A TALE OF TWO REVOLTS:
“1968” IN DIVIDED GERMANY

The global aspects of “1968” were writ larger in divided Germany than perhaps anywhere else. Integrated into a web of transnational relationships by virtue of their key position in the post-war bloc system, the two German societies sensitively registered the changing pressures of the Cold War situation. In the West, the American war in Vietnam, in the East, the crushing of the Prague Spring, had powerful local effects, putting the lie to the peaceful democratic pretensions of the older generation. The link between the global and the local was not purely passive, however, but operated in both directions—young rebels in the two Germanies not only “imagined” themselves as part of various global communities, but sought to forge connections within these communities.

Taking divided Germany as a case study for way that international currents of youth revolt on the one hand, and the specific political “1968” on the other, prospered or failed to prosper in radically different political-cultural settings, the paper proposed here will examine the connections—figurative and literal—linking the young rebels of the two Germanies both to the larger world, and to their German counterparts across the border.

Timothy S. Brown is Assistant Professor of German History at Northeastern University and a member of the Boston German History Workshop. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently from the American Council on Germany and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a specialist in the transnational cultural history of popular music, youth subcultures and radical politics after 1945, as well as on the history of Communism and National Socialism between the World Wars. His most recent publication is “Richard Scheringer, the KPD and the Politics of Class and Nation in Germany: 1922-1969” (Contemporary European History, August 2005, Volume 14, Number 1). His book Bolsheviks, “Beefsteaks” and Brownshirts: A Cultural History of the Radical Extremes in the Weimar Republic is forthcoming from Berghahn Books. He is currently working on the comparative cultural history of divided Germany in the 1960s and 70s.

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