Wesley Hogan has written that during the past forty years the civil rights movement came to be seen as “a kind of sacred ground … it began to occupy a terrain beyond reach, beyond analysis.” In the book Many Minds, One Heart, Hogan reentered this sacred ground in order “to acknowledge sober realities as well as intoxicating dreams.” A new generation of German historians shares both Hogan's understanding of the 1960s as “sacred ground” and her will to subject the decade to rigorous scholarly analysis in order to demystify it.
In 1968 und die 68er, editors Gerrit Dworok and Christoph Weissmann apply this approach to West Germany's deeply mythologized “1968.” The volume's seven chapters are drawn from a 2011 University of Würzburg conference of the same name. Although the chapters are not explicitly grouped into sections, they could be divided into three categories. Several essays remain true to...