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The Other ‘68ers
Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.
von, der Goltz, Anna. The Other '68ers : Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany, Oxford University Press
The Other ‘68ers
Student Protest and Christian Democracy
in West Germany
ANNA VON DER GOLTZ

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Anna von der Goltz 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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To Nico and Jasper
Acknowledgements
This book, my second, took a lot longer to research and write than my first.
I originally conceptualized the idea for The Other ‘68ers and began the research in
2008, while still a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was then side-
tracked by other projects and life events, among them a move to the United States.
Along the way, I received support from numerous institutions and individuals. It
is a pleasure to finally be able to express my gratitude here.
The Fellows of Magdalen College provided funds and an intellectual home in
the project’s very early stages. While in Oxford, I benefited immeasurably from
collaborating with my colleagues on the oral history project that became Europe’s
1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2013). It certainly distracted me
from thinking about the centre-right, but this would have been a very different—
and, I’m convinced, a much less interesting—book if I had not learned a great deal
about doing oral history and the 1960s in Europe from my interlocutors. In
particular, I want to thank Robert Gildea, James Mark, Anette Warring, John
Davis, and Juliane Fürst for intellectual stimulation and their friendship.
In 2008, I had the good fortune to meet Bernd Weisbrod at a conference, who
then invited me to be a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Graduate School on
‘Generations in Modern History’ at the University of Göttingen. His and the
group’s nuanced take on generational histories has influenced my thinking on the
topic in lasting ways. I have benefited immensely from his spirited and constructive
critique and from participating in the workshops and conferences that different
members of the Graduate School organized over the years. I am extremely grateful
to all its members, not least to Uffa Jensen, who helped to organize my stay.
An Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust brought me to the
History Faculty at the University of Cambridge and to Wolfson College, for the
better part of 2011. There, I profited, in particular, from the productive exchanges
in Richard J. Evans’s weekly workshop on German history and from the discus-
sions in the Modern European History Seminar.
Since taking up my post at Georgetown University in 2012, a semester of Junior
Faculty Leave, several Summer Academic Grants, a grant for a manuscript
workshop from the Mortara Center, and continuous research support from the
BMW Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and the School of
Foreign Service (SFS) helped to facilitate steady progress on the book. Faculty
and staff in CGES, SFS, and the History Department have all provided a wonderful
home base. A Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress allowed me to start
drafting the first chapters while looking out over the US Supreme Court.
viii 
I am grateful to the many colleagues in Germany, Britain, and the United States,
who invited me to present my arguments in various research seminars over the
years: the fellows at the German Historical Institutes in London and Washington,
D.C., Alexander Sedlmaier in Bangor, Paul Betts (then) at Sussex, Dieter
Gosewinkel at the WZB, Paul Nolte in Berlin, Andreas Rödder in Mainz, Frank
Bösch and Martin Sabrow in Potsdam, Nick Stargardt in Oxford, the organizers of
Der Kreis in Berkeley, especially Elena Kempf, Jim Brophy in Delaware, Jennifer
Allen at Yale, and, last but not least, my colleagues in Georgetown’s History
Faculty Seminar. Critical feedback on numerous conference presentations further
helped me to develop and refine my arguments.
Various colleagues read my original book proposal and drafts of this manuscript
or related articles I published, and their feedback has been invaluable in bringing
this book to completion: Martin Conway, Mario Daniels, Michael David-Fox,
David Collins, Jim Collins, Michael Kazin, Richard Kuisel, Eric Langenbacher,
Jamie Martin, Aviel Roshwald, Jordan Sand, Lu Seegers, Eva-Maria Silies, Quinn
Slobodian, Bernd Weisbrod, Judith Tucker, and Thomas Zimmer. Several
anonymous reviewers also offered criticism that was always helpful and deeply
appreciated.
At Georgetown, I have taught various courses on the 1960s and learned a lot
from the many lively conversations with my terrific students. Special thanks to the
undergraduate freshmen in my proseminar on ‘1968 in Europe’ and to the
graduates in ‘The 1960s in Transnational Perspective’, a seminar I happily co-
taught with Michael Kazin.
Several Georgetown graduate students in the MA program in German and
European Studies and in the History PhD program helped with bits of research,
translations, and copy editing. My sincere thanks to Robert Mevissen, Rebecca

Payne, Hannah Morris, Ricky Bordelon, Alexander Finn Macartney, Alistair
Somerville, Thom Loyd, Juliet Kelso, and Brent McDonnell for all their work.
Oral history interviews are one major group of sources for this study, and I am
extremely grateful to the former centre-right activists who took time out of their
often busy schedules to talk to me about their political lives. Many of them also
kindly shared documents in their possession. Even if they do not agree with all of
its analysis, I could not have written this book without their help.
It has been a great experience to work with Oxford University Press again.
Thanks to Cathryn Steele, Stephanie Ireland, Katie Bishop, and Thomas Deva for
shepherding the manuscript through peer review and production.
Family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic have provided much needed
emotional and logistical support, not least by housing, feeding, and entertaining
me while doing archival work and interviews. A special shout-out to Henrike
Heick, Sandra Jasper, Sarah Jastram, Kim Klehmet, and Birgitta Ashoff. My
adopted ‘DC family’ has helped me to feel at home in a city that I hardly knew
before moving to the United States and reminds me almost daily that there are
 ix
even more enjoyable things in life than writing books. I am particularly grateful to
Ben Mahler for his help with some of the illustrations.
This study owes some of its inspiration to my actual family, probably in more
ways than they are aware. I have often thought that my interest in the subject of
The Other ‘68ers must have been piqued early on, when observing some of the
family dynamics on display in my grandparents’ house in Essen, a building erected
on the visible remnants of a Nazi-era anti-aircraft position on grounds owned by
the Krupp dynasty. My mother, Heide, always seemed to stand out in these
surroundings. At the age of eighteen, she had left the Catholic Church that
meant so much to her father, who had consistently voted for the Christian
Democrats since the war. The first one in her family to attend university, she
moved to Freiburg to study English and Geography in the late 1960s, eventually
becoming a public school teacher in Bremen. Later on, she worked in education in
a local museum of ethnology and natural history. She never married and raised me
by herself in a culturally left-wing, urban milieu where everybody rode their bike,
even when it rained. At our annual Christmas Day gathering in Essen, I not only
noticed how different she was from her parents in almost every respect but would
often also see her spar with her brother-in-law. Like my mother, he had been born
in 1948, and he later married her younger sister. Like my mother, he had been a
first-generation student, and they both often shared stories about growing up in
fairly chaotic conditions in postwar West Germany. However, in most other ways,
they were quite different, including in their politics—although neither one of them
was overtly political and both had an argumentative streak. He had studied law in
Marburg, joined a fraternity, pursued a thriving career in the insurance industry,
made his home in a Cologne suburb with my aunt and my two cousins, and played
golf in his spare time. I always found it intriguing that he and my mother had been
born in the same year and both been students in the 1960s and yet fashioned such
different personas and lives. The annual scenes in Essen no doubt sparked my
interest in postwar generational dynamics, but they also must have made me
intuitively sceptical of overly deterministic histories of generation.
After her retirement, my mother transcribed many of the interviews on which
parts of this book are based. In the process, we had numerous enlightening
conversations about how she had experienced the years around 1968. It is one
of my great regrets that I did not complete this book during her lifetime. She died
in 2017—far too early at merely sixty-eight. I miss her every day.
Luckily, I still have wonderful family members in my life: among them my aunt
Gaby, my mother-in-law Gisi, and Christoph and Sofia, my brother- and sister-in-
law. They have all been tremendously supportive, especially in the past few years.
This book is dedicated to the two people closest to me: my husband, Nico, and
my son, Jasper, who was born in 2015. Nico has been an enthusiastic and patient
supporter of this work from the very beginning. Jasper remains unimpressed,
because the book is shorter than the first volume of Harry Potter. Both fill my life
x 
with love and daily laughter. Writing this as I am, in the midst of a global
pandemic that has brought life as we knew it to a near standstill, it is difficult to
imagine what the future holds. But I am immensely grateful for every day that the
three of us get to spend together.
Anna von der Goltz

Washington, D.C.,
July 2020
Contents
Abbreviations xiii
List of Illustrations xvii
Introduction 1
1968 and Histories of the Federal Republic 6
The Other ‘68ers and Histories of Generation 11
Sources 16
Chapter Structure 20
1. Between Engagement and Enmity 22
Centre-Right Students in the Streets 26
‘Be Where the Action Is!’ 36
A Silent Majority? 40
Reform vs. Revolution 43
Of Insiders and Outsiders 55
Renegades 67
2. Talking About (My) Generation 75
Narrating the War, Postwar, and Cold War 77
The Nazi Past and Totalitarianism 86
Intergenerational Conflict and Affinity 98
3. Between Adenauer and Coca-Cola 109

Reforming the World, (Not) Changing the Self? 110
‘None of Us Thought that You Weren’t Supposed to Sleep
with the Same Woman Twice’ 118
Changing Gender Roles and Women Activists 128
4. From Berlin to Saigon and Back 143
Cold War Imaginaries 147
The American War in Vietnam 157
Europe 163
Human Rights Activism 169
5. Combative Politics 181
Hardening Fronts 183
Weimar Re-enactments 189
Centre-Right Activists and the ‘Radicals Decree’ 194
Protecting the Constitution 202
The Spectre of Left-Wing Terrorism 206
Returning to the Fold 216
xii 
6. The (Ir)Resistible Rise of the Other ‘68ers 227

The Short March Through the Institutions 229
The Other ‘68ers and the Political Culture of the Late
Federal Republic 246
Commemorating 1968 252
Mescalero Returns 260
Conclusion: The Other ‘68ers in German History 267
Bibliography 273
Index 301
Abbreviations
ACDP Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik

ACSP Archiv für Christlich-Soziale Politik
ADS Aktionskomitee Demokratischer Studenten (Action Committee of
Democratic Students)
AHR American Historical Review
AI Amnesty International
AdsD Archiv der sozialen Demokratie
APO Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition)
ArchAPO Archiv APO und soziale Bewegungen
ARD Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Germany’s premier public television
station)
AUSS Aktionszentrum Unabhängiger und Sozialistischer Schüler (Action
Centre of Independent and Socialist Pupils)
BAK Bundesarchiv, Koblenz
BfV Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of
the Constitution)
BFW Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Association for the Protection of
Academic Freedom)
BRD Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany)
BSU Bonner Studentenunion (Bonn Student Union)

CDU Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CSU Christlich Soziale Union (Christian Social Union)
DKP Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party)
DM Demokratische Mitte (Democratic Centre)
Dpa Deutsche Presseagentur (German Press Agency)
DSU Deutsche Studentenunion (German Student Union)
EDS European Democrat Students
epd Evangelischer Pressedienst
EZA Evangelisches Zentral Archiv
FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
FCS Federation of Conservative Students (United Kingdom)
FDJ Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth)
FDP Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party)
FLN Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, Algeria)
FRG Federal Republic of Germany
FU Freie Universität Berlin (Free University Berlin)
GDR German Democratic Republic
xiv 
GN Göttinger Nachrichten
GSC German Subject Collection
HIA Hoover Institution Library and Archives
HIS Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
ICCS International Union of Christian Democrat and Conservative Students
IfZ Institut für Zeitgeschichte
ISC International Student Conference
JU Junge Union (Young Union)
Jusos Jungsozialisten (Young Socialists)
KSU Kölner Studentenunion (Cologne Student Union)
LAB Landesarchiv Berlin
LSD Liberaldemokratischer Hochschulbund (Liberal Democratic Higher
Education Association)
MSB Spartakus Marxistischer Studentenbund Spartakus (Marxist Student Association
Spartakus)
MSU Münchener Studentenunion (Munich Student Union)
NHB Nationaldemokratischer Hochschulbund (National Democratic Higher
Education League)
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NofU Notgemeinschaft für eine Freie Universität (Emergency Community for
a Free University)
NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei (National Democratic Party)
NVA Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army, East Germany)
POW Prisoner of war
RAF Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction)
RBB Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg
RCDS Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian
Democratic Students)
SA Sturmabteilung (Nazi stormtroopers)
SD Sicherheitsdienst (Nazi Security Service)
SDS Sozalistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student
League)
SHB Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund (Social Democratic Higher
Education League)
SLH Sozialliberaler Hochschulbund (Social-Liberal Higher Education League)
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of
Germany)
SS Schutzstaffel (Nazi paramilitary organization that oversaw the
Holocaust)
SZ Süddeutsche Zeitung
taz die tageszeitung
TU Technische Universität Berlin (Technical University of Berlin)
UP Unidad Popular (Chile)
UN United Nations
 xv
VDS Vereinigte Deutsche Studentenschaften (Association of German

Students)
Vf Z Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
VKS Verband Kritischer Schüler (Association of Critical Pupils)
YAF Young Americans for Freedom
ZDF Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Germany’s second public television
network)
List of Illustrations
0.1 Group photograph of the self-described ‘Alternative ‘68ers’, Bonn, May 1988. 3
(J.H. Darchinger/Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung)
1.1 Socialist student leader Rudi Dutschke and the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf
debate on the roof of a car in Freiburg in January 1968. Pictured to
Dahrendorf’s right are centre-right activists Meinhard Ade (face partially
covered) and Ignaz Bender (shown in profile). 25
1.2 Cover of the student magazine Semester-Spiegel (Münster) featuring the
student demonstrations of ‘Action 1 July’ 1965 with organizer Ignaz
Bender on the right. 27
(Semester-Spiegel, Münster)
1.3 Christian Democratic activist and future (West) Berlin Governing Mayor
Eberhard Diepgen arguing with a left-wing counter-demonstrator at a
pro-American citizens’ protest near Schöneberg Town Hall in West
Berlin on 21 February 1968. 66
(ullstein bild—Rogge)
1.4 Jürgen-Bernd Runge, RCDS chair at the Free University in West Berlin,
speaking to the members of the university’s Konvent (student parliament)
on 26 April 1967. 70
(Michael Ruetz/Agentur focus)

2.1 Centre-right student protests during an SDS-run event with East
German star lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul in Bonn on 6 February 1968. The
banners state ‘Freedom for the political prisoners of the GDR. What are
you doing, Mr. Kaul?’ and ‘Prof. Kaul: Against the murder of Jews in
Auschwitz—in favour of murder at the Wall.’ 97
(dpa Picture-Alliance)
3.1 The Bonn Student Union’s magazine Pop-Kurier (January 1969).
On the cover: Maria-Theresia (‘Musch’) van Schewick, BSU activist
and future RCDS national deputy chair. 117
(Hoover Institution Archives, German subject collection, box no. 85)
3.2 ‘Types we also attract.’ ‘Types who vote RCDS.’ 122
(RCDS poster, n. d. [1970s])
3.3 Former Bavarian RCDS chair Ursula Männle speaking at the fiftieth
anniversary of the Hanns-Seidel Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the
CSU that she chaired from 2014 until 2019 (Munich, 20 January 2017). 130
(dpa Picture-Alliance)
xviii   
4.1 SDS activist Rudi Dutschke (right) with the South Vietnamese Ambassador
to Bonn at an RCDS-organized event at the Free University in
West Berlin in December 1966. 144
(ullstein bild—Sakowitz)
4.2 Young Christian Democrats, including RCDS activists, at a
demonstration against communist aggression in South Vietnam in Hamburg
on 14 April 1975. The banners call for peace and human rights in Vietnam. 160
(ullstein bild—dpa)
4.3 The Fight for Human Rights . . . everywhere . . . 176
EDS and RCDS poster asking for signatures on a campaign to free
Chilean activist Juan Bosco Maino Canales and Soviet dissident
Boris Evdokimov.
(ACSP, Pl S 8835 [1977])
5.1 RCDS chair Gerd Langguth, speaking at a ‘Spartakus Tribunal’ at the
University of Hamburg on 19 January 1972. The white specks on his right
sleeve are curd cheese that left-wing students in the audience had thrown at
the student activist. Still from ZDF Magazin, 26 January 1972. 182
(Gerd Langguth Private Papers)
5.2 ‘Civil Servant ‘75 (representing the interests of the state)’. 201
Cartoon from the cover of the Hessian RCDS publication Campus.
(RCDS Frankfurt am Main, ACDP 04-046). Unnamed artist.
5.3 Friedbert Pflüger, then the RCDS deputy national chair, speaking at the
CDU’s annual party convention on 26 May 1976. 207
(Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Ulrich Wienke)
5.4 Cover page of Christian Democratic student magazine Demokratische
Blätter no. 14 (June/July 1977). The photographs shows the crime scene
with the covered corpses of Siegfried Buback (back) and his driver Wolfgang
Göbel (front), as well as the official car, in which both were shot. The caption
reads ‘Left-wing radicals: “Joy about Buback murder” ’. 211
(RCDS-Bundesvorstand; photographer Heinz Wieseler, dpa/picture-alliance)
5.5 Tumultuous scenes during an RCDS-run event with Helmut Kohl at the
University of Freiburg on 19 January 1976. Kohl’s speech was disrupted by
left-wing demonstrators. The police used tear gas and batons to escort the
CDU chair from the auditorium. 219
(Lutz Rauschnick, dpa/picture-alliance)
6.1 Former RCDS activist and CDU campaign strategist Peter Radunski
(left) with CDU Secretary General Heiner Geißler at the 1986 party
convention. 231
(Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Lothar Schaack)
6.2 ‘Come out of your left corner’, Christian Democratic campaign poster
for the 1976 national elections. 233
(ACDP, Plakatsammlung, 10-001-1862)
   xix
6.3 Former RCDS chair and CDU strategist Wulf Schönbohm featured in
Die Zeit as the ‘Lenin of the CDU’ in 1988. 235
(Matthias Horx und Marie Weinberger, ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin
no. 33 (1988), 12. Photograph by Paul Schirnhofer)
6.4 Former RCDS activist and ‘Kohl’s Kissinger’ Horst Teltschik (left) with the
newly elected Federal Chancellor on a flight to Rome on 18 November 1982. 239
(Bundesarchiv-Bildarchiv, Photograph by Ulrich Wienke)
Introduction
In May 1988, a group of people, all of whom had been student activists in West
Germany around 1968, came together to reminisce about what the revolt of those
years meant to them in retrospect. Twenty years after the events, ‘1968’ had
become a symbolic shorthand for a major moment of political and cultural
upheaval, one that was commemorated around the globe in the late 1980s.¹ The
former activists, most of them in their forties or early fifties, got together at an
educational institution in Bad Godesberg, a wealthy neighbourhood in the capital
Bonn, to relive their personal experiences with the student movement and to take
stock of the ways in which it had transformed West German society. During the
conference, Josef Heichrich (‘Jupp’) Darchinger, one of the most famous political
photographers of the Federal Republic, documented the proceedings and took
cheerful group photographs.² Moreover, the gathering generated considerable
media interest. West Germany’s prime television newscasts showed clips from
the day, and most of the major daily and weekly papers featured reports about the
meeting. A few months later, the ZDF, one of the country’s public service
television channels, showed a widely viewed documentary about the political
trajectories of some of those who had attended, sparking another wave of exten-
sive public commentary about this particular group of former activists.³
The heightened media interest was because those who met in Bonn in 1988
were unusual ‘68ers—a term that had become common to describe social actors
who had been young activists around 1968 and still embodied the spirit of these
years.⁴ Contrary to the ‘68er archetypes featured in most of the commemorative
¹ Timothy S. Brown, 1968. Transnational and Global Perspectives, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-
Zeitgeschichte, 11.06.2012, URL: http://docupedia.de/zg/1968?oldid=84582 (accessed on 10 April
2014).
² As part of its vast Jupp Darchinger photographic collection, the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie
(AdsD) holds dozens of negatives of photographs he took on the day. One of his group photographs
was published on the cover of RCDS Magazin no. 5 (1988); on Darchinger’s career, see ‘Das Auge von
Bonn’, Der Spiegel, 46 (1997), 52–3.
³ ZDF, Bonn direkt, 15 May 1988; Gunter Hofmann, ‘Nach links Flagge zeigen’, Die Zeit, 21 (20 May
1988); Oliver Tolmein, ‘Die “alternativen 68er Sieger” treffen sich’, tageszeitung (17 May 1988), 5;
Helmut Lölhöffel, ‘Unaufhaltsamer Aufstieg der Alternativ-68er’, Frankfurter Rundschau (17 May
1988); Heiko Gebhardt, ‘Wir waren Demokraten’, Stern (19 May 1988); also Martin Stallmann, Die
Erfindung von ‘1968’: Der studentische Protest im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen 1977–1998 (Göttingen,
2017), 142. Heinz Hemming/Werner A. Perger, Die anderen 68er: Dutschkes Gegenspieler und was aus
ihnen wurde, Dokumentation, BRD 1988, 43’, first shown on ZDF, 4 August 1988, 10.15 p.m.
⁴ June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society (Buckingham and
Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 15–16.
The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany. Anna von der Goltz,
2   ‘
reports about the student movement that had begun to appear in the run-up to the
twentieth anniversary, they had not been involved in the Socialist German Student
League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS), the radical left-wing
group that had been at the forefront of protest in the late 1960s. Nor had they
lived in the infamous Kommune 1, one of the Federal Republic’s first experiments
with communal living, whose inhabitants were household names.⁵ Instead, they
were Christian Democrats—and prominent ones at that.
Between the mid-1960s and late 1970s, all those who later gathered in Bonn had
been politically active in the Association of Christian Democratic Students (Ring
Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten, RCDS), a national political student group
founded in 1951 that was closely affiliated with the two Christian Democratic
sister parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christian
Social Union (CSU).⁶ They had thus been active at a time when the radical Left
had questioned the very foundations of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)
and defied the ‘establishment’ in highly visible and provocative ways. They had
one more thing in common: since 1968, many of them had successfully entered
the political institutions of the Federal Republic, particularly those in the hands
of the Christian Democrats, who had returned to power in 1982. The television
documentary about them included an interview with Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
in which he praised these particular ‘68ers for having carried fresh ideas into his
own party.⁷
At this point, many of those who gathered in Bonn indeed held high-ranking
posts in the CDU/CSU, in the capital’s political bureaucracy, or in one of the state
capitals. They were men—for almost all those in attendance were male—like Wulf
Schönbohm (b. 1941), who headed the CDU’s powerful policy and planning
division; Peter Radunski (b. 1939), who was the party’s number three and chief
campaign strategist; Peter Gauweiler (b. 1949), who was Secretary of State in the
State Interior Ministry in Bavaria; Horst Teltschik (b. 1940), who was a key aide
to the Chancellor and his ‘clandestine Foreign Minister’; and Friedbert Pflüger
(b. 1955), who was a few years younger than the others but already served as
press secretary to Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker.⁸ The television
documentary named them ‘Dutschke’s adversaries’ to highlight the fact that, as
students, some of them had gone face to face with Rudi Dutschke, the iconic
⁵ Detlef Siegfried, ‘Stars der Revolte: Die Kommune 1’, in Medien und Imagepolitik im 20.
Jahrhundert: Deutschland, Europa, USA, edited by Daniela Münkel and Lu Seegers (Frankfurt am
Main, 2008), 229–45.
⁶ RCDS members were not automatically members of the CDU/CSU and the group was nominally
independent, but it had a close relationship to the Christian Democrats, received some party funding,
and was generally thought of as the CDU/CSU’s student arm. For an organizational overview written
by a former RCDS national chair, see Johannes Weberling, Für Freiheit und Menschenrechte: Der Ring
Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS), 1945–1986 (Düsseldorf, 1990).
⁷ Hemming/Perger, Die anderen 68er.
⁸ Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
1982–1990, vol. 6 (Munich, 2006), 182.
 3
Illustration 0.1 Group photograph of the self-described ‘Alternative ‘68ers’, Bonn,

May 1988.
figurehead of SDS. The group photographs taken in Bonn showed them lined up
under a banner that said simply ‘The alternative ‘68ers’.⁹
In a speech he gave at the conference and in interviews with the press,
Schönbohm, who had been national chair of RCDS at the height of the student
revolt in 1967/68, justified why they had the right to claim 1968 for themselves.
‘Whether left-wingers or conservatives, we all had the feeling at the time that
something had to happen. That the dreadful social paralysis of the end of the
1960s had to come to an end. That through commitment it was possible to change
something.’¹⁰ ‘But we were completely isolated inside the universities’, he went on,
‘because we were the only political student group that rejected the revolutionary-
socialist utopia of SDS. [ . . . ] We wanted reform and not a revolution’, he
declared.¹¹ Since then, the left-wing student movement had realized none of its
actual political goals, including the system’s revolutionary transformation, he
opined. Instead, its effects had been mostly cultural.
⁹ The name was a nod to the term ‘alternative’ that they had used to demarcate themselves from the
Left since the 1960s—and one that was also popular on the Left in the 1970s.
¹⁰ Quoted in ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin, 33 (12 August 1988), 10.
¹¹ Schönbohm Private Papers, ‘Die alternativen “68er” – was bleibt von der APO-Zeit?’, MS (15 May
1988).
4   ‘
Schönbohm had clearly done his research. The notion that the revolt had set a
cultural revolution in motion, transforming authoritarian and patriarchal societies
into ones with flatter hierarchies, greater pluralism of lifestyles, and more partici-
pation from below, had begun to dominate western commemorations of 1968 in
the 1980s—and it has had remarkable staying power.¹² The balance sheet of the
centre-right was directly reversed, Schönbohm suggested. ‘In our case it is the
other way around: we achieved a lot politically, but little culturally.’ Invoking a
famous quotation by Dutschke, he declared gleefully that they had been particu-
larly successful at ‘marching through the institutions’ of the Bonn Republic and
were now ‘well-established’. Their former opponents, on the other hand, were in
crisis, he contended: out of power in Bonn and overtaken by the Zeitgeist. ‘All the
glamour is gone’, Schönbohm, who had often felt on the margins around 1968,
concluded with belated satisfaction.¹³ A few months later, a multi-page spread on
the ‘68ers of the CDU’ in the weekly Die Zeit featured the bearded former RCDS
chair in a leather jacket and introduced him to the paper’s mostly left-liberal
readers as ‘the Lenin of the CDU’.¹⁴
What are we to make of these retrospective political claims and generational
(self-)representations that suggest that centre-right students had played major
roles around 1968 and been deeply affected by these years? Was this mere political
posturing at a time of Christian Democratic hegemony? A brazen attempt to
appropriate one of the key moments of the Left and to reinterpret democratic
agency in the history of the Federal Republic? An invention of tradition with no
grounds in lived reality? This book is an attempt to engage with these questions.
However, it is also much more than that. This is a history of 1968 and its afterlives
told from a new perspective.
The Other ‘68ers sheds light on a neglected aspect of one of the major moments
of Germany’s late twentieth century. At the core of this study are young activists
from RCDS and from groups affiliated with the German Student Union (Deutsche
Studentenunion, DSU), a centre-right umbrella group founded on campuses
across the country in 1967/68. As such, it is a book about a political minority,
albeit a vocal one. Even at this moment of political upheaval, only a small minority
of students (around 5 per cent) was politically active. Even fewer were members of
student groups of the centre-right. There were approximately 300,000 students at
West German universities in the second half of the 1960s, and only about 2,300 of
them were members of RCDS—less than 1 per cent of the student population.¹⁵
¹² ‘Wir 68er waren alle ganz anders’, interview with Tilman Fichter and Wulf Schönbohm, con-
ducted by Werner A. Perger, Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 10 April 1988; Kristin Ross, May ‘68
and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL, 2002); Silja Behre, Bewegte Erinnerung: Deutungskämpfe um ‘1968’ in
deutsch-französischer Perspektive (Tübingen, 2016).
¹³ Schönbohm Private Papers, ‘Die alternativen “68er” – was bleibt von der APO-Zeit?’, MS (15 May
1988).
¹⁴ ‘Die 68er der CDU’, Zeit Magazin, 33 (12 August 1988), 10.
¹⁵ René Ahlberg, ‘Die politische Konzeption des Sozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes’,
Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament B20/68 (15 May 1968), 3–4; Konrad Jarausch, Deutsche
Studenten 1800–1970 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 232.
 5
Much the same can be said of their main opponents, however. The strength of
the student Left should not be overestimated either, in spite of the importance
much of the scholarship has accorded to them. SDS may have come to sym-
bolize student protest around 1968, but, prior to 1967, it was only the third
largest political student group in West Germany. Before June of that year, SDS
had merely around 1,200 members. Even at the height of its popularity in 1967/
8, the membership of SDS never exceeded 2,500, meaning that fewer than 1 per
cent of West German students belonged to the radical group.¹⁶ In terms of
membership, then, RCDS and SDS were approximately the same size around
1968. Despite this, we know hardly anything about the former’s role during
these years.
This is not an organizational history of RCDS and like-minded groups. It is a
broader cultural history of politics around 1968. Its subjects are centre-right
activists—their ideas, experiences, and memories. The book examines both what
they did around 1968 and what they later thought they had done in those years. It
interweaves individual voices with the archival record; it combines elements of a
‘collective biography’ of a group of people, who dedicated much of their lives to
politics, with an in-depth study of the ideas and repertoires of centre-right
students in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.¹⁷ In line with much of the recent
literature, it thus adopts an extended periodization of 1968. While eschewing
fixed chronological markers, ‘1968’ here denotes roughly the period between the
mid-1960s and the late 1970s, when centre-right activists engaged most closely,
indeed often obsessively, with the student Left.¹⁸ Similarly, it does not use a fixed
age bracket—e.g. the cohort born between 1938 and 1948 that is often used to
establish who counts as a ‘68er¹⁹—to determine who the other ‘68ers were. It
studies activists who played notable roles in centre-right groups during the
extended 1968 moment, with a special focus on those who later claimed that
these years had meant something to them.²⁰
¹⁶ Ahlberg, ‘politische Konzeption’; Andrea Wienhaus, Bildungswege zu ‘1968’: Eine Kollektivbiografie

des Sozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes (Bielefeld, 2014).
¹⁷ Paul Sturges, ‘Collective biography in the 1980s’, Biography 6, 4 (1983), 316–32; for Germany,
Dorothee Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins: Der Jahrgang 1949 in der DDR. Versuch einer
Kollektivbiographie (Berlin, 2002); Catherine Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists
and Their Century (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
¹⁸ This is similar to Timothy Brown’s periodization, who defines 1968 as lasting from 1962–78.
Timothy S. Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978
(New York, 2013). In French historiography, the notion of the ‘ “68 years” lasting from the end of the
Algerian war until François Mitterand’s election is similarly influential. See Philippe Artières and
Michelle Zancarini-Forunel (eds.), 68: Une Histoire Collective (1962–1981) (Paris, 2008).
¹⁹ Heinz Bude, Das Altern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt, 1997); Christina
von Hodenberg, Das andere Achtundsechzig: Gesellschaftsgeschichte einer Revolte (Munich, 2018).
²⁰ Those interviewed for this book, like those who later defined themselves publicly as ‘68ers of the
centre-right—were born between 1937 and 1955 and thus included several different micro-cohorts. On
the role of micro-cohorts in social movements, see Nancy Whittier, ‘Political Generations, Micro-
Cohorts and the Transformation of Social Movements’, American Sociological Review, 62 (1997),
760–78.
6   ‘
This book asks a number of simple but important questions about these
individuals and this period: what was it like to experience 1968 on the other
side of the political spectrum in West Germany? Did centre-right activists share
the New Left critique of advanced industrial society and German authoritarian-
ism, and how did they relate to activists of the Left and to the broader student
movement? What were their views of the older generation, whom young New
Leftists often condemned for their association with the Nazi past and what they
regarded as their failure to build a truly democratic society after 1945? How did
these young activists respond to the broader social and cultural transformations of
this dynamic decade? How did they view West Germany’s—and their own—place
in the wider world at a time when activists’ political imaginations were increas-
ingly global? What was their relationship to the CDU/CSU, and what role have
they played in (West) German politics since 1968? And in what ways have they
shaped the memory wars that continue to wage about this period in German
history?
1968 and Histories of the Federal Republic
The years around 1968 are among the most closely examined periods in
Germany’s twentieth century. In 2018, the fiftieth anniversary demonstrated
once again that public and scholarly interest in the protest movements of this
era remains high. A wave of new publications appeared, and numerous public
commemorations were held. As in previous years, however, the focus was pre-
dominantly on the role of the Left.²¹ Historical research on 1968 began in earnest
in the 1990s, and we now have a vast international literature on the subject, one
that has examined the revolt through a number of different frameworks, ranging
from political and social histories that have placed 1968 in broader temporal and
societal contexts, to histories of gender, cultural histories, histories of emotions,
and transnational and global histories.²² The scholarship has extended beyond a
²¹ Heinz Bude, Adorno für Ruinenkinder: Eine Geschichte von 1968 (Munich, 2018); Wolfgang
Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der 68er Bewegung (Stuttgart, 2018). Earlier examples of otherwise
exhaustive monographs on 1968 that do not touch on centre-right activists are Brown, West Germany
and the Global Sixties; and Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ‘68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North
America, 1956–1976 (Oxford, 2007). However, one major recent contribution to the literature explicitly
includes ‘other’ experiences of 1968. It shifts the focus to universities beyond the two capitals of the
revolt, Frankfurt and West Berlin, looks at older people’s attitudes toward the student movement, and
discusses the role of (left-wing) women. von Hodenberg, Das andere Achtundsechzig.
²² Christina von Hodenberg and Detlef Siegfried (eds.), Wo ‘1968’ liegt: Reform und Revolte in der
Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2006); Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Karl-Christian
Lammers (eds.), Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (Hamburg,
2000); Kristina Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provokation: Die Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik
und in Frankreich 1968–1976 (Frankfurt and New York, 2002); Ute Kätzel, Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer
rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin, 2002); Joachim Scharloth, 1968: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte
(Munich, 2011); Joachim Häberlen, The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left: West Germany
 7
sole focus on students and the dynamics of protest, with responses by other social
actors and the state taking centre stage in more recent studies of these years.²³
The first way in which this book contributes to this rich literature is by
redirecting our historical gaze to take in the spectrum of political diversity
characterizing the West German student experience of 1968. In doing so, it shifts
attention back to the student movement and the political conflicts of these years. It
thus returns to familiar territory. However, it examines a history that we think we
already understand fully from a perspective to which we are unaccustomed,
thereby opening up new vistas. Whereas we have fine-grained analyses of the
West German (student) Left around 1968, including collective portraits and
individual biographies of some of its protagonists, there have been very few studies
of activists of the right.²⁴ The few exceptions that exist to date are intellectual
histories that trace the reinvigoration and realignment of West German
conservative thought through its leading thinkers’ opposition to 1968. These
works have shown that the student revolt sparked a flurry of activity among
conservative intellectuals, including the founding of a number of influential new
publications, such as Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing’s Criticón and Klaus
Motschmann’s Konservativ heute, as well as of influential conferences and discus-
sion circles.²⁵ For the most part, existing studies focus on political figures who
1968–1984 (Cambridge, 2018); Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich, 2008);
Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the
Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ, 2009); Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties
West Germany (Durham, NC, 2012); Macartney, Alexander Finn, War in the Postwar: Japan and West
Germany Protest the Vietnam War and the Global Strategy of Imperialism (PhD dissertation,
Georgetown University, 2019).
²³ Knud Andresen, Gebremste Radikalisierung: Die IG Metall und ihre Jugend 1968 bis in die 1980er
Jahre (Göttingen, 2016); Klaus Weinhauer, Schutzpolizei in der Bundesrepublik: Zwischen Bürgerkrieg
und Innerer Sicherheit: Die turbulenten sechziger Jahre (Paderborn, 2003); Karrin Hanshew, Terror and
Democracy in West Germany (New York, 2012); Richard Vinen, The Long ‘68: Radical Protest and Its
Enemies (London, 2018).
²⁴ Belinda Davis, The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany,
1962–1983 (Cambridge, forthcoming); Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann: Avantgardist, Protestler,
Radikaler (Göttingen, 2009); Michaela Karl, Rudi Dutschke: Revolutionär ohne Revolution (Frankfurt
am Main, 2003). A few German language studies and edited collections have begun to examine the
right, though rarely in ways that put activists at the centre. See e.g. Massimiliano Livi, Daniel
Schmidt and Michael Sturm (eds.), Die 70er Jahre als schwarzes Jahrzehnt: Politisierungs- und
Mobilisierungsprozesse zwischen rechter Mitte und extremer Rechter in Italien und der
Bundesrepublik 1967–1982 (Bielefeld, 2010); Manuel Seitenbecher, ‘Die Reform als Revolution in
verträglicher Dosis: Der Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS) während der 68er-
Jahre an der FU Berlin’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 6 (2010), 505–26; Olaf Bartz,
Konservative Studenten und die Studentenbewegung: Die ‘Kölner Studenten-Union’, in:
Westfälische Forschung, 48 (1998), 241–56; and, most importantly, Nikolai Wehrs, Der Protest
der Professoren: Der ‘Bund der Freiheit der Wissenschaft’ in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen, 2014), a
study of conservative academics around 1968. On the contrary, there is a very robust literature on
US conservative movements, in the 1960s and beyond, and this book takes important cues from
some of these works. An early example was David Farber and Jeff Roche (eds.), The Conservative
Sixties (New York, 2003). A French example, though not focused on students, is François Audigier,
Histoire Du SAC: La Part Dʼombre Du Gaullisme (Paris, 2003).
²⁵ Jerry Z. Muller, ‘German Neoconservatism and the History of the Bonn Republic, 1968 to 1985’,
German Politics and Society, 18, 1 (2000), 1–32; Axel Schildt, ‘ “Die Kräfte der Gegenreform sind auf
8   ‘
turned right in the wake of 1968—liberal intellectuals who became liberal-

conservatives because they rejected the ‘excesses’ of the student movement or
more clearly reactionary figures, who began to embrace a radicalized and explicitly
anti-liberal conservatism during these years. Some recent works have also dealt with
political opposition to the 1968 Left on the far right and traced the intellectual roots
of the present-day European radical Right all the way back to the 1960s when its
fierce opposition to egalitarianism and multiculturalism began to take shape.²⁶
This book tells a different story: not just one of conservative resistance and
reaction, but also one of participation, engagement, and interaction. It focuses on
young activists of the centre-right, who were often closely involved in the student
movement. Their views represented a significant portion of the student body of
the late 1960s, and, especially during the early Kohl era, they were far more
politically influential than the radical Right. The protagonists of this book were
a part of 1968. They participated in many of the key protest events and embraced
some of the characteristic practices of these years and, in more than one instance,
were swept along by the anti-authoritarian spirit that animated the broader revolt.
These other ‘68ers, as they are called here, reacted to the Left but without
necessarily championing a reactionary politics, especially in the early phase of
student unrest.
Second, by foregrounding the role of centre-right students around 1968, this
book joins recent works that have revisited the extraordinary role that Christian
Democracy played in the history of postwar Europe.²⁷ It would indeed be difficult to
overstate the influence of Christian Democrats in the continent’s history after 1945,
especially in the Federal Republic. Apart from the Social-Liberal interlude between
breiter Front angetreten”. Zur konservativen Tendenzwende in den Siebzigerjahren’, Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte, 44 (2004), 449–7; Stefan Winckler, Felix Dirsch, and Hartmuth Becker (eds.), Die
68er und ihre Gegner: Der Widerstand gegen die Kulturrevolution, (Graz and Stuttgart, 2004); Riccardo
Bavaj, ‘Turning “Liberal Critics” into “Liberal-Conservatives”: Kurt Sontheimer and the Re-Coding of
the Political Culture in the Wake of the Student Revolt of “1968” ’, German Politics and Society, 27,
1 (2009), 39–59; Dominik Geppert and Jens Hacke (eds.), Streit um den Staat: Intellektuelle Debatten in
der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen, 2008); for a French example of this approach, see Serge
Audier, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, 2009).
²⁶ For France and Italy, Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007); Andrea
Mammone, Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy (New York and Cambridge, 2015); for
Germany, Quinn Slobodian, ‘Germany’s 1968 and Its Enemies’, AHR, 123, 3, (2018), 749–52; Volker
Weiß has recently cautioned against the tendency to write the history of the right as a simple reaction to
1968. He emphasizes that (West) Germany’s ‘New Right’ had much deeper roots in German history.
Volker Weiß, Die autoritäre Revolte: Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes (Stuttgart,
2017), 28 and 37.
²⁷ Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (eds.), Political Catholicism in Europe 1918–1965 (Oxford,
1996); Frank Bösch, Die Adenauer-CDU: Gründung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei 1945–1969
(Stuttgart, 2001); Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union
(Cambridge, 2007); Frank Bösch, ‘Die Krise als Chance. Die Neuformierung der Christdemokraten
in den siebziger Jahren’, in Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte, edited by Konrad
Jarausch (Göttingen, 2008), 296–309; Martina Steber, Die Hüter der Begriffe: Politische Sprachen des
Konservativen in Großbritannien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1980 (Berlin, 2017); James
Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church
(Cambridge, MA, 2018), 182–226.
 9
1969 and 1982, the CDU/CSU governed the ‘old’ Federal Republic throughout its
entire existence. Nevertheless, historians of the postwar have often focused their
attention on groups or movements that were more flamboyant, not least the left-
wing radicals of the 1960s. Rather than viewing Christian Democracy as a straight-
forward restoration of traditional conservatism, however, newer works treat it as a
remarkably flexible ideological formation, a dynamic and evolving phenomenon
that shared more common ground with the Left than once assumed.²⁸ This book
builds on these insights. It sheds fresh light on how West Germany’s centre-right
dealt with the crisis of hegemony and political identity it experienced in the wake of
1968, how it coped with generational change in its ranks, how it transformed and
modernized after losing power at the national level for the first time in 1969, and
how it managed to re-emerge so successfully in the 1980s. This study thus helps us
to understand why the age of Christian Democracy was interrupted but never really
ended in the Federal Republic—at least until now.²⁹
Third, by revisiting the idea that 1968 represented a watershed of sorts, The
Other ‘68ers contributes to recent attempts to historicize the ‘old’ Federal
Republic—a distinct entity that, like its neighbour to the east, the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), ceased to exist with the end of the Cold War.³⁰
Until recently, the years around 1968 were often interpreted as the ‘second
founding’ of the Federal Republic, as the moment when an authoritarian society
shed its illiberal tendencies and filled an imposed democratic order with life.³¹ As
the political scientist and left-wing public intellectual Claus Leggewie put it in
1987: ‘The symbolic number ‘68 symbolizes a potentiated 1949, the antifascist
²⁸ Martin Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy’, in European Christian Democracy:

Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg
(Notre Dame, IN, 2003), 43–67; Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution:
European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford,
2017), 375.
²⁹ Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy’; Franz Walter and Frank Bösch, ‘Das Ende des
christdemokratischen Zeitalters? Zur Zukunft eines Erfolgsmodells’, in Die CDU nach Kohl, edited by
Tobias Dürr and Rüdiger Soldt (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 46–58.
³⁰ Frank Biess and Astrid Eckert, ‘Why Do We Need New Narratives for the History of the Federal
Republic?’, Central European History, 52, 1 (2019), 1–18; Frank Bösch (ed.), A History Shared and
Divided: East and West Germany since the 1970s (New York, 2018); Sonja Levsen and Cornelius Torp
(eds.), Wo liegt die Bundesrepublik? Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die westdeutsche Geschichte
(Göttingen, 2016); Frank Bajohr, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Claudia Kemper, and Detlef Siegfried
(eds.), Mehr als eine Erzählung: Zeitgeschichtliche Perspektiven auf die Bundesrepublik (Göttingen,
2016).
³¹ Franz-Werner Kersting, Jürgen Reulecke, and Hans-Ulrich Thamer (eds.), Die zweite Gründung
der Bundesrepublik: Generationswechsel und intellektuelle Wortergreifungen 1955 bis 1975 (Stuttgart,
2010); Clemens Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, and Michael Bock (eds.), Die intellektuelle Gründung
der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main, 1999);
Matthias Frese, Julia Paulus, and Karl Teppe (eds.), Demokratisierung und gesellschaftlicher
Aufbruch: Die sechziger Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik (Paderborn, 2003).
10   ‘
re-establishment of the Federal Republic. The quasi-democracy released its

children.’³²
How exactly this post-fascist state turned into a stable liberal democracy in the
space of just a few decades has been one of the guiding questions of most of the
scholarship produced over the last thirty years. That the history of West Germany
represented a remarkable democratic ‘success story’—a kind of Sonderweg in
reverse—was the premise of many of the works produced from the 1980s into
the 2000s. In this period, historians published a growing number of surveys and
came up with a variety of closely related paradigms to describe the process of
social and political transformation the Federal Republic underwent, be it ‘liberal-
ization’, ‘Westernization’, or ‘recivilization’.³³ Many of the most influential works,
however, downplayed the importance of 1968 in explaining the FRG’s transform-
ation. They saw the events of these years at best as ‘surface froth’ produced by
structural shifts underneath and pointed out that the protests involved only a tiny
left-wing minority.³⁴ This study, by contrast, reasserts that political activism in
1968 mattered. The close involvement of the centre-right in this age of protest,
which the book details, suggests that it was a broader and more consequential
moment than much of this literature has allowed.
At the same time, recent works have been right to be sceptical of the ‘success
narrative’, pointing out the normative assumptions that underpinned this inter-
pretation and all the ways in which many of united Germany’s most pressing
problems had their roots in the Cold War-era FRG.³⁵ By emphasizing that the
student movement mattered, this study does not seek to reify 1968 as the birth-
place of authentic West German democracy. Rather, it takes its cues from more
critical recent works by treating the process of West Germany’s liberalization and
democratization not as a linear evolution, but as a far more winding and heavily
contested one—and as one that was not just optimistic and forward-looking but
³² Claus Leggewie, Der Geist steht rechts: Ausflüge in die Denkfabriken der Wende (Berlin, 1987),
214.
³³ Manfred Görtemaker, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Von der Gründung bis zur
Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 2004); Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik
und ihren Anfängen (Stuttgart, 2006); Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland:
Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Göttingen, 2002); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie
westlich sind die Deutschen: Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen,
1999); Axel Schildt, Ankunft im Westen. Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt,
1999); Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2: Deutsche Geschichte vom ‘Dritten
Reich’ bis zur Wiedervereinigung (Munich, 2000); Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing
Germans, 1945–1955 (New York, 2006).
³⁴ Similarly, many influential European surveys are sceptical of the idea that the Western 1968
mattered. See e. g. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 390–421;
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998), 322–4.
³⁵ Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik von 1949 bis in die
Gegenwart (Munich, 2009); Eckert and Biess, ‘Why Do We Need New Narratives’.
 11
driven by persistent fears about the fragility of democracy in Germany.³⁶ As we

shall see, liberal and illiberal impulses were often present simultaneously—on both
ends of the political spectrum. Such an approach allows us to comprehend much
more fully, and in a much more nuanced way, exactly how this watershed moment
transformed West German society. 1968 was far from a smooth transition to
cultural democratization. West Germany only became a stable democratic order
as a result of fierce public disputes in which the stakes were high.³⁷ The struggle
over what democracy meant and how to guard it did not just play out in the realm
of intellectual debate. It was an everyday lived experience for many, including the
protagonists of this book, who saw their own biographies as being intimately
connected to the fate of West German democracy.
The Other ‘68ers and Histories of Generation
The book does not just provide a new historical perspective on Germany’s 1968
and on the political culture of the Federal Republic. It also offers a larger
contribution to, and implicit critique of, broader ways in which some historians
have written contemporary German history. Its biggest conceptual contribution
lies in rethinking how to write a history of generation, which has been one of the
most influential approaches to twentieth-century German history in the past two
decades.
Germany has been referred to as the ‘country of generations’, because the many
social and political ruptures in its history made the experiences and mentalities of
different age cohorts diverge more starkly than in countries with more continuous
political traditions.³⁸ Historians have been drawn to generation to explain the

impact of political ruptures on individuals and to chart change over time.³⁹ This
³⁶ Frank Biess, Republik der Angst: Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Hamburg, 2019);
Christian Schletter, Grabgesang der Demokratie: Die Debatten über das Scheitern der bundesdeutschen
Demokratie von 1965 bis 1985 (Göttingen, 2015).
³⁷ Dirk A. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2006); Jens Hacke,
Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begründung der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen,
2006); Geppert and Hacke, Streit um den Staat; Frank Biess, ‘Thinking after Hitler: The new intellectual
history of the Federal Republic of Germany’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 221–45.
³⁸ Heinz Bude, ‘Die 50er Jahre im Spiegel der Flakhelfer- und der 68er-Generation’, in
Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Reulecke and Elisabeth
Müller-Luckner (Munich, 2003), 145.
³⁹ Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict (Cambridge, 1995); Ulrich Herbert, Best:
Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996);
Ulrich Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Reulecke and Müller-Luckner,
Generationalität, 95–115; Michael Wildt, Generation of the Unbound: The Leadership Corps of the
Reich Security Main Office (Jerusalem, 2002); Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and
Violence Through the German Dictatorships (Oxford, 2011); Hans Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche
Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 5: Bundesrepublik und DDR 1949–1990 (Munich, 2008); Thomas
A. Kohut, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT,
2012); Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (eds.), Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen
12   ‘
trope is intellectually seductive. It allows us to discuss big structural developments

in conjunction with the ways in which individual actors were shaped by and
effected events. It helps historians craft neat periodizations and compelling nar-
ratives explaining not only how the character of Germany changed multiple times
throughout the twentieth century ‘but also the very character of people them-
selves’, as Mary Fulbrook eloquently phrased it in her book Dissonant Lives.⁴⁰
One downside of this approach, however, is that it often tends to generalize the
experiences and features of a particular subset of a cohort and to portray them as
the universal characteristics of all those who were the same age. To put it simply,
in many generational histories one uniform generation succeeds another. This
leaves little room for understanding diversity, and often division, within gener-
ational cohorts.⁴¹ In histories of 1968 this tendency has been particularly
pronounced—and lately arguably buttressed by the global and transnational
turn; the ‘68ers appear as the first ‘global generation’, a worldwide community
of young activists with near-uniform ideas and traits.⁴²
Histories of 1968 in the Federal Republic have not just tended to portray the
‘68ers as a uniform collective. They have focused, in particular, on intergenera-
tional conflict—be it on the ‘68ers’ critique of their parents for their conduct
during the Nazi years, or on the frequently contentious relationship between the
‘68ers and the so-called ‘45ers, an influential generation of intellectuals who lived
through Germany’s wartime defeat as young adults and felt that they had a special
stake in the stability of the new state.⁴³ This book, by contrast, focuses first and
foremost on intragenerational debates and clashes. We are accustomed to viewing
the years around 1968 as a period of heightened political contestation, of spirited
intellectual debates, and heated confrontations between individuals with different
political views and philosophies. The key argument here is that this contestation
also played out among the young and even among students. The Other ‘68ers
Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005) see also Holger Nehring, ‘ “Generation” as Political Argument in the
West European Protest Movements in the 1960s’, in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited
by Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke, 2007), 57–78.
⁴⁰ Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives, 2; for a persuasive critique of the trope of generational change in histories
of twentieth-century Germany, Ulrike Jureit, ‘Generation, Generationalität, Generationenforschung,
Version: 2.0’, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 03.08.2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.1117.v2
⁴¹ This is not just an issue in German history writing. See e.g. Chinese historian Wang Zheng’s
critique of studies that have focused one-sidedly on Mao’s ‘Red Guard Generation’ at the expense of
those who were critical of this project of social transformation. Abosede George, Clive Glaser, Margaret
D. Jacobs, Chitra Joshi, Emily Marker, Alexandra Walsham, Wang Zheng, and Bernd Weisbrod,
‘AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations’, AHR, 123, 5 (2018),
1507–8.
⁴² Beate Fietze, ‘1968 als Symbol der ersten globalen Generation’, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 3
(1997), 365–86; Edmunds and Turner, Generations, Culture and Society.
⁴³ Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen
Medienöffentlichkeit, 1945 bis 1973 (Göttingen, 2006); Moses, German Intellectuals; Wehrs, Der
Protest der Professoren; for reflections on these and other ways of analysing generation around 1968,
see Anna von der Goltz (ed.), Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation: Conflicts of ‘Generation Building’ and
Europe’s ‘1968’ (Göttingen, 2011).
 13
asserts that political conflict was indeed key in 1968—but not just among activists
on the Left and their older antagonists in the media and other positions of
authority, but also among student activists of a similar age.
In shifting our gaze toward political conflicts among the ‘68ers, this book—like
most other histories of generation—takes important cues from Karl Mannheim’s
sociology of knowledge. Mannheim, a German sociologist, was born in Budapest
in 1893 and experienced the tumultuous first few decades of Europe’s twentieth
century as a young man. Writing in 1928, at a time when youth was a particularly
salient political category, he came up with a more nuanced and constructivist
understanding of generations to critique the notion of naturally recurring gener-
ational cycles that had been common until then. His ideas have structured most
generational histories since.⁴⁴ Mannheim’s theory of generations sought to explain
how ‘[e]arly impressions tend to coalesce into a natural view of the world’.
Members of a generation were ‘unwittingly determined’ by the natural world
view that they acquired in youth, he argued. Mannheim distinguished between
what he termed ‘generation location’ (put simply, the mere fact of having been
born or educated in a particular region at a particular time), ‘actual generation’,
and ‘generation unit’:
Youth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part
of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual gener-
ation which work up the material of their common experiences in different
specific ways, constitute separate generation units.⁴⁵
Most historians of modern Germany who have examined generations have

dealt with what Mannheim would have called ‘generation units’. They have
focused on particular (and often quite small) communities whose members not
only shared a set of age-specific experiences, but who also drew very similar
conclusions from these and conceived of themselves as members of a generational
collective.⁴⁶ However, such treatments frequently overlook that Mannheim’s
model provided for the formation of multiple generation units within any one
context. ‘[W]ithin any generation there can exist a number of differentiated,
⁴⁴ Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen’; Gabriele Rosenthal, ‘Zur interaktionellen Konstitution

von Generationen: Generationenabfolgen in Familien von 1890 bis 1970 in Deutschland’, in
Generationen-Beziehungen, Austausch und Tradierung, edited by Jürgen Mansel, Gabriele Rosenthal,
and Angelika Tölke (Opladen, 1997), 57–73. On the history of the concept, see Ohad Parnes, Ulrike
Vedder, and Stefan Willer (eds.), Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und
Kulturgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2008).
⁴⁵ Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, in idem, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge,
edited by Paul Kecskemeti (London, 1952), 276–322, here 304.
⁴⁶ Herbert, Best; Wildt, Generation of the Unbound; Kohut, A German Generation; Christoph
Cornelißen (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine
Generation (Berlin, 2010).
14   ‘
antagonistic generation units’, he theorized. These were ‘oriented toward each

other’, but ‘only in the sense of fighting one another’.⁴⁷ Rather than being marked
by a ‘unitary Zeitgeist’, each era was therefore defined by ‘mutually antagonistic
impulses’.⁴⁸ This insight has rarely been reflected in German histories of gener-
ation, which have overwhelmingly treated them as homogeneous entities.⁴⁹
Although the period around 1968 is often described as one of unchecked left-
wing hegemony, this dualism between different groups of activists—or ‘generation
units’ in Mannheim’s terminology—was, in fact, a defining feature of West
German student politics at this time, as this book argues. In focusing on intra-
generational relations among different kinds of ‘68ers, this study thus takes
important cues from a commonly overlooked aspect of Mannheim’s conceptual-
ization of generation, but it does not use it as a theoretical corset. Newer works on
generation have done much to historicize the very assumptions on which
Mannheim’s theory was based and have shown that his model privileged young,
bourgeois, politicized, male intellectuals, who often outlined eloquently how
major political caesuras had affected them—making it tempting for historians to
adopt the stories they told as scholarly interpretations.⁵⁰ They established that
Mannheim defined what constituted a generation in very specific—and ultimately
quite narrow—terms. The experiences of more ‘silent’ actors, or social experiences
that were not strictly speaking political, often do not fit as neatly into his
categories.⁵¹ Building on these insights, The Other ‘68ers therefore does not just
focus on those who were very vocal about what they had done during the years of
the student movement—such as the men who met in Bonn in May 1988. Instead,
the analysis also includes centre-right activists who had played important roles
around 1968 but have been more hesitant in giving their experiences generational
form, notably women activists and Christian Democratic ‘renegades’.

These recent works on generation have also pointed out that Mannheim’s
concept was a product of its time in that it relied on interwar ideas of develop-
mental psychology. According to the sociologist, identities were indelibly stamped
by (political) experiences individuals acquired around the age of seventeen. The
⁴⁷ Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, 306–7.

⁴⁸ Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, 318.
⁴⁹ The only comparable approach by a historian of Germany is A. Dirk Moses’s influential study of
the ‘45ers, which focuses on the antagonism between two key West German intellectuals, the sociolo-
gists Jürgen Habermas and Wilhelm Hennis. It is primarily an intellectual history, however, and closely
focused on these two individuals and their postwar body of thought. Moses, German Intellectuals.
⁵⁰ Charles Tilly, Stories, Identities and Political Change (Oxford, 2002), x.
⁵¹ Jürgen Zinnecker, ‘ “Das Problem der Generationen”: Überlegungen zu Karl Mannheims kano-
nischem Text’, in Reulecke and Müller-Luckner, Generationalität, 33–58; Eva-Maria Silies, Liebe, Lust
und Last: Die Pille als weibliche Generationserfahrung in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen,
2010); Christina Benninghaus, ‘Das Geschlecht der Generation. Zum Zusammenhang von
Generationalität und Männlichkeit um 1930’, in: Jureit and Wildt, Generationen, 127–58; for a specific
critique of the limitations of generational histories of 1968, see Maud Anne Bracke, ‘One-dimensional
conflict? Recent scholarship on 1968 and the limitations of the generation concept’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 47, 3 (2012), 638–46.
 15
impact of earlier (or later) experiences, the fact that identities hardly remain static
throughout an individual’s life course, or understanding how and why people
sustain a sense of belonging to a generational collective over time was of less
interest to him. The most theoretically rigorous and innovative works on gener-
ation produced in the last few years—many of them by historians of Germany—
have done much to deconstruct Mannheim’s theory and put it back together in
different forms by drawing on insights from neighbouring disciplines to capture a
wider range of (generational) experiences than his model allowed. Moreover, these
works no longer treat generations simply as objective ‘things’, as essentialist
entities that remain stable throughout the lives of their members and explain
everything about individual trajectories. Instead, they treat them as contingent
communities bound by affect and imagination that require communication to
generate and sustain a sense of belonging over time.⁵²
This book builds on these studies in adopting a more constructivist
understanding of generation. Rather than simply establishing the other ‘68ers’
historical agency—asserting their role in the history of the Federal Republic, in
other words—it also analyses their generational subjectivities and self-fashioning.
Why and how their student experiences remained relevant to them in an ever-
changing present is one of its main subjects. This book is thus based on the
premise that, like all self-conscious generation units, the other ‘68ers were at once
a real and an imagined community, and it tries to disentangle the two realms only as
much as possible. This is not to suggest that centre-right activists simply invented a
self-serving history of collective action and participation in 1968.⁵³ As we shall see,
the stories they told were always tied to actual experiences in the 1960s and 1970s,
different elements of which they chose to accentuate at different times.
⁵² Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Generation und Generationalität in der Neueren Geschichte’, Aus Politik und
Zeitgeschichte (2005), B8, 3–9; Ulrike Jureit, Generationenforschung (Göttingen, 2006); Lovell,
Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe; Björn Bohnenkamp, Till Manning, and Eva-Maria Silies
(eds.), Generation als Erzählung: Neue Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Deutungsmuster (Göttingen,
2009); Lutz Niethammer, ‘Die letzte Gemeinschaft: Über die Konstruierbarkeit von Generationen und
ihre Grenzen’, in Historische Beiträge zur Generationsforschung, edited by Bernd Weisbrod (Göttingen,
2009), 13–38; Andreas Petersen, Radikale Jugend: Die sozialistische Jugendbewegung in der Schweiz
1900–1930: Radikalisierungsanalyse und Generationentheorie (Zurich, 2001); Beate Fietze, Historische
Generationen: Über einen sozialen Mechanismus kulturellen Wandels und kollektiver Kreativität
(Bielefeld, 2009); the specific German contributions to the historiography of generation are outlined
eloquently by Bernd Weisbrod in a 2018 AHR conversation. Abosede George, Clive Glaser, Margaret
D. Jacobs, Chitra Joshi, Emily Marker, Alexandra Walsham, Wang Zheng, and Bernd Weisbrod,
‘AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations’, AHR, 123, 5 (2018),
1505–46; on the dangers of reifying identities, such as generation, and using them uncritically as
categories of analysis, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity” ’, Theory and
Society, 29, 1 (2000), 1–47, here 5.
⁵³ This is in contrast to the thought-provoking study on the afterlives of the French 1968 by Kristin
Ross, who treats ‘generation’ as a political ploy by converts to liberalism that sought to detract from the
revolutionary aspirations of the movement. Ross, 1968 and Its Afterlives. I build on Lutz Niethammer
here, who points out that the constructedness of generations as symbolic homes has its limits.
Niethammer, ‘Die letzte Gemeinschaft’.
16   ‘
In short, The Other ‘68ers does not simply paint a collective portrait of centre-
right activists, one that illustrates who they were, what they did in 1968, and how
those years shaped them as political actors. It pays equally close attention to how
they made sense of their experiences with activism, the stories they told in
retrospect (and the ones they preferred not to tell), and how and why what they
selected as relevant about these years changed with time. In doing so, it aims for a
reflexive use of a notoriously slippery concept, even if it does not escape entirely
the ambiguities of generation.
Sources
This book relies on a variety of sources to fulfil its different goals. It uses archival
documents from twelve archives in Germany and the United States and from a
number of private collections, many of them analysed here for the first time, to
establish the contours of centre-right activism around 1968. Pamphlets, speeches,
government and party documents, and newspaper and other media reports allow
us to track what the other ‘68ers did in 1968, not least the manifold ways in which
they related to the Left at the time. Posters, cartoons, and photographs provide
insights into their aesthetic preferences and how they represented themselves to
the outside world. Opinion polls and sociological studies from the period help to
contextualize the views of students who were politically active. They also allow us
to trace how generational interpretations shaped understandings of the student
movement from the very beginning.
Given that one of this book’s major goals is to understand what activists
thought they were doing around 1968, at the time and with hindsight, personal
testimonies are among the most important sources of this study. Some of its
protagonists, particularly those who went on to pursue high-profile careers in
politics, later published autobiographies or memoirs.⁵⁴ Others narrated their
personal recollections of activism publicly, sometimes repeatedly throughout the
decades, usually on the occasion of major anniversaries of 1968. Such testimonies
have much to reveal about the meaning centre-right activists ascribed to 1968 and
how they fit this period into their overall life story at different moments in time.⁵⁵
This study is not just based on written testimonies, however. It also makes use of
more than two dozen oral history interviews with a sample of former centre-right
⁵⁴ Peter Radunski, Aus der politischen Kulisse: Mein Beruf zur Politik (Berlin/Kassel, 2014/15);
Friedbert Pflüger, Ehrenwort: Das System Kohl und der Neubeginn (Munich, 2000); Horst Teltschik,
329 Tage: Innenansichten der Einigung (Berlin, 1991); Detlef Stronk, Berlin in den Achtziger Jahren: Im
Brennpunkt der Deutsch-Deutschen Geschichte (Berlin, 2009). Others had written draft memoirs or
autobiographical sketches that they had not published but were willing to share with me.
⁵⁵ Volker Depkat, ‘Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit’, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, 29, 3 (2003), 441–76; Volker Depkat, Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: Deutsche Politiker
und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2007).
 17
activists. Between 2008 and 2014, I travelled across the old Federal Republic, from
Berlin to Bonn and from Munich to Hamburg, to record the memories of former
centre-right activists. I first approached those who had been most visible—
chairpersons or leading figures in RCDS or the Student Unions—especially
those who had been active in the centres of left-wing protest and had therefore
been at the forefront of engagement with the student movement; others
I identified via snowball technique. When the stories my interviewees told me
began to sound familiar, I sought out people whose names I had seen mentioned
in documents from the period, but who had spoken less frequently about their
roles on the centre-right, particularly women and activists whose political views
shifted after 1968.
During the semi-structured interviews that usually lasted between one-and-a-
half and three hours, I first allowed people to tell the story they wanted to tell, by
inviting them to talk freely about their lives, how they got involved in student
activism, and what they remembered about 1968.⁵⁶ I then followed up with
questions about specific issues they had brought up, things other interviewees
had told me or that I had seen in the archives, or about what seemed like
inconsistencies in their stories. This technique generated rich information about
1968 and what these years have meant to activists of the centre-right. Like all other
sources, however, oral history interviews have to be analysed with care.
Interviewing people forty, and sometimes nearly fifty, years after the events
meant that they talked about 1968 with great temporal distance and narrated
the past through the prism of the present. People ‘tell the past as it appears to
them’.⁵⁷ Their life stories were framed by a host of public representations of the
student movement—and therefore by debates about a highly contested era in
which they had often intervened themselves.⁵⁸ This book addresses this issue by
using personal testimonies not so much to document what happened, but pri-
marily to understand how the interviewees articulated subjective experiences of
activism around 1968. Nevertheless, the interviews often also produced vivid
descriptions of events and revealed crucial pieces of factual information that
I then did my best to cross-reference with written sources from the period. In
an effort to ensure readability and avoid repetition, the testimonies are used freely
throughout the text, but they feature first and foremost as records of perceptions.
As much as possible, I have contextualized them with other sources, including
personal testimonies by the same people from earlier or later periods.⁵⁹
⁵⁶ Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, 2016), 124.
⁵⁷ Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral
History (Albany, NY, 1991), 52; also Abrams, Oral History Theory, 7, 90; Klatch, A Generation
Divided, 13.
⁵⁸ For a discussion of similar methodological issues with autobiographies and memoirs, see Konrad
Jarausch, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ, 2018).
⁵⁹ My methodology here thus differs from the one we adopted in our collectively written book on
European activism around 1968. Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Anette Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968:
18   ‘
One additional factor ‘makes oral history different’, as oral history pioneer
Alessandro Portelli put it: the historian is intimately involved in creating these
sources in the first place.⁶⁰ The mere fact of my presence, including the assump-
tions my interviewees had about who I was, influenced how they told their stories.
Many just seemed pleasantly surprised, perhaps even a bit flattered, that a German
historian who was based abroad and had been born a decade after 1968 was
interested in obscure details about their student days; some assumed that I had
sought them out because I was politically sympathetic; others were guarded
because I did not seem sympathetic enough.⁶¹ Even if I rarely discuss it explicitly
in the chapters of the book, I have done my best to reflect on how these mutual
perceptions—what oral historians call intersubjectivity—shaped the narratives.⁶²
Interviewing historical actors inevitably means that one learns things that could
not have been gleaned from the archival record or published memoirs alone. The
interviews took place in a great variety of settings: in people’s private homes or in
office suites or restaurants. I interviewed one former activist from West Berlin in
an opulent private members’ club overlooking Berlin’s beautiful Gendarmenmarkt.
Another, who was still visibly frail and hooked up to a medical device, I interviewed
in the courtyard of a Bonn hospital where he had just undergone surgery. These
starkly different settings alone—each chosen by the respective interviewee—
provided information about these individuals before they even spoke. Beyond
producing a narrative account of their political lives, such encounters yielded
insights into who the other ‘68ers had become, how they chose to present them-
selves, what mattered to them, and how they lived. I may have only recorded what
they said, but could not help to take note of small gestures—such as when one of
them lit a cigar during the interview or when the wives of male interviewees came
into the room to serve refreshments. All of this found its way into my analysis in one
way or another.⁶³
Voices of Revolt (Oxford, 2013). That book relied overwhelmingly on oral testimonies. Almost all
quotations from the interviews in this book are attributed to the interviewees by name. In a very few
cases, I have anonymized the interviewees. This was done in cases where providing the interviewee’s
name would not add much to the interpretation or the personal information conveyed might be
embarrassing.
⁶⁰ Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 45–58.
⁶¹ Two instances highlight these differences in perception: one interviewee assumed I had been in
RCDS and offered me help in getting this book published through the Konrad Adenauer Foundation,
the think tank affiliated with the CDU. Another interviewee told me that his partner had warned him
against speaking to me because I wore a high-collared black coat in a photograph shown on my
university’s web page—the implication being that I looked like a leftie. Regardless of such assumptions,
I did my best to build rapport with all my interviewees, as it made for better interviews. For a far more
extreme example of dealing with interviewees’ assumptions about an interviewer’s politics, see Kathleen
Blee, ‘Evidence, Empathy and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan’, Journal of American
History, 80, 2 (1993), 596–606; on the importance of building rapport also V.R. Yow, Recording Oral
History (2005), 157–87.
⁶² Abrams, Oral History Theory, 62.
⁶³ On the importance of performance during an interview, see Abrams, Oral History Theory, 22
and 151.
 19
The interviewees’ very mode of talking about their lives was also instructive.
With some exceptions, centre-right activists were less emphatically self-reflexive
than activists of the Left for whom self-critique was an important part of the
alternative culture they had helped to create. The other ‘68ers were also much
more focused on traditional politics than activists of the Left, whom I had
interviewed for a previous project. Left-wing activists often viewed the personal
as political and therefore found it quite natural—or even imperative—to talk
about their personal lives to a relative stranger.⁶⁴ Interviewing former centre-
right activists was a very different experience, but it was invaluable in helping me
see them as three-dimensional characters whose subjectivity mattered.
Regardless of what some of my interviewees may have tacitly assumed, how-
ever, this is not a work of political advocacy. To be sure, the actions of left-wing
activists and groups are often analysed here through the prism of how they
appeared to their political opponents, meaning that the more extreme aspects of
left-wing activism take centre stage. However, this specific perspective should not
be read as a verdict on the character of the 1968 Left as a whole. By examining
these years from the perspective of the centre-right, this book does not purport to
offer a comprehensive analysis of student activism around 1968. What is more,
that I chose a methodology long associated with challenging established power
dynamics and giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’—indeed a methodology pioneered
by historians with links to the 1968 Left⁶⁵—does not mean that the goal of this
book is to portray activists of the centre-right as objectively powerless or margin-
alized. On the contrary, many of them arrived at the centre of power quite some
time before the ‘68ers of the Left, and they have done much to shape public
memories of the student movement, even if scholars have rarely taken note. Oral
histories with ‘68ers of the centre-right, in combination with a wealth of written

sources from the period, allow me to trace what it was like to experience 1968 on
the ‘other side’. Uncovering this little-known history is the aim of this book.
⁶⁴ Gildea, Mark and Warring, Europe’s 1968; see further Sven Reichardt, Authentizität und
Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren (Berlin, 2014),
887; Celia Hughes, Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self
(Manchester, 2015).
⁶⁵ Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, 1996). The earliest works of
oral history in Germany were also produced by left-wing historians. Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die Jahre
weiß man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll.’ Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin/Bonn,
1983); Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Hinterher merkt man, daß es richtig war, daß es schiefgegangen ist.’
Nachkriegserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin/Bonn 1983); Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato
(eds.), ‘Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten’: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in
nachfaschistischen Ländern (Bonn, 1989); on the history of oral history in Germany, Knud
Andresen, Linde Apel, and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds.), Es gilt das gesprochene Wort: Oral History und
Zeitgeschichte heute (Göttingen, 2015); see further Abrams, Oral History Theory, 4–5; 154–6; and
Robert Gildea and James Mark, ‘Introduction’, Gildea, Mark, and Warring, Europe’s 1968, 9.
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IN WINTER COSTUME
As the law provides that the daughter of a slave must take the
place of her parent, should she die, it is plainly in the interests of the
owner to promote the marriage of his slaves. Slaves who receive
compensation for their services are entitled to marry whom they
please; quarters are provided for the couple. The master of the
house, however, has no claim upon the services of the husband. The
slave who voluntarily assigns herself to slavery and receives no price
for her services may not marry without consent. In these cases it is
not an unusual custom for her master, in the course of a few years,
to restore her liberty.
Hitherto, the position of the Korean woman has been so humble
that her education has been unnecessary. Save among those who
belong to the less reputable classes, the literary and artistic faculties
are left uncultivated. Among the courtesans, however, the mental
abilities are trained and developed with a view to making them
brilliant and entertaining companions. The one sign of their
profession is the culture, the charm, and the scope of their
attainments. These “leaves of sunlight,” a feature of public life in
Korea, stand apart in a class of their own. They are called gisaing,
and correspond to the geisha of Japan; the duties, environment, and
mode of existence of the two are almost identical. Officially, they are
attached to a department of Government, and are controlled by a
bureau of their own, in common with the Court musicians. They are
supported from the national treasury, and they are in evidence at
official dinners and all palace entertainments. They read and recite;
they dance and sing; they become accomplished artists and
musicians. They dress with exceptional taste; they move with
exceeding grace; they are delicate in appearance, very frail and very
human, very tender, sympathetic, and imaginative. By their artistic
and intellectual endowment, the dancing girls, ironically enough, are
debarred from the positions for which their talents so peculiarly fit
them. They may move through, and as a fact do live in, the highest
society. They are met at the houses of the most distinguished; they
may be selected as the concubines of the Emperor, become the
femmes d’amour of a prince, the puppets of the noble. A man of
breeding may not marry them, however, although they typify
everything that is brightest, liveliest, and most beautiful. Amongst
their own sex, their reputation is in accordance with their standard of
morality, a distinction being made between those whose careers are
embellished with the quasi chastity of a concubine, and those who
are identified with the more pretentious display of the mere
prostitute.
A PALACE CONCUBINE
In the hope that their children may achieve that success which will
ensure their support in their old age, parents, when stricken with
poverty, dedicate their daughters to the career of a gisaing, much as
they apprentice their sons to that of a eunuch. The girls are chosen
for the perfect regularity of their features. Their freedom from
blemish, when first selected, is essential. They are usually pretty,
elegant, and dainty. It is almost certain that they are the prettiest
women in Korea, and, although the order is extensive and the class
is gathered from all over the kingdom, the most beautiful and
accomplished gisaing come from Pyöng-an. The arts and graces in
which they are so carefully educated, procure their elevation to
positions in the households of their protectors, superior to that which
is held by the legal wife. As a consequence, Korean folk-lore
abounds with stories of the strife and wifely lamentation arising from
the ardent and prolonged devotion of husbands to girls, whom fate
prevents their taking to a closer union. The women are slight of
stature, with diminutive, pretty feet, and graceful, shapely hands.
They are quiet and unassuming in their manner. Their smile is bright;
their deportment modest, their appearance winsome. They wear
upon state occasions voluminous, silk-gauze skirts of variegated
hues; a diaphanous silken jacket, with long loose sleeves, extending
beyond the hands, protects the shoulders; jewelled girdles, pressing
their naked breasts, sustain their draperies. An elaborate, heavy and
artificial head-dress of black hair, twisted in plaits and decorated with
many silver ornaments, is worn. The music of the dance is plaintive
and the song of the dancer somewhat melancholy. Many movements
are executed in stockinged feet; the dances are quite free from
indelicacy and suggestiveness. Indeed, several are curiously
pleasing.
DANCING WOMEN OF THE COURT

Upon one occasion, Yi-cha-sun, the brother of the Emperor, invited
me to watch the dress rehearsal of an approaching Palace festival.
Although this exceptional consideration was shown me unsolicited, I
found it quite impossible to secure permission to photograph the
gliding, graceful figures of the dancers. When my chair deposited me
at the yamen the dance was already in progress. The chairs of the
officials and chattering groups of the servants of the dancers filled
the compound; soldiers of the Imperial Guard kept watch before the
gates. The air was filled with the tremulous notes of the pipes and
viols, whose plaintive screaming was punctuated with the booming of
drums. Within a building, the walls of which were open to the air, the
rows of dancers were visible as they swayed slowly and almost
imperceptibly with the music.
From the dais where my host was sitting the dance was radiant
with colour. There were eighteen performers, grouped in three equal
divisions, and, as the streaming sunshine played upon the
shimmering surface of their dresses, the lithe and graceful figures of
the dancers floated in the brilliant reflection of a sea of sparkling
light. The dance was almost without motion, so slowly were its
fantastic figures developed. Never once were their arms dropped
from their horizontal position, nor did the size and weight of their
head-dresses appear to fatigue the little women. Very slowly, the
seated band gave forth the air. Very slowly, the dancers moved in the
open space before us, their arms upraised, their gauze and silken
draperies clustering round them, their hair piled high, and held in its
curious shape by many jewelled and enamelled pins, which sparkled
in the sunshine. The air was solemn; and, as if the movement were
ceremonial, their voices rose and fell in a lingering harmony of
passionate expression. At times, the three sets came together, the
hues of the silken skirts blending in one vivid blaze of barbaric
splendour. Then, as another movement succeeded, the eighteen
figures broke apart and, poised upon their toes, in stately and
measured unison circled round the floor, their arms rising and falling,
their bodies bending and swaying, in dreamy undulation.
The dance epitomised the poetry and grace of human motion. The
dainty attitudes of the performers had a gentle delicacy which was
delightful. The long silken robes revealed a singular grace of
deportment, and one looked upon dancers who were clothed from
head to foot, not naked, brazen and unashamed, like those of our
own burlesque, with infinite relief and infinite satisfaction. There was
power and purpose in their movements; artistic subtlety in their
poses. Their flowing robes emphasised the simplicity of their
gestures; the pallor of their faces was unconcealed; their glances
were timid; their manner modest. The strange eerie notes of the
curious instruments, the fluctuating cadence of the song, the gliding
motion of the dancers, the dazzling sheen of the silks, the vivid
colours of the skirts, the flush of flesh beneath the silken shoulder-
coats, appealed to one silently and signally, stirring the emotions
with an enthusiasm which was irrepressible.
The fascinating figures approached softly, smoothly sliding; and,
as they glided slowly forward, the song of the music welled into
passionate lamentation. The character of the dance changed. No
longer advancing, the dancers moved in time to the beating of the
drums; rotating circles of colour, their arms swaying, their bodies
swinging backwards and forwards, as their retreating footsteps took
them from us. The little figures seemed unconscious of their art; the
musicians ignorant of the qualities of their wailing. Nevertheless, the
masterly restraint of the band, the conception, skill and execution of
the dancers, made up a triumph of technique.
As the dance swept to its climax, nothing so accentuated the
admiration of the audience as their perfect stillness. From the outer
courts came for a brief instant the clatter of servants and the
screams of angry stallions. Threatening glances quickly hushed the
slaves, nothing breaking the magnetism of the dance for long. The
dance ended, it became the turn of others to rehearse their individual
contributions, while those who were now free sat chatting with my
host, eating sweets, smoking cigarettes, cigars, or affecting the long
native pipe. Many, discarding their head-dresses, lay upon their
sitting mats, their eyes closed in momentary rest as their servants
fanned them. His Highness apparently appreciated the familiarity
with which they treated him. In the enjoyment and encouragement of
their little jokes he squeezed their cheeks and pinched their arms, as
he sat among them.
BOYS
CHAPTER V
The Court of Korea—The Emperor and his Chancellor—The Empress and some
Palace factions
HIS IMPERIAL HIGHNESS, PRINCE YI-

CHA-SUN
A study of the morals and personalities of the Court of Korea

throws no little light upon the interesting phases of its contemporary
condition, even affording some explanation of the political
differences and difficulties which, if now in the past, may be
expected none the less to crop up again. Since the dastardly murder
by the Japanese of the Queen, who held the reins of Government
with strong hands, the power of the Emperor has been controlled by
one or other of the Palace factions. His Majesty is now almost a
cypher in the management of his Empire. Nominally, the Emperor of
Korea enjoys the prerogative and independence of an autocrat; in
reality he is in the hands of that party whose intrigues for the time
being may have given them the upper hand. He is the slave of the
superb immoralities of his women. When he breaks away from their
gentle thraldom, in the endeavour to free himself from their political
associations, his exceedingly able and unscrupulous Minister, Yi
Yong-ik, the chief of the Household Bureau, rules him with a rod of
iron. It matters not in what direction the will of his Majesty should lie,
it is certain to be thwarted with the connivance of Palace concubines
or by the direct bribery of Ministers. If the King dared, Yi Yong-ik
would be degraded at once. No previous Minister has proved so
successful, however, in supplying the Court with money; and, as the
Emperor dreads an empty treasury, he maintains him in his
confidence.
HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY THE EMPEROR
In the position of Minister of Finance and Treasurer of the Imperial

Palace, which he once filled, Yi Yong-ik opposed foreign supervision
of the revenues of the Maritime Customs. Acting in concert with the
Russian and French Ministers, he was primarily responsible for the
most recent crisis in the affairs of Mr. McLeavy Brown, the Chief
Comptroller and Executive Administrator of the Korean Maritime
Customs. At a time when the Imperial household was in need of
money, Yi Yong-ik created the desire for a loan by withholding the
revenue of the Privy Purse from his master. It was explained to his
Majesty that his financial embarrassments were due to the action of
his Chief Commissioner of Customs in locking up the proceeds of
the Customs. Supported by the influence of the Russian and French
Ministers, Yi Yong-ik suggested that the Customs revenue should
become the security for the loan which was being pressed upon him
by a French syndicate. When Mr. McLeavy Brown heard of the
transaction between the agent of the syndicate and the Minister of
Finance, he at once repudiated any hypothecation of the revenues of
the Customs for such a purpose. In co-operation with the French and
Russian Ministers, Yi Yong-ik, upon a variety of pretexts, attempted
to bring about the peremptory dismissal of the Chief Commissioner
of the Customs. He was foiled in this by the unexpected
demonstration of a British Squadron in Chemulpo Harbour, and the
attendant preparation and embarkation of a field force at Wei-hai-
wei. Upon the withdrawal of the guarantee of the Customs revenue
the Franco-Russian scheme collapsed, the agent of the interested
syndicate returning to Europe to complain of the action of the British
Minister and the Chief Commissioner of Customs.
Yi Yong-ik is an instance, together with that afforded by Lady Om,
of a Korean of most humble birth rising to a position of great
importance in the administration of the country. A man of low
parentage, he attached himself to the fortunes of Min Yeung-ik,
gradually forcing himself upon the notice of his patron, as also of his
sovereign. The services which Yi Yong-ik rendered to the throne
during the émeute of 1884, when he was a chair coolie in the service
of the late Queen, found responsive echo in the memories of their
Majesties, who procured his preferment. He was advanced to a
position in which his admitted sagacity, strength of mind, and
shrewdness were of material assistance, continuing to rise until he
became Minister of Finance. He has thus made his own position
from very insignificant beginnings, and, in justice to him, it may be
said that he serves the interests of his Majesty to the best of his
ability. Nevertheless he is in turn feared and detested. Numerous
attempts have been made against him, while, within the last few
months, failing to take his life by poisoned food, some unknown
enemies discharged an infernal machine in the room at the Seoul
Hospital where he was confined during an attack of sickness.
Alternately upon the crest of the wave or in the backwash of the tide,
Yi Yong-ik remains the most enduring personality in the Court. The
Russian influence is behind him, while the Emperor also is secretly
upon the side of his energetic Minister. At a moment, recently, when
the opposition against him became too strong, Yi Yong-ik took refuge
upon a Russian warship, which at once carried him to Port Arthur.
From this retreat he negotiated for a safe return with his Majesty,
who at once granted him a strong escort. Yi Yong-ik then returned
and, proceeding at once to the Palace, quickly reinstated himself in
the good graces of his master, thus again thwarting the plans and
secret machinations of his opponents.
His Majesty the Emperor of Korea was fifty years old in September
1900, being called to the throne in 1864, when he was thirteen. He
was married at the age of fifteen to the Princess Min, a lady of birth,
of the same age as her husband. It was she who was wantonly
assassinated by the Japanese in 1895. The son of this union is the
Crown Prince. His Majesty is somewhat short of stature, as
compared with the average height of the Korean. He is only five feet
four inches. His face is pleasant; impassive in repose, brightening
with an engaging smile when in conversation. His voice is soft and
pleasing to the ear; he talks with easy assurance, some vivacity and
nervous energy.
During an audience with a foreigner, the manner of the Emperor
has an air of frankness and singular bonhomie. He talks with every
one, pointing his remarks with graceful gestures, and interrupting his
sentences with melodious and infectious laughter. The mark of the
Emperor’s favour is the receipt of a fan. When a foreigner is
presented to him, it is customary to find upon the conclusion of the
audience a small parcel awaiting his acceptance, containing a few
paper fans and sometimes a roll of silk. The Emperor rarely exceeds
this limit to his Imperial patronage, for, like the rest of his people, he
cannot afford to be unduly generous.
The dress of his Majesty upon these occasions is remarkable for
its impressive and Imperial grandeur. A long golden silk robe of
state, embroidered with gold braid, with a girdle of golden cord,
edged with a heavy gold fringe, covers him. While the magnificence
of this attire excites envy in the heart of any one who sees it, the
ease and dignity of his carriage suggest his complete
unconsciousness of the impression which he is creating in the minds
of his guests.
The Emperor is ignorant of Western languages, but he is an
earnest student of those educational works which have been
translated for the purposes of the schools he has established in his
capital. In this way he has become singularly well informed upon
many subjects. He speaks and writes Chinese with fluency, and he is
a most profound student of the history of his own people. The
method and system of his rule is based on the thesis of his own
personal supervision of all public business. If there be some little
difference between the Utopia of his intentions and the actual
achievement of his government, it is impossible to deny his assiduity
and perseverance. He is a kind, amiable, and merciful potentate,
desirous of the advancement of his country. He works at night,
continuing the sessions and conferences with his Ministers until after
dawn. He has faults, many, according to the Western standards by
which I have no intention of judging him. He has also many virtues;
and, he receives, and deserves, the sympathy of all foreigners in the
vast works of reform which he has encouraged in his dominions.
THE HALL OF AUDIENCE, SEOUL

His Majesty is progressive. In view of the number and magnitude
of the developments which have taken place under his rule, it is
impossible to credit him with any of those prejudices against
Western innovations which have distinguished the East from time
immemorial. There are special schools in Seoul for teaching English,
French, German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese; there is a School
of Law, a School of Engineering and Science, a School of Medicine,
and a Military Academy. These are but a few minor indications of the
freedom of his rule, the sure sign of a later prosperity. He is tolerant
of missionaries, and he is said to favour their activities. It is certain
that his rule permits great liberty of action, while it is distinguished by
extraordinary immunity from persecution. His reign is in happy
contrast with the inter-regnum of the Regent, Tai Won Kun, who
regarded priests and converts as a pest, and who eradicated them to
the best of his ability.
As the autocratic monarch of a country, whose oldest associations
are opposed to all external interference, the attitude of his Majesty
has been instinct with the most humane principles, with great
integrity of purpose and much enlightenment. It cannot be said that
his reign has been a failure, or that it has not tended to the benefit of
his people and his realms. Certain evil practices still exist, but his
faults as an Emperor are, to a great extent, due to the worthlessness
of his officials. Indeed, he frequently receives the condemnation
which should be passed upon the minds and morals of his Ministers.
Saving Yi Yong-ik, the most important figure in the Court is the
mature and elderly Lady Om, the wife of his Majesty. In a Court
which is abandoned to every phase of Eastern immorality, it is a little
disappointing to find that the first lady in the land no longer
possesses those charms of face and figure, which should explain her
position. There is no doubt that the Lady Om is a clever woman. She
is most remarkably astute in her management of the Emperor,
whose profound attachment to her is a curious paradox. Lady Om is
mature, fat, and feebly, if freely, frolicsome. Her face is pitted with
small-pox; her teeth are uneven; her skin is of a saffron tint. There is
some suggestion of a squint in her dark eyes, a possible reminder of
the pest which afflicts all Koreans. She paints very little and she
eschews garlic. Her domination of the Emperor is wonderful. Except
at rare intervals, and then only when the assent of Lady Om to the
visit of a new beauty has been given, he has no eye for any other
woman. Nevertheless, the Lady Om has not always been a Palace
beauty; she was not always the shining light of the Imperial harem.
Her amours have made Korean history; only two of her five children
belong to the Emperor; yet one of these may become the future
occupant of his father’s throne.
THEIR IMPERIAL HIGHNESSES THE CROWN PRINCE

AND PRINCESS
In her maiden days, she became the mistress of a Chinaman;

tiring of him she passed into the grace and favour of a Cabinet
Minister. He introduced her to the service of the late Queen, whose
acquaintance she made at the house of her father, a Palace
attendant of low degree, with quarters within the walls. By the time
that she became a woman in the service of her Majesty, the Lady
Om had presented a child to each of her respective partners. As the
virtue of the women in attendance upon the Queen had of necessity
to be assured, her previous admirers kept their counsel for the safety
of their own heads. The Lady Om boasted abilities which
distinguished her among the other maids in attendance. She sang to
perfection, danced with consummate grace; painted with no little
delicacy and originality, and could read, write, and speak Chinese
and Korean with agreeable fluency. The Queen took a fancy to her
apparently innocent, guileless, and very lovable attendant. Imitating
the excellent example of his illustrious spouse, his Majesty sealed
the rape of virtue with a kingly smile. The Queen grew restless.
Suspicion, confirmed by appearances, developed into certainty, and
the Lady Om fled from the Palace to escape the anger and jealousy
of her late mistress. The third child, of whom Lady Om became the
mother, was born beyond the capital, in the place of refuge where
the errant Griselle had taken up her abode. Meanwhile, Lady Om
avoided the parental establishment within the purlieus of the Palace.
Upon the death of her third child she sought the protection of another
high official. With him she dwelt in safety, peace, and happiness,
becoming, through her strange faculty of presenting each admirer
with evidences of her innocence, the subject of some ribald songs.
Since her return to Imperial favour, these verses have been
suppressed, and may not be uttered upon pain of emasculation.
It now seemed as if the Lady Om had settled down, but the events
of 1895, culminating in the foul murder of the late Queen, prompted
her to renew her acquaintance with the unhappy Emperor. She
became a Palace attendant again, and at once cleverly succeeded in
bringing herself before the Imperial notice. She was sweetly
sympathetic towards his Majesty; her commiseration, her
tenderness, her suppliant air of injured innocence, almost
immediately captivated him. She was raised to the rank of an
Imperial concubine; money was showered upon her, and she
proceeded immediately to exercise an influence over the Emperor
which has never relaxed. She became a power at Court and once
again a mother. Her influence is now directed towards the definite
maintenance of her own interests. She wishes her son to be the
future Emperor; she is now living in a palace, and, since she is the
apple of his Majesty’s eye, she permits nothing to endanger the
stakes for which she is playing. Recently Kim Yueng-chun, an official
of importance but of precarious position, wishing to secure himself in
the consideration of his sovereign, introduced a new beauty, whose
purity and loveliness were unquestioned. Lady Om heard of Lady
Kang and said nothing. Within two weeks, however, the Minister was
removed upon some small pretext, and subsequently tortured,
mutilated, and strangled. The Lady Kang found that if the mills of
Lady Om grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small.
Lady Om is a lover of ancient customs; by ancient customs she
made her way; by ancient customs she proposes to keep it. Her
power increases daily, and a stately edifice has been erected in the
centre of the capital to commemorate her virtues. A few months
before her marriage to the Emperor, when there was ample
indication of the trend of events, the Emperor published a decree
which declared that Lady Om had become an Imperial concubine of
the First Class. This did not give her Imperial status; but it conferred
upon her son Imperial rank. By reason of this decree, however, he
will, at some future date, ascend the throne, while it opened a way
for Lady Om to secure recognition in Korea as the lawful spouse of
her royal admirer.
A MINOR ROYALTY
CHAPTER VI
The passing of the Emperor—An Imperial pageant
The Emperor passed one morning in procession from the Imperial

Palace, which adjoins the British Legation upon its south wall, to the
newly erected Temple of Ancestors, the eastern wall of which marks
the limits of the Legation grounds. The festival was in no way public;
yet, such was the splendour of the pageant, that this progress of
eight hundred yards, leaving the Palace by its south gate and
entering again by the eastern gate, cost over two thousand pounds.
No warning of the Imperial plans was given to his Majesty’s subjects.
Just before the hour of his departure, however, the Emperor
expressed the hope that the British Minister and myself would be
interested in the procession, inviting us to watch the spectacle from
the Legation domain. Information of the movements of the Court
was, of course, bruited abroad. Large crowds gathered around the
precincts of the Palace and the Temple, attracted by the efforts
which the soldiers were making to form a cordon round the scene.
Hundreds of soldiers were told off to guard the approaches to the
Temple. One battalion of infantry was installed in the grounds of the
Imperial Korean Customs, another occupied the gates and garden of
the British Legation.
Despite the fact that the route of the procession lay between the
high walls of a private passage, some twenty-five feet wide, leading
from the offices of the Customs to the grounds of the Legation, into
which a postern gate gives access from the Palace, and through
which no Korean is ever permitted to pass, soldiers, one pace apart,
faced one another upon opposite sides of the road. The public,
seeing nothing of the ceremony, gathered such consolation as was
possible from the spectacle of the masses of infantry occupying the
Palace Square. Occasional glimpses of Palace officials were also
secured, and the blatant discord of triumphant song, with which the
private musicians of the Emperor greeted his arrival and the passing
of the Court, fell faintly upon expectant ears. It is, however, the proud
privilege of the Koreans to pay for these promenades of the Court. If
they did not see the august countenance of his Majesty upon this
occasion, it is to be hoped that they derived some consolation for the
heavy taxation, with which they are burdened, from the brave show
made by the brand new uniforms of the troops. The plumes, gold
lace and swords of the officers, and the rifles and bayonets of the
men would have fascinated any crowd. Until the moment of
departure, the army lay around upon the road, sleeping in the dust,
or squatted in the shade upon the steps of buildings, partaking of
breakfast—a decomposed mass of sun-dried, raw fish and rice
which stunk horribly, but which they devoured greedily, tearing it into
shreds with their fingers. Occasionally a loyal citizen brought them
water or passed round a pipe, taking the opportunity to run his finger
along the edge of a bayonet, or over the surface of a coat.
The Emperor was passing in this festive state to pay homage to
the tablets of his ancestors upon their transference to a fresh abode.
The gorgeousness of the pageant burst upon the colourless
monotony of the capital with all the violent splendour and vivid
beauty of an Arabian sunset. It was right and proper that the
magnificence of the celebration should be unrestricted. The
importance of the occasion was without parallel in the festivals of the
year. The momentary brilliancy of the picture, which centres round
the usually secluded sovereign at such a moment, implied the
glorification of a dynasty, which has already occupied the throne of
Korea for more than five centuries. Quaint and stately as the
pageant was, the splendour of a barbaric mediævalism is best seen
in processions of a more public character.

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Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late

West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment,

Britain, Germany and Colonial Violence in South-West

The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and

Transatlantis: Der öffentliche Intellektuelle John

Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory: The Other Issues that

Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side

ANNA VON DER GOLTZ

translations, and copy editing. My sincere thanks to Robert Mevissen, Rebecca

Anna von der Goltz

3. Between Adenauer and Coca-Cola 109

6. The (Ir)Resistible Rise of the Other ‘68ers 227

ACDP Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik

BSU Bonner Studentenunion (Bonn Student Union)

VDS Vereinigte Deutsche Studentenschaften (Association of German

(Michael Ruetz/Agentur focus)

Illustration 0.1 Group photograph of the self-described ‘Alternative ‘68ers’, Bonn,

¹⁶ Ahlberg, ‘politische Konzeption’; Andrea Wienhaus, Bildungswege zu ‘1968’: Eine Kollektivbiograﬁe

1968 and Histories of the Federal Republic

turned right in the wake of 1968—liberal intellectuals who became liberal-

²⁸ Martin Conway, ‘The Age of Christian Democracy’, in European Christian Democracy:

re-establishment of the Federal Republic. The quasi-democracy released its

driven by persistent fears about the fragility of democracy in Germany.³⁶ As we

The Other ‘68ers and Histories of Generation

political traditions.³⁸ Historians have been drawn to generation to explain the

trope is intellectually seductive. It allows us to discuss big structural developments

Most historians of modern Germany who have examined generations have

⁴⁴ Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen’; Gabriele Rosenthal, ‘Zur interaktionellen Konstitution

antagonistic generation units’, he theorized. These were ‘oriented toward each

form, notably women activists and Christian Democratic ‘renegades’.

⁴⁷ Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, 306–7.

histories with ‘68ers of the centre-right, in combination with a wealth of written

DANCING WOMEN OF THE COURT

HIS IMPERIAL HIGHNESS, PRINCE YI-

A study of the morals and personalities of the Court of Korea

In the position of Minister of Finance and Treasurer of the Imperial

THE HALL OF AUDIENCE, SEOUL

THEIR IMPERIAL HIGHNESSES THE CROWN PRINCE

In her maiden days, she became the mistress of a Chinaman;

The Emperor passed one morning in procession from the Imperial

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