One thing separated the left-wing students who demonstrated on the
streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts
elsewhere around the world. The young Germans who became known as the
1968 generation or the "Achtundsechziger" had grown up knowing that
their parents were responsible for Nazism and in particular for the
Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better
world as some of their revolutionary contemporaries in other countries
did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an
all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz.
However, although many in the West German student movement imagined
their struggle against capitalism as a kind of "ex post facto"
resistance against Nazism, they also had a tendency to relativise the
Holocaust. Others, meanwhile, wanted to draw a line under the Nazi past.
In fact, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the "Achtundsechziger,"
there were also nationalist and anti-Semitic currents in the West German
New Left that grew out of the student movement. In short, the 1968
generation had a deeply ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past.
Utopia or Auschwitz explores these contradictory currents as it traces
the political journey of Germany's 1968 generation, via the left-wing
terrorism of the seventies and the Social Democrats and Greens in the
eighties, to political power in the nineties in the form of the
first-ever "red-green" government in Germany. It examines the
"red-green" government's foreign policy, in particular its response to
the Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq crises, which reflected the 1968
generation's ambivalent relationship with the Nazi past.
