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  • 1968 und die 68er: Ereignisse, Wirkungen, und Kontroversen in der Bundesrepublik.eds. by Gerrit Dworok and Christoph Weissmann
  • Stephen Milder
Gerrit Dworok and Christoph Weissmann, eds., 1968 und die 68er: Ereignisse, Wirkungen, und Kontroversen in der Bundesrepublik. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2013. 227 pp. €29.90.

Wesley Hogan has written that during the past forty years the civil rights movement came to be seen as "a kind of sacred ground … it began to occupy a terrain beyond reach, beyond analysis." In the book Many Minds, One Heart, Hogan reentered this sacred ground in order "to acknowledge sober realities as well as intoxicating dreams." A new generation of German historians shares both Hogan's understanding of the 1960s as "sacred ground" and her will to subject the decade to rigorous scholarly analysis in order to demystify it.

In 1968 und die 68er, editors Gerrit Dworok and Christoph Weissmann apply this approach to West Germany's deeply mythologized "1968." The volume's seven chapters are drawn from a 2011 University of Würzburg conference of the same name. Although the chapters are not explicitly grouped into sections, they could be divided into three categories. Several essays remain true to the goal of myth busting by reevaluating the people, events, institutions, and discussions of 1968 on the basis of new archival research. Others work toward the same ends by questioning the myths themselves. Unfortunately, a third group of contributors appear to be most interested in replacing one set of myths with another.

Matthias Stickler's chapter on West German fraternities' place in the 1968 student revolt exemplifies the first category. Stickler helps us to define just who "the 68ers" were by analyzing the way fraternity brothers perceived and at times even participated in student protest. He also shows how the fraternities were deeply affected by the changes that "1968" wrought on higher education. Kristof Niese's essay on the journal Kursbuch works similarly, revealing that the illustrious publication was not widely read until after the 1967 Ohnesorg shooting and served more as a point of "intellectual connection" than as a site of practical guidance for activists.

The chapters by Gerrit Dworok, Matthias Stangel, and Philipp Gassert fit more easily into the second category, addressing myths about the 68ers and their politics. These chapters treat the 68ers' use of the term "fascism," their position on the German question, and their anti-Americanism, respectively. All three elucidate the 68ers' understanding of these concepts by placing them into longer historical trends and juxtaposing them with other elements of West German society in the 1960s. Stangel most clearly delineates the student movement's place in a longer process of political change. Even though the decision by the Socialist German Students' League (SDS) to acknowledge East German organizations was unpopular at the time, it preceded the policy of the social-liberal coalition that came into office in 1969. Gassert differentiates the 68ers' politics by explaining how they criticized the United States "with Americans," an attitude distinct from the dominant cultural tropes of rightwing anti-Americanism.

The contributor most prone to replacing one set of myths with another is Rolf Stolz, a former SDS member intent on reclaiming the 68ers' legacy on the basis of [End Page 252] personal reflections. Arguing that historians who did not experience the 1960s cannot understand the era, Stolz seems to attack the volume's demythologizing approach. In a contribution that draws heavily on his 2001 monograph Mythos '68, Gerd Langguth, too, seems more intent on polemicizing against the 68ers' intoxicating dreams than on carefully demystifying them. Langguth's premise that the SDS cheapened violence by talking about it so frequently is interesting and worthy of further consideration, but when writing an essay so focused on discourse, he ought to have taken more seriously the difference, for example, between a "propaganda of bullets" and a "propaganda of deeds." Like several other contributors to the volume, Langguth is also challenged by the specific role of Rudi Dutschke. These authors make the "Studentenführer" representative of the larger 68er movement without plumbing the movement's diversity. Dutschke's biography is intriguing and, given his voluminous papers, easier to study than the experiences of "subaltern...

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