Protest Movements in 1960S West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (Book Review‪)‬

Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy. By Nick Thomas (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. xvi plus 277 pp. $79.95 [cloth], $26.95 [paper]). A scholarly research literature is only slowly developing around the contexts and significance of 1968, either country by country or on a general European front. The thirtieth anniversary produced a couple of major conference volumes and a wide range of commentary by former sixty-eighters, together with a few substantial monographs. (1) A reasonably dense historiography has also begun retrieving the intellectual genealogies of the movements concerned, as for instance in the extensive literature on the contexts of the British New Left from the mid-1950s. But in contrast with the literature on the United States for the same period, which is far more richly developed in scholarly terms, these European discussions are still dominated to a striking degree by the writings of the participants themselves, whether as nostalgia or disavowal. Indeed, the most complex historical works have tended to focus less on the events per se than on Sixty-Eight's subsequent histories as memory and myth. (2) For Germany there is certainly an extensive literature focusing around the so-called "new social movements" and the prehistories of The Greens, most of it produced within sociology or political science. With respect to the student movement, Wolfgang Kraushaar's works have also become an indispensable resource. (3) But there is still remarkably little in English in the form of an overall analysis or a detailed narrative account.