1968 as event, milieu, and ideology

Jan-Werner Müller

pp. 117-143

in: German ideologies since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

For more than three decades, 1968 has been an event in search of an interpretation.² In Germany (and elsewhere), les événements remain shrouded in mystery—historians, with their fear of touching the "third rail of the present," have only recently begun to undertake research into wie es eigentlich gewesen. In these still rather tentative forays, they have treaded on seemingly sacred ground and often become polemically opposed to the numerous protagonists whose accounts have tended to mythologize, demonize, or sometimes just neutralize "68. While there have been a number of more or less illuminating controversies between "witnesses' and "historians' of "68, both about the events as such and their wider historical meaning, one rather obvious aspect of "68 has remained curiously neglected.³ This aspect is the actual political thought of the protagonists—or, to put it differently, an answer to the quasi-anthropological question, what did they think they were doing when they were doing politics?⁴