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‘1968’ in Context: Protest Movements in the 1960s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2011
Extract
The year 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the great revolts of 1968. As always, the occasion gave rise to impassioned debates. In Germany they were stimulated by the historian and 1968 veteran Götz Aly, who compared the ‘sixty-eight’ to the ‘thirty-three’ generations (the Nazi student body of the early 1930s), and postulated ‘parallels in German history’, continuities and ‘similarities in the approach to mobilisation, political utopianism and the anti-bourgeois impulse’. Following the thirtieth anniversary in 1998, which triggered a flood of scholarly publications, we have had ten further years of research into the recent history of the 1960s, up to the fortieth anniversary in 2008. In 1998, the central question was still to remove the 1960s protest movements from the realm of myth and to establish the ‘year of protest’ (i.e. 1968) itself as a subject for historical research. Since 1998, the aims of international research have been to develop a global comparative analysis of the movements and to contextualise them historically. Particular attention has been devoted to locating political protest movements in the overall process of socio-cultural transformation through the ‘long 1960s’.
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References
1 Aly, Götz, Unser Kampf 1968 – ein irritierter Blick zurück, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), esp. 169–84 (quotations 185, 170–1)Google Scholar. On the German debate, already launched in 2007, see, for example, Dirsch, Felix, ‘“1968”: Von der erlebten Zeitzeugenschaft zum Gegenstand der Historiographie? Eine Literaturauswahl in der Rückschau auf das Jubiläumsjahr 2008’, Zeitschrift für Politik, 56, 1 (2009), 89–97 (esp. 88–9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 From a comparative perspective, see: Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, ed., 1968 – Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998)Google Scholar; Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Fink, Carole, Gassert, Philipp and Junker, Detlef, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Gilcher-Holtey, 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft.
4 Thus, for example, Schildt, Axel and Siegfried, Detlef, ‘Youth, Consumption, and Politics in the Age of Radical Change’, in Schildt, Axel and Siegfried, Detlef, eds., Between Marx and Coca-Cola. Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), 1–35Google Scholar; Ebbinghaus, Angelika and van der Linden, Marcel, ‘1968 – ein Blick auf die Protestbewegungen 40 Jahre danach’, in Ebbinghaus, Angelika, van der Linden, Marcel and Henninger, Max, eds., 1968 – ein Blick auf die Protestbewegungen 40 Jahre danach aus globaler Perspektive, ITH-Tagungsberichte 43 (Leipzig: AVA, 2009), 7–20, esp. 7–8Google Scholar.
5 See Gassert, Philipp and Klimke, Martin, ‘1968: From Revolt to Research’, in Gassert, Philipp and Klimke, Martin, eds., Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt (Washington, DC: GHI Bulletin Supplement, 2009), 5–22 (esp. 8)Google Scholar.
6 Gassert and Klimke, ‘1968: From Revolt to Research’, 9, 17.
7 See especially, Ingrid Gilcher Holtey, ‘May 1968 in France. The Rise and Fall of a New Social Movement’, in Fink et al., 1968: The World Transformed, 253–76.