The 1960s mark a dividing point in the history of
the Western world. The old generation in govern-
ment was passing; the welfare state had come to
provide a safety net; a university education was no
longer the preserve of the privileged few; the
young were freed from sexual taboos and fears,
and they discovered a new sense of identity and
mission: romantic, idealistic, searching for a cause
more worthwhile than crass materialism in a secu-
lar age. That similar feelings were burgeoning in
the Soviet-dominated East becomes clear from
events in Poland and from the Prague Spring, but
for the most part repression kept the lid on free
expression. In the US, university students on the
eastern seaboard in particular identified them-
selves in the 1960s with the civil-rights cause of
black people, though in this context they had the
support of a new-generation president in J. F.
Kennedy. Elsewhere the old generation was still in
control, typified by de Gaulle in the Elysée. In the
US the promise of the Kennedy years ended with
the president’s assassination. Vietnam increasingly
blighted the lives of youth, of the conscripts sent
to fight on the other side of the world; the war
became the focus of a new student protest move-
ment and aroused general disillusionment with
the honesty of those who governed.
For the West German youth there was the
added trauma of the question ‘What did my par-
ents do during the war?’. The almost total silence
in their country about the Nazi past only widened
the gulf between the generations. As the activeprotesters in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt saw
it, the ‘grand coalition’ of Kiesinger–Brandt was a
cynical closing of the ranks of the establishment.
There was a short-lived resurgence of the extreme
right, a switch of voters from the CDU, for whom
the coalition with the Social Democrats was repug-
nant. Far more substantial was the movement by
those on the left who could not stomach the coali-
tion for exactly the opposite reason and felt disillu-
sioned by Willy Brandt’s political manoeuvres.
This discontent was fanned by the stirring
news of student riots in Paris and throughout the
Western world. Self-styled international student
leaders emerged and became cult figures. The
protesters were right about some of the causes
they espoused – the need for practical reforms in
the universities, for example, or the campaign
against excessive police repression, which threat-
ened civil liberties – but they were naive to
suppose that they could spearhead a Trotskyist or
anarchistic revolutionary movement. They them-
selves were mainly the offspring of the better-off,
privileged professional and middle classes, and
workers in Germany, France and Britain felt little
sympathy for them and less urge to identify with
their manifold causes. What gave the student
rioting such potency, nevertheless, were the tele-
vision cameras transmitting into millions of
peaceable sitting rooms scenes of blazing petrol
bombs and charging policemen.
The single event that provided the spark and
allowed the ultra-left to capture the student(^1) Chapter 71
THE GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLIC
REACHING MATURITY