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:
Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film
Richard McCormick examines the concepts of postmodernity and postmodernism as they apply to West Germany, discussing them against the background of cultural and political upheaval in that country since the 1960s, rather than exclusively in the more familiar setting of intellectual history. Considering six literary and cinematic texts that are marked by a preoccupation with the self and subjectivity, he underscores the crucial influence of feminism on writers and filmmakers--and on the "postmodern." In a broad international context he describes the conflicting forces that affected the West German student movementthe rationalistic tradition of the Weimar Left and more "irrational" influences such as French existentialism and surrealism (as well as the American "Beat" movement and rock & roll)--and shows how these forces played themselves out so that dogmatic Marxist Leninism was repudiated in favor of a "New Subjectivity.."At the center of the discussion are the novels "Lenz" by Peter Schneider, "Class Love (Klassenliebe)" by Karin Struck, and "Devotion" by Botho Strauss, and the films "Wrong Move" written by Peter Handke and directed by Wim Wenders, Germany, "Pale Mother" by Helma Sanders-Brahms, and "The Subjective Factor" by Helke Sander. The author shows how ongoing attempts to attack the separation of emotion from reason, life from art, the private from the public, and the personal from the political brought about changes in outlook, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, that are related to the rise of new political movements--ecology, nuclear disarmament, and feminism.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Long Memories: The German Student Movement in Recent Fiction
This article examines three novels about the German Student Movement published in 2001. While ‘1968’ continues to divide the nation, Leander Scholz's Rosenfest, Erasmus Schoofer's Ein Fruhling irrer Hoffnung, and Uwe Timm's Rot supply the reader with a sensitive ‘Innenansicht’ of the movement. They portray the definitive moments of individual or collective experience at the time, but they also set those experiences in relation to the present. As the process of literary representation is slowly being replaced by one of remembering and re–evaluation, temporal distance paradoxically allows for greater honesty and authenticity when dealing with problematic aspects of the movement such as violence, ‘open’ relationships, and idealism. It becomes clear that these three novels are less nostalgic than the ‘literarisierte Revolte’ is commonly perceived to be. The counter–cultural nature of the movement has certainly left its mark on Scholz, Schofer and Timm: while consciously contributing to a cultural memory, they assert the continuing relevance of the students’ utopian dream. 
 
 
 
Ist es tatsachlich schon 30 Jahre her, das wir die Revolution machen wollten. Kame es heute zur Revolution, die Leute wurden denken, es sei eine Werbeveranstaltung.