From Literary Representation to Imaginative (Re-)Construction

Acknowledging that there are elements that the chroniclers and interpreters of “1968” have failed to capture, Wolfgang Kraushaar has suggested that there exists a role for writers and artists in preserving the creative energy of the movement:

In spite of this (guarded) admission, the significant body of fictional texts set in, or against the backdrop of, the German student movement that has developed (and continues to grow) since the early 1970s has hardly featured in the debates about the historicization of “1968” discussed in the previous chapters. This is a serious oversight by historians, sociologists, and political scientists as it is in these novels that we find preserved the emotional memory that simply cannot be recovered in the archives. There are reasons for this oversight: historians, as a rule, are reluctant to accept fiction as evidence since it is subjective and almost impossible to corroborate. Moreover, some of the key literary texts about “1968” were written years or even decades before the historicization of “1968” was attempted in earnest. And yet, to ignore the evidence of these texts means to forego an insight into the psychological makeup of the 68ers, a ground-level perspective on what the abstract ideological debates meant to them, and a deeper understanding of the motives behind their protests and the impact of their experiences on their lives.

In this chapter, I discuss the specific contribution that literary authors have made to our understanding of “1968” and summarize the debate on the social function of literature. While there are many German-speaking authors who have engaged with “1968,” six wellknown writers have returned to the subject again and again over the past five decades. I will explore to what extent texts by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Schneider, Uwe Timm, Friedrich Christian Delius, Erasmus Schöfer, and Jochen Schimmang, authors who have made their name by writing about “1968,” represent a continuation of the revolt by other means.