Apathy, Subversion, and the Network Sublime: Envisioning Youth Unrest in West Germany, 1980–87

Abstract

The initial outbreak of the youth revolts that swept through European cities in the early 1980s caught many West German experts and social commentators completely by surprise. In the foreword to the 1983 publication of the West German Parliamentary Report on Youth Protests in a Democratic State, for example, Matthias Wissmann noted that ‘since the middle of the 1970s, the conversation always centred on the fact that there had never been a generation that was so adjusted, so integrated, and so quiet as the current one’.¹ Such myopia was not limited to the representatives of the West German state. Indeed, according to Jörg Bopp, progressive social commentators’ tendency to lament the generational shift from political engagement to hedonism, inwardness and terrorism meant that they too largely missed the early signs of widespread youth unrest in the late 1970s.² After years spent focusing on the failure of the younger generation to live up to their expectations, social commentators across the political spectrum were shocked when German youth took to the streets in record numbers to protest against bourgeois society in toto.