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Вестник СПбГУ. История. 2022. Т. 67. Вып. 4
The Student Riots in Germany and their Aftermath
V. N. Baryshnikov, V. N. Borisenko, O. Yu. Plenkov
For citation: Baryshnikov V. N., Borisenko V. N., Plenkov O. Yu. The Student Riots in Germany and their Aftermath. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History, 2022, vol. 67, issue 4, pp. 1212-1230. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu02.2022.411
This article deals with the peculiarities of the student protests of 1968 in Germany and their political and social consequences. Among the many protests in the West that year, they had particularly far-reaching consequences for German society. These consequences were related to the heavy legacy of the Nazis, who committed grave crimes against humanity during World War II. It is for this reason that the article places a special emphasis on overcoming the Nazi past, which played an extremely important role in the emergence and spread of youth protests in the FRG. Placing the German protests in the context of a generally rather homogeneous and synchronous protest movement in all Western countries against the old values of bourgeois society and its morals poses difficulty — it is no accident that one of the symbols of youth protest was John Lennon's single "Yesterday". The past ("yesterday") indeed came suddenly into the spotlight and was subjected to unrelenting criticism. But the changes in the political culture of society and its mentality were very significant. The mutation toward the triumph of leftist-liberal discourse in the West German public consciousness was so complete and total that it is possible to state, as German satirists joke, that the situation was similar to the way public opinion was controlled in the GDR. As a result, it can be rightly asserted that 1968 in the FRG was perhaps the most important reason for the triumph of left-liberal political discourse in Germany.
Keywords: revolution of 1968, new left, anti-war movement, extra-parliamentary opposition, overcoming the Nazi past, student movement in Germany, Frankfurt School of Sociology, youth subculture in Germany.
Vladimir N. Baryshnikov — Dr. Sci. (History), Professor, St Petersburg State University, 7-9, Universi-tetskaya nab., St Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation; [email protected]
Владимир Николаевич Барышников — д-р ист. наук, проф., Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, Российская Федерация, 199034, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 7-9; [email protected]
Victor N. Borisenko — PhD (History), Associate Professor, St Petersburg State University, 7-9, Universitetskaya nab., St Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation; v.borisenko@spbu
Виктор Николаевич Борисенко — канд. ист. наук, доц., Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, Российская Федерация, 199034, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 7-9; v.borisenko@spbu
Oleg Yu. Plenkov — Dr. Sci. (History), Professor, St Petersburg State University, 7-9, Universitetskaya nab., St Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation; [email protected]
Олег Юрьевич Пленков — д-р ист. наук, проф., Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, Российская Федерация, 199034, Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 7-9; [email protected]
© St Petersburg State University, 2022
Студенческие протесты в Германии и их последствия
В. Н. Барышников, В. Н. Борисенко, О. Ю. Пленков
Для цитирования: Baryshnikov V. N., Borisenko V. N., Plenkov O. Yu. The Student Riots in Germany and their Aftermath // Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. История. 2022. Т. 67. Вып. 4. С. 1212-1230. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu02.2022.411
Статья посвящена особенностям студенческих протестов в 1968 г. в ФРГ и их политическим и социальным последствиям. Среди многочисленных в том году протестных выступлений на Западе для немецкого общества они имели особенно далекоидущие последствия. Эти последствия были связаны с преступлениями против человечества, совершенными нацистами во время Второй мировой войны. Именно поэтому в статье делается упор на преодолении нацистского прошлого, которое в возникновении и распространении молодежных протестов в ФРГ сыграло чрезвычайно важную роль. При этом особенная трудность состояла в том, чтобы вписать немецкие протесты в контекст в целом довольно однородного во всех странах Запада синхронного протестного движения против старых ценностей буржуазного общества и его морали. Не случайно одним из символов молодежного протеста стал сингл Джона Леннона "Yesterday". Прошлое («вчера») в самом деле неожиданно оказалось в центре внимания и подверглось нещадной критике. При этом критика почти во всех случаях была совершенно неконструктивной, исходившей из различных концепций троцкизма, марксизма-ленинизма, маоизма, анархизма, а также всевозможных толкований индуизма или буддизма. На деле, конечно, термин «революция» в отношении 1968 г. — это просто метафора, и никаких политических изменений эти волнения в ФРГ не принесли. Зато весьма существенными были перемены в политической культуре общества, его менталитете. При этом трансформация в сторону торжества леволиберального дискурса в западногерманском общественном сознании была столь полной и тотальной, что возник контроль общественного мнения, подобный тому, который существовал в ГДР. В итоге можно с полным правом утверждать, что 1968 г. в ФРГ был едва ли не самой главной причиной торжества леволиберального политического дискурса в Германии. Ключевые слова: революция 1968 г., новые левые, антивоенное движение, внепарламентская оппозиция, преодоление нацистского прошлого, студенческое движение в ФРГ, Франкфуртская школа социологии, молодежная субкультура в ФРГ.
As time goes by, it becomes increasingly clear that 1968 is as symbolic for history as 1789, 1848, 1914, 1917, 1933, 1945. Surprisingly, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers: "The children of the twenty-first century, when they become adults, will learn from the experience of 1968, just as we learned from the experience of the revolution of 1848". Indeed, there are similarities between these events. When comparing the events of 1968 with the revolution of 1848 in Europe, one can see the sharp intergenerational conflict which accelerated the political processes that ultimately led to very important changes. After 1848, the failed revolutionaries began a process of gradual mastery of the institutions of the state. The "revolutionaries" of 1968 did the same. In both cases there was a split between "realists" and "fundamentalists" in politics, structural changes in the system of political parties, and, finally, the German unification that followed after a twenty-year pause in 1871 and in 1990.
A special interest in the phenomenon of the German 1968 is connected with the fact that it was in Germany that the "youth revolution" brought about the greatest changes in the development of society. At the same time, unlike in other countries, a central element
of youth protest in Germany concerned overcoming the Nazi past. In an interview with "Der Spiegel", Bettina Röhl, the daughter of prominent "revolutionaries of '68" Klaus Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof, expressed a curious view of the causes of German 1968. Asked by the journalist whether that year was a catalyst for change, she replied that this was nonsense. Denazification, women's emancipation, and the liberalization of the family were already part of everyday life. The participants in the "revolution of '68" were rather the first users of these innovations. B. Röhl stressed that there was no reason for a revolt. There was simply a cultural explosion in Germany, and in the West in general. "Yes, the older generation had a sense of loyalty, but they were, in fact, afraid that all prosperity would collapse. And young people in 1968 had many options: student anarchist riots, militant groups, home invasions, then five years in the Bhagwan cult, then graduation, a career in politics. So many different things, different chances, there wasn't one before '68, there isn't one now". It was this variety of choices that she particularly emphasized. Even in overcoming Nazism, in her view, 1968 did not play a significant role. Young people then were not fighting against Nazism, but against the petty bourgeois family and against capitalism. In her view, '68 simply reflected an "unbearable lightness of being". Young people filled their inner emptiness with musty Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism. There was no match for material progress and prosperity in the spiritual sphere. Young people needed meaning, and "revolution" became its substitute. Bettina pointed out that even the Vietnam War was just an excuse for anarchist excesses1, which is generally true.
In trying to find a more detailed historical explanation of German 1968, we have to go back a decade to the last third of the Adenauer era. We can agree with B. Röhl that no one now takes seriously the myth that there was a static, frozen society in the FRG before '68, but there is a grain of truth in this myth. Of course, German '68 was not some second (post-1945) "hour zero." But it was in the last years of Adenauer's Chancellorship that young people began to protest against the lifestyle of the older generation, its authoritarianism, against the establishment with its "repressive tolerance," against the old system of domination of professors at universities. An additional motive was "overcoming the past". It was in the decade before '68 that the generational confrontation began, which grew a few years later into the conflict between the establishment and the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO — Außerparlamentarische Opposition), consisting of various leftist student groups. The core of APO was a student organization that had originally been part of the German Social Democratic Party. But after the Bundestag elections on November 6, 1961, the SPD board decided that membership in the SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund) did not mean simultaneous membership in the SPD. The SPD board felt that communist tendencies in the SDS were dangerous, which could have had a negative effect during the election campaign. The "right-wing" part of the SDS was founded in May 1960. "The SDS, however, denounced the SPD's "revisionism" and "reformism" in its theoretical journal Neue Kritik. And the SDS board accused the SDS of being influenced by the Communists"2.
In many ways, the SDS played a key role in the "revolution of '68" in the FRG. Separated from the SPD, the SDS opposed the government in every way it could. Students were especially active against the government of the "grand coalition" (Social Democrats and
1 Der Spiegel. 2018. Nr. 14. S. 48.
2 Langguth G. Protestbewegung. Entwicklung, Niedergang, Renaissance. Die neue Linke seit 1968. Köln, 1983. S. 46-47.
Christian Democrats), which, in their view, sought to establish an authoritarian order in the FRG and supported the war in Vietnam. SDS activists in the APO, taking advantage of the ineffectiveness of the left-wing parliamentary opposition, were gaining more and more supporters among students.
The motives for student activism in the FRG were manifold. Especially significant, however, was the deficit of democratic tradition in Germany. This was expressed, in particular, in the demand for "councils" and the rejection of formal democracy as fixed in the constitution, for the reason that after the establishment of the "grand coalition" government, students no longer perceived the SPD as an alternative to the CDU.
To be sure, the German "bipartisan" party system — the two major parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU, and the Free Democratic Party, on which the formation of the government depended — provided extraordinary stability and continuity of power. But it was it that generated the "extra-parliamentary opposition", giving the feeling that the Bundestag had been predetermined. The APO, unlike the SDS, did not raise systemic issues, but simply sought a more open, liberal, pluralistic society with clear rules of the game. An idea of the scope of APO's activities can be seen in the archive "APO and Social Movements", compiled by Siegward Lonnendonker who collected APO pamphlets and flyers from 1963 onwards. Since 2004, the Archive has been part of the University Archives of the Free University of Berlin. There are more than 200,000 items in the archive, which are of great importance to the study of this curious phenomenon3.
The APO first made its appearance in early 1958, when a broad extra-parliamentary movement against the planned arming of the Bundeswehr with nuclear weapons began. In April 1958, 120,000 people demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Hamburg under the slogan "it is better to be active than radioactive"4. These protests culminated in the 1962 Der Spiegel case, which was to the FRG what the Dreyfus case was to France. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Rudolf Augstein, accused of treason, was compared to Emile Zola5.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators across the country took part in actions related to the planned nuclear weapons. In Frankfurt's Romerberg square, Jürgen Habermas, a 28-year-old assistant of Theodor Adorno, soon to become one of the theorists of the '68 "revolution," declared that the first civic duty was to participate in the protests. In Münster, Ulrika Meinhof, 23, then not even a member of the SPD youth organization, made a similar call.
The anti-war movement and protests against nuclear weapons took place in Germany against the backdrop of a generational conflict. The criticism of the "unconquered past" and the almost complete continuity of the former (Third Reich) and the then (Adenauer's FRG) elites was the starting point for the generational confrontation. This focus on overcoming the past was the most important difference between the events of '68 in Germany and the rest of the West6. The twelve years of the Nazis' "Millennium Reich" had caused damage to Germany incomparable to anything other Western countries had experienced. In 1945, the Germans had to start from scratch. German historians often view the '68 riots as a generational political duel. In Germany, the explosion of youth anger took a sharply
3 Sontheimer M. Das Gedächtnis der Revolte // Der Spiegel. 2018. Nr. 22. S. 48.
4 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. München, 2008. S. 89.
5 Bering D. Die Epoche der Intellektuellen 1898-2001. Berlin, 2010. S. 354.
6 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 79.
anti-Nazi form. Students branded their parents as collaborators and accomplices of Nazi crimes. On their parents' heads fell the fruits of American-led postwar re-education. It is no coincidence that German filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder wrote: "Our democracy was established for the Western zones of occupation, we ourselves had no part in it"7. The United States, absorbed in fighting the Soviet threat, was suddenly confronted by Germans who claimed that they were atoning for the Nazi past on the wrong side of the Cold War front8. Hannah Arendt noted the apparent generational antagonism in Germany as early as 1961, calling it "downright terrifying". She wrote that young Germans "do not want to talk to their fathers because they know how seriously they were involved in the crimes of the Nazis". Three years later, Karl Jaspers wrote to Arendt that "the voices of German students are increasingly being heard — they do not want to remain deceived"9.
Usually, historians write about the key importance for the German 1968 of overcoming Nazism and the conflict with the previous generation of Nazi adopters and survivors. Indeed, this topic was the focus of public attention in view of the trial of the Auschwitz wardens. The most important element of German identity in the FRG, as Peter Glotz pointed out, is the Holocaust. He pointed out that while nations with a democratic tradition can build on their successful revolutions, Germans, if they aspire to democracy, must first refer to the catastrophic failure of their revolution against democracy in 1933-1945. National Socialism thus appears as an argument against democracy10. Most historians believe that '68 only accelerated the process of rethinking the Nazi past, which was already well underway11. The mutual misunderstanding and exaggerated fears that dominated the second German republic, the "republic of fear," also made things worse. This is how the Dutch historian Frank Biss called his monograph. "The participants in the events of '68 saw the FRG as a transitional stage from a post-fascist to a pro-fascist state. And their liberal opponents compared the student movement to the illiberal and irrational movements of the Weimar Republic period. While the students saw themselves as the "new Jews," their opponents saw them as a new version of fascism"12.
The generational gap in values has been widest in Germany since the late 1960s compared to other Western countries. An international survey in 1981 showed that when twenty-five-year-olds were asked if they shared the values of their parents, only 38 percent of Germans answered affirmatively compared to 50 percent of Europeans as a whole and 77 percent of Americans. Perhaps, Germans' dislike of compromise, idealism (compared to the "materialism" of the postwar generation), and German utopianism played a role in this13. Indeed, the spiritual and cultural climate of the Adenauer era was conditioned not by the "collective oblivion" of Nazism, but rather by the bourgeois privateness of small happiness, which was especially desirable after the misery and suffering of war. This bourgeois privateness was perceived by young people as "spiritually empty and boring"14. This
7 Judt T. Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945. London, 2010. P. 417.
8 Gottfried P. Strannaia smert' marksizma. Evropeiskie levye v novom tysiacheletii. Moscow, 2009. P. 126.
9 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 80, 77.
10 Winkler H. A. Der lange Weg nach Westen. Zweiter Band. Deutsche Geschichte vom „Dritten Reich" bis zur Wiedervereinigung. München, 2002. S. 656.
11 Schmidtke M. Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz. S. 143.
12 Biess F. Republik der Angst. Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Reinbeck, 2019. S. 246.
13 Ardagh J. Germany and the Germans. London, 1987. P. 422.
14 Kleinert H. Mythos 1968 // Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 2008. Nr. 14-15. S. 10.
"materialism" was particularly evident during the years of the German economic miracle, when, as Hans Werner Richter, the founder of the left-liberal literary association Group 47, put it, "eating was more important than thinking". Almost 20 years of the group's existence contributed greatly to the emergence of a new political consciousness among Germans. The new critical mass media (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit) acted in the same direction15.
It is clear that this "ancestral materialism" in the student milieu was necessarily linked to the theme of overcoming the past. A Munich student, Rolf Seeliger, published a pamphlet in 1964 whose title soon became a household name: "The Brown University. German Professors Then and Now. Documentation." In this and the following six issues, Seeliger showed that many professors continued their careers after 1945 with no qualms of conscience or remorse. These publications attracted a student public that readily accepted accusations and criticisms of professors16.
No contemporary critical text influenced the German youth of '68 as much as Wolfgang Fritz Haug's little book "The Helpless Anti-Fascism". The assistant from the Free University of Berlin summed up disappointingly for the elders: everything the professors offered in explaining Nazism boiled down to two well-known and incorrect judgments — a theory of totalitarianism that equated Nazism and Communism and an appeal to a "sterile and apolitical" pseudo-science. Haug noted that bourgeois anti-fascism consisted of a specific mixture of progressive, conservative, and reactionary elements. This allowed the older generation to take a position of formal anti-fascism, but in the fundamental part continued to practice the same fascism. As a result, Haug stated, "the struggle against fascism can only be completed by defeating it in the struggle for socialism". This approach was fully consistent with the spirit of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) in the FRG. Obviously, the main thing for them was not the theoretical postulates and their adequacy, but the moral protest against the guilt of the fathers and against the false authorities, who talked about duty and dignity, but ended up in moral bankruptcy. APO '68 was impossible without the protest culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s17. Looking ahead, it should be said that out of the APO later emerged the Green Party in Germany in 1979.
An important circumstance that influenced student activism was the fact that no other institution in old Germany resisted change as long and as tenaciously as the universities, which up until the 1970s maintained their traditional forms of internal governance. The Free University of Berlin, established in 1948 as an alternative to the Humboldt University, which had remained in the Soviet sector, initially seemed to turn to changes in its internal management. However, restrictions were soon placed on the parity system, and students were gradually pushed out of the university's management. It was this university that became the epicenter of student radicalism in West Germany. This was probably because the Free University was created with the aim of ensuring greater student involvement in the educational process and moving away from the rigid hierarchy, traditionally characteristic of German higher education. Its structure was largely developed by the English liberal educator Robert Birley18. He was responsible for the "re-education" of the Germans in the British military administration. In addition, according to some estimates, a quarter of the
15 Kristof N. „Vademecum" der Protestbewegung. Transnationale Vermittlungen durch das Kursbuch von 1965 bis 1975. Bonn, 2017. S. 52.
16 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 82.
17 Ibid. S. 88.
18 Kraushaar W. 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur. Hamburg, 2000. S. 259.
most active student radicals in the FRG lived in West Berlin. This city remained the capital of European protest until the events in Paris in May19.
University professors were the main force behind the resistance to change. As government officials, they held secure positions and had incomes that combined with annual salaries, housing allowances, student lecture fees, honoraria for private lectures, and daily payments for government appointments could often exceed 70,000 marks. "Der Spiegel" in February '68 pictured them seated on a throne over 300,000 students, atop a hierarchical pyramid of junior assistants, assistants, assistant professors, senior assistants, visiting professors, scientific advisors, department heads, academic advisors, trustees, projectionists, curators, auditors, lecturers, librarians, student advisors, workers, and support staff.
It was the professors who were initially attacked by students. On November 9, 1967, in the auditorium of the University of Hamburg, students first formulated the slogan "Unter den Talaren Muff von 100 Jahren" ("Beneath the professors' robes is a century of junk"). In doing so, they implied the legacy of Nazism among the resident professors. One of them responded to the students' provocative shouts by saying that they were ripe for placement in a concentration camp. This provoked a violent backlash, especially since this man was a former Nazi20.
It is clear that universities, because of their strong academic tradition of self-governance, are conservative institutions that have been very resistant to modernization. Clothing, academic insignia, rituals, titles, and speech patterns all pointed to the past, although in fact universities had long since become bureaucratic institutions. It was especially so since German universities were founded by local town or princely authorities, or by spiritual lords, on a strictly authoritarian basis with the unquestioning authority of influential and preoccupied ordinarii21.
Under the new conditions, when the need for qualified personnel increased manifold compared to past times, the democratization of the universities became a decisive factor in overcoming the crisis of the educational system. SDS did not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate means of fight in the struggle for educational reform. All authority figures, even those who had reached the greatest heights in their fields of knowledge, had to be dethroned in order to fundamentally change the system. In fact, the student movement in '68 was radically anti-systemic. However, the structural problems of the obsolete higher education system were not exclusively a German problem. The situation was roughly the same throughout Europe.
At the same time, the older generation of Germans had great respect for their professors. Opinion polls of the 1950s and 1960s showed that professors were admired more than bishops, ministers, and business directors22. On the whole, students' political activism in 1967-1968 provoked an extremely negative reaction in the German public, which was constantly stirred up by Axel Springer's concern. In Berlin, students demanding an end to the Vietnam War were often shouted down by gawkers, who urged demonstrators to go to the GDR if they did not like it here. The students were called "pubertare Weltverbesserer" ("unfinished saviors of the world"). In a September 1967 poll by the Allensbach Institute, 73 % of Germans questioned expressed no sympathy whatsoever for the hippie
19 Vainen R. Dolgii '68: Radikal'nyi protest i ego vragi. Moscow, 2020. S. 274.
20 Kraushaar W. 1968 als Mythos. S. 197.
21 Ringer F. Zakat nemetskikh mandarinov. Moscow, 2008. Passim.
22 Ibid. S. 184.
radicals ("Gammler"). 56 % were of the opinion that the hippies should be forced to work, and 31 % were in favor of tolerance23.
But young people paid no attention to the opinion of the majority, eager to show their activism in every way they could. In the early 1960s, members of the German SDS formed a group called "Subversive Action" (which, in imitation of Situationist International, used all kinds of theatrical forms to denounce consumer capitalism). Its leader was Dieter Kunzelmann. In 1963, Rudy Dutschke and Berndt Rabel, who wrote articles on the methods of revolutionary Leninist politics, joined the group. The group used stink bombs and rotten tomatoes to protest on various occasions.
"Subversive Action" condemned the SDS leadership for respectability and inaction. Helmut Schauer, leader of the German SDS, was surprised to find that members of his own organization were showing increasing interest in Kunzelmann and his supporters24. Meanwhile, the moderate youth wing of the SPD had 250,000 members, an order of magnitude larger than the SDS25. While 38 % of students in January-February 1968 and 53 % in June-July of that year participated in demonstrations, the figure for non-academic youth was only 5 %. Although there was talk of a "youth revolution", it was forgotten that students and high school students made up only 10 % (300,000) of their age group26. In other words, a great deal in the dynamics of the revolution depended on a small minority.
It should also be remembered that the German SDS was under the influence of the old left until the mid-1960s. Wolfgang Abendroth, a Marburg history professor and member of the SED, supported the separation of the SDS from the SPD. He was expelled from the SPD in 1961. A little later he was replaced by the new left, when the "guru" of the students was the philosopher of the Frankfurt School of Sociology, Herbert Marcuse. At the age of 20, Marcuse was a participant in the November Revolution. Then he fled from the Nazis to the United States. He worked in America for the government (CIA). The books he wrote in the 1930s remained little known. He was a rank-and-file American professor of political science. The German SDS invited him to teach after Ohnesorg's death. In 10-13 July 1967 Marcuse spoke to students every evening, debating with them27. At one of these discussions, he stated, "The eradication of exploitation, hunger, poverty and war at this stage in the development of productive forces has become possible for the first time in human history. Those who fight for it are the real realists".
Marcuse accused the existing system of "repressive tolerance" and of creating a "one-dimensional man". On the contrary, the younger generation of "critical theory," T. Adorno, J. Habermas, and M. Horkheimer, found the actionism of the Left (R. Dutschke and his supporters) threatening. They even accused young people of "left-wing fascism," believing that the political system in FRG had enough legitimate means to fight for the transformation of society28.
A politically important theme for the SDS and APO was popular education, which they felt needed to be freed from the manipulation and authoritarianism of the authorities. Hence the demand for an anti-authoritarian, repression-free education in kindergartens, schools, families, and high schools. The SDS sought to question the authority of
23 Pamperrien S. 1967 Das Jahr der zwei Sommer. S. 253.
24 Vainen R. Dolgii '68. S. 267.
25 Ibid. S. 288.
26 Langguth G. Protest von Links // Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 1977. Nr. 12. S. 4.
27 Chaussy U. Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke. Darmstadt, 1983. S. 183.
28 Winkler H. A. Geschichte des Westens. S. 482; Judt T. Postwar. P. 420.
teachers, to make them look ridiculous, to make them look bad. Some provincial governments were in favor of liberalizing the educational system. The anti-authoritarian concept in the education of children and youth in the late 1960s was consistently implemented in kindergartens and schools. All demands for order, discipline, obedience were discarded. It was thought that the best results in the process of education could be achieved in the process of self-education of children, and any punishment and coercion only harmed. This approach, of course, was flawed29. Michel Houellebecq, in his novel "Elementary Particles", vividly illustrated the faults and foolishness of this destructive approach to parenting.
The reason for the centralization of the French educational system lay in the fact that the protest movement was national, while the German universities were in the hands of the lands and their problems were solved there. Also in the FRG, unlike in France, there was no visible unification of the labor and student movement, which narrowed the scope of the protests. As a result, the "grand coalition" government was able to keep control of developments.
The impact of the student protest was ambivalent and, for the most part, unpredictable. Although participants were opposed to "American imperialists," they adopted forms of protest — "sit-in," "go-in" — from the Americans, thus Americanizing their own country. Students sought to overcome pluralism as a screen for capitalist class domination, but at the same time contributed to making the FRG much more pluralist after their protests. They attacked parliamentarism and demanded that it be replaced by the Soviets, but also proved in practice that their model was precisely the manipulation of an "unenlightened" majority by an "advanced" minority. They demanded a revision of the "fascist legacy," but in doing so, they so emasculated the concept of "fascism" that it became meaningless. The student theorists held such a dogmatic image of Marxist thought that they turned it into a vulgar model of thinking. At the same time, they provided a significant impetus for a critical rethinking of Marxism as such. This is especially true of the activities of the New Left.
In contrast to the other "revolutions" of '68, all kinds of ideological scholastic debates played a very significant role in the FRG. The Germans have always been great masters in this respect30. In the FRG, the romantic protest against modern industrial society was closely linked to the purely German tendency to see politics as a matter of faith and "metaphysical militancy".
At the center of this scholastic debate was the Frankfurt School of sociology, formed during the Weimar Republic and during the emigration of its representatives to the United States, which continued to accumulate its ideological constructions aimed at criticizing a bourgeois society. In 1968, the position of the members of the Frankfurt School was particularly attractive to rebels. T. Adorno, J. Habermas, M. Horkheimer, E. Fromm, H. Marcuse, W. Reich and other sociologists, who returned from exile after the war, belonged to this school. Seminars by Frankfurt School participants Max Horkheimer and especially Theodor Adorno were attended by hundreds of students in the early 1960s, and in 1969 a thousand students attended Adorno's summer semester lectures. Adorno noted in his book "The Authoritarian Personality" that Marx's economic determinism was being replaced by the determinism of culture. If a Christian and strictly bourgeois family
29 Schönbohm W. Die 68er: politische Verirrungen und gesellschaftliche Veränderungen // Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 2008. Nr. 14-15. S. 21.
30 Krebs P., Benua A., Fai G., Odri Zh, Khunke Z., Korzents A., Promp D. Evropeiskaia identichnost. 30 let seminara Tule. Moscow, 2018. P. 52.
is dominated by an authoritarian father, it is very likely that the children will grow up to be racists and fascists. The American scholar Charles Sainz described the book as "an uncompromising verdict on bourgeois civilization", with views previously considered no more than old-fashioned, now, according to this book, recognized as fascist and unworthy of a mentally healthy person. It turns out that while Marx criminalized the capitalists, the Frankfurt School of sociology criminalized the middle class. The Frankfurt School regarded bourgeois society as essentially fascist, and the New Left picked up this idea in 1968 and deployed it31.
Students were particularly interested in understanding if the society had any other goals than material satiation. The answers, formulated by the Frankfurt School, boiled down to the following.
1. The FRG represents a type of developed industrial society in which a new form of totalitarian domination, latently fascist, has taken shape. Parliamentary democracy is only a facade. Totalitarianism is understood by Frankfurt theorists as the domination in all areas of social life of technologies that have a coercive and repressive effect on all individuals and suppress their needs. Emancipation is therefore needed to overcome the domination of all alien forces that enslaved man.
2. In modern society, the criterion of rational activity is only economic efficiency: how can we achieve a given goal in the shortest possible time and avoid undesirable side-effects? Thus, society is at the mercy of the irrational, and, devoid of control, is heading for new catastrophes. The way out is in acts of sabotage as a protest against the inhuman fate of the individual.
3. All institutions of society are engaged only in material production. Only the turnover of production and consumption takes place, the rest is given over to entertainment. This is the picture of a society that has abandoned history. This society is not even capable of posing the really relevant questions: what goals do we pursue?32
Thus, as Oskar Negt, also a member of the Frankfurt School, put it: "The goal of the new left is not to replace one political system of domination with another similar one, but to eliminate the division between political domination and politics itself". Self-determination, self-government, self-organization came to the fore in the FRG and became symbolic of a new political culture. It became a new form of political identification, bringing politics closer to the reality of life33.
In the FRG, the new left preferred to speak not of National Socialism, but of "fascism", because they feared the illegal, in their view, usurpation of the concept of "socialism". That is why the Left preferred not to talk about violence, terror, the systematic destruction of the masses, but rather about the fact that, like the Nazis, the fascists had blocked the revolutionary potential of the working class by their propaganda manipulations. In this way, the "late capitalist" FRG found itself in the neighborhood of fascism. The Left categorically rejected the concept of "totalitarianism". It was seen as an attempt to equate the crimes of the "reds" and the "browns", thus demeaning the concept of "socialism"34.
Under the influence of the Frankfurt School, especially the media theories of M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, J. Habermas, H. Marcuse, and H. M. Enzensberger since the
31 Byukenen P. Smert' Zapada. Moscow, 2003. P. 119.
32 Rormozer G. Krizis Liberalisma. Moscow, 1996. P. 172.
33 Gilcher-Holtey I. 1968 — Eine Zeitreise. Frankfurt am Main, 2008. S. 106-107.
34 Winkler H. A. Geschichte des Westens. S. 488.
early 1960s, the media had been constantly under suspicion of performing a repressive function against society. Accordingly, one of the APO's tasks was to demonstrate the repressive role of the media. Just before the assassination attempt, Dutschke had called for direct actions against Springer's delivery of publications to West Berlin35.
The influence of the Frankfurt School was greatly strengthened in Germany by the magazine "Kursbuch", founded by the poet and writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger together with the writer Karl Markus Michel. In one of his first poems he wrote: "Don't read odes, my son, read schedules — they are more accurate". Enzensberger himself was most afraid, as he admitted, of becoming an authority figure, even in pocket-size36. So, he avoided in every possible way the instructive or moralizing tone in his publications.
"Kursbuch" was a remarkable media phenomenon of the '60s, a true mediator of mutual understanding between Europeans of different countries, which regularly featured unfamiliar names who, with their texts, made it easier to understand what was going on in '68. "Kursbuch" came into being after the Franco-German "Revue internationale" had ended its days. Enzensberger showed exceptional organizational skills in involving a wide variety of '68 activists in explaining and interpreting what was going on. The "Kursbuch" did much to move the subject of Vietnam to the left in 1965. In early December 1965, 70 writers and 130 professors signed a protest against the Vietnam War at the initiative of SDS37.
On the pages of "Kursbuch" appeared texts by the famous critic of colonialism F. Fanon, the Italian leftist journalist who sympathized with the "revolutionaries" of '68 in Europe; R. Rossandra; E. Hobsbawm; F. Castro. In 1970, Enzensberger published "The Havana Interrogation", which offered a literary reconstruction and praise of the show trials that took place in Cuba. Enzensberger, along with his wife Masha (daughter of Alexander Fadeev), was at a cultural congress in Havana in 1968 organized by Fidel Castro for propaganda purposes. The trial described by Enzensberger tried Cuban immigrants after the failed landing in the Bay of Pigs. The author was convinced that "only as a defeated counterrevolution can the ruling class be made to speak"38. Gianfranco Feltrinelli, the publisher of Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" and of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's sensational novel "The Leopard", was present at the Havana Congress organized by F. Castro in addition to Enzensberger39.
One could say that the "Kursbuch" was more than a collection of homework sermons for the "revolutionaries" of '68. It later became a link between the wreckage of '68 and the "homeless left" of the '70s, floundering between dogmatic Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and reformism of the Social Democrats.
In 2008, all issues of the 1968 "Kursbuch" were reprinted in bright red bindings, which shows their significance for developments in subsequent times. Other authors believe that it could be argued that the 1968 was an invention of the "Kursbuch". In 1978, in "Kursbuch" volume 54, one of the authors of the edition stated the collapse of the "ghetto left" as the main event for his generation (in the sense of expanding to the national scale of left-liberal culture). He also noted that the movement itself effectively ended in 197040.
35 Malte K. „Geschichte ist machbar, Herr Nachbar!" // Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 2018. Nr. 3. S. 477.
36 Kristof N. „Vademecum" der Protestbewegung. S. 19.
37 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 107.
38 Gumbrecht U. Posle 1945. Latentnost' kak istochnik nastoiashchego. Moscow, 2018. P. 159.
39 Hobsbawn E. Interesting Time. A Twentieth-Century Life. London, 2002. P. 257.
40 Nassehi A. Gab es 1968? S. 20.
The impetus for the outbreak of student unrest in Germany came from the fact that the rector of the Free University of West Berlin banned a student rally planned for May 7, 1965. The rector banned the publicist E. Kube because of his offensive words about the Free University in the past. In response to this ban, the students of the Free University of Berlin called for a strike and demonstrations of defiance on May 30. J. Habermas, T. Ellwein, H. Ridder, as well as journalists and publicists participated in this event.
The next significant event in the development of the protest movement was the Congress in Frankfurt/Main on October 30, 1966, held under the slogan "The plight of democracy in Germany". Five thousand people took part in six discussion platforms. The reason for the congress was the emergency legislation, which had been prepared since 196041. The Emergency Powers Act was proposed by the Social Democrats in order to give Germany full sovereignty and curtail the Allies' interference in its internal affairs. Its essence was to determine how and in what order the authorities should act in the event of war, natural disaster, and other exceptional situations. Formally, the need for change arose because the lack of emergency legislation meant a real restriction on the sovereignty of the FRG after the abolition of the occupation status in 1954. Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder proposed the law in 1960. The SDS perceived the question of emergency legislation as an effort to establish an authoritarian state. Students used M. Horkheimer's formula of an "authoritarian state" as a stage in the development of capitalist society42. Protesting against the emergency legislation, the SDS demanded the elimination of the class hegemony of the bourgeoisie.
The final rally of the Frankfurt Congress gathered 20,000 people, in front of whom the main critics of these laws, H. M. Enzensberger, E. Bloch, G. Benz, O. Brenner, spoke. SDS did not take part in the forum because of the domination of the Social Democrats and trade unions. Instead, the SDS decided to compensate for its passivity with protests against colonialism and its consequences. From the beginning, the German student movement was linked to the Third World. One of the student leaders, R. Dutschke, saw this line of struggle as the most important, the main reason to start and expand the youth movement43. Dutschke called for active protests during the visit of Congolese President M. Chombe on December 18, 1964, who was reputedly responsible for the murder of P. Lumumba, whom the left considered a martyr in the struggle against colonialism. SDS, whose activists included Dutschke, tried to organize a protest demonstration at the airport, but Chombe was able to get through to the town hall of the Schoenberg district of Berlin unnoticed. But there, according to Dutschke himself, he managed to "hit this 'imperialist agent and murderer' with a tomato". Dutschke later noted that it was the demonstration against Chombe's visit that was the first effective political action of the SDS that allowed it to seize the political initiative in the city. Dutschke even called it "the beginning of our cultural revolution"44.
Also connected to the anti-colonial sentiments of Berlin students was an incident during the visit of the Shah of Iran to Germany on June 2, 1967. In March 1967, a 40,000-circulation pamphlet about the crimes of the Shah's regime was published. In "Kursbuch" in June 1967, Nirumand called on German intellectuals for revolution.
41 Winkler H. A. Geschichte des Westens. S. 480.
42 Schmidtke M. Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz. S. 126-127.
43 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 149.
44 Ibid. S. 102.
The sympathy and a particular interest of German radicals in the "third world" was explained by the fact that the working class, in their view, was reconciled to life under capitalism, and guerrilla warfare outside Europe seemed to be the real motor of the revolution.
It was at such a tense moment, on June 2, 1967, that the Shah of Iran visited West Berlin. After the official part of his visit, he was invited to the German Opera House for a performance of "The Magic Flute". On the eve of his visit, Nirumand gave a lecture at the Free University of Berlin about the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His speech about the torture, persecution, and murder of dissidents in Iran made a strong impression on the assembled students45. A large crowd of students gathered in front of the theater to boo the shah's official attendants. It could have ended as usual, but the police chief ordered the demonstrators to disperse when the visitors were already in the theater. The police dispersed the students quite harshly during the opera, beating up any suspicious "bespectacled" or bearded men. Even the girls got in trouble. At 8:30 p.m. a shot rang out in the parking lot. The bullet hit student B. Ohnesorg in the back of the head. He died in hospital. The shooter was K. Kurras, a policeman in civilian clothes46. After this shot on June 2, student protests spread to all universities in Germany and became increasingly widespread. The protests were intensified by the fact that B. Ohnesorg, a 26-year-old philology student, was not the leader of the students. He only joined the protesters out of curiosity and was a completely random victim47. The mourning of Ohnesorg was exploited by student activists. Finally, there was a victim to justify the actions of the rioters and to give a reason to the leftist terrorists. It was on 2 June 1967 that the spiral of violence and bloodshed began to unfold, leading to the eventual emergence of the "Red Army Faction". Its activist Ulrike Meinhof called the FRG a police state after the murder of Ohnesorg and an influential SDS activist, B. Rabel, stated that "a leftist popular movement against the ruling elites needs to create an urban military guerilla apparatus"48. Even outside observers, such as the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, believed that 1968 was important for events in Paris, while in Germany it was 1967 because of the enormous resonance to the murder of Ohnesorg49.
In contrast, the public reaction in the FRG was not so negative. This was reflected in the court's acquittal of Kurras on November 21 (it was later revealed that he had been a Stasi informant). This verdict was met with student protests. The students' reaction was particularly negative, as the Springer media concern unleashed a real propaganda campaign against them. The German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher has compared it with the harassment of supporters of Weimar Democracy by the Hugenberg Press Concern in the 1920s. It became especially clear to many people then that the country had not departed far from its recent Nazi past50.
The tabloid "Bild" wrote about the murder of Ohnesorg: "He who questions decency and order must reckon with the fact that he will be called to order". According to the newspaper, "the Red Storm Troopers chose anti-communism as an object of attack instead of
45 1968 — Vom Ereignis zum Mythos / I. Gilcher-Holtey (Hrsg.). Frankfurt am Main, 2008. S. 47.
46 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 114.
47 Ibid. S. 118.
48 Winkler W. Die Geschichte der RAF. S. 102.
49 Der Spiegel. 2007. Nr. 5. S. 148.
50 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 117.
the Jews"51. "Bild" called the perished a "hooligan" and compared student protests to the antics of the Stormtroopers before 1933, which aroused the indignation of the participants and their new protests against the Springer concern52.
Springer's media empire, according to the writer Heinrich Böll, was engaged in distorting the facts and consistently turning a potential threat into mass hysteria. It was Springer's concern that was one of the main enemies of the leftist movement in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As early as 1967, the literary association Group 47, which included major German writers and publishers, announced a boycott of the tabloid "Bild". A year later, the weekly Die Zeit published an "Appeal of the Fourteen" — an open letter from left-wing intellectuals demanding a public debate on Springer's "journalistic manipulation"53. Böll devoted his novel "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or How Violence Arises and Where It Can Lead to" to this problem.
What the FRG experienced after the assassination of B. Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, until the winter of 1968/69 was a real revolt: spontaneous, unexpected, emerging simultaneously in many places, unpredictable, with new groups of students emerging all the time. The whole period from the assassination of Ohnesorg.
To the assassination of R. Dutschke was filled with an incessant series of political demonstrations, congresses, protests, "teach-ins", "go-ins", "sit-ins". The atmosphere in the society during this period was shaped by enormous public tension and people's corresponding reactions to what was going on. All of this formed the so-called generation of '68.
The location of these events was not limited to universities and demonstration routes. Nor were these events simply about printing and distributing leaflets, debates, and chanting slogans of all kinds. In fact, in this atmosphere, people's sense of self was changed, new possibilities of self-realization and a sense of freedom for an entire generation emerged. In fact, this was the main thing. Ideological chimeras often overshadowed the ideal goals that young people aspired to: more democracy, more openness. That some dreamed of socialism, while others dreamed of revolutionary violence, indicates only that a distinction must be made between the core of the New Left and the mass protest movement of the time54.
First there were the riots at the University of Hamburg during the winter semester of 1967/68 and the summer semester of 1968, and then it came to the universities of Heidelberg, Kiel, Göttingen, Marburg, Tübingen, West Berlin. The protests took the form of spontaneous happening.
In September 1967, R. Dutschke stunned those present at the SDS conference in Frankfurt with a call for "propaganda by action in the metropolises", according to Che Guevara's call. As Dutschke stated, it was necessary to send guerrillas into families to destroy "the biosocial structure of society" from within. This call for organized guerrilla warfare seemed, even to most SDS, too radical. But Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Kral, in contrast to J. Habermas, announced at the congress that a revolutionary situation was ripe and called for direct action. According to them, "the development of productive forces
51 Winkler W. Die Geschichte der RAF. S. 95.
52 Ramge T. Die großen Politik-Skandale. Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Frankfurt am Main, 2003. S. 98.
53 [Böll H.] Kak voznikaet nasilie i k chemu ono mozhet privesti: Genrikh Bell' i RAF. Moscow, 2018.
S. 9.
54 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 132, 134.
has reached a level to begin to eliminate hunger, wars and despotism. Everything now depends on the conscious will of the people to change". J. Habermas responded by labelling these calls "leftist fascism"55. But Dutschke insisted that at present it was not the "class question" but the "revolutionary will" that was decisive. "What matters now", he declared, "is the propaganda of the shot". According to Dutschke, "the urban guerilla must be the organizer of the destruction of the system of repressive institutions". This was not yet the beginning of an "armed struggle," but a decisive break with both the Marburg orthodox Marxists and the Frankfurt "critical theory". As for the representatives of the banned CPG (Hannes Heer), who were present at the SDS meeting, Dutschke called them "leftist fascists", and they accused him of "anarchist terror"56.
On June 27, 1968, about a hundred students barricaded themselves inside the rector's office of the Free University of West Berlin. Led by D. Kon-Bendit, the students demanded a new organization of the universities57. The self-appointed "rector" Fritz Teufel, using documents seized from the rector's office, dismissed all ordinarians from their jobs by "official" letter. In doing so, all formalities, except for the signature of the present rector, were observed. All this was done against a background of anarchist, communist, socialist slogans and shouting. Red, black banners, catchy slogans against the system were ubiquitous in universities. Anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, linked to the system, were also in circulation, as were the symbolic figures of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, F. Castro, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Marx58.
Interestingly, when students in West Berlin rioted against the authorities, East Berlin students helped them with construction helmets and raincoats to protect them from the police. The dairy shop in Sofienstrasse 31 was the place from which this aid came. In this way East Germans solidified with their compatriots on the other side of the wall. Students in East Berlin collected 20,000 marks to buy protective helmets and raincoats. A fictitious construction firm was even founded in order to be able to buy helmets for construction workers59. But by and large the German left did not support the East German regime and were confused when Angela Davis was welcomed in the GDR (and in the USSR)60.
In February 1968, in West Berlin, shortly after the opening of the International Congress on Vietnam, the SDS leadership, in the words of R. Dutschke, placed the Vietnam War at the center of what was going on. "Comrades, we are out of time. We have been defeated in Vietnam". After the congress meetings, 12,000 demonstrators marched through Berlin under the slogan "Der Kampf für die Vietnamische Revolution ist Teil des Kampfes für die Befreiung aller Menschen von Unterdrückung und Ausbeutung". A similar rally was held in Frankfurt. True, Dutschke was arrested at the airport and was not allowed to attend the rally against the Vietnam War. At the beginning of April, two department stores burned down in Frankfurt, the metropolis of West German imperialism, the arsonists being Gudrun Enselin and Andreas Baader. The news of the murder of Martin L. King on April 4, 1968, further inflamed the passions. And another week later, on Green Thursday, April 11, one Holy Week day, Josef Bachmann shot R. Dutschke. Riots and violence be-
55 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 120.
56 Ibid. S. 124.
57 Kraushaar W. 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur. S. 201.
58 Ibid. S. 203.
59 Sontheimer M., Wensierski P. Berlin — Stadt der Revolte. Berlin, 2018. Passim.
60 Vainen R. Dolgii '68. P. 280.
gan, unprecedented since the founding of the FRG. In this turmoil and violence, the riot finally lost its practical meaning. President Lübke, in his New Year's address to the nation, said that "a small minority outside the democratic parties had created unrest and terror" in the country. Most politicians believed that it was up to professors, police, or other law enforcement agencies to engage in dialogue with students.
Since late 1968 public interest in student unrest had begun to wane, and it itself began to fade. The newly introduced self-governance occupied the attention and energy of student leaders. The police learned to treat demonstrators more loyally. German burghers became more lenient toward students. At the same time, from the end of 1968 to 1970, more and more radical Maoist, Trotskyist and other groups emerged in the FRG, opposing each other and competing with each other. The SDS collapsed in the winter of 196861. It was out of the question to reach any kind of agreement with the workers' movement in the FRG. In the fall of 1973, a worker on strike at the Ford factory in Cologne commented on the perspective of an alliance between students and workers in this way: "The anarchists are like eunuchs who, even if they know what they want, don't know how to get it done"62.
In general, reactions to the street riots by German students (less than 5 % of whom were from the working class) were negative among both workers and the bourgeoisie. When Berlin students demonstrated against the Vietnam War, the unions responded with demonstrations in support of Washington's version of events in Southeast Asia63.
The same is true of the Emergency Powers Act, which initially provoked such a violent reaction from students. On May 30, 1968, the Bundestag passed the legislation dealing with emergency situations (Notstandsverfassung) by 340 votes to 100, with one abstention, which included laws to restrict the secrecy of mail, telegrams, and letters. The campaign against the emergency legislation was the culmination of the German 1968. The Bundestag's decision had a sobering effect on many and contributed to a shift away from left-wing radical positions. The unrestrained violence, such as the SDS-sponsored "Battle of the Tegel Road" on November 14, 1968, when students stoned the police, only discredited the "revolutionary avant-garde" of the student movement in the eyes of the German public and contributed to its isolation. So many students turned to the SPD when it abandoned its "grand coalition" policy, charting a much more left-leaning course than before. This greatly contributed to the disintegration of the unity of the "revolutionaries". The minority, though, turned to terror. On the night of April 2 to 3 (a week before the assassination attempt on R. Dutschke), Andreas Baader, an unemployed gymnasium student, and Gudrun Enselin, the daughter of a Protestant priest from Württemberg who had been trained as teachers, set fire to a department store in Frankfurt, protesting against the "terror of consumer society"64.
But overall, there was a clear pacification. With the end of the summer semester of 1968, student unrest in the FRG came to an end, although internationally the summer was tragic. The June 5 assassination of U. S. Democratic hopeful Robert Kennedy, the beginning of unrest in black neighborhoods in northern states, the Mexico City uprising, the refusal of two black athletes to accept Olympic medals in October, the youth riots in Zurich, the bloody suppression of youth protests in Montevideo due to increased bus
61 Mehnert K. Jugend im Zeitbruch. S. 130.
62 Ibid. S. 144.
63 Roszak T. Istoki kontrkul'tury. Moscow, 2014. P. 53.
64 Winkler H. A. Geschichte des Westens. S. 500.
fares, the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia, sparked spontaneous protests in German cities. The dashed hopes for a victory of reform in Czechoslovakia were one of the most important reasons for what no one in the FRG had expected even in the summer. The protest movement quickly went downhill. A whole year of uninterrupted activity had exhausted the strength of the rebellious students65. As the winter semester of 1968/69 began, student activity dropped to zero. The SDS, which had lost all unity, soon dissolved itself. After the dissolution of the SDS, in 1970, there was a time of "organizational fetishism". Voluntary and spontaneous activity was replaced by revolutionary discipline. In doing so, a wide variety of groups competed with each other incessantly66.
"Adorno, as a social institution, is dead", read one leftist newspaper in early 1969, a few months before the philosopher's actual early death. The revolt had outlived itself. The country was becoming different. What is meant here is not the wave of terror that began in 1968, but the social changes that enveloped all walks of life, something the right-wing forces had warned against in vain. Most of the critics of '68 saw a real modernization of German society, not in the German "special way" but in the broad path of change that engulfed the entire Western world67.
In the meantime, new forms of university governance were working quite well, aided by the gradual realization of the wisdom of the May 1973 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court. The court recognized that the model of the Collective University, where academic staff and students had to participate together in decision-making, was preferable to the former Ordinarien-Universität, which the judges had convinced was too authoritarian and unsuited to integrate academic staff forced to take more hours. Nevertheless, the court affirmed the special position of professors, ruling that in university bodies professors should have half a vote in matters concerning teaching, and in the event of a stalemate should guarantee the "capacity" of the university. As a consequence of the 1968 revolution, the triple parity was introduced in some German states, under which the university senate and faculty bodies were elected with equal participation by professors, junior faculty and students. At the Free University of Berlin in 1969, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology was elected rector68.
However, in the political sphere, unlike in the United States, where the Great Society project collapsed, Willy Brandt managed to attract a significant part of the protest movement to the project of internal reforms. The formation of a social-liberal coalition opened up new opportunities, which Brandt took advantage of. He tactically and precisely insisted on lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. In his 1969 government statement, Brandt promised to make government decision-making more open, to satisfy the critical need for information, called for "more democracy" and also stated that "we will strive to ensure that not only members of the Bundestag, but also every citizen, can contribute to the reform of state and society"69. The election of Brandt and, more generally, the reforms of the social-liberal coalition contributed to the integration of young people into the democratic system of the Federal Republic of Germany. The number of young people who joined the SPD rose from 46,499 to 160,000 in 1969-1972. In the U. S., on the other hand, the protests of '68 resulted in nothing more than the disintegration of the Democratic Party in politics.
65 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 147.
66 Langguth G. Protest von Links // Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 1977. Nr. 12. S. 23.
67 Frei N. 1968 Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. S. 151.
68 Kreig G. Nemtsy. Moscow, 1999. P. 213.
69 Die Regierungserklärungen der BRD / Hrsg. H. U. Behr. München, 1971. S. 206.
So, was there a 1968 in the FRG? 20 years later, Heinz Bude, in a study of the personages of '68, summed it up this way: "It remains the firm conviction that '68 gave the first postwar generation a favorable opportunity for social change. Dissatisfaction of all kinds was very effectively and accurately articulated. Motives of protest therefore do not account for the success of the social movement". Bude distinguished between movement and generation. It was the generation that was the protagonist. Indeed, the rebellion itself was short, and the number of its active participants quite foreseeable. P. Dutschke later said that there were 15-20 activists in West Berlin, supported by several hundred sympathizers"70. Simplifying things a bit, one could say that the SDS played the role of a "useful idiot". Not only did it not achieve any of its goals, but also strengthened the political system it so fiercely fought against71. Moreover, the emergence of a wide variety of civic initiatives and self-help groups would have been unthinkable without the experience of '68. These groups acted in addition to, and often against, the communal and city authorities72.
These initiatives contributed greatly to the political polarization of the country. Whereas before 1968 left-wing positions were inherent only in a certain part of the German society, after this milestone they became implicit from the outset, helped by the long period of the Social Democrats in power (from the late 1960s to the early 1980s). But, unexpectedly, the 1968 in the FRG had an even greater impact on conservatives and liberals. It was the conservatives who became more pluralistic in Germany, more open to the West, more mobile. Today, it has become even more difficult to distinguish the principled positions of the CDU/CSU from those of the Social Democrats in the Federal Republic of Germany. The example comparing the positions of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chancellor Olaf Scholz is very illustrative. After '68, the intentions and goals of both parties necessarily include left-liberal views and positions. And the further away from '68, the more so. The right-wing political spectrum is increasingly sidelined. It is no coincidence that the co-chairman of the Alternative for Germany party, Jörg Meuthen, declared war on "link-red-green contamination by 1968 thinking" in 201873.
We can definitely say that the spirit of the 1968 under Merkel had reached public hegemony. Merkel's main point is clear: everything that belongs to the right is taboo. She was able to realize this conviction. It was not Schroeder or Fischer but Merkel who was able to realize the goal of 1968: the social hegemony of the left. But any hegemony in democracy is fraught with backlash. Munich sociologist Armin Nassehi published a book about the student revolt and its aftermath in early 2018. "Gab es 1968? Eine Spurensuche". Among other things, in this book he arrives at the idea that overly insistent moralization as well as the victorious march of pop culture will soon come into interaction. And since the concept and meaning of pop culture includes a certain posture, this merger will eventually lead to the formation of a certain moral posture. And this moral posture reigns in discourse today. Political communication has become a pose74. Of course, in post-war Germany, nationalism has not disappeared altogether — it has simply been studiously ignored, while the German left, which dominates public discourse, put forward the ex-
70 Nassehi A. Gab es 1968? S. 19-20.
71 Schönbohm W. Die 68er: politische Verirrungen und gesellschaftliche Veränderungen. S. 18.
72 Ibid. S. 20.
73 Hodenberg Chr. Gesellschaftliche Perspektiven auf das westdeutsche „Achtundsechzig" // Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 2018. Nr. 38/39. S. 31.
74 Hammelehle S. Wer sind wir? // Der Spiegel. 2018. Nr. 34. S. 110-121.
emplary German Willkommenskultur ("welcome culture") and use it no more and no less as an indispensable element of German identity. This is probably the main outcome of German 196875.
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Статья поступила в редакцию 1 июня 2022 г.
Рекомендована к печати 10 сентября 2022 г.
Received: June 1, 2022 Accepted: September 10, 2022
75 Plenkov O. Ju. Chto ostalos' ot Gitlera. Istoricheskaia vina i politicheskoe pokaianie Germanii. St Petersburg, 2019. Passim.
