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Introduction: The Other '68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany

Introduction: The Other '68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany

Profile image of Anna von der GoltzAnna von der Goltz

2021

This chapter introduces the book’s protagonists and main subject: the other ‘68ers, a group of centre-right activists who had participated in the West German student movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and later commemorated their efforts as a form of democratic resistance against left-wing radicals. It argues that a close examination of the other ‘68ers’ ideas, experiences, repertoires, and remarkable career trajectories enables us to rethink the history of 1968 and its afterlives in important ways. Studying the hitherto neglected role these individuals played at the time, as well as their life paths and long-term impact on West German political culture, opens up new vistas for understanding the history of protest in 1968, the late Federal Republic, and the role that generation played in postwar Germany. The Introduction also discusses the different sources used for this study, including the oral history methodology on which parts of the book are based.

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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi The Other ‘68ers OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi The Other ‘68ers Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany ANNA VON DER GOLTZ 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Anna von der Goltz 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934763 ISBN 978–0–19–884952–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849520.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi To Nico and Jasper OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi Acknowledgements This book, my second, took a lot longer to research and write than my first. I originally conceptualized the idea for The Other ‘68ers and began the research in 2008, while still a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was then sidetracked by other projects and life events, among them a move to the United States. Along the way, I received support from numerous institutions and individuals. It is a pleasure to finally be able to express my gratitude here. The Fellows of Magdalen College provided funds and an intellectual home in the project’s very early stages. While in Oxford, I benefited immeasurably from collaborating with my colleagues on the oral history project that became Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2013). It certainly distracted me from thinking about the centre-right, but this would have been a very different— and, I’m convinced, a much less interesting—book if I had not learned a great deal about doing oral history and the 1960s in Europe from my interlocutors. In particular, I want to thank Robert Gildea, James Mark, Anette Warring, John Davis, and Juliane Fürst for intellectual stimulation and their friendship. In 2008, I had the good fortune to meet Bernd Weisbrod at a conference, who then invited me to be a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Graduate School on ‘Generations in Modern History’ at the University of Göttingen. His and the group’s nuanced take on generational histories has influenced my thinking on the topic in lasting ways. I have benefited immensely from his spirited and constructive critique and from participating in the workshops and conferences that different members of the Graduate School organized over the years. I am extremely grateful to all its members, not least to Uffa Jensen, who helped to organize my stay. An Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust brought me to the History Faculty at the University of Cambridge and to Wolfson College, for the better part of 2011. There, I profited, in particular, from the productive exchanges in Richard J. Evans’s weekly workshop on German history and from the discussions in the Modern European History Seminar. Since taking up my post at Georgetown University in 2012, a semester of Junior Faculty Leave, several Summer Academic Grants, a grant for a manuscript workshop from the Mortara Centre, and continuous research support from the BMW Centre for German and European Studies (CGES) and the School of Foreign Service (SFS) helped to facilitate steady progress on the book. Faculty and staff in CGES, SFS, and the History Department have all provided a wonderful home base. A Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress allowed me to start drafting the first chapters while looking out over the US Supreme Court. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi viii  I am grateful to the many colleagues in Germany, Britain, and the United States, who invited me to present my arguments in various research seminars over the years: the fellows at the German Historical Institutes in London and Washington, D.C., Alexander Sedlmaier in Bangor, Paul Betts (then) at Sussex, Dieter Gosewinkel at the WZB, Paul Nolte in Berlin, Andreas Rödder in Mainz, Frank Bösch and Martin Sabrow in Potsdam, Nick Stargardt in Oxford, the organizers of Der Kreis in Berkeley, especially Elena Kempf, Jim Brophy in Delaware, Jennifer Allen at Yale, and, last but not least, my colleagues in Georgetown’s History Faculty Seminar. Critical feedback on numerous conference presentations further helped me to develop and refine my arguments. Various colleagues read my original book proposal and drafts of this manuscript or related articles I published, and their feedback has been invaluable in bringing this book to completion: Martin Conway, Mario Daniels, Michael David-Fox, David Collins, Jim Collins, Michael Kazin, Richard Kuisel, Eric Langenbacher, Jamie Martin, Aviel Roshwald, Jordan Sand, Lu Seegers, Eva-Maria Silies, Quinn Slobodian, Bernd Weisbrod, Judith Tucker, and Thomas Zimmer. Several anonymous reviewers also offered criticism that was always helpful and deeply appreciated. At Georgetown, I have taught various courses on the 1960s and learned a lot from the many lively conversations with my terrific students. Special thanks to the undergraduate freshmen in my proseminar on ‘1968 in Europe’ and to the graduates in ‘The 1960s in Transnational Perspective’, a seminar I happily cotaught with Michael Kazin. Several Georgetown graduate students in the MA program in German and European Studies and in the History PhD program helped with bits of research, translations, and copy editing. My sincere thanks to Robert Mevissen, Rebecca Payne, Hannah Morris, Ricky Bordelon, Alexander Finn Macartney, Alistair Somerville, Thom Loyd, Juliet Kelso, and Brent McDonnell for all their work. Oral history interviews are one major group of sources for this study, and I am extremely grateful to the former centre-right activists who took time out of their often busy schedules to talk to me about their political lives. Many of them also kindly shared documents in their possession. Even if they do not agree with all of its analysis, I could not have written this book without their help. It has been a great experience to work with Oxford University Press again. Thanks to Cathryn Steele, Stephanie Ireland, Katie Bishop, and Thomas Deva for shepherding the manuscript through peer review and production. Family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic have provided much needed emotional and logistical support, not least by housing, feeding, and entertaining me while doing archival work and interviews. A special shout-out to Henrike Heick, Sandra Jasper, Sarah Jastram, Kim Klehmet, and Birgitta Ashoff. My adopted ‘DC family’ has helped me to feel at home in a city that I hardly knew before moving to the United States and reminds me almost daily that there are OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  ix even more enjoyable things in life than writing books. I am particularly grateful to Ben Mahler for his help with some of the illustrations. This study owes some of its inspiration to my actual family, probably in more ways than they are aware. I have often thought that my interest in the subject of The Other ‘68ers must have been piqued early on, when observing some of the family dynamics on display in my grandparents’ house in Essen, a building erected on the visible remnants of a Nazi-era anti-aircraft position on grounds owned by the Krupp dynasty. My mother, Heide, always seemed to stand out in these surroundings. At the age of eighteen, she had left the Catholic Church that meant so much to her father, who had consistently voted for the Christian Democrats since the war. The first one in her family to attend university, she moved to Freiburg to study English and Geography in the late 1960s, eventually becoming a public school teacher in Bremen. Later on, she worked in education in a local museum of ethnology and natural history. She never married and raised me by herself in a culturally left-wing, urban milieu where everybody rode their bike, even when it rained. At our annual Christmas Day gathering in Essen, I not only noticed how different she was from her parents in almost every respect but would often also see her spar with her brother-in-law. Like my mother, he had been born in 1948, and he later married her younger sister. Like my mother, he had been a first-generation student, and they both often shared stories about growing up in fairly chaotic conditions in postwar West Germany. However, in most other ways, they were quite different, including in their politics—although neither one of them was overtly political and both had an argumentative streak. He had studied law in Marburg, joined a fraternity, pursued a thriving career in the insurance industry, made his home in a Cologne suburb with my aunt and my two cousins, and played golf in his spare time. I always found it intriguing that he and my mother had been born in the same year and both been students in the 1960s and yet fashioned such different personas and lives. The annual scenes in Essen no doubt sparked my interest in postwar generational dynamics, but they also must have made me intuitively sceptical of overly deterministic histories of generation. After her retirement, my mother transcribed many of the interviews on which parts of this book are based. In the process, we had numerous enlightening conversations about how she had experienced the years around 1968. It is one of my great regrets that I did not complete this book during her lifetime. She died in 2017—far too early at merely sixty-eight. I miss her every day. Luckily, I still have wonderful family members in my life: among them my aunt Gaby, my mother-in-law Gisi, and Christoph and Sofia, my brother- and sister-inlaw. They have all been tremendously supportive, especially in the past few years. This book is dedicated to the two people closest to me: my husband, Nico, and my son, Jasper, who was born in 2015. Nico has been an enthusiastic and patient supporter of this work from the very beginning. Jasper remains unimpressed, because the book is shorter than the first volume of Harry Potter. Both fill my life OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi x  with love and daily laughter. Writing this as I am, in the midst of a global pandemic that has brought life as we knew it to a near standstill, it is difficult to imagine what the future holds. But I am immensely grateful for every day that the three of us get to spend together. Anna von der Goltz Washington, D.C., July 2020 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi Contents Abbreviations List of Illustrations xiii xvii Introduction 1968 and Histories of the Federal Republic The Other ‘68ers and Histories of Generation Sources Chapter Structure 1 6 11 16 20 1. Between Engagement and Enmity Centre-Right Students in the Streets ‘Be Where the Action Is!’ A Silent Majority? Reform vs. Revolution Of Insiders and Outsiders Renegades 22 26 36 40 43 55 67 2. Talking About (My) Generation Narrating the War, Postwar, and Cold War The Nazi Past and Totalitarianism Intergenerational Conflict and Affinity 75 77 86 98 3. Between Adenauer and Coca-Cola Reforming the World, (Not) Changing the Self? ‘None of Us Thought that You Weren’t Supposed to Sleep with the Same Woman Twice’ Changing Gender Roles and Women Activists 109 110 4. From Berlin to Saigon and Back Cold War Imaginaries The American War in Vietnam Europe Human Rights Activism 143 147 157 163 169 5. Combative Politics Hardening Fronts Weimar Re-enactments Centre-Right Activists and the ‘Radicals Decree’ Protecting the Constitution The Spectre of Left-Wing Terrorism Returning to the Fold 181 183 189 194 202 206 216 118 128 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi xii  6. The (Ir)Resistible Rise of the Other ‘68ers The Short March Through the Institutions The Other ‘68ers and the Political Culture of the Late Federal Republic Commemorating 1968 Mescalero Returns 246 252 260 Conclusion: The Other ‘68ers in German History 267 Bibliography Index 227 229 273 301 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi Abbreviations ACDP ACSP ADS AHR AI AdsD APO ArchAPO ARD AUSS BAK BfV BFW BRD BSU CDU CIA CSU DKP DM Dpa DSU EDS epd EZA FAZ FCS FDJ FDP FLN FRG FU GDR Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik Archiv für Christlich-Soziale Politik Aktionskomitee Demokratischer Studenten (Action Committee of Democratic Students) American Historical Review Amnesty International Archiv der sozialen Demokratie Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition) Archiv APO und soziale Bewegungen Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Germany’s premier public television station) Aktionszentrum Unabhängiger und Sozialistischer Schüler (Action Centre of Independent and Socialist Pupils) Bundesarchiv, Koblenz Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Association for the Protection of Academic Freedom) Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) Bonner Studentenunion (Bonn Student Union) Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) Central Intelligence Agency Christlich Soziale Union (Christian Social Union) Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party) Demokratische Mitte (Democratic Centre) Deutsche Presseagentur (German Press Agency) Deutsche Studentenunion (German Student Union) European Democrat Students Evangelischer Pressedienst Evangelisches Zentral Archiv Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Federation of Conservative Students (United Kingdom) Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party) Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, Algeria) Federal Republic of Germany Freie Universität Berlin (Free University Berlin) German Democratic Republic OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi xiv  GN GSC HIA HIS ICCS IfZ ISC JU Jusos KSU LAB LSD MSB Spartakus MSU NHB NATO NofU NPD NVA POW RAF RBB RCDS SA SD SDS SHB SLH SPD SS SZ taz TU UP UN Göttinger Nachrichten German Subject Collection Hoover Institution Library and Archives Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung International Union of Christian Democrat and Conservative Students Institut für Zeitgeschichte International Student Conference Junge Union (Young Union) Jungsozialisten (Young Socialists) Kölner Studentenunion (Cologne Student Union) Landesarchiv Berlin Liberaldemokratischer Hochschulbund (Liberal Democratic Higher Education Association) Marxistischer Studentenbund Spartakus (Marxist Student Association Spartakus) Münchener Studentenunion (Munich Student Union) Nationaldemokratischer Hochschulbund (National Democratic Higher Education League) North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Notgemeinschaft für eine Freie Universität (Emergency Community for a Free University) Nationaldemokratische Partei (National Democratic Party) Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army, East Germany) Prisoner of war Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian Democratic Students) Sturmabteilung (Nazi stormtroopers) Sicherheitsdienst (Nazi Security Service) Sozalistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student League) Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund (Social Democratic Higher Education League) Sozialliberaler Hochschulbund (Social-Liberal Higher Education League) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) Schutzstaffel (Nazi paramilitary organization that oversaw the Holocaust) Süddeutsche Zeitung die tageszeitung Technische Universität Berlin (Technical University of Berlin) Unidad Popular (Chile) United Nations OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  VDS Vf Z VKS YAF ZDF Vereinigte Deutsche Studentenschaften (Association of German Students) Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Verband Kritischer Schüler (Association of Critical Pupils) Young Americans for Freedom Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Germany’s second public television network) xv OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi List of Illustrations 0.1 Group photograph of the self-described ‘Alternative ‘68ers’, Bonn, May 1988. (J.H. Darchinger/Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) 1.1 Socialist student leader Rudi Dutschke and the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf debate on the roof of a car in Freiburg in January 1968. Pictured to Dahrendorf’s right are centre-right activists Meinhard Ade (face partially covered) and Ignaz Bender (shown in profile). (J.H. Darchinger/Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) 1.2 Cover of the student magazine Semester-Spiegel (Münster) featuring the student demonstrations of ‘Action 1 July’ 1965 with organizer Ignaz Bender on the right. (Semester-Spiegel, Münster) 1.3 Christian Democratic activist and future (West) Berlin Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen arguing with a left-wing counter-demonstrator at a pro-American citizens’ protest near Schöneberg Town Hall in West Berlin on 21 February 1968. (ullstein bild—Rogge) 1.4 Jürgen-Bernd Runge, RCDS chair at the Free University in West Berlin, speaking to the members of the university’s Konvent (student parliament) on 26 April 1967. (Michael Ruetz/Agentur focus) 2.1 Centre-right student protests during an SDS-run event with East German star lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul in Bonn on 6 February 1968. The banners state ‘Freedom for the political prisoners of the GDR. What are you doing, Mr. Kaul?’ and ‘Prof. Kaul: Against the murder of Jews in Auschwitz—in favour of murder at the Wall.’ (dpa Picture-Alliance) 3.1 The Bonn Student Union’s magazine Pop-Kurier (January 1969). On the cover: Maria-Theresia (‘Musch’) van Schewick, BSU activist and future RCDS national deputy chair. (Hoover Institution Archives, German subject collection, box no. 85) 3.2 ‘Types we also attract.’ ‘Types who vote RCDS.’ (RCDS poster, n. d. [1970s]) 3.3 Former Bavarian RCDS chair Ursula Männle speaking at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hanns-Seidel Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the CSU that she chaired from 2014 until 2019 (Munich, 20 January 2017). (dpa Picture-Alliance) 3 25 27 66 70 97 117 122 130 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi xviii    4.1 SDS activist Rudi Dutschke (right) with the South Vietnamese Ambassador to Bonn at an RCDS-organized event at the Free University in West Berlin in December 1966. (ullstein bild—Sakowitz) 4.2 Young Christian Democrats, including RCDS activists, at a demonstration against communist aggression in South Vietnam in Hamburg on 14 April 1975. The banners call for peace and human rights in Vietnam. (ullstein bild—dpa) 4.3 The Fight for Human Rights . . . everywhere . . . EDS and RCDS poster asking for signatures on a campaign to free Chilean activist Juan Bosco Maino Canales and Soviet dissident Boris Evdokimov. (ACSP, Pl S 8835 [1977]) 5.1 RCDS chair Gerd Langguth, speaking at a ‘Spartakus Tribunal’ at the University of Hamburg on 19 January 1972. The white specks on his right sleeve are curd cheese that left-wing students in the audience had thrown at the student activist. Still from ZDF Magazin, 26 January 1972. (Gerd Langguth Private Papers) 5.2 ‘Civil Servant ‘75 (representing the interests of the state)’. Cartoon from the cover of the Hessian RCDS publication Campus. (RCDS Frankfurt am Main, ACDP 04-046). Unnamed artist. 5.3 Friedbert Pflüger, then the RCDS deputy national chair, speaking at the CDU’s annual party convention on 26 May 1976. (Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Ulrich Wienke) 5.4 Cover page of Christian Democratic student magazine Demokratische Blätter no. 14 (June/July 1977). The photographs shows the crime scene with the covered corpses of Siegfried Buback (back) and his driver Wolfgang Göbel (front), as well as the official car, in which both were shot. The caption reads ‘Left-wing radicals: “Joy about Buback murder” ’. (RCDS-Bundesvorstand; photographer Heinz Wieseler, dpa/picture-alliance) 5.5 Tumultuous scenes during an RCDS-run event with Helmut Kohl at the University of Freiburg on 19 January 1976. Kohl’s speech was disrupted by left-wing demonstrators. The police used tear gas and batons to escort the CDU chair from the auditorium. (Lutz Rauschnick, dpa/picture-alliance) 6.1 Former RCDS activist and CDU campaign strategist Peter Radunski (left) with CDU Secretary General Heiner Geißler at the 1986 party convention. (Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Lothar Schaack) 6.2 ‘Come out of your left corner’, Christian Democratic campaign poster for the 1976 national elections. (ACDP, Plakatsammlung, 10-001-1862) 144 160 176 182 201 207 211 219 231 233 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi    6.3 Former RCDS chair and CDU strategist Wulf Schönbohm featured in Die Zeit as the ‘Lenin of the CDU’ in 1988. (Matthias Horx und Marie Weinberger, ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin no. 33 (1988), 12. Photograph by Paul Schirnhofer) 6.4 Former RCDS activist and ‘Kohl’s Kissinger’ Horst Teltschik (left) with the newly elected Federal Chancellor on a flight to Rome on 18 November 1982. (Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Ulrich Wienke) xix 235 239 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi Introduction In May 1988, a group of people, all of whom had been student activists in West Germany around 1968, came together to reminisce about what the revolt of those years meant to them in retrospect. Twenty years after the events, ‘1968’ had become a symbolic shorthand for a major moment of political and cultural upheaval, one that was commemorated around the globe in the late 1980s.¹ The former activists, most of them in their forties or early fifties, got together at an educational institution in Bad Godesberg, a wealthy neighbourhood in the capital Bonn, to relive their personal experiences with the student movement and to take stock of the ways in which it had transformed West German society. During the conference, Josef Heichrich (‘Jupp’) Darchinger, one of the most famous political photographers of the Federal Republic, documented the proceedings and took cheerful group photographs.² Moreover, the gathering generated considerable media interest. West Germany’s prime television newscasts showed clips from the day, and most of the major daily and weekly papers featured reports about the meeting. A few months later, the ZDF, one of the country’s public service television channels, showed a widely viewed documentary about the political trajectories of some of those who had attended, sparking another wave of extensive public commentary about this particular group of former activists.³ The heightened media interest was because those who met in Bonn in 1988 were unusual ‘68ers—a term that had become common to describe social actors who had been young activists around 1968 and still embodied the spirit of these years.⁴ Contrary to the ‘68er archetypes featured in most of the commemorative ¹ Timothy S. Brown, 1968. Transnational and Global Perspectives, Version: 1.0, in: DocupediaZeitgeschichte, 11.06.2012, URL: http://docupedia.de/zg/1968?oldid=84582 (accessed on 10 April 2014). ² As part of its vast Jupp Darchinger photographic collection, the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) holds dozens of negatives of photographs he took on the day. One of his group photographs was published on the cover of RCDS Magazin no. 5 (1988); on Darchinger’s career, see ‘Das Auge von Bonn’, Der Spiegel, 46 (1997), 52–3. ³ ZDF, Bonn direkt, 15 May 1988; Gunter Hofmann, ‘Nach links Flagge zeigen’, Die Zeit, 21 (20 May 1988); Oliver Tolmein, ‘Die “alternativen 68er Sieger” treffen sich’, tageszeitung (17 May 1988), 5; Helmut Lölhöffel, ‘Unaufhaltsamer Aufstieg der Alternativ-68er’, Frankfurter Rundschau (17 May 1988); Heiko Gebhardt, ‘Wir waren Demokraten’, Stern (19 May 1988); also Martin Stallmann, Die Erfindung von ‘1968’: Der studentische Protest im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen 1977–1998 (Göttingen, 2017), 142. Heinz Hemming/Werner A. Perger, Die anderen 68er: Dutschkes Gegenspieler und was aus ihnen wurde, Dokumentation, BRD 1988, 43’, first shown on ZDF, 4 August 1988, 10.15 p.m. ⁴ June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society (Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 15–16. The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany. Anna von der Goltz, Oxford University Press (2021). © Anna von der Goltz. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849520.003.0001 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 2   ‘ reports about the student movement that had begun to appear in the run-up to the twentieth anniversary, they had not been involved in the Socialist German Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS), the radical left-wing group that had been at the forefront of protest in the late 1960s. Nor had they lived in the infamous Kommune 1, one of the Federal Republic’s first experiments with communal living, whose inhabitants were household names.⁵ Instead, they were Christian Democrats—and prominent ones at that. Between the mid-1960s and late 1970s, all those who later gathered in Bonn had been politically active in the Association of Christian Democratic Students (Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten, RCDS), a national political student group founded in 1951 that was closely affiliated with the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU).⁶ They had thus been active at a time when the radical Left had questioned the very foundations of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and defied the ‘establishment’ in highly visible and provocative ways. They had one more thing in common: since 1968, many of them had successfully entered the political institutions of the Federal Republic, particularly those in the hands of the Christian Democrats, who had returned to power in 1982. The television documentary about them included an interview with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in which he praised these particular ‘68ers for having carried fresh ideas into his own party.⁷ At this point, many of those who gathered in Bonn indeed held high-ranking posts in the CDU/CSU, in the capital’s political bureaucracy, or in one of the state capitals. They were men—for almost all those in attendance were male—like Wulf Schönbohm (b. 1941), who headed the CDU’s powerful policy and planning division; Peter Radunski (b. 1939), who was the party’s number three and chief campaign strategist; Peter Gauweiler (b. 1949), who was Secretary of State in the State Interior Ministry in Bavaria; Horst Teltschik (b. 1940), who was a key aide to the Chancellor and his ‘clandestine Foreign Minister’; and Friedbert Pflüger (b. 1955), who was a few years younger than the others but already served as press secretary to Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker.⁸ The television documentary named them ‘Dutschke’s adversaries’ to highlight the fact that, as students, some of them had gone face to face with Rudi Dutschke, the iconic ⁵ Detlef Siegfried, ‘Stars der Revolte: Die Kommune 1’, in Medien und Imagepolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Deutschland, Europa, USA, edited by Daniela Münkel and Lu Seegers (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 229–45. ⁶ RCDS members were not automatically members of the CDU/CSU and the group was nominally independent, but it had a close relationship to the Christian Democrats, received some party funding, and was generally thought of as the CDU/CSU’s student arm. For an organizational overview written by a former RCDS national chair, see Johannes Weberling, Für Freiheit und Menschenrechte: Der Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS), 1945–1986 (Düsseldorf, 1990). ⁷ Hemming/Perger, Die anderen 68er. ⁸ Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1982–1990, vol. 6 (Munich, 2006), 182. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  3 Illustration 0.1 Group photograph of the self-described ‘Alternative ‘68ers’, Bonn, May 1988. (J.H. Darchinger/Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) figurehead of SDS. The group photographs taken in Bonn showed them lined up under a banner that said simply ‘The alternative ‘68ers’.⁹ In a speech he gave at the conference and in interviews with the press, Schönbohm, who had been national chair of RCDS at the height of the student revolt in 1967/68, justified why they had the right to claim 1968 for themselves. ‘Whether left-wingers or conservatives, we all had the feeling at the time that something had to happen. That the dreadful social paralysis of the end of the 1960s had to come to an end. That through commitment it was possible to change something.’¹⁰ ‘But we were completely isolated inside the universities’, he went on, ‘because we were the only political student group that rejected the revolutionarysocialist utopia of SDS. [ . . . ] We wanted reform and not a revolution’, he declared.¹¹ Since then, the left-wing student movement had realized none of its actual political goals, including the system’s revolutionary transformation, he opined. Instead, its effects had been mostly cultural. ⁹ The name was a nod to the term ‘alternative’ that they had used to demarcate themselves from the Left since the 1960s—and one that was also popular on the Left in the 1970s. ¹⁰ Quoted in ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin, 33 (12 August 1988), 10. ¹¹ Schönbohm Private Papers, ‘Die alternativen “68er” – was bleibt von der APO-Zeit?’, MS (15 May 1988). OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 4   ‘ Schönbohm had clearly done his research. The notion that the revolt had set a cultural revolution in motion, transforming authoritarian and patriarchal societies into ones with flatter hierarchies, greater pluralism of lifestyles, and more participation from below, had begun to dominate western commemorations of 1968 in the 1980s—and it has had remarkable staying power.¹² The balance sheet of the centre-right was directly reversed, Schönbohm suggested. ‘In our case it is the other way around: we achieved a lot politically, but little culturally.’ Invoking a famous quotation by Dutschke, he declared gleefully that they had been particularly successful at ‘marching through the institutions’ of the Bonn Republic and were now ‘well-established’. Their former opponents, on the other hand, were in crisis, he contended: out of power in Bonn and overtaken by the Zeitgeist. ‘All the glamour is gone’, Schönbohm, who had often felt on the margins around 1968, concluded with belated satisfaction.¹³ A few months later, a multi-page spread on the ‘68ers of the CDU’ in the weekly Die Zeit featured the bearded former RCDS chair in a leather jacket and introduced him to the paper’s mostly left-liberal readers as ‘the Lenin of the CDU’.¹⁴ What are we to make of these retrospective political claims and generational (self-)representations that suggest that centre-right students had played major roles around 1968 and been deeply affected by these years? Was this mere political posturing at a time of Christian Democratic hegemony? A brazen attempt to appropriate one of the key moments of the Left and to reinterpret democratic agency in the history of the Federal Republic? An invention of tradition with no grounds in lived reality? This book is an attempt to engage with these questions. However, it is also much more than that. This is a history of 1968 and its afterlives told from a new perspective. The Other ‘68ers sheds light on a neglected aspect of one of the major moments of Germany’s late twentieth century. At the core of this study are young activists from RCDS and from groups affiliated with the German Student Union (Deutsche Studentenunion, DSU), a centre-right umbrella group founded on campuses across the country in 1967/68. As such, it is a book about a political minority, albeit a vocal one. Even at this moment of political upheaval, only a small minority of students (around 5 per cent) was politically active. Even fewer were members of student groups of the centre-right. There were approximately 300,000 students at West German universities in the second half of the 1960s, and only about 2,300 of them were members of RCDS—less than 1 per cent of the student population.¹⁵ ¹² ‘Wir 68er waren alle ganz anders’, interview with Tilman Fichter and Wulf Schönbohm, conducted by Werner A. Perger, Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 10 April 1988; Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL, 2002); Silja Behre, Bewegte Erinnerung: Deutungskämpfe um ‘1968’ in deutsch-französischer Perspektive (Tübingen, 2016). ¹³ Schönbohm Private Papers, ‘Die alternativen “68er” – was bleibt von der APO-Zeit?’, MS (15 May 1988). ¹⁴ ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin, 33 (12 August 1988), 10. ¹⁵ René Ahlberg, ‘Die politische Konzeption des Sozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes’, Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament B20/68 (15 May 1968), 3–4; Konrad Jarausch, Deutsche Studenten 1800–1970 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 232. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  5 Much the same can be said of their main opponents, however. The strength of the student Left should not be overestimated either, in spite of the importance much of the scholarship has accorded to them. SDS may have come to symbolize student protest around 1968, but, prior to 1967, it was only the third largest political student group in West Germany. Before June of that year, SDS had merely around 1,200 members. Even at the height of its popularity in 1967/ 8, the membership of SDS never exceeded 2,500, meaning that fewer than 1 per cent of West German students belonged to the radical group.¹⁶ In terms of membership, then, RCDS and SDS were approximately the same size around 1968. Despite this, we know hardly anything about the former’s role during these years. This is not an organizational history of RCDS and like-minded groups. It is a broader cultural history of politics around 1968. Its subjects are centre-right activists—their ideas, experiences, and memories. The book examines both what they did around 1968 and what they later thought they had done in those years. It interweaves individual voices with the archival record; it combines elements of a ‘collective biography’ of a group of people, who dedicated much of their lives to politics, with an in-depth study of the ideas and repertoires of centre-right students in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.¹⁷ In line with much of the recent literature, it thus adopts an extended periodization of 1968. While eschewing fixed chronological markers, ‘1968’ here denotes roughly the period between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, when centre-right activists engaged most closely, indeed often obsessively, with the student Left.¹⁸ Similarly, it does not use a fixed age bracket—e.g. the cohort born between 1938 and 1948 that is often used to establish who counts as a ‘68er¹⁹—to determine who the other ‘68ers were. It studies activists who played notable roles in centre-right groups during the extended 1968 moment, with a special focus on those who later claimed that these years had meant something to them.²⁰ ¹⁶ Ahlberg, ‘politische Konzeption’; Andrea Wienhaus, Bildungswege zu ‘1968’: Eine Kollektivbiografie des Sozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes (Bielefeld, 2014). ¹⁷ Paul Sturges, ‘Collective biography in the 1980s’, Biography 6, 4 (1983), 316–32; for Germany, Dorothee Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins: Der Jahrgang 1949 in der DDR. Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie (Berlin, 2002); Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (Cambridge, MA, 2003). ¹⁸ This is similar to Timothy Brown’s periodization, who defines 1968 as lasting from 1962–78. Timothy S. Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (New York, 2013). In French historiography, the notion of the ‘ “68 years” lasting from the end of the Algerian war until François Mitterand’s election is similarly influential. See Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Forunel (eds.), 68: Une Histoire Collective (1962–1981) (Paris, 2008). ¹⁹ Heinz Bude, Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt, 1997); Christina von Hodenberg, Das andere Achtundsechzig: Gesellschaftsgeschichte einer Revolte (Munich, 2018). ²⁰ Those interviewed for this book, like those who later defined themselves publicly as ‘68ers of the centre-right—were born between 1937 and 1955 and thus included several different micro-cohorts. On the role of micro-cohorts in social movements, see Nancy Whittier, ‘Political Generations, MicroCohorts and the Transformation of Social Movements’, American Sociological Review, 62 (1997), 760–78. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 6   ‘ This book asks a number of simple but important questions about these individuals and this period: what was it like to experience 1968 on the other side of the political spectrum in West Germany? Did centre-right activists share the New Left critique of advanced industrial society and German authoritarianism, and how did they relate to activists of the Left and to the broader student movement? What were their views of the older generation, whom young New Leftists often condemned for their association with the Nazi past and what they regarded as their failure to build a truly democratic society after 1945? How did these young activists respond to the broader social and cultural transformations of this dynamic decade? How did they view West Germany’s—and their own—place in the wider world at a time when activists’ political imaginations were increasingly global? What was their relationship to the CDU/CSU, and what role have they played in (West) German politics since 1968? And in what ways have they shaped the memory wars that continue to wage about this period in German history? 1968 and Histories of the Federal Republic The years around 1968 are among the most closely examined periods in Germany’s twentieth century. In 2018, the fiftieth anniversary demonstrated once again that public and scholarly interest in the protest movements of this era remains high. A wave of new publications appeared, and numerous public commemorations were held. As in previous years, however, the focus was predominantly on the role of the Left.²¹ Historical research on 1968 began in earnest in the 1990s, and we now have a vast international literature on the subject, one that has examined the revolt through a number of different frameworks, ranging from political and social histories that have placed 1968 in broader temporal and societal contexts, to histories of gender, cultural histories, histories of emotions, and transnational and global histories.²² The scholarship has extended beyond a ²¹ Heinz Bude, Adorno für Ruinenkinder: Eine Geschichte von 1968 (Munich, 2018); Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der 68er Bewegung (Stuttgart, 2018). Earlier examples of otherwise exhaustive monographs on 1968 that do not touch on centre-right activists are Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties; and Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ‘68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford, 2007). However, one major recent contribution to the literature explicitly includes ‘other’ experiences of 1968. It shifts the focus to universities beyond the two capitals of the revolt, Frankfurt and West Berlin, looks at older people’s attitudes toward the student movement, and discusses the role of (left-wing) women. von Hodenberg, Das andere Achtundsechzig. ²² Christina von Hodenberg and Detlef Siegfried (eds.), Wo ‘1968’ liegt: Reform und Revolte in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2006); Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Karl-Christian Lammers (eds.), Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (Hamburg, 2000); Kristina Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provokation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik und in Frankreich 1968–1976 (Frankfurt and New York, 2002); Ute Kätzel, Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin, 2002); Joachim Scharloth, 1968: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte (Munich, 2011); Joachim Häberlen, The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left: West Germany OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  7 sole focus on students and the dynamics of protest, with responses by other social actors and the state taking centre stage in more recent studies of these years.²³ The first way in which this book contributes to this rich literature is by redirecting our historical gaze to take in the spectrum of political diversity characterizing the West German student experience of 1968. In doing so, it shifts attention back to the student movement and the political conflicts of these years. It thus returns to familiar territory. However, it examines a history that we think we already understand fully from a perspective to which we are unaccustomed, thereby opening up new vistas. Whereas we have fine-grained analyses of the West German (student) Left around 1968, including collective portraits and individual biographies of some of its protagonists, there have been very few studies of activists of the right.²⁴ The few exceptions that exist to date are intellectual histories that trace the reinvigoration and realignment of West German conservative thought through its leading thinkers’ opposition to 1968. These works have shown that the student revolt sparked a flurry of activity among conservative intellectuals, including the founding of a number of influential new publications, such as Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s Criticón and Klaus Motschmann’s Konservativ heute, as well as of influential conferences and discussion circles.²⁵ For the most part, existing studies focus on political figures who 1968–1984 (Cambridge, 2018); Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich, 2008); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ, 2009); Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC, 2012); Macartney, Alexander Finn, War in the Postwar: Japan and West Germany Protest the Vietnam War and the Global Strategy of Imperialism (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2019). ²³ Knud Andresen, Gebremste Radikalisierung: Die IG Metall und ihre Jugend 1968 bis in die 1980er Jahre (Göttingen, 2016); Klaus Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: Zwischen Bürgerkrieg und Innerer Sicherheit: Die turbulenten sechziger Jahre (Paderborn, 2003); Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (New York, 2012); Richard Vinen, The Long ‘68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (London, 2018). ²⁴ Belinda Davis, The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962–1983 (Cambridge, forthcoming); Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann: Avantgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen, 2009); Michaela Karl, Rudi Dutschke: Revolutionär ohne Revolution (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). A few German language studies and edited collections have begun to examine the right, though rarely in ways that put activists at the centre. See e.g. Massimiliano Livi, Daniel Schmidt and Michael Sturm (eds.), Die 70er Jahre als schwarzes Jahrzehnt: Politisierungs- und Mobilisierungsprozesse zwischen rechter Mitte und extremer Rechter in Italien und der Bundesrepublik 1967–1982 (Bielefeld, 2010); Manuel Seitenbecher, ‘Die Reform als Revolution in verträglicher Dosis: Der Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS) während der 68erJahre an der FU Berlin’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 6 (2010), 505–26; Olaf Bartz, Konservative Studenten und die Studentenbewegung: Die ‘Kölner Studenten-Union’, in: Westfälische Forschung, 48 (1998), 241–56; and, most importantly, Nikolai Wehrs, Der Protest der Professoren: Der ‘Bund der Freiheit der Wissenschaft’ in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen, 2014), a study of conservative academics around 1968. On the contrary, there is a very robust literature on US conservative movements, in the 1960s and beyond, and this book takes important cues from some of these works. An early example was David Farber and Jeff Roche (eds.), The Conservative Sixties (New York, 2003). A French example, though not focused on students, is François Audigier, Histoire Du SAC: La Part Dʼombre Du Gaullisme (Paris, 2003). ²⁵ Jerry Z. Muller, ‘German Neoconservatism and the History of the Bonn Republic, 1968 to 1985’, German Politics and Society, 18, 1 (2000), 1–32; Axel Schildt, ‘ “Die Kräfte der Gegenreform sind auf OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 8   ‘ turned right in the wake of 1968—liberal intellectuals who became liberalconservatives because they rejected the ‘excesses’ of the student movement or more clearly reactionary figures, who began to embrace a radicalized and explicitly anti-liberal conservatism during these years. Some recent works have also dealt with political opposition to the 1968 Left on the far right and traced the intellectual roots of the present-day European radical Right all the way back to the 1960s when its fierce opposition to egalitarianism and multiculturalism began to take shape.²⁶ This book tells a different story: not just one of conservative resistance and reaction, but also one of participation, engagement, and interaction. It focuses on young activists of the centre-right, who were often closely involved in the student movement. Their views represented a significant portion of the student body of the late 1960s, and, especially during the early Kohl era, they were far more politically influential than the radical Right. The protagonists of this book were a part of 1968. They participated in many of the key protest events and embraced some of the characteristic practices of these years and, in more than one instance, were swept along by the anti-authoritarian spirit that animated the broader revolt. These other ‘68ers, as they are called here, reacted to the Left but without necessarily championing a reactionary politics, especially in the early phase of student unrest. Second, by foregrounding the role of centre-right students around 1968, this book joins recent works that have revisited the extraordinary role that Christian Democracy played in the history of postwar Europe.²⁷ It would indeed be difficult to overstate the influence of Christian Democrats in the continent’s history after 1945, especially in the Federal Republic. Apart from the Social-Liberal interlude between breiter Front angetreten”. Zur konservativen Tendenzwende in den Siebzigerjahren’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 44 (2004), 449–7; Stefan Winckler, Felix Dirsch, and Hartmuth Becker (eds.), Die 68er und ihre Gegner: Der Widerstand gegen die Kulturrevolution, (Graz and Stuttgart, 2004); Riccardo Bavaj, ‘Turning “Liberal Critics” into “Liberal-Conservatives”: Kurt Sontheimer and the Re-Coding of the Political Culture in the Wake of the Student Revolt of “1968” ’, German Politics and Society, 27, 1 (2009), 39–59; Dominik Geppert and Jens Hacke (eds.), Streit um den Staat: Intellektuelle Debatten in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen, 2008); for a French example of this approach, see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, 2009). ²⁶ For France and Italy, Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007); Andrea Mammone, Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy (New York and Cambridge, 2015); for Germany, Quinn Slobodian, ‘Germany’s 1968 and Its Enemies’, AHR, 123, 3, (2018), 749–52; Volker Weiß has recently cautioned against the tendency to write the history of the right as a simple reaction to 1968. He emphasizes that (West) Germany’s ‘New Right’ had much deeper roots in German history. Volker Weiß, Die autoritäre Revolte: Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes (Stuttgart, 2017), 28 and 37. ²⁷ Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (eds.), Political Catholicism in Europe 1918–1965 (Oxford, 1996); Frank Bösch, Die Adenauer-CDU: Gründung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei 1945–1969 (Stuttgart, 2001); Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge, 2007); Frank Bösch, ‘Die Krise als Chance. Die Neuformierung der Christdemokraten in den siebziger Jahren’, in Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte, edited by Konrad Jarausch (Göttingen, 2008), 296–309; Martina Steber, Die Hüter der Begriffe: Politische Sprachen des Konservativen in Großbritannien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1980 (Berlin, 2017); James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 182–226. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  9 1969 and 1982, the CDU/CSU governed the ‘old’ Federal Republic throughout its entire existence. Nevertheless, historians of the postwar have often focused their attention on groups or movements that were more flamboyant, not least the leftwing radicals of the 1960s. Rather than viewing Christian Democracy as a straightforward restoration of traditional conservatism, however, newer works treat it as a remarkably flexible ideological formation, a dynamic and evolving phenomenon that shared more common ground with the Left than once assumed.²⁸ This book builds on these insights. It sheds fresh light on how West Germany’s centre-right dealt with the crisis of hegemony and political identity it experienced in the wake of 1968, how it coped with generational change in its ranks, how it transformed and modernized after losing power at the national level for the first time in 1969, and how it managed to re-emerge so successfully in the 1980s. This study thus helps us to understand why the age of Christian Democracy was interrupted but never really ended in the Federal Republic—at least until now.²⁹ Third, by revisiting the idea that 1968 represented a watershed of sorts, The Other ‘68ers contributes to recent attempts to historicize the ‘old’ Federal Republic—a distinct entity that, like its neighbour to the east, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), ceased to exist with the end of the Cold War.³⁰ Until recently, the years around 1968 were often interpreted as the ‘second founding’ of the Federal Republic, as the moment when an authoritarian society shed its illiberal tendencies and filled an imposed democratic order with life.³¹ As the political scientist and left-wing public intellectual Claus Leggewie put it in 1987: ‘The symbolic number ‘68 symbolizes a potentiated 1949, the antifascist ²⁸ Martin Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy’, in European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, IN, 2003), 43–67; Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford, 2017), 375. ²⁹ Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy’; Franz Walter and Frank Bösch, ‘Das Ende des christdemokratischen Zeitalters? Zur Zukunft eines Erfolgsmodells’, in Die CDU nach Kohl, edited by Tobias Dürr and Rüdiger Soldt (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 46–58. ³⁰ Frank Biess and Astrid Eckert, ‘Why Do We Need New Narratives for the History of the Federal Republic?’, Central European History, 52, 1 (2019), 1–18; Frank Bösch (ed.), A History Shared and Divided: East and West Germany since the 1970s (New York, 2018); Sonja Levsen and Cornelius Torp (eds.), Wo liegt die Bundesrepublik? Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die westdeutsche Geschichte (Göttingen, 2016); Frank Bajohr, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Claudia Kemper, and Detlef Siegfried (eds.), Mehr als eine Erzählung: Zeitgeschichtliche Perspektiven auf die Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2016). ³¹ Franz-Werner Kersting, Jürgen Reulecke, and Hans-Ulrich Thamer (eds.), Die zweite Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Generationswechsel und intellektuelle Wortergreifungen 1955 bis 1975 (Stuttgart, 2010); Clemens Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, and Michael Bock (eds.), Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus, and Karl Teppe (eds.), Demokratisierung und gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch: Die sechziger Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik (Paderborn, 2003). OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 10   ‘ re-establishment of the Federal Republic. The quasi-democracy released its children.’³² How exactly this post-fascist state turned into a stable liberal democracy in the space of just a few decades has been one of the guiding questions of most of the scholarship produced over the last thirty years. That the history of West Germany represented a remarkable democratic ‘success story’—a kind of Sonderweg in reverse—was the premise of many of the works produced from the 1980s into the 2000s. In this period, historians published a growing number of surveys and came up with a variety of closely related paradigms to describe the process of social and political transformation the Federal Republic underwent, be it ‘liberalization’, ‘Westernization’, or ‘recivilization’.³³ Many of the most influential works, however, downplayed the importance of 1968 in explaining the FRG’s transformation. They saw the events of these years at best as ‘surface froth’ produced by structural shifts underneath and pointed out that the protests involved only a tiny left-wing minority.³⁴ This study, by contrast, reasserts that political activism in 1968 mattered. The close involvement of the centre-right in this age of protest, which the book details, suggests that it was a broader and more consequential moment than much of this literature has allowed. At the same time, recent works have been right to be sceptical of the ‘success narrative’, pointing out the normative assumptions that underpinned this interpretation and all the ways in which many of united Germany’s most pressing problems had their roots in the Cold War-era FRG.³⁵ By emphasizing that the student movement mattered, this study does not seek to reify 1968 as the birthplace of authentic West German democracy. Rather, it takes its cues from more critical recent works by treating the process of West Germany’s liberalization and democratization not as a linear evolution, but as a far more winding and heavily contested one—and as one that was not just optimistic and forward-looking but ³² Claus Leggewie, Der Geist steht rechts: Ausflüge in die Denkfabriken der Wende (Berlin, 1987), 214. ³³ Manfred Görtemaker, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Von der Gründung bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 2004); Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik und ihren Anfängen (Stuttgart, 2006); Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Göttingen, 2002); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen: Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999); Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen. Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt, 1999); Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2: Deutsche Geschichte vom ‘Dritten Reich’ bis zur Wiedervereinigung (Munich, 2000); Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1955 (New York, 2006). ³⁴ Similarly, many influential European surveys are sceptical of the idea that the Western 1968 mattered. See e. g. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 390–421; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998), 322–4. ³⁵ Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich, 2009); Eckert and Biess, ‘Why Do We Need New Narratives’. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  11 driven by persistent fears about the fragility of democracy in Germany.³⁶ As we shall see, liberal and illiberal impulses were often present simultaneously—on both ends of the political spectrum. Such an approach allows us to comprehend much more fully, and in a much more nuanced way, exactly how this watershed moment transformed West German society. 1968 was far from a smooth transition to cultural democratization. West Germany only became a stable democratic order as a result of fierce public disputes in which the stakes were high.³⁷ The struggle over what democracy meant and how to guard it did not just play out in the realm of intellectual debate. It was an everyday lived experience for many, including the protagonists of this book, who saw their own biographies as being intimately connected to the fate of West German democracy. The Other ‘68ers and Histories of Generation The book does not just provide a new historical perspective on Germany’s 1968 and on the political culture of the Federal Republic. It also offers a larger contribution to, and implicit critique of, broader ways in which some historians have written contemporary German history. Its biggest conceptual contribution lies in rethinking how to write a history of generation, which has been one of the most influential approaches to twentieth-century German history in the past two decades. Germany has been referred to as the ‘country of generations’, because the many social and political ruptures in its history made the experiences and mentalities of different age cohorts diverge more starkly than in countries with more continuous political traditions.³⁸ Historians have been drawn to generation to explain the impact of political ruptures on individuals and to chart change over time.³⁹ This ³⁶ Frank Biess, Republik der Angst: Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Hamburg, 2019); Christian Schletter, Grabgesang der Demokratie: Die Debatten über das Scheitern der bundesdeutschen Demokratie von 1965 bis 1985 (Göttingen, 2015). ³⁷ Dirk A. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2006); Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begründung der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2006); Geppert and Hacke, Streit um den Staat; Frank Biess, ‘Thinking after Hitler: The new intellectual history of the Federal Republic of Germany’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 221–45. ³⁸ Heinz Bude, ‘Die 50er Jahre im Spiegel der Flakhelfer- und der 68er-Generation’, in Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Reulecke and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich, 2003), 145. ³⁹ Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict (Cambridge, 1995); Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996); Ulrich Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Reulecke and Müller-Luckner, Generationalität, 95–115; Michael Wildt, Generation of the Unbound: The Leadership Corps of the Reich Security Main Office (Jerusalem, 2002); Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships (Oxford, 2011); Hans Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 5: Bundesrepublik und DDR 1949–1990 (Munich, 2008); Thomas A. Kohut, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2012); Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (eds.), Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 12   ‘ trope is intellectually seductive. It allows us to discuss big structural developments in conjunction with the ways in which individual actors were shaped by and effected events. It helps historians craft neat periodizations and compelling narratives explaining not only how the character of Germany changed multiple times throughout the twentieth century ‘but also the very character of people themselves’, as Mary Fulbrook eloquently phrased it in her book Dissonant Lives.⁴⁰ One downside of this approach, however, is that it often tends to generalize the experiences and features of a particular subset of a cohort and to portray them as the universal characteristics of all those who were the same age. To put it simply, in many generational histories one uniform generation succeeds another. This leaves little room for understanding diversity, and often division, within generational cohorts.⁴¹ In histories of 1968 this tendency has been particularly pronounced—and lately arguably buttressed by the global and transnational turn; the ‘68ers appear as the first ‘global generation’, a worldwide community of young activists with near-uniform ideas and traits.⁴² Histories of 1968 in the Federal Republic have not just tended to portray the ‘68ers as a uniform collective. They have focused, in particular, on intergenerational conflict—be it on the ‘68ers’ critique of their parents for their conduct during the Nazi years, or on the frequently contentious relationship between the ‘68ers and the so-called ‘45ers, an influential generation of intellectuals who lived through Germany’s wartime defeat as young adults and felt that they had a special stake in the stability of the new state.⁴³ This book, by contrast, focuses first and foremost on intragenerational debates and clashes. We are accustomed to viewing the years around 1968 as a period of heightened political contestation, of spirited intellectual debates, and heated confrontations between individuals with different political views and philosophies. The key argument here is that this contestation also played out among the young and even among students. The Other ‘68ers Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005) see also Holger Nehring, ‘ “Generation” as Political Argument in the West European Protest Movements in the 1960s’, in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke, 2007), 57–78. ⁴⁰ Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives, 2; for a persuasive critique of the trope of generational change in histories of twentieth-century Germany, Ulrike Jureit, ‘Generation, Generationalität, Generationenforschung, Version: 2.0’, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 03.08.2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.1117.v2 ⁴¹ This is not just an issue in German history writing. See e.g. Chinese historian Wang Zheng’s critique of studies that have focused one-sidedly on Mao’s ‘Red Guard Generation’ at the expense of those who were critical of this project of social transformation. Abosede George, Clive Glaser, Margaret D. Jacobs, Chitra Joshi, Emily Marker, Alexandra Walsham, Wang Zheng, and Bernd Weisbrod, ‘AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations’, AHR, 123, 5 (2018), 1507–8. ⁴² Beate Fietze, ‘1968 als Symbol der ersten globalen Generation’, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 3 (1997), 365–86; Edmunds and Turner, Generations, Culture and Society. ⁴³ Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit, 1945 bis 1973 (Göttingen, 2006); Moses, German Intellectuals; Wehrs, Der Protest der Professoren; for reflections on these and other ways of analysing generation around 1968, see Anna von der Goltz (ed.), Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation: Conflicts of ‘Generation Building’ and Europe’s ‘1968’ (Göttingen, 2011). OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  13 asserts that political conflict was indeed key in 1968—but not just among activists on the Left and their older antagonists in the media and other positions of authority, but also among student activists of a similar age. In shifting our gaze toward political conflicts among the ‘68ers, this book—like most other histories of generation—takes important cues from Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Mannheim, a German sociologist, was born in Budapest in 1893 and experienced the tumultuous first few decades of Europe’s twentieth century as a young man. Writing in 1928, at a time when youth was a particularly salient political category, he came up with a more nuanced and constructivist understanding of generations to critique the notion of naturally recurring generational cycles that had been common until then. His ideas have structured most generational histories since.⁴⁴ Mannheim’s theory of generations sought to explain how ‘[e]arly impressions tend to coalesce into a natural view of the world’. Members of a generation were ‘unwittingly determined’ by the natural world view that they acquired in youth, he argued. Mannheim distinguished between what he termed ‘generation location’ (put simply, the mere fact of having been born or educated in a particular region at a particular time), ‘actual generation’, and ‘generation unit’: Youth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways, constitute separate generation units.⁴⁵ Most historians of modern Germany who have examined generations have dealt with what Mannheim would have called ‘generation units’. They have focused on particular (and often quite small) communities whose members not only shared a set of age-specific experiences, but who also drew very similar conclusions from these and conceived of themselves as members of a generational collective.⁴⁶ However, such treatments frequently overlook that Mannheim’s model provided for the formation of multiple generation units within any one context. ‘[W]ithin any generation there can exist a number of differentiated, ⁴⁴ Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen’; Gabriele Rosenthal, ‘Zur interaktionellen Konstitution von Generationen: Generationenabfolgen in Familien von 1890 bis 1970 in Deutschland’, in Generationen-Beziehungen, Austausch und Tradierung, edited by Jürgen Mansel, Gabriele Rosenthal, and Angelika Tölke (Opladen, 1997), 57–73. On the history of the concept, see Ohad Parnes, Ulrike Vedder, and Stefan Willer (eds.), Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2008). ⁴⁵ Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, in idem, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by Paul Kecskemeti (London, 1952), 276–322, here 304. ⁴⁶ Herbert, Best; Wildt, Generation of the Unbound; Kohut, A German Generation; Christoph Cornelißen (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation (Berlin, 2010). OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 14   ‘ antagonistic generation units’, he theorized. These were ‘oriented toward each other’, but ‘only in the sense of fighting one another’.⁴⁷ Rather than being marked by a ‘unitary Zeitgeist’, each era was therefore defined by ‘mutually antagonistic impulses’.⁴⁸ This insight has rarely been reflected in German histories of generation, which have overwhelmingly treated them as homogeneous entities.⁴⁹ Although the period around 1968 is often described as one of unchecked leftwing hegemony, this dualism between different groups of activists—or ‘generation units’ in Mannheim’s terminology—was, in fact, a defining feature of West German student politics at this time, as this book argues.In focusing on intragenerational relations among different kinds of ‘68ers, this study thus takes important cues from a commonly overlooked aspect of Mannheim’s conceptualization of generation, but it does not use it as a theoretical corset. Newer works on generation have done much to historicize the very assumptions on which Mannheim’s theory was based and have shown that his model privileged young, bourgeois, politicized, male intellectuals, who often outlined eloquently how major political caesuras had affected them—making it tempting for historians to adopt the stories they told as scholarly interpretations.⁵⁰ They established that Mannheim defined what constituted a generation in very specific—and ultimately quite narrow— terms. The experiences of more ‘silent’ actors, or social experiences that were not strictly speaking political, often do not fit as neatly into his categories.⁵¹ Building on these insights, The Other ‘68ers therefore does not just focus on those who were very vocal about what they had done during the years of the student movement— such as the men who met in Bonn in May 1988. Instead, the analysis also includes centre-right activists who had played important roles around 1968 but have been more hesitant in giving their experiences generational form, notably women activists and Christian Democratic ‘renegades’. These recent works on generation have also pointed out that Mannheim’s concept was a product of its time in that it relied on interwar ideas of developmental psychology. According to the sociologist, identities were indelibly stamped by (political) experiences individuals acquired around the age of seventeen. The ⁴⁷ Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, 306–7. ⁴⁸ Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, 318. ⁴⁹ The only comparable approach by a historian of Germany is A. Dirk Moses’s influential study of the ‘45ers, which focuses on the antagonism between two key West German intellectuals, the sociologists Jürgen Habermas and Wilhelm Hennis. It is primarily an intellectual history, however, and closely focused on these two individuals and their postwar body of thought. Moses, German Intellectuals. ⁵⁰ Charles Tilly, Stories, Identities and Political Change (Oxford, 2002), x. ⁵¹ Jürgen Zinnecker, ‘ “Das Problem der Generationen”: Überlegungen zu Karl Mannheims kanonischem Text’, in Reulecke and Müller-Luckner, Generationalität, 33–58; Eva-Maria Silies, Liebe, Lust und Last: Die Pille als weibliche Generationserfahrung in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen, 2010); Christina Benninghaus, ‘Das Geschlecht der Generation. Zum Zusammenhang von Generationalität und Männlichkeit um 1930’, in: Jureit and Wildt, Generationen, 127–58; for a specific critique of the limitations of generational histories of 1968, see Maud Anne Bracke, ‘One-dimensional conflict? Recent scholarship on 1968 and the limitations of the generation concept’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47, 3 (2012), 638–46. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  15 impact of earlier (or later) experiences, the fact that identities hardly remain static throughout an individual’s life course, or understanding how and why people sustain a sense of belonging to a generational collective over time was of less interest to him. The most theoretically rigorous and innovative works on generation produced in the last few years—many of them by historians of Germany— have done much to deconstruct Mannheim’s theory and put it back together in different forms by drawing on insights from neighbouring disciplines to capture a wider range of (generational) experiences than his model allowed. Moreover, these works no longer treat generations simply as objective ‘things’, as essentialist entities that remain stable throughout the lives of their members and explain everything about individual trajectories. Instead, they treat them as contingent communities bound by affect and imagination that require communication to generate and sustain a sense of belonging over time.⁵² This book builds on these studies in adopting a more constructivist understanding of generation. Rather than simply establishing the other ‘68ers’ historical agency—asserting their role in the history of the Federal Republic, in other words—it also analyses their generational subjectivities and self-fashioning. Why and how their student experiences remained relevant to them in an everchanging present is one of its main subjects. This book is thus based on the premise that, like all self-conscious generation units, the other ‘68ers were at once a real and an imagined community, and it tries to disentangle the two realms only as much as possible. This is not to suggest that centre-right activists simply invented a self-serving history of collective action and participation in 1968.⁵³ As we shall see, the stories they told were always tied to actual experiences in the 1960s and 1970s, different elements of which they chose to accentuate at different times. ⁵² Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Generation und Generationalität in der Neueren Geschichte’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (2005), B8, 3–9; Ulrike Jureit, Generationenforschung (Göttingen, 2006); Lovell, Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe; Björn Bohnenkamp, Till Manning, and Eva-Maria Silies (eds.), Generation als Erzählung: Neue Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Deutungsmuster (Göttingen, 2009); Lutz Niethammer, ‘Die letzte Gemeinschaft: Über die Konstruierbarkeit von Generationen und ihre Grenzen’, in Historische Beiträge zur Generationsforschung, edited by Bernd Weisbrod (Göttingen, 2009), 13–38; Andreas Petersen, Radikale Jugend: Die sozialistische Jugendbewegung in der Schweiz 1900–1930: Radikalisierungsanalyse und Generationentheorie (Zurich, 2001); Beate Fietze, Historische Generationen: Über einen sozialen Mechanismus kulturellen Wandels und kollektiver Kreativität (Bielefeld, 2009); the specific German contributions to the historiography of generation are outlined eloquently by Bernd Weisbrod in a 2018 AHR conversation. Abosede George, Clive Glaser, Margaret D. Jacobs, Chitra Joshi, Emily Marker, Alexandra Walsham, Wang Zheng, and Bernd Weisbrod, ‘AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations’, AHR, 123, 5 (2018), 1505–46; on the dangers of reifying identities, such as generation, and using them uncritically as categories of analysis, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity” ’, Theory and Society, 29, 1 (2000), 1–47, here 5. ⁵³ This is in contrast to the thought-provoking study on the afterlives of the French 1968 by Kristin Ross, who treats ‘generation’ as a political ploy by converts to liberalism that sought to detract from the revolutionary aspirations of the movement. Ross, 1968 and Its Afterlives. I build on Lutz Niethammer here, who points out that the constructedness of generations as symbolic homes has its limits. Niethammer, ‘Die letzte Gemeinschaft’. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 16   ‘ In short, The Other ‘68ers does not simply paint a collective portrait of centreright activists, one that illustrates who they were, what they did in 1968, and how those years shaped them as political actors. It pays equally close attention to how they made sense of their experiences with activism, the stories they told in retrospect (and the ones they preferred not to tell), and how and why what they selected as relevant about these years changed with time. In doing so, it aims for a reflexive use of a notoriously slippery concept, even if it does not escape entirely the ambiguities of generation. Sources This book relies on a variety of sources to fulfil its different goals. It uses archival documents from twelve archives in Germany and the United States and from a number of private collections, many of them analysed here for the first time, to establish the contours of centre-right activism around 1968. Pamphlets, speeches, government and party documents, and newspaper and other media reports allow us to track what the other ‘68ers did in 1968, not least the manifold ways in which they related to the Left at the time. Posters, cartoons, and photographs provide insights into their aesthetic preferences and how they represented themselves to the outside world. Opinion polls and sociological studies from the period help to contextualize the views of students who were politically active. They also allow us to trace how generational interpretations shaped understandings of the student movement from the very beginning. Given that one of this book’s major goals is to understand what activists thought they were doing around 1968, at the time and with hindsight, personal testimonies are among the most important sources of this study. Some of its protagonists, particularly those who went on to pursue high-profile careers in politics, later published autobiographies or memoirs.⁵⁴ Others narrated their personal recollections of activism publicly, sometimes repeatedly throughout the decades, usually on the occasion of major anniversaries of 1968. Such testimonies have much to reveal about the meaning centre-right activists ascribed to 1968 and how they fit this period into their overall life story at different moments in time.⁵⁵ This study is not just based on written testimonies, however. It also makes use of more than two dozen oral history interviews with a sample of former centre-right ⁵⁴ Peter Radunski, Aus der politischen Kulisse: Mein Beruf zur Politik (Berlin/Kassel, 2014/15); Friedbert Pflüger, Ehrenwort: Das System Kohl und der Neubeginn (Munich, 2000); Horst Teltschik, 329 Tage: Innenansichten der Einigung (Berlin, 1991); Detlef Stronk, Berlin in den Achtziger Jahren: Im Brennpunkt der Deutsch-Deutschen Geschichte (Berlin, 2009). Others had written draft memoirs or autobiographical sketches that they had not published but were willing to share with me. ⁵⁵ Volker Depkat, ‘Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29, 3 (2003), 441–76; Volker Depkat, Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2007). OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  17 activists. Between 2008 and 2014, I travelled across the old Federal Republic, from Berlin to Bonn and from Munich to Hamburg, to record the memories of former centre-right activists. I first approached those who had been most visible— chairpersons or leading figures in RCDS or the Student Unions—especially those who had been active in the centres of left-wing protest and had therefore been at the forefront of engagement with the student movement; others I identified via snowball technique. When the stories my interviewees told me began to sound familiar, I sought out people whose names I had seen mentioned in documents from the period, but who had spoken less frequently about their roles on the centre-right, particularly women and activists whose political views shifted after 1968. During the semi-structured interviews that usually lasted between one-and-ahalf and three hours, I first allowed people to tell the story they wanted to tell, by inviting them to talk freely about their lives, how they got involved in student activism, and what they remembered about 1968.⁵⁶ I then followed up with questions about specific issues they had brought up, things other interviewees had told me or that I had seen in the archives, or about what seemed like inconsistencies in their stories. This technique generated rich information about 1968 and what these years have meant to activists of the centre-right. Like all other sources, however, oral history interviews have to be analysed with care. Interviewing people forty, and sometimes nearly fifty, years after the events meant that they talked about 1968 with great temporal distance and narrated the past through the prism of the present. People ‘tell the past as it appears to them’.⁵⁷ Their life stories were framed by a host of public representations of the student movement—and therefore by debates about a highly contested era in which they had often intervened themselves.⁵⁸ This book addresses this issue by using personal testimonies not so much to document what happened, but primarily to understand how the interviewees articulated subjective experiences of activism around 1968. Nevertheless, the interviews often also produced vivid descriptions of events and revealed crucial pieces of factual information that I then did my best to cross-reference with written sources from the period. In an effort to ensure readability and avoid repetition, the testimonies are used freely throughout the text, but they feature first and foremost as records of perceptions. As much as possible, I have contextualized them with other sources, including personal testimonies by the same people from earlier or later periods.⁵⁹ ⁵⁶ Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, 2016), 124. ⁵⁷ Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY, 1991), 52; also Abrams, Oral History Theory, 7, 90; Klatch, A Generation Divided, 13. ⁵⁸ For a discussion of similar methodological issues with autobiographies and memoirs, see Konrad Jarausch, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ, 2018). ⁵⁹ My methodology here thus differs from the one we adopted in our collectively written book on European activism around 1968. Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Anette Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968: OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 18   ‘ One additional factor ‘makes oral history different’, as oral history pioneer Alessandro Portelli put it: the historian is intimately involved in creating these sources in the first place.⁶⁰ The mere fact of my presence, including the assumptions my interviewees had about who I was, influenced how they told their stories. Many just seemed pleasantly surprised, perhaps even a bit flattered, that a German historian who was based abroad and had been born a decade after 1968 was interested in obscure details about their student days; some assumed that I had sought them out because I was politically sympathetic; others were guarded because I did not seem sympathetic enough.⁶¹ Even if I rarely discuss it explicitly in the chapters of the book, I have done my best to reflect on how these mutual perceptions—what oral historians call intersubjectivity—shaped the narratives.⁶² Interviewing historical actors inevitably means that one learns things that could not have been gleaned from the archival record or published memoirs alone. The interviews took place in a great variety of settings: in people’s private homes or in office suites or restaurants. I interviewed one former activist from West Berlin in an opulent private members’ club overlooking Berlin’s beautiful Gendarmenmarkt. Another, who was still visibly frail and hooked up to a medical device, I interviewed in the courtyard of a Bonn hospital where he had just undergone surgery. These starkly different settings alone—each chosen by the respective interviewee— provided information about these individuals before they even spoke. Beyond producing a narrative account of their political lives, such encounters yielded insights into who the other ‘68ers had become, how they chose to present themselves, what mattered to them, and how they lived. I may have only recorded what they said, but could not help to take note of small gestures—such as when one of them lit a cigar during the interview or when the wives of male interviewees came into the room to serve refreshments. All of this found its way into my analysis in one way or another.⁶³ Voices of Revolt (Oxford, 2013). That book relied overwhelmingly on oral testimonies. Almost all quotations from the interviews in this book are attributed to the interviewees by name. In a very few cases, I have anonymized the interviewees. This was done in cases where providing the interviewee’s name would not add much to the interpretation or the personal information conveyed might be embarrassing. ⁶⁰ Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 45–58. ⁶¹ Two instances highlight these differences in perception: one interviewee assumed I had been in RCDS and offered me help in getting this book published through the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the think tank affiliated with the CDU. Another interviewee told me that his partner had warned him against speaking to me because I wore a high-collared black coat in a photograph shown on my university’s web page—the implication being that I looked like a leftie. Regardless of such assumptions, I did my best to build rapport with all my interviewees, as it made for better interviews. For a far more extreme example of dealing with interviewees’ assumptions about an interviewer’s politics, see Kathleen Blee, ‘Evidence, Empathy and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan’, Journal of American History, 80, 2 (1993), 596–606; on the importance of building rapport also V.R. Yow, Recording Oral History (2005), 157–87. ⁶² Abrams, Oral History Theory, 62. ⁶³ On the importance of performance during an interview, see Abrams, Oral History Theory, 22 and 151. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  19 The interviewees’ very mode of talking about their lives was also instructive. With some exceptions, centre-right activists were less emphatically self-reflexive than activists of the Left for whom self-critique was an important part of the alternative culture they had helped to create. The other ‘68ers were also much more focused on traditional politics than activists of the Left, whom I had interviewed for a previous project. Left-wing activists often viewed the personal as political and therefore found it quite natural—or even imperative—to talk about their personal lives to a relative stranger.⁶⁴ Interviewing former centreright activists was a very different experience, but it was invaluable in helping me see them as three-dimensional characters whose subjectivity mattered. Regardless of what some of my interviewees may have tacitly assumed, however, this is not a work of political advocacy. To be sure, the actions of left-wing activists and groups are often analysed here through the prism of how they appeared to their political opponents, meaning that the more extreme aspects of left-wing activism take centre stage. However, this specific perspective should not be read as a verdict on the character of the 1968 Left as a whole. By examining these years from the perspective of the centre-right, this book does not purport to offer a comprehensive analysis of student activism around 1968. What is more, that I chose a methodology long associated with challenging established power dynamics and giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’—indeed a methodology pioneered by historians with links to the 1968 Left⁶⁵—does not mean that the goal of this book is to portray activists of the centre-right as objectively powerless or marginalized. On the contrary, many of them arrived at the centre of power quite some time before the ‘68ers of the Left, and they have done much to shape public memories of the student movement, even if scholars have rarely taken note. Oral histories with ‘68ers of the centre-right, in combination with a wealth of written sources from the period, allow me to trace what it was like to experience 1968 on the ‘other side’. Uncovering this little-known history is the aim of this book. ⁶⁴ Gildea, Mark and Warring, Europe’s 1968; see further Sven Reichardt, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren (Berlin, 2014), 887; Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self (Manchester, 2015). ⁶⁵ Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, 1996). The earliest works of oral history in Germany were also produced by left-wing historians. Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die Jahre weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll.’ Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin/Bonn, 1983); Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Hinterher merkt man, daß es richtig war, daß es schiefgegangen ist.’ Nachkriegserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin/Bonn 1983); Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (eds.), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (Bonn, 1989); on the history of oral history in Germany, Knud Andresen, Linde Apel, and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds.), Es gilt das gesprochene Wort: Oral History und Zeitgeschichte heute (Göttingen, 2015); see further Abrams, Oral History Theory, 4–5; 154–6; and Robert Gildea and James Mark, ‘Introduction’, Gildea, Mark, and Warring, Europe’s 1968, 9. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi 20   ‘ Chapter Structure The structure of this book is partly thematic and partly chronological. The first chapter, Between Engagement and Enmity, charts the involvement of centre-right students in some of the key moments and debates around student activism from the mid-1960s until the climactic years of the West German protest movement in 1967/68. It demonstrates that centre-right students were there throughout, and not just as passive observers. Writing them back into the history of 1968, this chapter reveals that student activism in these years was a much broader, more versatile, and, ultimately, more consequential phenomenon than the traditionally narrower focus on left-wing radicals allows. The second chapter, Talking About (My) Generation, engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods, the meaning of the Nazi past to their activism, and intergenerational relations. Like their student peers on the Left, centre-right activists had been raised in a post-genocidal society. With that in mind, how did they view and engage with Germany’s recent history of mass violence? The chapter highlights the centrality of anti-totalitarianism to their thinking. It also shows that, inspired by the ‘45ers and nudged by social scientists who routinely portrayed student protest as a symptom of generational conflict, they began to think of themselves as a distinct generational community in the late 1960s. Between Adenauer and Coca-Cola, the third chapter, focuses on the cultural practices of centre-right students to determine to what extent they participated in the broader cultural moment that was 1968. It examines different forms of cultural expression and everyday aesthetics to investigate whether centre-right activists viewed these as political. It also examines their attitudes toward the evident modernization of sexuality in West Germany in this period. Most importantly, it puts women’s experiences centre stage. Analysing changing gender roles and centre-right women’s attitudes toward the emerging women’s movement, it seeks to understand why at least some of them thought that emancipation did not have to equal revolution. The fourth chapter, entitled From Berlin to Saigon and Back, argues that centreright activists not only disagreed with left-wing students’ plans for the Federal Republic’s domestic future, but that they also had a distinct internationalist imagination. In spite of an ever-growing literature on the Global 1960s, we know surprisingly little about how centre-right activists conceived of the global. This chapter broadens our view of student internationalism around 1968 by showing that the centre-right also looked beyond the borders of the Federal Republic. The chapter explores three areas on their ‘mental map’ in detail: the powerful ways in which the Cold War binary structured the centre-right’s view of OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/3/2021, SPi  21 the world; the (Western) European ties of conservative and centre-right student groups; and, finally, their campaigns for human rights in the wake of 1968. Chapter 5, Combative Politics, examines the shift toward a much more confrontational form of campus politics in the wake of the dissolution of SDS in 1969/70, one in which concerns about left-wing violence moved centre stage. It analyses centre-right students’ roles in some of the key debates of the 1970s—the controversy surrounding the ‘Radicals Decree’, the ‘Mescalero Affair’, and students’ alleged support for the terrorism of the RAF. It argues that RCDS was instrumental in making a scandal of left-wing activism at a time when a left-wing coalition governed the country for the first time since the war. Centre-right students contributed much to the febrile climate of the 1970s, this chapter shows, stoking public hysteria and helping to create a climate of distrust that made left-wing dissent politically suspect. Their conduct highlights that the process of political liberalization in the wake of 1968 was not a linear but rather a winding one. The final chapter, The (Ir)Resistible Rise of the Other ‘68ers, traces how these former student activists became a major public phenomenon after Kohl was elected Chancellor in 1982. It charts the other ‘68ers’ short ‘march through the institutions’ and assesses their programmatic, strategic, and cultural impact on the CDU/CSU from the 1970s into the 1980s. Second, it analyses the role that commemorations of 1968 and generational claims played in their rise to public prominence. It shows that the other ‘68ers helped to shape memories of the student movement in important ways and, from the 1980s into the early 2000s, were key players in the memory wars about how exactly 1968 had transformed West German politics and society. The Conclusion summarizes and expands upon the findings of the book’s six chapters. It offers some overarching comments about how this study helps us to rethink the existing scholarship on 1968 and postwar German history more broadly. It also teases out some of the commonalities between activists of the Left and Right to highlight the ways in which the other ‘68ers and their student opponents on the Left often moved in tandem, even if inadvertently so. The chapters of this book tell a very specific story—that of the other ‘68ers. However, in doing so, they address much larger historical and conceptual questions: about the nature of generational belonging; about the ways in which Germans struggled over democracy in the postwar period and came to terms with the Nazi past; about the contested nature of memory; and about the place of 1968 in German history. In short, this book casts a well-known chapter of Germany’s twentieth century in a new light.

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RELATED TOPICS

German HistoryOral historyThe SixtiesNew Left and the 1960s19681960sGenerationsProtest MovementsPostwar Germany1968 in EuropePostwar EuropeStudent ProtestGlobal Sixties