Introduction

THE MAIN OUTLINES OF POLITICAL AND LITERARY developments in the Federal Republic in the 1960s were sketched at the beginning of the previous chapter. This chapter will deal with events (and writers' reactions to them) that can be linked to the student movement, a phenomenon that ran parallel to mainstream political developments, although of course the two worlds did influence one another. Specifically, large parts of the student movement sought to change the nature of the Federal Republic and set up a different kind of society that would be based on socialism, albeit not that of the GDR. In this they appeared to have the support of a number of writers and intellectuals, not least those who at the beginning of the 1960s had supported the SPD but had become increasingly disillusioned by the party's apparent drift to the right. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, claimed in 1967 that it was no longer possible to repair the political system of the Federal Republic. The choice was either the status quo or a new system (VLMS, 257). It is the ideas and events that can be linked to this view that will form the subject of this chapter.

The Return of Ideology

The first two postwar decades in the western part of Germany can be seen as characterized by suspicion of political ideologies. The experience of Nazism had put right-wing ideology, or at least that of the extreme kind, beyond the pale, while the negative example of the GDR acted as a deterrent to the adoption of ideologies based on Marxism.