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Traditions of Protest
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Germany – West German Student Movement, 1966-69
In this course, Dr Hanno Balz (University of Cambridge) explores the West German student movement between 1966-69. In the first module, we think about the growth of protest movements in Germany in the 1960s, especially following the formation in 1966 of the 'grand coalition' between the SPD and CDU. In the second module, we think about the impact of Germany's Nazi past on the German stuent movement, before turning in the third module to consider the international context – the Cuban Revolution (1953-59), the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), the Vietnam War (1955-75), and so on. In the fourth module, we trace the escalation and radicalisation of the student movement through two shootings – that of Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967 and that of Rudi Dutschke in April 1968 – before turning in the fifth and final module to consider the growth of the women's liberation movement out of the German student movement, and the fragmentation of the movement from the late 1960s onwards
Traditions of Protest
In this module, we think about the growth of protest movements in Germany in the 1960s, focusing in particular on: (i) the transformation of the German economy and society in the decades following the Second World War; (ii) increasing importance of white-collar work and the (consequent) expansion of student numbers at German universities; (iii) the reasons that left-wing politics was underrepresented in West Germany at this time; (iv) the emergence of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) as an independent political organisation in the early 1960s; (v) the shifting political sympathies of German students in this period; (vi) the creation of the first 'grand coalition' in Germany in 1966, the lack of a strong parliamentary opposition, and the emergence of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO); and (vii) the figure of Rudi Dutschke and the idea of the 'long march through the institutions'.
My name is Hannah Bods.
00:00:05I'm originally from Germany,
00:00:07but now I'm a lecturer for modern European
00:00:08and German history at the University of Cambridge.
00:00:11Today,
00:00:14the topic of the lecture will be the revolt of 1968 in Germany and two p precise.
00:00:15This is West Germany
00:00:21when we talk about West Germany, Um,
00:00:24we should always keep in mind that this is the times of the Cold War.
00:00:26So we always have to be aware of the fact that there's also the other Germany,
00:00:30which is East Germany.
00:00:34But I will not really talk about what happened in East Germany during this period.
00:00:35So the first session of this lecture will be about the traditions of the protests.
00:00:40Where do the protests that fully emerged in the sixties actually come from?
00:00:47So we can actually say that all over the Western world,
00:00:52young people and this is what the lectures about.
00:00:56It's about young people, not only students.
00:00:59They started to rebel in the early 19 sixties,
00:01:01whereas in other parts of the world,
00:01:05the Cuban revolution of 1959 and anti colonial struggles left the
00:01:07impression that the world is about to be radically changed.
00:01:12after the Second World War, societies saw a new era of affluence,
00:01:16C and also a transformation of the economic sphere.
00:01:20The new economy of the 19 fifties or
00:01:25sixties was more dependent on white collar workers,
00:01:27people that worked in the service industry
00:01:31industry that needed a better education.
00:01:33So what you would need is more young people
00:01:36that would actually go to college or university,
00:01:40and therefore student numbers were exploding everywhere.
00:01:43If we look at West Germany, the numbers of university students tripled between 1950
00:01:471965
00:01:53and now we can actually say that by the early 19 sixties
00:01:56it was obvious for students that the times they were changing.
00:02:00As Bob Dylan said in one of his famous songs,
00:02:05This was a period of high expectations
00:02:09and students thought that society should be reformed and
00:02:12leave this post war focus of hard work,
00:02:16hard word ethics, political, social,
00:02:20cultural stagnation behind There should be a new era dawning.
00:02:24That will be a real social progress.
00:02:28I would actually say that high expectations can be
00:02:32seen in general as a motor of social history.
00:02:34This is something that affected history through our social history, uh,
00:02:38but we always have to see this history of
00:02:41high expectations connected to a history of disillusionment,
00:02:45and we will cover this as well.
00:02:49So West Germany in the 19 fifties,
00:02:52it was a society that a lot of people that were more liberal,
00:02:55found to be very stagnant, stale, Uh,
00:02:59it was called like this was rather leaden time or decade.
00:03:03Um,
00:03:09Communists and the left in general were widely associated
00:03:10with the other Germany with the East Germany.
00:03:14And so if you were Communists or generally on the left in West Germany in the fifties,
00:03:17people on the streets would actually tell you,
00:03:22Why don't you go to the other side just over the Iron Curtain
00:03:25and we should not forget that West Germany eventually was one
00:03:30of the few West European countries where Communist Party was banned.
00:03:34It was banned in 1956
00:03:39but we also had some social movements in the 19 fifties.
00:03:42Already there was a mass protests against the atomic bomb,
00:03:45the nuclear bomb and German ambitions to actually acquire a nuclear option.
00:03:49And more generally,
00:03:54there were protests against German rearmament when
00:03:55there should be a new German army.
00:03:59These were big protests,
00:04:02but not many students took part in these protesters was mainly Social Democrats,
00:04:03labour unionists and so on.
00:04:09This then would change. By the beginning of the sixties,
00:04:11the student organisations of the Socialists and Social Democrats
00:04:15was called STS Socialist League of German Students,
00:04:19and this would become more leftist, more radicalised by the late fifties,
00:04:24would engage in a rereading of Max and Maxine
00:04:30classics and would then split from the party,
00:04:36the mother party, the Social Democrats
00:04:39by 1960
00:04:42become an independent left wing student organisation.
00:04:44By now, a whole generation was becoming more left wing, too social,
00:04:47same for the first time, traditionally,
00:04:51students who were mostly from upper class and middle class families.
00:04:53Uh, we are more conservative than the rest of society,
00:04:57or even as we have seen in the thirties, supported the Nazis.
00:05:00This would change now.
00:05:05More more German students would come from lower
00:05:07middle class families or even working class families,
00:05:09and would start uh, studying at one of the West German universities.
00:05:12In the 19 sixties,
00:05:18a new student generation was to take democracy
00:05:19serious and not only take it as granted.
00:05:22This was part of a rejection of the Cold War ideology that was actually saying,
00:05:25You could just be proud about living in a
00:05:30democratic state and don't ask any further questions.
00:05:33This is a fluency. We have democracy. That's it for now.
00:05:37And this is something that students didn't really want to accept.
00:05:41And they said democracy
00:05:44should be a bit more than just this.
00:05:46So students now called for a reform, especially of higher education.
00:05:50That should cater to the needs of a society that needed more and more education,
00:05:54especially higher education,
00:06:00and that society should get rid of the still dominant old
00:06:01fashioned curricula that were in the universities that were decades old.
00:06:05Furthermore,
00:06:11student representatives should be sitting
00:06:12on the university's government bodies.
00:06:14This then, they would say, would be real democracy. We want to have our say.
00:06:17The year 1966 then saw the first sit in in
00:06:23the occupation of administrative buildings at the Free University in Berlin
00:06:27when students protested against the introduction of limits of the
00:06:31number of semesters you allowed to study beyond the university.
00:06:35A more general concern for students as well as the liberal spectrum
00:06:40was the grand coalition that formed in West Germany in 1966.
00:06:44For the first time,
00:06:50the conservative Christian Democratic Party and the Socialists Social Democrats
00:06:51together formed
00:06:56the West German government.
00:06:58That left only the Free Democrats being the only opposition in
00:07:00parliament with less than 10% of the seats in parliament.
00:07:05The newly emerging student movement saw this as a decline in democracy and
00:07:10called for a real opposition that would have to materialise outside of parliament
00:07:15being disillusion ised with the Socialist Party in new umbrella,
00:07:21organisation for student groups and other political movements was launched.
00:07:25It called itself Apple a P o which in German meant outside parliamentary
00:07:30opposition, which in English is extra parliamentary opposition,
00:07:37and it was declared that this new real opposition will be taken to the streets
00:07:42by now.
00:07:49The movement had found a spokesperson who became one of the
00:07:50most prominent figures of the 68 movement in Germany and beyond.
00:07:53His name was Rudi Dutschke
00:07:57Dodge, who was born in 1940
00:07:59spent his youth in East Germany,
00:08:02where he already ran into trouble with the authorities in
00:08:041961 only one day before the Berlin Wall was erected.
00:08:08Uh, he fled to West Berlin, where he started to study sociology
00:08:11after reading Max's philosophers like Thibodaux Adan? Oh, Or how about Makuza?
00:08:18He became a member of the S.
00:08:22D s and soon one of the leading protagonists
00:08:24who everyone in the student movement would know.
00:08:28Soon Dutschke would coin one of the central slogans of the 1968 movement,
00:08:32and that was the long march through the institutions.
00:08:39This, of course,
00:08:44is referenced to Mao Zedong and his Chinese revolution that
00:08:45started with his long march and ended in a revolution.
00:08:50But it was also about the duty of the future elite to take over
00:08:54the institutions and therefore transformed the institutions
00:09:00and therefore change the whole system.
00:09:04In the end, this long march would create a new German society,
00:09:08one that would finally detach itself from the Nazi past.
00:09:13And this is what I will talk about in session number two
00:09:19
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Balz, H. (2021, March 03). Germany – West German Student Movement, 1966-69 - Traditions of Protest [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/germany-west-german-student-movement-1966-69
MLA style
Balz, H. "Germany – West German Student Movement, 1966-69 – Traditions of Protest." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 03 Mar 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/germany-west-german-student-movement-1966-69