposition of Marxist dialectical materialism, if they even know that Che was some kind of Marxist. His iconic image is a symbol of rebellion. And for the German 68ers who actually did find the Cultural Revolution symbolically appealing, it was very likely more as a symbol of rebellion, with the added shock value of it being something happening in the Communist world. China was an exotic, far-away place to most Germans. And with both the US and the Soviet Union carrying on propaganda wars against China in the 1960s, anyone who didn't have a healthy dose of skepticism about claims of the horrors of Communism in China probably wasn't thinking very hard about the subject.

Yes, those youthful admirers of Mao's Cultural Revolution were often wrong about it. And they were committing the sin of being young. But it hardly represents some kind of widespread callousness toward mass murder, which conclusion a reader might easily choose to draw from Aly's account.

Aly is on stronger ground when he argues that in terms of long-term historical signficance, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a more consequential historical event than the protests in Germany or even the May-June revolt in Paris that same year. But his account also does carry the weight of the impression he leaves that most West German activists were indifferent to it or unsympathetic to it. In fact, the New Left in Europe and America was not generally attracted to the Soviet model of society, nor especially sympathetic to the Soviet Union. For adherents of the Soviet line, the New Left was largely "anti-Communist".

But what the New Left had to deal with, as did any mainstream critics of particular Cold War policies, was the fact that all sorts of military and political policies were justified by the US and its allies as necessary to combat Communism. Anyone serious about bringing about drastic changes in Western foreign policies would need to be very hesitant about helping promote attitudes and analyses that would reinforce their governments' Cold War positions. That context doesn't really come through in Aly's arguments along those lines. Here, I get the impression that his own need to renounce the less edifying aspects of his own youthful ideas gets in the way of his historical account.

Free speech poster by Ina Weiss

I find his thoughts on the relationship of the radicals of "1968" to the memory of the Third Reich far more valuable. The memory of the Third Reich and the Holocaust is a subject on which Aly is an actual expert. From Aly's as well as other accounts, it's clear that the skepticism of the younger generation about their elders' role during the Third Reich provided an important background to the events of the Sixties in Germany.

But the actual issues the movement raised from 1967 on had very little to do with the working out of remaining issues of the Nazi past. He argues that some of the revolutionary purism of the militants was in part a way of declaring themselves innocent of the sins of their parents' generation during the Third Reich. And he has a good case in noting that reflexive embrace of the Palestinian cause by many militants after the Six-Day War of 1967 was often taken with little thought of the complex relation of Germany to Middle Eastern affairs as a result of the Holocaust.

He cites a couple of actions by leftist activists that showed a particularly bone-headed attitude toward the anti-Semitism of the Nazi period. Activists associated with the Tupamaros West-Berlin group planted a firebomb in 1969 in Jewish Community House in West Berlin. It was meant to explode on November 9, the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom action of 1938. Fortunately, it failed to explode.

In June of 1969, Israel had sent its first Ambassador to the Federal Republic (West Berlin), Asher Ben-Natan. Soon after his posting, he was invited to speak on June 9 at Frankfurt University on the topic, "Peace in the Near East". Leftist demonstrators protested his appearance with chants of "Ha, ha, ha - Al Fatah ist da" (Ha, ha, ah, Al Fatah is there) and "Zionisten raus aus Deutschland" (Zionists out of Germany).

Again, it's important to be careful about overly-broad generalizations about a vaguely-defined movement. But occurrences like this do give some reason to think that young German activists sometimes assumed a revolutionary purity without much thought of the extent to which they were affected by old-fashioned anti-Semitism or much reflection on the responsibilities of contemporary Germany in relation to the crimes of the Third Reich.

The fascination of the events of the Sixties is still with us. Maybe it's more of a Baby Boomer phenomenon than anything else. But there's no question that the events of the Sixties shook up most Western societies to one degree or another. For all the movement's faults, not least of them the terrorist offshoots, it did represent what Jerry Brown calls a "democratic moment" for Germany, in which citizen activism asserted itself without the initiative of the political elites.

Tags: 1968, deutschland, german+politics, germany, götz aly, reinhard mohr