The Anti-Authoritarian Student Movement (1965 to 1969): a Caesura in the Political Discourse

Abstract

The anti-authoritarian student movement of the late 1960s occupies a pivotal place both in the history of protest and in the development of democracy in the Federal Republic. It was accompanied by, and overlapped with, the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and terms such as anti-autoritäre Bewegung (anti-authoritarian movement), Protestbewegung (protest movement) and Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (APO — Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) were often used synonymously. The latter arose as a distinct, though not altogether separate form of protest, specifically directed against the proposed Emergency Laws which the Grand Coalition of the Kiesinger/Brandt government was steering through a parliament that now contained no effective opposition. While the APO certainly contributed to the general climate of protest which characterised the second half of the 1960s, it was preoccupied essentially with one issue and disbanded when this was resolved by the Bundestag. Even though this legislative initiative had farreaching implications regarding changes in the Basic Law and the legitimacy of representative democracy in West Germany, the extraparliamentary debate about the Emergency Laws did not pose the same kind of fundamental questions about class, the manipulation of social awareness by the media, the affinity of authoritarian patterns of socialisation with those under National Socialism and the emancipation of the individual from a number of repressive influences in the social structures.