The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent by Susanne Rinner (review)

The student revolts in West Germany that reached their zenith in the year 1968 were so seminal for the constitution of the identity of the protestors that the broad cohort of this age group is named after this year: the 1968 Generation. The debates about the events that took place in the late 1960s were, and continue to be, so intense, that as the author of this volume, Susanne Rinner, claims, the signifier itself has gained the status of a “dritte Vergangenheitsbewältigung” alongside the GDR and the Third Reich (6, 9). The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination focuses on how fictional treatments, in the form of novels, make a seminal contribution to the cultural memory of the “1968” era. While there were novels written soon after the student revolts, such as Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Uwe Timm’s Heißer Sommer (1974), Rinner only treats such earlier works tangentially and by way of contrast to significantly later fiction, usually published in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, she contrasts the early efforts by Schneider and Timm with later prose fiction by these same authors, Edwards Heimkehr (1999) and Rot (2001) respectively. For it is Rinner’s central thesis that while the earlier works give voice to the disillusion of the young authors and a concomitant withdrawal from public life, the later texts not only “emphasize the need to actively engage with one’s personal environment in order to shape the public discourse” (46), but take on a broadly transnational and transethnic scope, frequently crossing spatial and temporal borders and coming to terms with an event generally elided in the 1970s fiction, the Holocaust. Rinner’s book draws on theories broadly connected to the discourse of public memory, such as Walter Benjamin’s notions of spatiotemporal constellations, Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” concept, and Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” paradigm. Engaging such critical discourse, Rinner successfully demonstrates how relatively contemporary fiction on “1968” reenergizes the ideals of the generation named for this year and makes them relevant and productive for the geopolitics of contemporary Germany.

After an introduction in which Rinner outlines her approaches and provides an overview of the genre the book will explore, “1968 memory novels,” the first chapter engages in the previously mentioned contrast of novels published in the 1970s with those which appeared in the 1990s. While the 1960s revolts constituted a refutation of the students’ parents’ Nazi generation, both their inhumanity in the 1930s and 1940s as well as their consumerist quietude in the 1950s Adenauer era, Rinner shows that historical guilt concerning, especially, the Holocaust is first given expression, albeit obliquely, in postunification 1968 memory novels through a dialectic of remembering and forgetting, and through fictive dialogue with Holocaust survivors. The second chapter goes back in time to GDR literature to show that East German authors were well aware of late 1960s protest in Western Europe as well as in Prague, and thematized these events, despite the fact that many scholars virtually deny the existence of “East German ‘68ers” (57). Rinner focuses here on Irmtraud Morgner’s Salman trilogy, which creates the figure of a revenant female troubadour whose experiences reflect Morgner’s disillusion with how the revolution played out in, particularly, Paris, East Berlin, and Prague. The following section highlights 1968 memory novels that feature the United States as a spatial locus where Germans who suffered from the 1970s Berufsverbot against leftist agitators found fulfilling lives, and where encounters between German narrators and Holocaust survivors can be productively staged. Once again, Edwards Heimkehr is drawn upon in order to illustrate this staging as well as Bernhard Schlink’s widely read novel Der Vorleser (1995). Ulrike Kolb’s novel Frühstück mit Max (2000) is also discussed, albeit in order to show how the central protagonists grapple with their earlier Berlin communal...