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Philipp Gassert Pavel A. Richter
Hypertext version by Raimund Lammersdorf
Detlef Junker
Philipp Gassert, Pavel A. Richter
University Politics, Student Organizations
Emergency Laws (Notstandsgesetze)
Nuclear Disarmament (Ostermarsch)
Third World, Internationalism, Transnational Relations
Forms of Action, Strategy, Violence, Terrorism
Marxist Theory, New Left, Alliances
Education, Counterculture, Sexuality
The decade between the second Berlin crisis and the beginning of détente and Ostpolitik, between the heyday of Adenauer's Christian Democratic government in the late 1950s and the "change of power" from the Grand Coalition to a Social Democratic administration in 1969, represents a special chapter in contemporary German history. Not unlike the United States, West Germany experienced a period of cultural, social, and political instability, which led to a major transformation of West German society. As some scholars have argued, the 1960s represent the second foundation of the Federal Republic.
Thirty years later, more and more scholars are turning their attention to the 1960s and to the decade's most famous year - 1968. For the first time, substantial collections of primary source material have become available for scholarly research. Historians will now be able to explore the issues that divided the contemporaries not solely by relying on memoirs, the reports of the media, and other documents that had been published at the time, but by looking at the historical record as it has been preserved in the archives.
With this Reference Guide, the German Historical Institute hopes to aid scholars who are working on one of the most significant aspects of West German history in the 1960s - the emergence of a large-scale extraparliamentarian opposition. As the two compilers stress in their introduction, this unique chapter of postwar German history would continue to gain enormously from the insights of American historians, whose contributions have been critical to the study of German history in the past half-century. Because information on archival repositories relating to the history of social movements is traditionally difficult to obtain - particularly for those who live and work outside Germany - this Reference Guide will provide basic information on archival collections as well as a bibliography of contemporary publications.
This Reference Guide is a by-product of a large international conference on the year 1968 in global and comparative perspective that was organized by the German Historical Institute in May 1996. It is part of the effort of the Institute to promote comparative studies in the fields of social and cultural history. We hope that this Reference Guide makes a strong contribution to what is one of the most rapidly growing areas of research in contemporary German history.
Washington, D.C., December 1997
Detlef Junker
PHILIPP GASSERT is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1996 and is currently writing a biography of the former chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1904-1988). He is the author of Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997) and co-editor of a collection of essays entitled 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
PAVEL A. RICHTER is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bielefeld and a participant in the research project "The Protest Movements of the 1960s in Western Europe and the United States." He received his M.A. from the University of Freiburg in 1995 and is currently working on a Ph.D. thesis entitled "The Extraparliamentarian Opposition in Germany, 1966-1968."
The authors would like to thank Janine Micunek and Petra Marquardt-Bigman for editing the manuscript. Furthermore, we would like to thank Jan Kurz, Daniel S. Mattern, and David B. Morris for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the introduction.