Looking At The Construction of “1968” by historians, novelists, and the media over the past five decades, this study has revealed two important points that need to be borne in mind when discussing its “afterlives.” The first one is that this building work is not happening randomly but consciously, overseen by a relatively small number of determined writers who have a clear (though often not declared) objective in mind.1 There may be several objectives, which can amplify each other or cancel each other out. An example for this phenomenon would be the claim that “1968” has freed Germans from their “authoritarian character” versus the claim that “1968” has undermined “secondary virtues” like diligence, obedience, sense of duty, and discipline.

The second point is that we need to distinguish the aims and objectives of the German student movement from its subsequent construction in history books, literature, and the media. While some of the people active in the movement have become interpreters of their own history, others have come to writing about “1968” for a variety of reasons, often in response to sociopolitical developments that they see in some way connected to the German student movement (or which can be blamed on them). An example for this would be the recurring reference made to antiauthoritarian practices in primary and secondary education and their alleged disastrous impact on the attitudes and performance of school leavers. 2 We should also note that different political constellations in the past five decades have repeatedly changed the trajectory of the discourse over the legacy of “1968,” for example the “German Autumn” in 1977, German unification in 1989/90, the coming to power of the red–green government in 1998, the terrorist attacks in September 2001, or the global financial crisis in 2008.

A third point that needs to be made is that the German student movement has, right from the start, invited an association with a number of cultural reference points that have, for better or worse, influenced the course of German history and continue to shape German identity debates in the present. In this chapter, I explore two interpretative paradigms that help explain the longevity and intensity of the debate in Germany.