Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia/Hurst)

By Hans Kundnani

The left-wing students who demonstrated in the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 differed from their international counterparts in one crucial way. These young Germans, who would become known as the 1968 generation, or the Achtundsechziger, were raised knowing their parents were responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. Consequently, this generation dreamed of making a better world, but they also felt compelled to save Germany from itself. For them, it was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz.Though these demonstrators imagined their struggle against capitalism to be an ex post facto resistance against Nazism, they also exhibited a tendency to relativize the Holocaust. Some in fact wanted to highlight their country's Nazi past, and despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the Achtundsechziger, nationalist and anti-Semitic currents emerged from the student movement and took root in the rhetoric of the West German New Left.It can be argued, therefore, that the 1968 generation had a deeply ambivalent relationship with their Nazi past. Utopia or Auschwitz. explores these contradictions as it traces the political journey of Germany's 1968 generation through the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s and the Social Democrats and Greens of the 1980s. It concludes with the 1990s and the first-ever "red-green" government in Germany. Hans Kundnani examines the foreign policy of this new coalition government, especially its response to the Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq crises, which reflects the 1968 generation's ambivalent relationship with its Nazi heritage.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231701373
• ISBN13: 9780231701372
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 5.8"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher