Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement
The legacy of the West German student movement continues to be a debated topic in Germany today: Did the call for political and social change bring about a new and truly democratic Germany or did it trigger a backlash that determined the politics of the 1980s and 1990s under conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl? Did the activists themselves “sell out” and betray their own ideals? How did the student movement influence the next generation growing up in Germany? These questions about the social and political effects of the student movement influence discussions about pedagogy, violence in schools, and about how young Germans today understand political change and social activism. Media often paint a simplistic picture of both, of what became of the generation of activists in 1968 and of their “children” who were born in the 1970s and came of age in the 1990s. Not only conservative voices since the late 1980s support the idea that members of the student movement of the 1960s brought up a generation of confused young people without clear values and moral guidance. The question of whether the ideals of liberal education failed led to heated debates within the Green Party in the 1990s. An article in the news magazine Der Spiegel cites Beate Scheffler, a forty-year-old teacher and Green Party delegate:
A New, "Western" Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s
n 1952 one of West Germany's foremost experts on youth and film, Fritz Stiickrath, wrote a damning critique of film westerns, in which he connected the consumption of movie westerns directly to male juvenile delinquency. Stiickrath titled his piece "The Attack of the Ogallala on the Youth," thus suggesting that both western films and American Indians were dangerous. In 1956 he wrote another, much more positive article on the same topic, now arguing that westerns could in fact help boys to distinguish between good and evil. A year later, the West German staterun television station broadcast a show with the title "Nothing against Wild-West-Films," during which an education professor maintained that westerns provided an outlet for the excessive energies of young men and thus fulfilled an important societal function.' These three examples stand for changing West German attitudes toward westerns, which transformed from a general rejection of the genre in both dime novels and movies to increasing acceptance as a tool for shaping proper West German men. In this article, I examine briefly what was at stake in this change of heart. While my aim is not a general critique of westerns, I suggest that some shifts within the genre may have contributed to transforming German views of westerns in the postwar period. More important, I argue that the changing West German attitudes toward westerns have to be understood in the context of the legacy of National Socialism and the cold war division of Germany. Although my focus is on West Germany, I draw some comparisons to East German reactions. In doing so, I investigate debates over westerns as a site for the reconstruction of East and West German masculinities. Finally, I explore briefly how changing
Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture
Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times. Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as "the end of sex," and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern.