Anna von der Goltz
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198849520
- eISBN:
- 9780191883644
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198849520.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Political History
This chapter engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods; the meaning of the Nazi past to their ...
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This chapter engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods; the meaning of the Nazi past to their activism; and intergenerational relations. Like their student peers on the Left, centre-right activists had been raised in a post-genocidal society. Given that, how did they view and engage with Germany’s recent history of mass violence? The chapter highlights the centrality of anti-totalitarianism to their thinking. It also shows that, inspired by the so-called ‘‘45ers’ and nudged by social scientists who routinely portrayed student protest as a symptom of generational conflict, they began to think of themselves as a distinct generational community in the 1960s.Less
This chapter engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods; the meaning of the Nazi past to their activism; and intergenerational relations. Like their student peers on the Left, centre-right activists had been raised in a post-genocidal society. Given that, how did they view and engage with Germany’s recent history of mass violence? The chapter highlights the centrality of anti-totalitarianism to their thinking. It also shows that, inspired by the so-called ‘‘45ers’ and nudged by social scientists who routinely portrayed student protest as a symptom of generational conflict, they began to think of themselves as a distinct generational community in the 1960s.
