After the end of WWII, the generation of what would become known as the 68ers found themselves in a precarious position. They came into adulthood to realize that their parent’s generation were if not perpetrators then at least accomplices to one of the gravest genocides in human history, that they had enthusiastically endorsed a fascistic maniac, that the country they inhabited stood in ruins, bombed to the ground morally and physically, and that they now stood at the epicenter of the cold war, half capitalist, half communist. From the perspective of the 68ers, the worst of all was that there had been no cultural reckoning. With the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials and the prosecution of the elite Nazi administration, the majority of the population seemed content to simply to forget. For the 68ers that was not an option. Rather than view the WWII and the Holocaust as an aberration and horrific exception to German culture, the youth of the 68er generation demanded a revolutionary reevaluation of everything German. They asked: What factors, economic, social, cultural, and historical, led to this catastrophe? How can we come to terms with this past? And what vision of a transformed future could replace the old? The answer to these questions involved a three-step approach. A radical critique of the past and the structures of nationalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, racism, and capitalism, which they believed were the foundational underpinnings of German fascism. Active political dissent that demanded change and culminated in the domestic bombings of the left-wing group the Red Army Faction. And a total re-conception of the norms of society, sexuality, and selfhood perhaps best represented in the Love Parade and the drugs, sex, and radical experimentation that fueled the raves and Berlin techno scene after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This course will investigate the transformations of postwar German society in the literature, philosophy, film, photography, and art of the time. We will focus on the social critiques of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, political resistance in both the communist East and capitalist West Germany as well as the life in and relationship between the two, and the utopic visions of the postwar German left as well as the success and failures of this radical political movement. Readings and figures may include: Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Deleuze, Foucault, Crista Wolf, Max Frisch, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Rainald Goetz, Anselm Kiefer, Helene Hegemann, and Felix Denk.