The year 1968, with its student radicalism, seemed in retrospect to mark a turning point in the intellectual history of the Federal Republic. The students indicted everything from the structure of higher education to the failure to come to terms with the past. Existing democratic institutions were denounced as façades behind which lay a potentially authoritarian, if not fascist, state. The symbol of 1968 is now regarded by some as myth rather than reality. Nevertheless, it was a powerful symbol for discontent and protests that, according to Karl-Dietrich Bracher, ‘led to a renaissance of the sense of crisis, which put in question anew the successful politics of reconstruction – but now in the global context of a world civilisation, of the north–south conflict and a worldwide renewal of ideologies’. Marxism of varying kinds was one of those ideologies that fed into the student protests. Yet their radicalism was not only unsettling in the eyes of established figures but also seemed suspect. Indeed, the call for direct democracy seemed to invoke visions of identitarian models of democracy that were regarded as one of the flaws in German political thought. Even those in principle more sympathetic to the students, including members of the Frankfurt School from whom the students initially claimed to draw inspiration, were concerned by their political activism, so much so that Jürgen Habermas accused the most radical of ‘left-wing fascism’, a charge from which he later distanced himself.