Von Schwanenflaum und Vogelschiss

The global student protests of 1968 formed a radical left-wing precursor of social, cultural and political change processes. In West Germany (FRG), this extra-parliamentary opposition developed along unique lines given the country's history. This specifically German development can be explained not least by the fact that the political and ideological thought leaders of the protest movement came from a generation that had experienced the authoritarian socialized Nazi generation, a fact that would have consequences for cohesion within the German extra-parliamentary opposition (the Außerparlamentarische Opposition in German, or APO). Ideological and theoretical revolutionary concepts of the pioneering visionary leaders (the ‘Primär-68er’), who had themselves been shaped by differing systems (Nazi Germany, the GDR and the FRG), increasingly managed to move the compass of the radical left-wing movement after 1968.Germany's 1968 protest movement has already been analysed from many angles in recent decades: historically, conceptually and even psychologically. A more profound study approaching the matter from the perspectives of discourse analysis and political linguistics has, however, remained largely elusive. The political linguistic study presented here – partly quantitative, partly qualitative – now aims to connect this set of scientific perspectives from the objective distance that a Dutch researcher can provide. This is done by enriching the existing literature on 'Germany 68' not just with new research methods involving applications in the field of computational linguistics, but also with unique interviews with prominent witnesses who were directly involved at the time and who were still alive at the time of the study.Based on the postulated 'conundrum chain theory' – the theory of left-wing ideological language manipulation – the study shows that 1968 should no longer be regarded as a fault line in German history, but rather as a moment of historical continuity. It also disproves the unfounded radical left-wing accusations of dissent and betrayal made against the elder generation of activists (the ‘Primär-68er’, later emerging as radical nationalists), who were also the ideological pioneers of the 1968 movement, thus placing them in a different, more nuanced light.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/f048e9d1-464e-4da7-9f2e-5bed8e7c0e71