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

that motivated groups such as the RAF and that was rooted in the conviction
“that the existing order was irredeemably corrupt and had to be destroyed; that
its destruction would give birth to something radically new and better; and that
the transcendent nature of this leap rendered the future into a largely blank or
unrepresentable utopia.” 43
When it entered the parliamentary system, the
extreme Left in West Berlin distanced itself from this impulse. By accepting the
rules of parliamentary democracy instead of making a fateful leap into the
unknown, the AL in essence asserted its conviction that the Bonn Republic
needed change, but also conceded that its political system made this change
possible. In this way, members expended their energies in bolstering democracy
rather than attacking it. The subsequent implications for Germany’s stability
cannot be overstated.
The AL did not, of course, arise out of nowhere: this dissertation
interprets the AL in part as a product of the New Left of the 1960s. Foremost
among the historians of the New Left has been Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey. Drawing
on the work of social movement theorists Friedhelm Neidhart and Dieter Rucht,
Gilcher-Holtey’s scholarship has done much to advance historians’
understanding of the New Left. 44
43
Jeremy Varon, Shadowboxing the Apocalypse: New Left Violence in the
United States and Germany (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1998), 378.
44
See especially Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ed., Neunzehnhundertachtundsechzig
(1968): Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998). For a very good overview, see Ingrid
Gilcher-Holtey, 68er Bewegung. Gilcher-Holtey draws extensively on the work of
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