Book contents
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
1 - “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
Summary
Translated by Sally E. Robertson
EVENT, EXPERIENCE, MYTHOLOGY: 1968 AS A PROBLEM OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
In the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany alike, the 1960s were a period of great unrest that was fundamentally shaped by student rebellions. It may be pure coincidence that the “ringleaders” in both countries bore the name SDS. In German, the acronym stood for Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union), the antiauthoritarian and neo-Marxist coalition that broke away from the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) in the late 1950s and became the engine of the student protest movement in West Germany between 1960 and 1970. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Students for a Democratic Society stood at the center of the protest movement during the same period. The adjective “socialist” did not appear in the Americans' SDS, which points to an important difference. Student and youth movements in Germany and other European countries in the 1960s were more in thrall to socialist-communist ideologies and the organizational structures of traditional workers' movements than their fellow students in America. The two New Left movements otherwise shared a predilection for deviations from and offshoots of the left tradition, such as anarchists and Trotskyists, and as self-proclaimed “tiersmondists,” both declared their steadfast solidarity with the liberation movements of the Third World.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990A Handbook, pp. 421 - 429Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004