Publisher's Synopsis
"Free Radicals offers both a comprehensive panorama of the oppositional politics of the 'Generation of 1968' in Germany and a trenchant interpretation of the ideas and politics of the movement, placing them in a larger historiographical framework. The book argues that the activists of the 1960s fundamentally misconstrued the nature of the young German republic, conflating it with earlier problematic German polities, particularly the doomed Weimar Republic, and offered a hazy world-shattering future based on artificial comparisons to past revolutionary models. This book situates the German Student movement within the spectrum of major social changes that occurred in postwar West Germany, arguing that the student radicals at first were swept along by the liberalizing forces of the young democracy, but then made a decisive turn against reform and gradual political evolution in favor of an aggressive rejection of the existing order. The stu
