‘Like a family tree’? Memories of ’68 in the German anti-austerity movement Blockupy

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen a series of anniversaries of iconic protests. This draws attention to social movements’ long-term legacies both in terms of their impact on society at large as well as their influence on subsequent cycles of mobilization. The growing literature on the interconnections between memories and movements provides crucial insights into such legacies as it explores how movements are remembered or forgotten. The paper aims to contribute to this literature and our understanding of continuities and discontinuities between different cycles of mobilization. For this purpose, we explore how activists of a central strand of the German anti-austerity movement, Blockupy, remember the ’68 movement. Based on interviews with Blockupy activists and a media analysis, the paper shows how Blockupy activists largely share a joint memory of ’68 despite ideological and generational differences. This shared memory is characterized by recurrent patterns of mnemonic adoptions of some ’68 traits and rejection of others. At the same time, we reveal that this memory is only partly movement-specific as it overlaps with public memories in several respects. Activists however clearly reject public memories with respect to ’68’s central goals. The paper’s findings show how impacts of past movements on later activism are shaped by activists’ memories of that past and in particular by two levels of mnemonic rejection and adoption: how activists reject or adopt characteristics of a past movement and, in doing so, how they reject or adopt public memories of that movement.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-austerity movement
• ‘68 movement
• Blockupy
• Germany
• collective memory
• movement
• legacies

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also thank Samuel Merrill and Lorenzo Zamponi for their fruitful feedback. This work was supported by a research grant by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the context of the ERA.Net RUS Plus Project LIVINGMEMORIES funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. Our thanks go to the consortium’s coordinator Kirsti Salmi-Niklander.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This also means that memory building here is understood to not necessarily precede adoption or rejection of past mobilizations’ ideas and tactics, both processes are closely intertwined as reconstructions of the past will depend on what is considered relevant today (Halbwachs, 1992).

2. This overview of the ’68 Movement will largely focus on the mobilizations in West Germany. Also in East Germany mobilizations took place around the year 1968, but these remained much smaller in scale than the protests in West Germany and had a different thematic focus and actor constellation. Accordingly most studies about memories of ’68 focus on West-Germany, with a few exceptions (e.g. von der Goltz, 2011, 2013).

3. In contrast, memories about ’68 in other countries have been examined for a while, on Italy see e.g. Passerini (1996); Foot (2010); Hajek (2013); Zamponi (2018); della Porta (2018); on France see e.g. Gordon (2010); Neveu (2014); Ross (2008).

4. German chapter of the international Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Citizen’s Action.

5. In interview quotes below identified as M for moderate left, and R for radical left.

6. In interview quotes below identified as G1 for Generation 1 and G2 for Generation 2.

7. In response to the first open questions about Blockupy the interviewed activists instead most frequently referred to Global Justice Movement as a direct predecessor of Blockupy.

8. While a few activists do mention the continued relevance of ’68’s spontaneous and anti-authoritarian form of organising, most focus on highlighting organizational discontinuities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research  in the context of the ERA.Net RUS Plus Project LIVINGMEMORIES funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme.

Notes on contributors

Priska Daphi

Priska Daphi is Professor of Conflict Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany, and founding member of the Institute for Protest and Social Movements Studies in Berlin. She is author of Becoming a Movement. Identity, Narrative and Memory in the European Global Justice Movement (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and co-editor of Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilizing Mediated Remembrance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Jens Zimmermann

Jens Zimmermann was a research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt from 2016 to 2018 before joining his current position at the Trade Union of Construction, Agriculture and Environment (IG BAU).