Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 The Years of Division
- 1 The Aftermath of War and the New Beginning
- 2 The 1950s: The Deepening Division
- 3 The 1960s: Taking Sides
- 4 A West German Interlude: Writers and Politics at the Time of the Student Movement
- 5 The 1970s: Writers on the Defensive
- 6 The 1980s: On the Threshold
- Intermezzo: Writers and the Unification Process
- Part 2 Writers and Politics After Unification
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - A West German Interlude: Writers and Politics at the Time of the Student Movement
from Part 1 - The Years of Division
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 The Years of Division
- 1 The Aftermath of War and the New Beginning
- 2 The 1950s: The Deepening Division
- 3 The 1960s: Taking Sides
- 4 A West German Interlude: Writers and Politics at the Time of the Student Movement
- 5 The 1970s: Writers on the Defensive
- 6 The 1980s: On the Threshold
- Intermezzo: Writers and the Unification Process
- Part 2 Writers and Politics After Unification
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction
THE MAIN OUTLINES OF POLITICAL AND LITERARY developments in the Federal Republic in the 1960s were sketched at the beginning of the previous chapter. This chapter will deal with events (and writers' reactions to them) that can be linked to the student movement, a phenomenon that ran parallel to mainstream political developments, although of course the two worlds did influence one another. Specifically, large parts of the student movement sought to change the nature of the Federal Republic and set up a different kind of society that would be based on socialism, albeit not that of the GDR. In this they appeared to have the support of a number of writers and intellectuals, not least those who at the beginning of the 1960s had supported the SPD but had become increasingly disillusioned by the party's apparent drift to the right. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, claimed in 1967 that it was no longer possible to repair the political system of the Federal Republic. The choice was either the status quo or a new system (VLMS, 257). It is the ideas and events that can be linked to this view that will form the subject of this chapter.
The Return of Ideology
The first two postwar decades in the western part of Germany can be seen as characterized by suspicion of political ideologies. The experience of Nazism had put right-wing ideology, or at least that of the extreme kind, beyond the pale, while the negative example of the GDR acted as a deterrent to the adoption of ideologies based on Marxism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writers and Politics in Germany, 1945–2008 , pp. 70 - 87Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009