West Germany and the Global Sixties is an account of the rebellions of a series of avant-garde activist groups against the established authorities and norms of 1960’s Germany. Brown’s account is build upon the belief that the 68 rebellion represented a “great convergence” between a cultural/ lifestyle rebellion and a Marxist political one, as well as a “great divergence”, as these groups split and splintered within themselves. a protest against the mass consumer society which had defined the previous decade.
Brown’s chapters are thematic first and foremost, but do follow a roughly chronological fashion. Titles include such topics as “time” (the search for historical precedents for the New Left and the attempt to turn away from the German past) and “death” (the turn towards terrorism by a small faction of the New Left) but the greatest focus on the book is on “space”. The chapter on space and the global sixties is not only the longest, but discussions on space reappear in later chapters too. In many ways, Brown’s ideas of convergence and divergence are built first and foremost around the ideas of overlapping, shared spaces (such as the club scene in Berlin), and later, the separation of space as symbolised by the flight of some activists to the rural communes.
Brown’s approach is to perform a close analysis of specific small sub-groups which he believes to have influenced and directed wider movements, an example being the relationship between the SDS and the radical political group “Subversive Aktion”. Whereas the SDS was demonised by the mainstream press as a dissident organisation, most members were far from revolutionary. Brown focuses on the beliefs and inspirations of those who were revolutionary in order to understand how mass demonstrations, such as the International Vietnam Congress in West Berlin, were able to take place. Thus we read detailed accounts of the antics of Berlin’s Kommune I, the travels of Cologne’s Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and the innovations of Munich women’s Aktionsrat. In the process, the story of the “typical” German man or woman’s 1968 is lost, aside from the chapter on “sound”, new music being a shared experience between activist elites and the wider mass of young poor and middle class citizens.
An important aspect of the beliefs of the small activist groups was their perception of themselves as situated in a wider global wave, and their subsequent search throughout other parts of the world for solutions to specifically German problems. Brown refers to this as the transaction of the global and the local. He stresses that the idea of being in a world-wide movement was a matter not only of principles but of practicality. Of the examples mentioned above, Brinkmann was heavily influenced by the London countercultural scene (itself a by-product of American trends), and transferred it to his home city. The Munich women read much American literature, and followed (sometimes participating in) the campaign to legalise abortion in France. Brown examines the cultural creations of the activists, such as their artwork, to highlight how they saw themselves as a small cog in a greater global movement, and examines their tangible connections to show how they used the global to help in their local struggles.
Lastly, Brown’s approach does not allow for a flexible understanding of the institutions of sixties Germany, which are only discussed when responding to the actions of the activists, e.g. on the issue of squatters in Chapter VI “Power”. This lens of the institutions as antagonists, rather than actors in their own right, limits the extent to which we can understand the changing nature of the sixties protests in Germany. Events are seen to be driving by the activist’s own beliefs and strategies, rather than in tandem with an ever-changing governmental policy.