Attraction and Aversion in Germany’s ‘1968’: Encountering the Western Revolt in East Berlin

Abstract

This article uses oral history interviews and archival sources to investigate the entanglements between East and West German activists of 1968. Cold War Berlin remained an important zone of exchange between East and West after the border closure of 1961; the study focuses on what a particular group of young East Berliners with oppositional leanings, who engaged in different forms of political and cultural experimentation in the late 1960s, and who took their ideas from both Eastern Socialist reformers and Western New Leftists, made of their direct encounters with the Western revolt. The article shows that the connections between East and West around 1968 were indeed striking, but contends that these produced ambiguous results; both attraction and aversion marked the exchanges and personal interactions of Eastern and Western activists in this period. Engaging with the broader literatures on the ‘transnational 1960s’ and the ‘asymmetrical entanglement’ of the two Germanies after 1945, this research suggests that the two German states represent a fruitful case to study the meaning of transnationalism around 1968 for the opposite reason of what one may intuitively expect. Encounters between the Socialist East and liberal capitalist West could be facilitated with relative ease, because of the geographical proximity of the two states and the shared language, but, far from spelling ever-greater convergence, increasing connections and closeness could actually foster a greater sense of difference.