POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 57
during this decade. It membership doubled to over 700,000, while the
CSU (Christian Socialist Union) saw a 70 percent increase. This growth
indicates that the 1970s were not simply a “red decade.” There was also
a corresponding conservative side to the political mobilization occur-
ring among the youth at the time, although this was defi nitely more of a
minority phenomenon within the university context.^46 Meanwhile, party
members also began to take a more active role within party politics. At
the 1968 CDU congress in Berlin, thirty thousand members took part
in the discussion of the party’s agenda. Moreover, in the decade that
followed, the CDU entered into a fi ve-year debate over its fi rst party man-
ifesto.^47 As in the SPD, this politicization sprouted debates and tensions
within the party. Key issues, such as rights of participation, social secu-
rity, or Ostpolitik, turned into hotly contested topics—for example, be-
tween the left and conservative wings or between the more liberal Young
Union and the old guard. Simultaneously, the general public in the FRG
began to wrestle with fundamental concepts such as freedom and secu-
rity, political participation, and solidarity.^48 The SPD presented itself in
1972 as the “new middle,” which the CDU countered in 1975 with its
pithy “new social question” slogan that alluded to the poverty of fam-
ilies, single parents, and older individuals that had been neglected by
the SPD with its focus on trade union workers. Indeed, a new “working
group for semantics” was established in the CDU, which had otherwise
traditionally shied away from theory per se. It was not until the CDU/
CSU took over the government in 1982 that these debates over the party
platform waned and the focus of the party leadership turned back toward
the chancellor’s offi ce.
This dynamic expansion of the parties was also accompanied by a pro-
cess of professionalization. Even the traditional middle-class parties be-
gan to train their own functionaries, who were charged with organizing
politics at the local level. This professionalization was a reaction to the
dissolution of the traditional social-moral milieu in the 1960s, which had
been propped up by a stronger volunteer commitment to associations,
municipal communities, and even the political parties. For example, the
CDU began to employ local managers who took over the day-to-day run-
ning of the party, which used to be done on a volunteer basis by leaders
of the local sports shooting associations or church congregations.
The politicization that occurred in the 1970s was linked to political
polarization within West German society. Bitter confl icts not only erupted
between the Right and the Left, but also within the individual political
camps. While the SPD was divided over fundamental issues, similar splits
plagued the radical Left Party and the newly established Green Party in
which the fundamentalist “Fundis” pitted themselves against the more