Wolfgang Kraushaar of the Hamburg Institut for Sozialforschung is an academic expert in protest. He writes a column called the "Protest Chronicle" in each issue of the periodical Mittelweg 36, in which he describes some significant act of past protest in countries all over the world. He has also published several collections of such vignettes, including 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (1998).
In book form, these are something of a mixed blessing. They are excellent references for particular periods. But reading it as a single work requires the reader to digest straight narrative with minimal analytical commentary and context. And, in the case of "1968" it may be particularly challenging. Because, as he writes in a concluding essay, "1968" is a broad concept similar (though he doesn't mention this specifically) to the way in America "the Sixties" stands for a period variously dated but usually including 1964-73. In Germany as in America, it also has become over the years a symbolic touchstone by which people situate themselves culturally. Whether the "culture war" over that symbolic collection of events has been as intense in Germany as in the US is something I find it impossible to judge at this point. Since one side of the Culture War recently gave us such contributions as the Iraq War and the Cheney-Bush torture program, I would find it hard to see how Germany has experienced more toxic effects from it that the US has. But I'll leave that to others to judge.
This book's "just the facts, ma'am" approach to recounting the political events of those years with particular references to those in Germany (West and East) is a valuable presentation of the history of that year just because it does concentrate on recounting the factual events without reference to their later cultural significations. But even factual accounts are bound by their time and perspective. The event that really began "the Sixties" in 1967 was the shooting of a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967 by a West Berlin policeman named Karl-Heinz Kurras. All evidence indicates that it was a really unnecessary shooting, murder really, although Kurras was twice acquitted on related charges. The shooting took place as part of a police riot against demonstrators against the visiting Shah of Iran. Those events and the exceptionally ham-handed response of Berlin officials to the shooting set off student protests all over West Germany. The German press the last two weeks has been devoting a lot of news and opinion attention to very recent revelation that the shooter, Kurras, had been a member of the East German Communist Party (SED) and an active spy for East Germany. Not just a lower-level snitch, either, but a serious spy. A big reminder that history is not always what we think it is, even in the case of Kraushaar's book published 31 years after the Ohnesorg murder.
Kraushaar quotes philosopher Hannah Arendt in a letter to Karl Jaspers in June 1968: "Mir scheint, die Kinder des nächsten Jahrhunderts werden das Jahr 1968 mal so lernen wie wir das Jahr 1848." (It seems to me that children of the coming century will learn about the year 1968 as we learned about the year 1848.) "1848" doesn't have a lot of resonance for Americans. But it is was one of the most important years in the history of democracy in Europe, in which democratic revolts swept the western and central parts of the Continent. Although the revolts initially failed in their goals and were followed by monarchist victories and restorations, they established the democratic tradition in Europe that eventually led to the democratization of the "Old World".
Kraushaar evaluates the lasting effects of 1968/the Sixties in light of several categories: the role of utopian thought in politics, democratization, how the experience of "1989" (the crisis in the East German and other Soviet-bloc socialist countries that then quickly produced the fall of those governmental forms) affected the public perception of "1968", the mixed experience of "1968" both in the Federal Republic and internationally as a year both of outbreaks of protests and their defeat, the combination of emancipatory and left-totalitarian impulses within the broad APO (extra-parliamentary opposition), the fact that few of those who became prominent in the APO remained leading public figures in 1998 (two major exceptions: Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit).
He makes some important empirical observations. For instance, in the Federal Republic (West Germany), the late 1960s were not the high point of protest movements. More protesters were participating in demonstrations in the 1950s and early 1960s against West Germany joining NATO and against nuclear weapons, and then in 1981-3 against the stationing of mid-range nuclear weapons in West Germany, than in the mass protests of the late 1960s.
He summarizes the lasting effects of "1968" in this book as follows (my translation from the German) in the following ways:
He argues that what made "1968" a turning point was the way in which Germans started to understand politics as an individual responsibility and a part of daily life in a new way. That, of course, is an analytical rather than an empirical conclusion.
- A minority can move political mountains in a parliamentary democracy, even if they immediately seem to be fully powerless.
- No one is simply an object of politics. Everyone can exercise influence themselves on political events. That seems to sound entire different from [student leader Rudi] Dutschke's emphatic, "History is something we make" ("Geschichte ist machbar", literally "history is make-able"), but leaves enough hope for change in a basic sense - as the practice of various groupings and citizens' initiatives shows.
- Political activity can only be grasped in the international context, and thereby its undergoes and redefinition and new definition of its establishment of goals. The horizon has become complete different.
- To change a society means to democratize the institutions. If that fails to be accomplished, political goals must also in the end fail of realization.
In 2009 terms, we might restate point #2 as saying it validates a "Yes We Can" attitude. And point #4 could also be seen in terms of "change we can believe in". I'm just saying.
In his conclusion, he quotes the highly respected German President Richard von Weizsäcker in his speech on the first Day of German Unity, October 9, 1990: "Die Jugendvevolte am Ende der Sechziger Jahre trug allen Verwundungen zum Trotz zu einer Vertiefung des demokratische Engagements in der Gesellschaft bei." (The youth revolt at the end of 1960s despite all the wounds brought a deepening of democratic engagement in society.)
See further:
"Wir hielten die DDR für das bessere Deutschland" Die Welt 30.05.2009
Ohnesorg, Springer und die linke Einäugigkeit Die Welt 31.05.2009
Tags: 1968, wolfgang kraushaar
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