Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy.

Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy. By Nick Thomas (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. xvi plus 277 pp. $79.95 [cloth], $26.95 [paper]).

A scholarly research literature is only slowly developing around the contexts and significance of 1968, either country by country or on a general European front. The thirtieth anniversary produced a couple of major conference volumes and a wide range of commentary by former sixty-eighters, together with a few substantial monographs. (1) A reasonably dense historiography has also begun retrieving the intellectual genealogies of the movements concerned, as for instance in the extensive literature on the contexts of the British New Left from the mid-1950s. But in contrast with the literature on the United States for the same period, which is far more richly developed in scholarly terms, these European discussions are still dominated to a striking degree by the writings of the participants themselves, whether as nostalgia or disavowal. Indeed, the most complex historical works have tended to focus less on the events per se than on Sixty-Eight's subsequent histories as memory and myth. (2) For Germany there is certainly an extensive literature focusing around the so-called "new social movements" and the prehistories of The Greens, most of it produced within sociology or political science. With respect to the student movement, Wolfgang Kraushaar's works have also become an indispensable resource. (3) But there is still remarkably little in English in the form of an overall analysis or a detailed narrative account.

In this well researched study of extra-parliamentary protest movements, Nick Thomas sets out to remedy this deficit, situating his analysis in the now well established context of the Federal Republic's democratization in the 1960s. In the complex conjuncture of the middle of that decade, as the heightened expectations of an increasingly affluent consumer-citizenry itched against the authoritarian habits of an exhausted Christian Democratic governing culture, the student-based activism of the self-styled "Extra-Parliamentary Opposition" (APO) began crystallizing a direct challenge to the given forms of democratic consensus. A number of enabling conditions encouraged this coalescence of dissent. One came from a building up of demands during the early sixties for a more vigorous pluralism and a liberalizing of the public sphere, which registered the concerted impatience of the so-called "1945ers," those cohorts of intellectuals who came of age during the foundation years of the Federal Republic and were now demanding their voice. (4) A second was the rising pressure of greater permissiveness and the loosening of social mores, itself associated with the growth of a youth-based consumer culture of pleasure and entertainment. (5) Above all, thirdly, the great higher education expansion produced a far-reaching ferment in the universities. Thomas touches on each of these processes, but focuses them through the particular frictions arising from the unresolved legacies of the Nazi past, which increasingly dramatized the broader socio-cultural tensions of the period.

Thomas takes an appropriately broad view of his subject, including in his definition of protest "all liberal, left-liberal, social democratic, or socialist organizations, coalitions and individuals engaged in oppositional activity outside the parliamentary process that took a critical stance toward the parliamentary system, parliamentary parties, or government policy," while stopping short of terrorist strategy and armed acts (p. 8). After a cursory look at the APO's origins in the period 1945-64 (32 pages), the bulk of the book examines the dynamics of radicalization during 1965-67 (74 pages) and 1967-69 (70 pages), before closing with two chapters on the 1970s, "The Descent into Terrorism" (18 pages) and "The Women's Movement" (16 pages). The two central parts observe a common structure, each with two chapters on "University Reform" and "The Vietnam Campaign," followed by a discussion of "Conspiracies and Counter-Conspiracies?" and a chapter on the pivotal acts of violence respectively driving forward the radicalization--namely, the street execution of the student Benno Ohnesorg by a plain-clothes policeman during a West Berlin demonstration against the Shah of Iran on 2 June 1967; and the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968 by a rabidly anti-Communist Munich house painter. In each case, Thomas captures the atmospherics of a frenetically polarizing political climate, for which the crude and obtuse authoritarianism of the state officials provided the main motor. In the Ohnesorg chapter he centers this narrative around the repressive heavy-handedness of the West Berlin government and its police response, in the Dutschke chapter around the brutalized rhetoric of Bild-Zeitung and the Springer press.

The strength of the book is in the clear and finely crafted analytical narratives Thomas weaves, chapter by chapter. For the central discussions of the student movement during 1965-69 there is now nothing better in English: the weight of the treatments in Sabine von Dirke's study of the counter-culture and Andrei Markovits' and Philip Gorski's history of the German Left falls in the following decade, while Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will base their briefer discussion of the student movement on far less research. (6) The two chapters on the campaigning against the Vietnam War are especially useful, as are the event-centered narratives of the Ohnesorg and Dutschke shootings. Remarkable though it seems, these matters have not been written properly into the record, historiographically speaking, until now. Thomas is at his best when drawing his disparate materials together in this kind of way.

In light of his introductory arguments about the open-endedness and breadth of the extra-parliamentary activity, on the other hand, Thomas presents a surprisingly focused and narrowly drawn picture. The deeper context of social movement and single issue campaigning before the mid-sixties remains very thinly described, making the upsurge of student radicalism more dramatically unexpected than need be. It becomes ever clearer that the Cold War conformities of the fifties concealed much disguised and displaced dissent, for example. Both the British New Left and the U.S. civil rights movements of the 1960s fed on longer gestating prehistories and potentials, and an equivalent case can certainly be made for West Germany, even allowing for the specificities of its post-1945 political culture. Thomas does refer briefly to the Easter March and anti-nuclear movements, but makes no use of Michael Schneider's pioneering study of the campaign against the Emergency Laws and says little about the role of cultural avant-gardes or the bohemian milieus of cities like Hamburg or Munich. (7) Similarly, he also ignores the antecedents and generative contexts of the Burgerinitiativen (Citizens' Initiatives), which between roughly 1969 and the mid-1970s became such a distinctive feature of the West German political scene. At a general level the indebtedness of such grassroots activism to the momentum surrounding the APO is clear enough, but the further intersections with the local cultures of the SPD and other progressive political formations are far less understood.

In the late 1960s the SPD also began a major renewal, after all, but Thomas largely neglects this broader setting. On the one hand, he rightly affirms the APO's decisive contribution to the strengthening of West German democracy: its activities "played a central role in the creation of a democratic political environment, in which ordinary people were willing to criticize government policy and participate in political activity" to a new degree (p. 239). But on the other hand, this came to fruition only through intense interaction with the parliamentary reformism also in the process of coalescing. However disappointing the SPD's later movement to the right after 1972, the forming of the Brandt-Scheel government in 1969 nonetheless drew the aspirations of broad sections of the progressive citizenry, including those academic, artistic, and cultural intellectuals who had been arguing for a liberalizing of the public sphere. These versions of radical proceduralism were hardly "extra-parliamentary" in Thomas's sense, but fed vitally into the period's reformism. Moreover, these separate contexts of political change shared a common ferment of ideas on precisely the ground Thomas presumes, defined by emergent notions of participatory democracy, the expanding boundaries of citizenship, the ethics of public engagement, the bases for enunciating claims to knowledge, and so forth. One crucial setting where these commitments converged was the intense public debate over coming to terms with the Nazi past, but Thomas does not draw these broader alliances out. The Brandt government's equally vital initiative in normalizing relations with the socialist East, which further defined the common progressivist ground, is also missed.

These tightly circumscribed boundaries of the analysis reduce the book's value. Moreover, its argument about the dynamics of democratization is rather less original than its author suggests. Discussions have for many years stressed the decisive divergence of the two Germanies precisely as a result of what happened in the late 1960s, when the GDR failed to experience a comparable crisis of renewal or refounding of the polity. It is also unclear how this book qualifies as a "social history." Thomas comes closest to this in his use of survey and opinion polling evidence, which he skilfully deploys for the purposes of arguments about generational contrasts and changing popular attitudes. Otherwise his analysis lacks the thickness of local contextualizing, situational richness, or systematic sociologies we would normally expect from such a description. But this foreshortening of the book's contribution probably has extraneous explanations: given the pressures for speedy publication imposed by the British RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) and constraints now set by publishers, scholarly books find it harder to be as comprehensive and challenging as before.

ENDNOTES

1. See Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (eds.), 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge, 1998); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1969--Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Gottingen, 1998); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, "Die Phantasie an die Macht". Mai 1968 in Frankreich (Frankfurt am M., 1995); Marica Tolomelli, "repressiv getrennt" oder "organisch verbundet": Studenten und Arbeiter 1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in Italien (Opladen, 2001); Michael Schmidtke, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er-Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und der USA (Frankfurt am M., 2002).

2. See especially Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002); Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 (Middeltown, Conn., 1996); Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison, 1997), pp. 183-98, 232-48; Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. An International Oral History (New York, 1988).

3. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946 bis 1995, Vol. I: Chronik, Vol. II: Dokumente, Vol. III: Aufsatze (Hamburg, 1998); Kraushaar, 1968. Das Jahr das alles verandert hat (Munich, 1998); Kraushaar, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zasur (Hamburg, 2000).

4. See especially A. D. Moses, "The Forty-Fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy," German Politics and Society, 17 (1999), 94-126; and Christine von Hodenberg's forthcoming study of Liberalisierung der politischen Offentlichkeit. Massenmedien, Journalismus und Pressepolitik in Westdeutschland, 1949-1969.

5. Here see especially Azel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Karl Christian Lammers (eds.), Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (Hamburg, 2000); Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton, 2001); and the fundamental study by Michael Wildt, Am Beginn der "Konsumgesellschaft": Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung, Wohlstandshoffnung in Deutschland in den funfziger Jahren (Hamburg, 1994).

6. Sabine von Dirke, "All Power to the Imagination!" The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln, 1997); Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (Cambridge, 1993); Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda (New York, 1988).

7. See Michael Schneider, Demokratie in Gefahr? Der Konflikt um die Notstandsgesetze. Sozialdemokratie, Gewerkschaften und intellektueller Protest 1958-1968 (Bonn, 1986).

Geoff Eley

University of Michigan