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

Thus reviews have been mixed regarding the legacy of the New Left, with
many contemporaries seeing in the New Left the beginning of the end of the
Bonn Republic. Despite all these predictions of doom, however, the Bonn
Republic survived to provide the basic blueprint for the unified Berlin Republic,
and the New Left did not succeed in tearing down West German society.
Instead, in the minds of many, quite the opposite occurred. According to this
view, the New Left helped usher in reforms and modernize and democratize
German society. Gerd Koenen’s account of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1970s
epitomizes the dilemma regarding the legacy of the New Left. To him, the New
Left was quite clearly anti-parliamentary and anti-Western. He finds it thus all
the more puzzling why the movement has been credited with advancing the very
causes it originally opposed. Koenen expresses this paradox explicitly when he
asks, “How can a movement that, until the early 1980s, had precisely the
opposite inscribed on its banners, have advanced liberalism, democracy and
westernization?” 62
Koenen addresses changes said to have occurred during the
1960s and 1970s, whereas I look to the 1980s for the source of these changes. To
extend Koenen’s metaphor, I assert that, during the course of the eighties, the
Left rewrote its banners.
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Wie kann aber eine Bewegung Liberalität, Demokratisierung und
Verwestlichung vorangetrieben haben, die bis in die frühen 80er Jahre hinein das
deutliche Gegenteil auf ihre Fahnen geschrieben hatte? Gerd Koenen, Das Rote
Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2001),
24.
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