Avoiding the Subject: Six Tropes in 68er Fiction

Abstract

The tropes that I characterize in this chapter come from novels either written by members of the generation of 1968 themselves or by slightly older contemporaries. Born in the 1940s, the 68ers had childhood memories of the war, in particular, of the Allied bombing, followed by postwar deprivation. They often grew up without fathers, or with parents who had been damaged by the war and the aftereffects of Nazism. The family, as Wilhelm Reich did not always need to teach them, was a site of oppression. They entered adulthood at a moment when West Germany was changing, authority being challenged, and the whole postwar settlement was being questioned. Some of their anger could have been sparked by resentment for the hardships they suffered as a result of Germany’s losing the war. They both despised and pitied their parents. The student movement experience in the second half of the 1960s was their experience. The 68er novelists are writing about a part of themselves and their own past when they write about Baader-Meinhof. Many knew individual RAF members: Ulrike Edschmid attended Berlin’s Film- und Fernsehakademie with Holger Meins, for instance. Uwe Timm, in contrast, studied with Benno Ohnesorg.¹ Günter Grass knew Ulrike Meinhof and campaigned with Gudrun Ensslin on behalf of the SPD in 1965, as did Peter Schneider and F. C. Delius. Peter O. Chotjewitz was one of the German writers who helped Baader and Ensslin when they arrived in Rome with Astrid Proll in November 1969.