Timothy Scott Brown,West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt,1962–1978

Reviewed by: Holger Nehring, University of Stirling, UK

Research on the 1960s in West Germany has been booming ever since historians took over from contemporaries in interpreting this decade of transformation and contestation. But, with the exception of Nick Thomas's excellent narrative of protest movements in West Germany and Detlef Siegfried's path-breaking exploration of the politics of culture that undergirded these movements, there is not yet a synthetic analytical account of this transformative period that would place the protest movement in a larger context. Two interpretations have dominated research so far: one strand has zoomed in on the revolutionary potential of the student movements, but has mostly remained focused on a number of key activists, intellectuals and movement organizations; another strand has interpreted protest and activism as mere surface phenomena of a ‘cultural revolution’, a shift towards liberalism and pluralism in West German political culture. Within this research landscape, transnational links are typically explored in the form of networks and transfers. Neither of these interpretations is entirely satisfactory because of the significant blind spots they entail, especially with regard to their understanding of what constituted the political force of these movements.

Brown's excellent and in many ways path-breaking West Germany and the Global Sixties is the synthesis we have been waiting for. In a book that is analytically rigorous and theoretically versatile, yet soundly grounded in primary materials, including rarely used collections and ‘grey literature’, Brown pushes the boundaries of the existing interpretations forward significantly. The study is structured thematically, while the individual sections follow an implicit chronology. The first two chapters quite literally lay the ground by zooming in on the two key parameters within which history unfolds: space and time. The first chapter discusses the ways in which activists expanded the realms of politics through their interactions with space and emphasizes the deep entanglements between local protests and global developments. The second chapter discusses the 1968ers’ conception of historical time: their interpretations of the Nazi past as well as the ways in which they sought to marshal German revolutionary traditions in their quest for utopia. The following three chapters analyse the modes these reinterpretations and questionings took. In Chapter 3, Brown provides us with an excellent survey of underground publishing in creating communities of protest. The next two chapters analyse the role of music and sound as well as new ways of seeing (‘visions’) the activists created. The last three chapters detail the outcomes of activism: reconfigurations of power, the question of sexual liberation as well as ‘death’, and the rise and demise of ‘terrorism’. All chapters are carried by a deep and careful engagement with the relevant methodologies, and they take our attention away from well-known activists and locations to ground-level experiences.

Throughout his study, Brown highlights the ‘interpretation of global vectors across one local terrain’ (5), interprets the antiauthoritarian movement as one that created an ‘alternative sphere of knowledge’ (7) and emphasizes the deep ‘interpenetration of culture and politics’ (11). He manages to uncover the 68ers’ utopian potential and to highlight the fundamental transformation of notions of the political around 1968. With his interpretation of the 1960s, Brown thus manages to sail between the Scylla of a myopic emphasis on the revolutionary politics of the student activists and the Charybdis of interpreting the 1960s as part of a process of change of cultural values. He intelligently combines attention to what Geoff Eley has called the political ‘eventfulness’ of the 1960s with an acute attention to longer-term socio-cultural developments.

This book, then, is a major achievement, both in its analytical rigour and in its recovery of new source materials. It will hopefully be used as set reading for courses on the global sixties at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Through its suturing of the political and the cultural, and its attention to the micropolitics of the 1960s in its transnational context, the book is also an important intervention in the way in which we might transnationalize the history of the Federal Republic. It can only be hoped that the publisher will issue a paperback edition soon, so that it can more conveniently be used as a textbook.