About the lecture

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'.

About the lecturer

Dr Hanno Balz is DAAD Lecturer in Modern German and European History at the University of Cambridge. He has published extensively on the history of the "Red Army Faction" West-German militant group and the legal, intellectual, and political reverberations in West German society that came along with challenging the state. He works more broadly on European social movements from the 1960s to the 1980s as well as on the history of Nazi rule and the Shoah.