Utopia or Auschwitz

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One thing separated the left-wing students who demonstrated in West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts worldwide. The young Germans, known as the 1968 generation or Achtundsechziger, grew up aware that their parents were responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. This awareness compelled them to act, believing they needed to save Germany from itself. For them, it was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. While many in the West German student movement viewed their struggle against capitalism as a form of resistance to Nazism, they also tended to relativize the Holocaust. Others sought to move past the Nazi legacy. Despite the anti-fascist rhetoric, nationalist and anti-Semitic currents emerged within the West German New Left, stemming from the student movement. Thus, the 1968 generation maintained a complex relationship with their Nazi past. The narrative explores these contradictions, tracing the political journey of this generation through the left-wing terrorism of the seventies, the rise of the Social Democrats and Greens in the eighties, and their eventual attainment of political power in the nineties with Germany's first "red-green" government. It also examines this government's foreign policy, particularly its responses to the Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq crises, reflecting the generation's ambivalence towards their historical legacy.