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:
"Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together": Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany
Research for this essay was begun with an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University and completed with a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; I am grateful to both organizations for their generosity and support. Even as this essay only marks the beginning for me of a long search to make sense of the issues it raises, I am also deeply grateful to the many individuals whoby patiently wading through its earlier incarnations and offering astute criticisms-have helped me to give it whatever clarity it has now. Each of them has left his or her mark; none of them is responsible for the outcome. I thank Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Volker Berghahn, Lauren Berlant, Jane Caplan, Erica Carter, David Crew, Geoff Eley, Sander Gilman, Atina Grossmann, Elizabeth Heineman, Kali Israel, Claudia Koonz, Robert Moeller, Uta Poiger, Anson Rabinbach, Christiane Rothmaler, Joan Scott, and Michael Staub. 1. Arno Plack, Die Gesellschaft und das Bose: Eine Kritik der herrschenden Moral (Munich, 1967), p. 309, hereafter abbreviated G; and Volkmar Sigusch, "Editorial," Sexualitait Konkret
Conception of a Language Learning Environment Based on the Communicative and Actional Approaches
This paper's aim is to give a conceptual framework about the conception of a Computer Assisted Language Learning environment based on the communicative and actional approaches. In this environment, the learner is implicated in a task that he/she has to complete by interacting with a partner using his/her language competencies. Given a task, different ways exist to accomplish it and the different competencies of the learner can then be solicited with different types of interaction. Works accomplished in human computer dialogue give models to manage this interaction.