contested terrain

New Book: Utopia or Auschwitz?: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

Utopia or Auschwitz?: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust
By Hans Kundnani

The left-wing students who demonstrated in the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 differed from their international counterparts in one crucial way. These young Germans, who would become known as the 1968 generation, or the Achtundsechziger, were raised knowing their parents were responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. Consequently, this generation dreamed of making a better world, but they also felt compelled to save Germany from itself. For them, it was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz.

Though these demonstrators imagined their struggle against capitalism to be an ex post facto resistance against Nazism, they also exhibited a tendency to relativize the Holocaust. Some in fact wanted to highlight their country’s Nazi past, and despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the Achtundsechziger, nationalist and anti-Semitic currents emerged from the student movement and took root in the rhetoric of the West German New Left.

It can be argued, therefore, that the 1968 generation had a deeply ambivalent relationship with their Nazi past. Utopia or Auschwitz. explores these contradictions as it traces the political journey of Germany’s 1968 generation through the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s and the Social Democrats and Greens of the 1980s. It concludes with the 1990s and the first-ever “red-green” government in Germany. Hans Kundnani examines the foreign policy of this new coalition government, especially its response to the Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq crises, which reflects the 1968 generation’s ambivalent relationship with its Nazi heritage.

About the Author

Hans Kundnani is a journalist based in London. He studied philosophy and German at Oxford University and journalism at Columbia University. He is a former correspondent for the Observer and writes for various newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Prospect, and the Times Literary Supplement.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 7:41 pm and is filed under German Left, Germany, Holocaust, social movements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.