Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement

The legacy of the West German student movement continues to be a debated topic in Germany today: Did the call for political and social change bring about a new and truly democratic Germany or did it trigger a backlash that determined the politics of the 1980s and 1990s under conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl? Did the activists themselves “sell out” and betray their own ideals? How did the student movement influence the next generation growing up in Germany?

These questions about the social and political effects of the student movement influence discussions about pedagogy, violence in schools, and about how young Germans today understand political change and social activism. Media often paint a simplistic picture of both, of what became of the generation of activists in 1968 and of their “children” who were born in the 1970s and came of age in the 1990s. Not only conservative voices since the late 1980s support the idea that members of the student movement of the 1960s brought up a generation of confused young people without clear values and moral guidance. The question of whether the ideals of liberal education failed led to heated debates within the Green Party in the 1990s. An article in the news magazine Der Spiegel cites Beate Scheffler, a forty-year-old teacher and Green Party delegate:

Ich halte die emanzipatorische Erziehung nach wie vor für richtig, muß aber feststellen: Wir haben unsere Erziehungsziele nicht erreicht. Statt der mündigen, sozial und ökologisch engagierten, politisch hochmotivierten Jugend hat unsere Erziehung eine Spezies hervorgebracht, die zum überwiegenden Teil egozentrisch, konsumorientiert und im schlimmsten Falle sogar gewalttätig und fremdenfeindlich ist.

(“Linke Lehrer, rechte Schüler”)

During the red-green coalition government under Gerhard Schröder in the late 1990s, which included some former student protesters (most famously the foreign minister Joschka Fischer), members of the young generation explained and justified their apolitical perspective on life, their focus on personal happiness and careers, and their longing for “tradition” as a reaction against growing up in the shadow of the rebellious and politically active generation of their parents. Young people in West Germany had learned to associate the generation of their parents with the student movement of the late 1960s, political protest, sexual liberation, rebellion against authority, and a break with the Nazi past along with the authoritarian structures of the 1950s. Thus rebellion in the 1980s could mean only to withdraw from political identifications and to concentrate on personal gain, careers, and consumption. As opposed to the “Apo-Generation,” the so-called “Generation Golf” is defined by its “Abwendung von postmaterialistischen Werten” and its apolitical self-definition (KAI 9). Monika Shafi confirms that in the literary realm “debates about the current state of affairs have been increasingly framed within generational paradigms” (201). Upon closer inspection, the political interpretations of generational paradigms in literary text and fiction films vary greatly.

While journalistic and academic publications perpetuate dominant constructions of generations in West German national history – the rebellious 68ers and their sons and daughters as apolitical, global consumers – some novels, memoirs, and feature films (see Shafi 204–05) challenge these interpretations. Shafi argues that in “the current debate on the meaning and importance of 1968, different generations vie for the task of delivering the interpretative framework that will shape cultural memory” (204). She claims that this “‘struggle for cultural hegemony’ [...] makes the discussion of 1968 and its legacy so emotionally charged, even explosive” (204). Starting in the 1970s, fictional accounts of the West German student movement contributed to these discussions and reveal a complicated picture of the movement’s effects and legacies and of the resulting generational models. In these narratives, a tension emerges between, on the one hand, stagnation and resignation and, on the other, the continued search and longing for political and social change. This tension is crucial in reflections of two generations: in the 1970s, when the 1968-activists themselves look back at the movement, and in the 1990s, when their “sons” and “daughters” reflect on the importance of 1968 and the associated activists and activisms. To exemplify how questions of...