The Israel of the Spirit: The German Student Movement of the 1960s and its Attitude to the Holocaust

Abstract

The German student movement of the 1960s, which reached its climax with the street revolt of 1968, grew out of the rejection, by members of Germany’s younger generation, of their parents’ complicity in the Holocaust. The movement’s ideology and development should to be viewed against the background of messianic political theologies among the students, reflecting a complex relationship with both their biological German parents and their ideological Jewish ones.

The movement’s radicals viewed themselves as the true interpreters of the meaning of Auschwitz and thus as a kind of “true Israel.” But this pathological attitude was rejected by its moderates, who paved the way for an ethics of memory that could serve as a basis for rational democratic politics.