Book Review: The Other '68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany

The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany. By Anna von der Goltz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. xix + 308 pp. £75.00 (hardback)

Extract:

In The Other ‘68ers, Anna von der Goltz analyses the ‘68 of Christian Democratic activists and how they remembered and refashioned that experience in subsequent decades. The book makes excellent use of over two dozen oral history interviews in addition to extensive archival research and tells a multifaceted story—of Christian Democratic engagement with and resistance to ‘68, of Centre-Right activists’ mimicry and envy of left-wing activism, and of the complex relation of these ‘other 68ers’ to Christian Democratic elders and conservatives. The Other ‘68ers makes important contributions to the history of 1968, Christian Democracy and the Federal Republic.

Von der Goltz presents a ‘long 1968’ that was, at times, shared between Centre-Right and Left and, at others, marked by their confrontation. The first chapter reframes the origins of protest in 1968 by demonstrating that some Christian Democratic activists shared a desire for change and need to be heard in the 1960s, suggesting that ‘1968 was a much broader phenomenon than is traditionally assumed’ (p. 73). However, the 1967 death of Benno Ohnesorg did not shape Centre-Right self-consciousness as it did the Left’s. After 1967 a predominantly reactive relation to the Left displaced previously shared concerns of higher education and political stagnation. Christian Democratic activists claimed to embody sober rationality in contrast to an emotional and irrational Left, but also indulged in a romantic image of themselves as rebels against the left-wing zeitgeist, all the while pretending to represent a silent majority in a feat of ‘mostly wishful thinking’ (p. 41).