Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

by Hans Kundnani

One thing separated the left-wing students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts elsewhere around the world. The young Germans who became known as the 1968 generation or the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their parents were responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better world as some of their revolutionary contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing Utopia or Auschwitz. However, although many in the West German student movement imagined their struggle against capitalism as a kind of ex post facto resistance against Nazism, they also had a tendency to relativise the Holocaust. Others, meanwhile, wanted to draw a line under the Nazi past. In fact, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the Achtundsechziger , there were also nationalist and anti-Semitic currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement. In short, the 1968 generation had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past. Utopia or Auschwitz explores these contradictory currents as it traces the political journey of Germany's 1968 generation, via the left-wing terrorism of the seventies and the Social Democrats and Greens in the eighties, to political power in the nineties in the form of the first-ever "red-green" government in Germany. It examines the "red-green" government's foreign policy, in particular its response to the Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq crises, which reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past.

Genres: History, Politics, Germany

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the beginning of last month fifty-eight year old Verena Becker appeared in court in Stuttgart, charged as an accomplice in the murder over thirty years ago of Siegfried Buback, then Germany’s prosecutor-general, in a drive-by shooting. Becker, if you have never heard of her, was once a member of a collection of terrorist fanatics generally known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after the two principal leaders, though they preferred to call themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion – Red Army Faction – or the RAF.

These people had declared war on what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, Buback being a prime target, an agent of the ‘fascist’ state. The fact that Buback’s driver was also killed probably counted, if it counted for anything at all, as a terrorist version of ‘collateral damage.’

Becker and her crowd were part of a generation now known in Germany as the Achtundzechzigers – the 68ers – the student cohort of 1968, born to put the world to rights, born to compel their parents – the Auschwitz generation- to face the facts of their past, to face the fact that Germany had not been liberated at all in 1945, that the Federal Republic was not a true democracy merely a continuation of the Hitler state.

Knowing nothing about Becker and next to nothing about German urban terrorism I’ve had a quick and enlightening trot through Utopia or Auschwitz; Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundani, a London-based journalist. It’s quite a tale, a story of political pathology, intellectual delusion and sophistry of the most tortured kind imaginable. For me it simply confirmed something that I had long deduced: that when it comes to the supposed lessons of history nobody is more deluded or capable of self-delusion than those on the political left.

I say left but it in the end it’s impossible to determine where these people, the generation of 68, belong other than in a kind of bedlam. They started off with a radical Marxist agenda but there were always undertones of distinct forms of German nationalism, allowing them to perceive the United States as an occupying power in the West as the Soviets were in the East. They began in criticising Nazism with attitudes, outlooks and practices that were distinctly Nazi. They began to upholding Auschwitz as a symbol of absolute evil only to relativise it, placing it alongside the bombing of German cities and the sufferings of the Palestinian people, before, in some cases, wishing to forget it altogether, or even denying that it happened at all.

Yes, that was another of their favoured causes, Palestine in the wake of the Six Day War, an event that transformed Jews and Israel from history’s victims to history’s perpetrators. In an article published in The New Republic in August 2001 Paul Berman put it thus: “To the West German students Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms.”

It certainly did, not in Israel, not in the German State, but in people like Becker, people that Jurgen Habermas, once the doyen of radical thought in Germany, described as ‘left-wing fascists.’ The anti-Semitism was, of course, disguised in the usual dishonest way as ‘anti-Zionism’, a wholly enlightened process that saw a ‘selection’ of Jews by some 68ers following the Entebbe hijacking, that saw a bomb planted in a Berlin synagogue on 9 November 1969, which just happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Horst Mahler, an RAF activist who supported the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, is a Nazi. No, that’s not an insult; he is a leading neo-Nazi, currently in prison for using the Hitler salute and Holocaust denial, both of which are crimes in Germany.

It went on, the tortuous delusions went on, specifically in the sporadic murder campaign of the RAF, a substitute for action by the proletarian masses, ever immersed in ‘false consciousness’, who had to be shown how things were done, how things were to be done, how the inconvenient were to be done away with.

Becker’s trial will doubtless draw a curtain on one of the most shameful periods, on one of the most shameful generations, in German history, the real children of Hitler, people who saw murder as a means to an end, utopia on skulls. It seems to me that the capacity of power to corrupt is not nearly as great as that of idealism.

[Kersplebedeb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of routine observations about the West German contemporaries of the babyboomers, i.e. the sixties generation, using the life history of Joschka Fischer as an obvious thread weaving it all together. Joins Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists and Paul Hockenos' Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic as books telling the same (fascinating) story. What Kundnani adds to the mix is a focus on how the sixties generation handled the legacy of the Holocaust, and its relationship to antisemitism. Thought this combined some good insights with some misleading claims. Difficult to have an honest account of zionism/antizionism as long as the Palestinians remain minor characters in the drama.

Also, curious if Habermas is really to blame (or thank) for the taming of the Greens - Kundnani really gives him a lot of weight in this.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, though I'm not sure it would appeal to someone who wasn't already interested in Germany and/or the politics of the 1960s and 70s. It's a bit flat -- doesn't really bring the times and people to life, or present a novel theoretical perspective. Just one thing after another. Interesting for its revelations about the early turn of the German radical left toward pro-Palestinian antisemitism.

No idea whether it would be more or less interesting to someone who knows less about the events and people described.