Rory Hanna

Supervisors:

• Benjamin Ziemann (Primary)
• Sarah Frank (Secondary)

Period:

Post-1800 

Thesis abstract:

The student protest movement in West Germany during “1968” came as a shock to contemporary observers. Sociologists, after all, had seemingly shown that young Germans were largely apolitical and uninterested in reform.

Although the unanticipated outbreak of revolt in the late sixties suggests that their findings had rested upon flawed assumptions, there has been little interest among historians in tracing students’ critical engagement in the years before “1968”.

My study into student protest and activism between 1949 and 1967 seeks to re-evaluate a period which has been frequently characterised as one of political apathy and deference to authority.

From the student demonstrations against the re-emergence of Nazi cultural elites at the beginning of the fifties to the campaigns to open up higher education to rural and working class Germans in the mid-sixties, the early Federal Republic oversaw a succession of student protests.

These can tell us much about cultural and social changes in early West Germany, and how these processes were influenced by the Cold War, Allied efforts at democratisation, decolonisation in the Global South, and West Germany’s economic miracle.

This project examines instances of protest at several West German universities, including Göttingen, Hamburg, Freiburg, Marburg, Frankfurt, and West Berlin.

Drawing on student newspapers, files from campus political groups, records from university committees, press reports,written memoirs and oral history interviews, it investigates the causes and aims of the protests, the forms of protest used, the attempts by students to frame and legitimise their dissent, and the responses from peers, politicians, professors, journalists, and the wider public.

By highlighting the characteristics, successes, failures, and blind spots of student protest and activism between 1949 and 1967, my research will offer new perspectives on students’ changing mentalities and their contribution to processes of reform in the first years of West German democracy.