This Book Set out to answer three closely related questions:

1. 1) How can a relatively small number of individuals maintain control over the cultural memory of a generation?

2. 2) How has the representation of “1968” changed in response to political events over the last five decades?

3. 3) To what extent has “1968” become the master narrative of a nostalgically commemorated West Germany?

The discussion has shown that the perseverance of a cultural elite made up of novelists, academics, and journalists has indeed created, maintained, and defended a concept of “1968” that is now very difficult to alter, at least in its key elements. If it is true that history is written by the victors, then the 68ers—and their tale spinners—seem not to have heard the news. In spite of the students’ failure to achieve their key objectives, “1968” is seen today as a crucial moment in postwar German history that “changed everything”: attitudes to authority, sexuality, democracy, history, traditions, and cultural practice. Over five decades the student revolt has been historicized, memorialized, sensationalized, romanticized, analyzed, mythicized, theorized, dramatized, aestheticized, vilified, and glorified. Through a process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, former activists, writers, academics, and the media have fashioned a complex narrative if not for a nation, then certainly for the old Federal Republic. In doing so, they created a collective consciousness that continues to shape political and cultural identities in united Germany.

What has become clear is that “1968” isn't just a narrative produced by 68ers: it has become a screen onto which a small but vocal group of historians, political scientists, sociologists, novelists, political pundits, media professionals, and activists from the Left and Right project their political opinions and private fantasies. Almost fifty years on, “1968” in Germany is not primarily about historicization or impact or cultural memory, though these aspects are all important. The initial impetus for writing about “1968” was a desire to continue the revolt by other means when it had failed in the streets. Yet the main motivation for the continued and sustained production of narratives by subsequent generations of writers is a widely shared, diffuse sense of unfinished business: a feeling that the 68ers started something that needs to be concluded or rejected.