For the Federal Republic of Germany, like for most Western countries, the 1960s represent a watershed in the post-World War II era. A growing number of books, memoirs, newspaper articles, movies, radio broadcasts, and television documentaries is testimony to considerable public interest in the history of this "crucial decade." Although scholarly interest in the 1960s is indeed growing, there is still a paucity of historical research based on primary sources. After more than thirty years, the discourse on the 1960s remains colored by partisanship and the nostalgic recollections of former activists as well as by the contempt of those who were opposed to the ideas and ideals that are associated with the rebellious 1960s and their most enduring symbol - the year 1968. In addition, after German unification and the end of the Cold War, the 1960s have moved toward the center of current political debates. Today, a new generation of post-unification eighty-niners is defining itself in opposition to the ideas of "1968."1
Why have the 1960s been so resistant to historicization, and why have historians only recently begun to treat 1968 as a viable historical subject?2 There are three possible answers to these questions: First, the discourse about 1968, loosely defined as the high point of the 1960s protest cycle, has been shaped by former activists and their foes - or at least by those participants who were able to publish, who enjoyed access to the mass media, and who moved into strategic positions in academia, journalism, and politics.3 Dieter Rucht, one of Germany's leading experts on the history of the social movements, has observed that most of the accounts written during the 1970s by former activists did not "pursue ambitious theoretical and analytic goals, but rather aimed at describing, documenting, and promoting the movements."4 Because 1968 was such an important biographical caesura in their lives, most professional interpreters were incapable of distancing themselves from their subject.
Second, scholarship on the 1960s in West Germany is simultaneously overtheorized and underhistoricized. Only recently, historians have started to use the methods that have been developed by researchers of social movements. Whereas this approach might provide us with a more nuanced analytical tool to explain the rise and fall of particular movements,5 to date most studies have rather concentrated on large-scale social-scientific explanations, such as the generation paradigm,6 or general sociopolitical and sociopsychological theories.7 As a result, we now have an astonishing number of theoretical treatises on the nature and impact of these confusing, sometimes contradictory, and notoriously difficult to define phenomena. Works on the theory of "resource mobilization," for example, would fill whole libraries.8 For the outsider, it is difficult to find his or her way among these broad and overly sophisticated theoretical and methodological debates.
Although we still lack basic empirical studies of the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, most scholars cannot even agree on the terms of debate. Some define 1968 as a protest cycle stretching from the late 1950s well into the 1980s.9 Others limit the term to a few student organizations and their activities in the second half of the 1960s.10 Another group uses 1968 primarily as a chiffre or as a symbolic date that is on the same level as other historic revolutions, for example, 1789, 1848, or 1917.11 A fourth group takes a biographical approach that focuses on the sixty-eighters as a generation.12 Whereas it is impossible to proceed without any theoretical and methodological framework - and here the social-movement approach seems to be the most fruitful - preconceived notions do not easily translate into research strategies, nor do they lend themselves to archival studies. At this point, a healthy dose of old-fashioned historical archival research might be helpful.
Third, the study of the history of the social movements of the 1960s in West Germany faces unusually high obstacles of access to archival holdings and documentation. Traditional archives see it as their primary goal to preserve the records of state and private organizations. Documents generated by social movements, if they have survived in the first place, are hard to track down. With this Reference Guide we hope to provide basic information on archives that specialize in the collection of historical records related to the history of social movements.13 We also hope to stimulate the interest of American scholars in the study of 1968 in Germany. Any historicization of the subject would be incomplete without the perspectives and insights of American historians, whose contributions have been critical to the study of German history during the past sixty years.14
Historicizing 1968 requires going beyond visions of the 1960s shaped primarily by the memories of contemporaries, by their talk of revolution and counterrevolution, and by those ubiquitous images of turmoil and crisis that have been relentlessly recreated and recycled by the media. A historicization of 1968 does not necessarily imply that the issues of the 1960s have become irrelevant or no longer have any bearing on the present. Rather, to situate the 1960s in the larger picture of twentieth-century German history, we should now concentrate on empirical research. The 1960s should be re-examined in relation to the successes and failures in German history, particularly the emergence of a consumer society, changing gender roles, the division of Germany within the history of the Cold War, the "Westernization" of the Federal Republic, and the legacies of authoritarianism and Nazism.
After World War II, West Germany experienced a period of quiet but rapid modernization.15 The consequences of the arrival of a consumer society and the implications for the protest movements of the 1960s have not been sufficiently addressed. Students of American history have started to explore the connections between the "good times" of the 1950s, the promises of a consumer society that propagated individual satisfaction, and the calls of a younger generation for self-fulfillment and personal liberation.16 As Uta G. Poiger has recently argued, the efforts of the West German government to depoliticize consumption while at the same time using the lure of Western goods as a weapon in Germany's Cold War competition with the East contributed to antiauthoritarian radicalism in the 1960s. During the 1950s, youth culture raised expectations for freedom and individual expression, which some 1960s radicals would transform into explicit political demands. Ironically, many sixty-eighters were unaware of how deeply their fight against the "tyranny of consumption" was rooted in the same promises that had been integral to consumer society.17
Parallel to the arrival of a consumer society, the relations between the sexes started to change in the early 1960s. Women began entering the workforce in record numbers. Sexuality had been redefined. Reform of marriage and abortion laws became growing problems in West German society. Against the background of these larger societal transformations, the student movement of the 1960s provided the philosophical origins and the cultural framework for the emergence of the new women's movement in West Germany. The failure of the all-male leadership of the SDS to grant women the same rights they claimed for themselves provoked the decision to form independent women's groups - a development that symbolically culminated in Helke Sander's famous speech at the 1968 SDS conference in Frankfurt.18 Whereas today this is a familiar story, many general accounts still fail to incorporate gender relations in their analysis of the social movements of the 1960s. Furthermore, the rise of the new women's movement has generally not been subjected to a critical review in the light of primary sources. Much of the literature on the origins of the new women's movement in West Germany has either been written by former participants or is motivated by the desire to promote women's concerns in interpretations of the movement.19
A second set of issues that should be part of the study of 1968 includes the question of German national unity, the nuclear arms race, and the Cold War. The campaign for nuclear disarmament was perhaps the most important precursor of the protest movements of the second half of the 1960s.20 There are some older studies that deal extensively with the campaigns against the plans of NATO and the German government to give the Bundeswehr at least indirect access to nuclear weapons. Most of these studies have focused on the so-called Ostermarschbewegung, which emerged around 1960.21 The direct personal and institutional links between the campaigns for nuclear disarmament and the protest movements of the 1960s have seldom been explored in the literature. In Germany, it is also little known that the campaign for nuclear disarmament was in fact an international movement that prefigured the trans-European and transatlantic student cooperation a few years later.22
In the 1970s and 1980s, being a sixty-eighter would become synonymous with being opposed to German unification. It should not be overlooked, however, that national unity was an important issue for many in the 1960s student movement and that its anti-Americanism was partly motivated by the conviction that the United States had significantly contributed to the division of the country. This is further highlighted by the fact that important figures in the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), like Bernd Rabehl and Rudi Dutschke, had come from East Germany.23 A careful examination of the positions taken by Dutschke and others would not only advance the study of the protest movements, but it would also significantly enhance our understanding of the central problem of German history after 1945. In addition, the frequently made allegations that certain groups within the West German movements were on the payroll of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) might now be explored in the records that have become available in the former East German archives.24
A third complex of open questions relates to the cultural and personal impact of the close cooperation between West Germany and the United States during the Cold War. Many historians of 1968 have underscored the fact that the student revolution of the 1960s contributed significantly to the fundamental liberalization of West German society.25 After 1968, the Federal Republic became a more modern, Westernized country. Thus, the study of 1968 in Germany should be more closely tied to Germany's relations with the United States, which exerted a powerful cultural influence on the country.26 It is one of the great ironies of the 1960s that the exchange programs that had been set up by the German and American governments as part of their effort to "democratize" the Germans might actually have worked too well, at least from the perspective of the ruling elites. Many former exchange students experienced a severe cultural shock after they returned to Germany. To them, the open atmosphere at American institutions of higher learning compared very favorably to what they saw at German universities.27 Furthermore, important figures of the SDS, like Michael Vester, Günter Amendt, and Karl-Dietrich Wolff, had become acquainted with the American New Left as a result of their studies in the United States. Vester developed close ties to American activists and contributed to the famous conference at which the Port Huron statement was drafted.28 Later in the decade, American and German leftists would cooperate in their protests against American involvement in Vietnam.29 Ingo Juchler's excellent book on the influences of the Third World liberation movements on West German and American student movements has shown that there is much more to be studied.30
The fourth and perhaps most difficult topic confronting any historian of the 1960s in West Germany is the Left's troubled relationship with the Nazi past. Most sixty-eighters were motivated by their resistance to the desire of the older generations to forget and quietly absorb the moral, social, and economic implications of the Nazi dictatorship. Although they deserve credit for returning the past to the contemporary political agenda - and this has been universally acknowledged in the literature - it is nevertheless important to re-examine the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung within the context of the 1960s rebellion. Whereas the protesters urged their compatriots to confront the past anew, they also contributed to an instrumentalization of highly sensitive historical issues for political purposes. Their "anti-Zionism" and their pro-Palestinian stance shed an ambivalent light on their attempts to address the legacies of the past. Furthermore, the intolerance and the undemocratic methods of the rebellious students led many of their professors - some of them former emigrants or survivors of the Hitler regime - to believe that the Nazis had re-emerged. Thus, we still have to rediscover the "German" in the history of 1968.31
Finally, we need more "establishment studies." Any history of the "extraparliamentarian" opposition in Germany would be incomplete without revisiting what happened inside the Bundestag (federal parliament).32 After all, it was not in the streets, but within the halls of government, where the first signs of an impending crisis appeared. Only a few years after Konrad Adenauer had won the 1957 elections by a landslide, the stability of the Federal Republic seemed to be crumbling. The building of the Berlin Wall rocked the foundations of the German-American relationship and seemed to throw the concept of Germany's Western orientation into complete disarray.33 In 1963, Adenauer was ousted by his own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). When his successor, Ludwig Erhard, the highly popular architect of Germany's postwar economic miracle, failed to cope with the first postwar economic crises in 1966, the almost hysterical reaction of his own party forced him to step down and hand over power to a Grand Coalition of the two largest parties, the CDU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Only the small Free Democratic Party (FDP) remained in opposition.34
Whereas most general surveys of the 1960s devote at least some space to the history of 1968 and try to evaluate its impact on the political, cultural, and social history of Germany,35 historians of social movements have often neglected the reactions of and interactions with those who held positions of power. Social-movement historians have also been inattentive to the role of the media.36 Only the opposition to the so-called emergency laws (Notstandsgesetze) has been thoroughly studied.37 Bridging the whole political spectrum from the churches to labor unions, the fight against the emergency laws - a central issue on the legislative agenda of the Grand Coalition - would develop into one of the most important extraparliamentarian opposition movements in the Federal Republic. The establishment of the Grand Coalition itself - a highly popular government, according to public opinion polls38 - aroused the suspicions of many intellectuals and contributed significantly to the growth of a large-scale protest movement in West Germany. Whereas governments of "national unity" were hardly new in West European politics, the peculiar circumstances under which this coalition was formed, the very notion of a Germany without a viable political alternative, and the rhetoric of some of its leading politicians reminded critics of the abolition of democratic freedoms during the early 1930s.39
Recently, the German archivist Peter Dohms emphasized the problems facing every student of social movements. Most public archives in Germany and elsewhere see it as their mission to collect and store the official record of national, state, or local bureaucracies.40 For many years, political parties and labor unions have been actively gathering source material on the history of social movements. There also have been notable efforts to establish new archives devoted to the preservation of records generated by the protest movements of the 1960s.41 Yet the archival situation remains unsatisfactory. Some of the new archival repositories have had to cope with administrative and financial problems. In addition, there is no consensus and not much experience on what exactly should be preserved. Archivists will have to develop new criteria for the collection of primary sources and will have to decide how they should handle the uneven and often sketchy documentation. This process is further complicated by the enormous fluctuation in the amount of source material. For the foreseeable future, the availability and access to source material related to the 1960s will continue to pose a serious challenge to archivists and historians.
Owing to the ephemeral nature of the protest movements, it will not be easy to reconstruct the internal decision-making processes within particular organizations. Oral history will help to bridge some of the gaps, but it cannot always substitute for the written record.42 At the same time, however, we are faced with too many sources if we choose to include all contemporary documents: press reports and newspaper articles, photographs, as well as transcripts of radio and television broadcasts.43 It is impossible to assemble a complete bibliography of the myriad theoretical texts and pamphlets, books and memoirs, justifications and condemnations that have already appeared in print. We have tried to list at least some of the most important texts in the second part of this Reference Guide.