Revolutionary Angst

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the impact of the West German student movement on the history of fear and on emotional culture more generally. The “68ers” propagated an expressive emotional culture that partly displaced the older repressive emotional culture. The student movement celebrated the public display of emotions and enabled a new significance of emotions within political activism and for individual subjectivities. The chapter brings into focus the specific role that fear and anxiety played in shaping the political outlooks and subjectivities of student activities. While historians have often emphasized the optimism that drove the student movement, activists’ fears and disappointments resulted, in part, from their far-reaching, even utopian, ambitions. Fears also resulted from student activists’ confrontation with police and popular violence. Students’ politicization of sexuality turned personal relationships into a source of anxiety because many activists found it difficult to reconcile their political views with their private lives. Finally, the chapter analyzes conservative fears of revolution, as they were expressed by the conservative Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft that sought to contain the influence of left-wing forces within the universities. The dialectic of fear that had already shaped the interplay between democratic fears and fears of democracy in the earlier period intensified further. Revolutionary fears and fears of revolution structured the political debate in the West German 1960s and beyond.