What’s in a Name? “Student” Protests in 1960s West Germany

The political activism of the 1960s  has long been known in Western Europe as elsewhere as “the student movement.”  But in West Germany (BRD), this is a misleading characterization.  It ignores the actions of hundreds of thousands who weren’t students, including secretaries, welders, and unemployed.  The category “student” itself was highly amorphous, specifically in the BRD, referring e.g. to many registered indefinitely at a university or college, but taking no classes, whether precisely in order to pursue fulltime political work—and/or because there were no employment opportunities.  Activists included too many non-ethnic Germans, for example, Africans, Iranians, and Turks who had come to study or work.  Acknowledgement of this broader population challenges still-prevalent myths of these activists as only a “tiny, radical minority,” or as the objects of the “mercy of a late birth,” escaping the scourge of Nazism and spoiled by the “Economic Miracle.”  Interviews with fifty former activists and other sources make clear this breadth and variability, with significant implications.  For one, it highlights the variability of forms of influential popular activism that may be considered together, well beyond marches, sit-ins—and the violent acts of a tiny number.  For another, it makes clear the importance of considering as of a piece activism over a longer period (here from ca. 1962 to 1983), and in turn over the course of individuals’ lives, accounting for example for the remarkable political activity among schoolchildren.  This in turn challenges and transcends the current binary in describing this activity: as either a revolutionary “explosion” of the late ‘60s, or as the epiphenomenon of decades-long “liberalization” from above.  The nature of this activism and its actors is worth understanding because, possibly more deeply than anywhere else, it lastingly transformed the national political culture, broadening definitions of legitimate politics and of democratic participation.