Rebels, Radicals, Revolutionaries - Resistance and Protest in Post-War Europe 1953-1989

Overview

What you will learn

In this Rebels, Radicals, Revolutionaries -  Resistance and Protest in Post-War Europe 1953-1989 course at Freie Universität Berlin  we account for the nature and intensity of post-war European protest movements by examining the historical context of the traumatic impact of recently defeated fascism on the continent, and the division of Europe into spheres of interest reflecting the Cold War world.

We examine the post-war socio-economic developments that led to the massive expansion of higher education in Western Europe, promoting a generational divide which saw a radicalized younger generation turn on their parents and other members of the older (Nazi) generation or the so called ‘system’, sometimes in rage and violence, as in the examples of the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy.

We compare this to examples in Eastern Europe, where resistance movements against Communist regimes, such as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, were met with deadly force and violent oppression.

The course keeps as its particular focus East Germany (GDR) and West Germany (FRG), but we will also encounter the student-led uprisings against Sovietized Communism in Hungary in 1956 and during the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’, as well as the curious case of the ‘Soviet Hippies’.

Throughout the course, the city of Berlin will serve as a backdrop: as a place of often very radical anti-government movements in West Berlin, compared with the muted and hidden resistance to authority over the Berlin Wall in East Berlin.

We will also examine how ‘resistance’ in Western Europe often meant solidarity with anti-colonial movements in the Middle East, Africa and South America. Last but not least, we will also discuss the gestation and rise, within these larger movements, of political parties such as the Green Party in Germany.