ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: FROM RED TO GREEN IN ... - Isioma

ounds. Of particular importance here were attitudes toward using violence as a
tool of political protest. In part because of West Berlin’s unique situation, but
also because of the nature of the relationship between the Green Party and the
AL, the affiliation with the Green Party did not go as far in integrating the AL
into the parliamentary system as one might have expected. Nevertheless,
especially by exerting constant pressure on the AL to reconsider its stance on
violence, the Green Party in the end helped bring the radical Left in West Berlin
into the parliamentary fold.
The recent proliferation of analyses of the Federal Republic as a success
story can sometimes obscure the fact that, from its founding in 1949 to German
unification in 1990, historians, political scientists, and commentators of virtually
every political stripe worried that the Bonn Republic was fraught with the same
instabilities as the Weimar Republic had been. 34
The rise of the New Left in the
1960s merely increased these concerns. Many of the works on the New Left
either implicitly or explicitly expressed the concern that the Bonn Republic was
coming increasingly to resemble the ill-fated Weimar Republic. Richard
Löwenthal took up classic themes about the fall of Weimar and the rise of the
34
For an example of these concerns during the 1960s, see Klaus
Schönhoven, “Unbehagen an der Bonner Demokratie. Ein Rückblick auf die
politikwissenschaftliche Diskussion in den sechziger Jahren,” in Geschichte als
Möglichkeit: über die Chancen von Demokratie, ed. Karsten Rudolph and Christl
Wickert (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 1995). Early in the history of the Federal
Republic, these fears provoked an early attempt at a rebuttal with the title
directly inspired by the issue. See Fritz Rene Allemann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1956).
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