The Social and Political Context

“68” – a number that says it all

The very name it is known by in Germany - “68” – has paved the way for all kinds of glorifying legend-making (invention of tradition). The protests of the late 60s were commemorated for the first time in 1977 and then it took another 11 years for 1968 to establish itself as the actual commemorative year. “68” represents the year when a generation revolted and, alongside global homogeneity, it implies both the beginning and the end of the movement – no build-up to it and no echo afterwards. From this point of view “68” is a name that seems to hover in the sky like a spaceship that cannot find a place to land.

Looking back through the prism of 1989/90

“68”, the name itself, already implies a certain pattern of interpretation. Wolfgang Kraushaar, one of the leading chroniclers of the movement of “68”, is particularly vehement about the way he views it. He sees the protest movement of the 1960s as an almost inevitable precursor to the left-wing terrorism of the later years, making it quite clear that the perspective from which we look back at the 60s today has been distorted by the prism created by the political upheaval of 1989/90, i.e. it was greatly affected by the dissolution of the bipolar world order. The key words on the subject were provided by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Joachim Fest in Ende des utopischen Zeitalters (End of the Utopian Age). It was Fest in particular who, in his polemic paper, Der zerstörte Traum (The Shattered Dream), set up the paradigm of “utopia = terror” that he had deduced from the idea of “68 = terror” – a mechanical causality that was propounded only by right-wing conservative politicians in the 1970s. The decisive factor however is that when present-day retrospectives look back at “68”, they are significantly influenced by the paradigm shift of 1989/90 and by the tendency to equate a protest movement whose socially critical impulses have been condemned across the board with violence.

A socio-cultural rebirth

If “68” was like a “thorn in one’s side” (Oskar Negt) a decade ago, now a kind of historicisation of the protest movement has taken place – “68” appears as an episode in the history of a 50-year-old, “successfully practised democracy”. There have however been some hefty objections to this historicisation – for example, the proposition of the fundamental liberalisation of the Federal Republic of Germany (Jürgen Habermas) or a kind of socio-cultural rebirth of the “68” protest movement and its ensuing “invasion of the nation’s institutions” (Rudi Dutschke). Viewed from this point of view “68” could never be a mere episode in the history of West Germany, but quite definitely a decisive phase in the cementing of the Federal Republic of Germany’s democratic foundations.

A sentence from a speech held by Oskar Negt on the Römerberg in Frankfurt on 13th April 1968 puts in a nutshell just how politically charged the struggle against “fear-ridden institutionalism” was – a struggle involving the programmatic transformation from a democracy in name only to a real one. “If you leave the safeguarding of a country’s freedom to its own appointed representatives, its institutions and powerful organisations, then you are labouring under a fatal misapprehension – the belief in the viability of a democracy without any democrats.”

When it comes to the way the actual members of the protest movement interpret “68”, it was seen as a struggle for the democratisation of state and society at all kinds of levels, e.g. against the “authoritarian character” of the small family, against tenured professors at the universities and for the right to have a say in the institutions of the state, against the ominously authoritarian state and against a “rekindling of National Socialism in German democracy” (Th. W. Adorno) that brought about the German Emergency Acts, as well as against the aggressive tendencies of capitalism on an international level – the Vietnam War served here as the pars pro toto, politicising young people all over the world.

“68” as a loss of traditional values

It is not only in Germany, where since 1989/90, there has been a tendency for former activists of the protest movement to dissociate themselves from their previous stances. They have reduced “68” to a conflict of the generations and placed the emphasis on the difficulties the protesters of “68” had with their parents who, for them, represented the musty, old, fossilised structures of society. At the same time they say they made the mistake of living out their adolescent, oedipal fight for freedom outside in society rather than at home in the family. This “psychologisation” of the issue detracts from the movement’s political significance and the socio-cultural impulses it generated all over the world. Oscar Negt in his book, Achtundsechzig. Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht (Sixty-Eight – The Political Intellectual and Power) describes this form of opportunism as a “mental sickness of the intellectuals” who are actually disavowing what they once stood for.

In the meantime the protest movement of the late 60s is being held responsible for all kinds of putative long-term effects: for the general loss of traditional values, hedonism, egoism, drop in the birth rate, lack of education, shrinking economic growth due to lack of discipline in the working world - in general for all of society’s woes, yes, even for the disappearance of sociality itself.

Many of these reproaches were already being aired in what was known as the turnaround that took place in the middle of the 1970s. Back then it was conservative right-wingers like Helmut Schelsky, Hans-Joachim Arndt or Hans Filbinger who criticised the supposed moral decline or the “flipping out of whole generations”. The advent of neo-liberal ideologies that the 90s heralded in has enabled this kind of thinking to move to centre-stage in society.

The compilation of the texts

With the following we hope to be able to open up vistas on the anti-authoritarian protests of the late 1960s without having to socio-politically legitimise any of the motives, as well as to clarify the movement’s socio-political context. The protesters of “68”, in particular those members of the SDS (Socialist German Student Union) who considered themselves to be the “most aware element of the movement”, stormed the barricades in protest against an insidious de-politicisation and de-democratisation of society. This they did with an approach based on theoretically reflective practice that was rarely taken seriously – “The world cannot be interpreted correctly until it has been changed.” (Ernst Bloch)

The first part consists of ten portraits of people who were teachers or mentors to those elements of the “68” movement who were in search of adequate interpretations of the world that they wanted to change. In the second part we will be presenting the main publications of the 60s and commenting on their significance for the protest movement. It was often the case that the classics of socialist theory and thought were not available; books and pamphlets that were out of print were therefore copied en masse as pirate editions. These publications with their famous black covers showed how great the need for theory was – in order to be able to understand the actual practice of protest. This need started to dwindle as the anti-authoritarian movement was faced with its first setbacks and started to crumble and various new splinter groups took over with new needs for legitimisation.

Related literature:

Negt, Oskar: Achtundsechzig. Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht, (Sixty-Eight – The Political Intellectual and Power) Göttingen 1995, ISBN 3-88243-299-3.

Dutschke, Gretchen: Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben. Rudi Dutschke. Eine Biographie, (We Had A Barbaric, Beautiful Life – A Biography of Rudi Dutschke) Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-462-02573-2.

Kurlansky, Mark: 1968. Das Jahr, das die Welt veränderte (1968 – The Year That Changed The World) Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-462-03618-1.

Fraser, Ronald: 1968. A Student Generation in Revolt. An International Oral History, New York 1988, ISBN 0-679-73953-X.

Kraushaar (Hg.), Wolfgang: Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946 bis 1995. Chronik, (The Frankfurt School and the Student Movement: From the Message in the Bottle to the Molotov Cocktail, 1946—1995, A Chronicle), Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-8077-0345-4.