Memories of 1968

Immigrants in France during May ’68: participation, encounter, and memory

The paper explores aspects of the participation of immigrant workers in the 1968 events in France, and looks at the discrepancies between the immigrants’ own memories of 1968 and mainstream public memories of the events.

It is clear from police records and press material that immigrant workers, especially Algerians, were active in the massive strike movement that developed in France in the second half of May. Yet, immigrant workers have been omitted from the mainstream public memories of 1968, which have most often presented the protagonists of the events as “white” students, intellectuals and workers.

In public memory and to a lesser extent in scholarly debate, the role played by immigrant workers in France has not been understood in actual political and social terms – at most in symbolic terms and in relation to anti-imperialism.

Forgetting the presence of immigrant workers is related to the broader tendency since the late 1970s in French public memories of 68 not only to de-politicise the events, but also to disregard the relevance of the political and social issues of 1968 to contemporary European society. By exploring the historical links between immigrant activism in 1968 and the immigrant movements in France of the 1970s, attention might be drawn to an important issue of contemporary politics, namely the creation of multicultural society and its contradictions.

At the centre of attention in this paper will be the immigrant workers’ own memories of 1968. Based on a number of interviews with former immigrant worker activists, I will discuss the following three sets of questions.

- How did they experience their – actual and symbolic – encounter with “white” French workers, students and intellectuals?

- How do their memories of 1968 relate to, fit in with, and depart from mainstream public recollections of 1968, and how has this changed over time?

- Finally, how do they understand the “aftermath” and the impacts of 1968? Do they perceive continuity between the 1968 events and the rise of immigrant activism in France in the 1970s and beyond?

The analysis will be based on a number of in-dept interviews, as well as press material.

1968 was a pivotal year in Mexico. The Olympic Games were to begin in October and Mexico was both the first Latin American country and the first developing nation to host the event. Although many questioned if Mexico had sufficient funds and organizational skills to stage the Games, President Díaz Ordaz intended to use the occasion as a showcase for Mexican stability and progress. The thousands of young protesters who took to the streets of Mexico City that summer jeopardized these ambitions. Students voiced opposition to a political system that until then had ensured that all important debates and decisions had taken place within the system.

The Mexican student movement abruptly ended on 2 October when government forces massacred up to 500 people at a demonstration – just 10 days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. This use of force against Mexico’s youth, among them future politicians and academics, proved to be a watershed in the relationship between the Mexican government and its people. The scale of brutality used by the police and army decisively ended the myth, begun after the 1910 Revolution, of the benevolent, paternal State.

This paper addresses the long-term political and cultural impact of the Mexican student movement. I discuss how Mexican writers and intellectuals have used a variety of media to ensure that the events of 1968 have remained in the public domain. Although it was a short-lived phenomenon, the student protests marked the beginning of the slow, faltering, and yet to be completed, path towards democratisation. I examine how actors from across the political spectrum have appropriated the movement for their own ends.

There are few national settings in which “1968” has been so heavily debated as in the United States of America. The “sixties” continue to haunt the American consciousness as (depending on the politics of the observer) unfulfilled dream or persistent nightmare. The reaction against the “sixties” continues to play a central role in American politics, the Vietnam War, especially, having become a sort of litmus test for political and cultural legitimacy. Yet if the war holds pride of place in the American politics of memory, focus on it has tended to obscure other important areas of contention. The broader emancipatory movement of the 1960s, even more than the war, has proven a fruitful ground for the emergence of stale tropes and flat stereotypes, in equal measure depoliticizing (the “lost idealism” of the “baby-boomers”) and recuperative (“revolution” as sales tactic). Yet, while cultural reproductions of the war’s legacy (e.g. films like The Deer Hunter and Rambo) and their instrumentalization by the political right have been the object of significant scholarly study, rather less attention has been paid to the legacy of the radical democratic activism of the 1960s. Successfully positioned by the political right as a short-lived generational revolt with an overwhelmingly negative legacy, the sixties have been lifted out of history in the United States, separated both from the preceding span of radical history and from the radical history that has followed. This essay will focus on the way in which the radical content of the 1960s in the United States has been portrayed, teasing out various threads—in film, literature, memoir, and advertising—through which the 1960s in the U.S. have been mythologized, recuperated, and depoliticized.

This paper takes as its subject the important theoretical interventions in architecture and urbanism developed by the Venice School, and associated with the names of Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari. These writings vastly exceed the conditions of their historical specificity. What was an account specifically addressing architecture and avant-gardism has come to represent a key position within the assessments of modernist and postmodernist cultural theory (as evidenced by the place attributed to Tafuri by Fredric Jameson). This body of work is now recognised as one of the major contributions to the development of modern theory by the New Left. What emerged in a political dialogue local to the Italian context of the 1960s and 70s - and more especially to a northern Italian context – became the foundational critical work for the renewal of architectural theory at the international level. Closely related to the emergence and experiences of Italian operaismo (which, in the wake of the anti-capitalist movements, is itself currently the focus of much renewed discussion within political theory), many of the figures associated with the Venice School were intimately involved in Italy’s ‘long 1968’.

This study provides an important case in mapping the historiographical transformations in the reception and representation of ‘1968’ - more especially, the reception and representation within the new-left inspired wings of the liberal academy. In particular, my paper considers the complex pattern of disjunctions that have occurred within these representations between the immediate context for the development of the theories and their subsequent dissemination and internationalisation. This project does not set out simply to recover the original motivation of this work; rather, it explores the tensions between particularising and universalising strands of the subsequent discourse.

“Thank You for This Beautiful Exhibition.” Remembering Art World Protests in Kassel, Venice, and Milan, 1968

The recurring nature of periodic art events, for example, contemporary art exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial, represents the idea of the modern art world’s unceasing drive to innovate and change. When protests or attempts at “revolt” occur at such an event, the possibility thus arises that rebellious actions may be subsumed into, or remembered as, part of the exhibition’s own relationship to concepts of “progress,” rather than as contestations of that institution. In 1968, the proceedings of three significant art events in Italy and Germany were disrupted by students and artist groups: the 14th Milan Triennial of Decorative Arts, the 35th Venice Biennial, and Documenta 4 in Kassel. In each case, student actions engendered different reactions. In Venice, a police presence was required at the opening. In Milan, organizers gave protesters their own hall, thereby incorporating students into the exhibition. At Documenta, students and artists, through their own actions, blurred the line between “happening” and “protest.” In all three cases, exhibition organizers made profound changes in their policies and formats in the years immediately following. The1968 editions of these exhibitions have now come to be considered turning points in the narratives of their corporate histories.

Recent anniversaries of these exhibitions—Documenta, for example, celebrated its fifty-year jubilee in 2005—have encouraged a retrospective attitude toward these art world establishments. This paper will look at accounts of the Kassel, Milan, and Venice protests in recent histories, including each exhibition’s own corporate history, art historical narratives, and more general accounts of 1968 and the student movement. How have these protests been historicized, remembered, and incorporated into the very different historical discourses of art institutions, art history, and the history of the 1960s?

Tropicalismo: the name itself suggests what this movement, created by young Brazilian northeasterners, proposed for Brazil. It was directed at the needs and expectations of a nation which, in 1968, was dominated by the destructive forces of a military dictatorship, but at the same time maintained the joy and irreverence of the tropics.

Caetano Veloso kick-started it, after having contact with three artistic works which gave rise to the counter-culture movement. Firstly the film Earth Entranced, directed by Glauber Rocha, which, by means of its anarchic form, incorporating the ethnic mixture and carnavalesque aspects of Brazilian people, discusses the impasse undergone by intellectuals after the 1964 military coup. Secondly, the play O Rei da Vela, written by Oswald de Andrade in 1936 and produced in the Teatro Oficina by José Celso Martinez in 1967. This play criticizes the surrendering of the Brazilian bourgeousie to foreign capital. Finally, Hélio Oiticica’s work Tropicalia, an installation comprised of several interconnected rooms through which the ‘spectator’ walks and smells tropical scents of fruits, clove and cinnamon, while listening to peculiar forest sounds. The walk finishes in a room where there is a television set with no antenna, capturing random waves, with no concern with quality of sound or image. This final piece makes an allusion to the state of Brazilian society at the time.

From the fusion of these three manifestations is born the Tropicalismo Movement, a “geléia geral” (general jam), the expression which is also the title of a song written by Gilberto Gil, with lyrics by Torquato Neto, one of the tracks of the manifesto-record Tropicália or Panis et Circensis. I will analyse this song in order to look back at the 1968 period in Brazil and understand the socio-cultural changes that were happening then.

Tropicalismo lasted just under two years, but its proposal of a behavioural revolution remained strong in Brazil throughout the 70s and 80s, and still has an impact on present generations.

Critical Theory as lieu de mémoire in German Post-Punk
Over the past several years, there has been a plethora of scholarly activity on the West German alternative scene of the early 1980s. In unpacking the scene’s aesthetic and political coordinates, commentators have been unable to ignore the philosophical debates of 1968. In order to legitimize their left-wing political activism and artistic experimentation, the musicians and multi-media artists of German Post-Punk continuously used fragments of Critical Theory gleaned from the Student Movement. While the 68ers unpacked the theories of the Frankfurt School through close readings, the 80ers tended to merely rip, mix, and burn these readings as theoretical soundbytes. In a move from “exegesis” to “citation,” this decontexualization of Critical Theory constructed 1968 as a lieu de mémoire [Nora] in the political imaginary of Post-Punk. The theoretical debates of the Student Movement survived as a kind of transferential future perfect: they were transported – as a Freudian screen memory – into the “conservative wasteland” of the 1980s. Erasing any dialectical penetration of the past, these artists understood the theoretical insights of 1968 (particularly, as they pertained to Benjamin) as proven strategies for a renewed cultural-revolutionary Umfunktionierung in aesthetics. Although the post-punk reception of Critical Theory was often characterized by gross misreadings, the memory of 1968 and its (supposed) actuality for contemporary cultural politics was kept alive in the unique form of subcultural capital. It is precisely because of this memorialization that a fringe community of graduate students and untenured faculty, who were active in the German alternative scene, began to re/engage and problematize the legacy of Critical Theory in 1968 well before its general “acceptance” in the academy.

Dangerous, Divine and Marvellous? Post-1968 Political Cinema in Europe and Brazil

One of the stranger cinematic after-shocks of 1968 was the ‘debate’ between Jean-Luc Godard, then the radical figure of French film, and Glauber Rocha, the internationally much admired enfant terrible of Brazilian cinema. In the midst of that extraordinary Godard-Gorin piece of anti-cinema, Vent d’est, Glauber Rocha, standing at a symbolic cross-roads, offers directions to a pregnant woman with a movie-camera who demands of him “Excuse me for interruping your class struggle, but could you please tell me the way towards political cinema?” Rocha gestures down the alternative routes: “That way is the unknown cinema of aesthetic adventure and philosophical speculation; while this way is Third World cinema, a dangerous cinema, divine and marvellous, where the questions are practical ones like production, distribution, training 300 filmmakers to make 600 films a year for Brazil alone, to supply one of the world’s biggest markets.”

This didactic posing of alternative political cinemas was very much a product of 1968, a time of perceived choices between once radical, modernist aestheticism and a new, subversive, anti-aestheticism; between political populism and political puritanism; between third and first worlds, third and first cinemas; between the mass audience and, in all probabiliy, no audience at all. How do those choices fare in today’s cinema? Does the world then, in which Godard’s or Rocha’s positions at least made some sense, now seem a lost time, only dimly remembered among modern film-makers or in modern film theories? In this paper we shall revisit the themes of that confrontation and consider what consequences they may or may not have had for the subsequent trajectory of political cinema both in Europe and in Brazil.

Stuart Hilwig, Adams State College in Colorado, USA

“How the Other Side Remembers the Sessantotto : An Oral History of the Establishment’s Memories of the Italian ’68”

In 1988, Paul Piccone wrote a critical article in Telos claiming that protagonists of the 1968 student revolts had turned the events of that momentous year into a kind of mythology that grew with each passing decade. By implication, the Marxist scholar highlighted a significant gap in an historical understanding of the ’68 phenomenon: the paucity of works dealing with the “Establishment.” This paper seeks to fill this lacuna by offering an insight into the ways in which those who dealt with the student demonstrators recall the events of what Italians call the “Sessantotto.” Drawing upon a series of interviews conducted thirty years after the outbreak of student rebellion; this paper elucidates the position of 1968 in the historical consciousness of police, priests, professors, lawyers, journalists and factory workers. The ’68 student rebellion has left a divided legacy among the members of the so-called Establishment provoking expressions ranging from ridicule and terror to respect and admiration for the cultural revolutionaries. Conditioned by class biases and exacerbated by media hype, the memories of the Establishment vary widely. Complicating these memories is the phenomenon whereby members of the “Establishment” have formed certain general aphorisms to retrospectively describe the movimento studentesco as a whole, but offer strikingly different interpretations based upon experiences with individual activists. For example, the issue of violence: many among the Establishment remember the smashed windows, graffiti and angry shouts of student demonstrators but also recall individual students who were committed to non-violence. Such examples from oral testimonies suggest that members of the Establishment have created a variety of memories that are not uniform and are often contradictory. Ultimately, the inclusion of memories from those on the other side of the barricades adds an important counterpoint to the voices of former activists and enriches the historiography of the “year that rocked the world.”

Monica Jansen, University of Antwerp / Utrecht University, Belgium

The Memory of 1968 and the Revolt against ‘Precarity’ in recent Post-industrial Italian Fiction

In 2006 the demonstrations in France of a whole generation of students against precarity (the widespread condition of contingent and intermittent work in neoliberal/postindustrial societies) called to mind analogies with the 68 Movement that started as a student and worker movement. Ex-leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit who initiated May 68 at Nanterre University, asked to comment on the similarities between the two revolts, highlights also the differences between the 68 and post-68 generation: while the first could count on nearly full employment in 1968 and was really a revolt against authoritarian practices in society with the idea that another society was possible, the latter sees itself faced with instability and with unemployment crushing dreams of a better world to come. In a manifesto for Euro Mayday 2006 one can read: “On Mayday, we will demonstrate and protest against precarity, the most crucial and burning social issue in Europe today, as the gigantic demonstrations in France of a whole generation against precarity and the CPE are proving. Precarity is a widespread work and life condition for millions of Europeans. […] We demand […] INCOME SECURITY FOR ALL as fundamental steps toward a truly social Europe”.

In Italy not only students but also trade unions organize demonstrations and declare their solidarity with the student demonstrations started at the Sorbonne; social movements and their leaders are engaged with the cause of “precariato”. Studies are being written on the phenomenon (Aris Accornero, San Precario lavora per noi (2006)), and the cultural field is also being mobilized. The blog on publisher Feltrinelli’s website mentions that, ironically, the category of precarious workers has proven to be a fruitful resource for a new series of “post-industrialist” novels that represent the world of labour, as the so-called “romanzi industriali” did in the 60s and 70s. Young subjects “under 40” show how they are raised with a 68 myth of freedom of thought and social emancipation but are trapped in living conditions that prevent them from realizing that other, better, society dreamt of by their parents.

This paper will focus on the phenomenon of “precariato” on an ideological level – how does resistance against it re-interpret ’68 and how is the anti-globalist revolt against neo-capitalism linked to it? – as well as on a cultural level: how is “precariato” expressed in artistic media by narrators that often are personally involved in it? Could “precarity” also be considered the symbol of a new kind of mobile cultural identity?

Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner once remarked that "If you can remember the 1960s, you weren't really there!" But despite this verdict, we do remember this turbulent decade quite extensively, as is illustrated by the plethora of publications and conferences during this year's 40th anniversary of "1968." In the public memory of numerous countries, images of generational revolt, countercultural liberation and confrontations with the authorities are still closely connected to this decade. This paper will illustrate that, regardless of different national experiences, there was a transnational dimension to the "sixties" which has by now found entry into a cultural memory transcending national borders. It will retrace the passage of this turbulent decade from communicative to cultural memory by analyzing selected works of historiography, public debates and popular culture.

“The Post-‘68 Storm: Student and Police Memories in Authoritarian Brazil”

This paper follows Michel Pollak’s suggestion that we must analyze “how social events become things [in order to understand memories of the past],” by exploring what 1968 came to mean in Brazil both for university students and for the security agents who monitored them. It begins on December 13, 1968, when a dramatically repressive turn of the four-year old military regime then in place transformed the country and definitively ended the massive anti-dictatorship student demonstrations that had so marked the previous ten months. But if 1968 as a period of mass student mobilization ended abruptly on this day, then “1968” in quotation marks, the “1968” that swelled beyond the bounds of a temporal marker to become a fiercely contested and symbolically powerful memory of anti-regime student protest, only began to be created in the following years. It is this process that the paper traces, arguing that for students 1968 as a symbolic marker of resistance grew synchronously with a closing down of opposition activity, while for state security forces memories of 1968 loomed constantly as dark and dangerous specters of chaos narrowly avoided and against which they remained unceasingly guarded. Within this discussion, the paper also addresses the transnational dimensions of 1968, as the relationship between Brazilian students’ anti-dictatorship struggles in that year with events occurring in other areas of the world came to mean very different things to students and state security forces, and to grant differing forms of authenticity to each group’s memories. As the dictatorship endured through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, these multiple memories of 1968 underwent several generational and political transformations, particularly once the military announced its eventual departure from government and pro-democracy organizing reinvigorated civil society activism. Meanwhile continued scholarly, journalistic and popular cultural attention to the global 1968 also impacted local Brazilian meanings and memories in important ways.

The Italian '68 Revisited. Sessantotto. L'utopia della realtà: Revisionism or Utopianism?

Contrary to what happened in other European countries, the anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional protest wave of 1968 in Italy lasted a decade because, as Corriere della Sera journalist Michel Brambilla puts it,the State of Italy was unwilling to face the problems and requirements raised mainly by students and workers. The post-’68 protest movements divided public opinion on right and left wing lines, a polarisation exploited by Italy's political leaders who positioned themselves at the centre in order to maintain control.

Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani's documentary Sessantotto. L'utopia della realtà (Istituto Luce, 2000-2006), based upon the script by journalist Adalberto Baldoni, is an attempt to supply answers to the questions raised by the phenomenon in Italy, but within a transnational perspective. The documentary starts with a presentation of the Beat Generation (Ginsberg, Kerouac) and ends with the portrayal of the protest movement based in Rome. The central thesis of the film is that the escalation of violence in the 70s and 80s resulted from the “strategia degli opposti estremi”, an instumentalised polarisation of the anti-authoritarian conflict of ‘68.

However, the long series of interviews with intellectuals, writers, and politicians – all more or less well-known to the wider audience – seems to refute the makers’ interpretation of 1968 while stressing other aspects of its memory. It might be said that the interviewees themselves were the first critics of the film, the reception of which was rather poor. At the same time, the violently negative reaction of some to the appearance in the documentary of representatives of the MSI (the neo-fascist party) reenacted the polarisation which typifies the Italian context, and led to the accusation of revisionism on the part of the filmmakers.

The present paper proposes, to follow a brief contextualizing history of the 1968 phenomenon in Italy, with a consideration of to what extent Sessantotto. L'utopia della realtà might succeed in demonstrating the polarisation strategy effected by the Italian State. What does the film add to the complex debate on the perception and the historiography of the 1968 phenomenon? Could the film be considered an act of revisionism? The paper will present an analysis of the discursive strategies of the dvd set (documentary, extra features, and book), its reception and impact on the representation of 1968 in Italy. The paper will also offer a comparison with other recent representations of the Italian 1968, documentaries, essays, and testimonies (Aresu 2002, Cercocchi 2006, Rossi 2003), which privilege lesser-known or even anonymous witnesses, and portray 1968 as “the never-ending year”, the (symbolic) start of an on-going evolution in sociopolitical processes.

Disrupting Male Hegemony from the Margins: Italian Men, Sexual Liberation and 1968

In Autobiography of a Generation, Luisa Passerini argues that the challenge of 1968 to the ethics of authoritarianism in Italy was also an attempt to disrupt patriarchal systems of sexual repression and gender normalization. Passerini’s study privileges insights into the ambivalent and yet increasingly important role of women within the movement by leaving unanswered questions concerning the new image of the 1968 man. This paper intends to push Passerini’s analysis one step further by focussing on the effects of 1968 on cultural representations of male subjectivity as a response to the anti-authoritarian challenges of the period. It will question to what extent the 1968 experience allowed masculinities on the margins of the phallic discourse of patriarchy to emerge and how such masculinities resisted normative symbols of gender. The relation between the 1968 events and the Italian Sexual Liberation movement will be examined by dealing with the politically disruptive role given to dissident sexualities within the movement.

By looking at Moretti’s Io sono un autarchico and Pietrangeli’s Porci con le ali as case studies, this paper will compare how questions of gender hegemony and male sexuality were dealt with in Italian films of the late 1970s. Both films focus on some of the anxieties felt by young Italian men within the student groups in having to negotiate shifting parameters of gender interaction and particularly the rise of a young generation of feminists. As I examine these two films, I will show the specific role of Italian cinema in shedding light on issues of sex and masculinity within the 1968 movement.

Transnational Memories: 1968 in East - and West-Germany as seen through the eyes of Turkish-German Writers

The representation of “1968” in Germany is a popular theme in a number of literary texts. Their analysis provides fruitful insights, links the field of literary studies to its neighboring disciplines, most importantly history, and contributes to the discourse on 1968 as well as to shared theoretical and methodological considerations.

Yet one of the aspects that have been overlooked so far is the fact that novels written in German by Turkish-German writers also contribute to the discourse on 1968. I argue that these texts create a transnational moment that not only advances our understanding of the sixties but that also poses new theoretical and methodological challenges.

In my paper, I provide a complementary reading of two novels, Sten Nadolny’s Selim oder Die Gabe der Rede (1992) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (2003), in which I explore the following three distinct yet related questions:

1. Encompassing and expanding the concept of identity, transnationalism points to the importance of border-crossing and cross-border interaction while questioning the narrative of the nation-state. How then does the notion of transnationalism contribute to an analysis of the discourse on 1968 in the national context and how does reading these two novels against the backdrop of transnationalism undercut and transcend national boundaries at the same time?

2. Combining two theoretical approaches, transnationalism and cultural memory, my reading adds a spatial dimension to the chronological one. By analyzing the importance of origins, locations, and destinations, of border crossing and travel, “situations” intersect with the “moment” of 1968 – a narrative move that is reflected not only in the countries represented in the novels (most importantly Turkey, France, West-Germany, and the GDR) but also in the forms these novels take as hybrid genres.

3. In response to Leslie Adelson’s study The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005) I propose to read these novels as integral contributions to the discourse on 1968 as defined by both its national and international context.

'In the spring of 1968 artists, students, and workers came together in collectives that sprung up in art schools and professional schools all over Paris, and produced 600 000 posters with over 800 different designs. These posters, which were created to support the general strike, were pasted up throughout the Latin Quarter, before being painted over, torn down, and finally cleared away by the authorities, at the end of June. Carefully collected and preserved by various interested parties, from around the world, the international reception, categorization, and exhibition of this distinctive chapter of French art history differed dramatically from one country to another. Before the events were over, at the end of June, the posters were being exhibited at the University of Cologne. While in America, for instance, the posters were shown, after the events came to an end, in the fall of 1968, in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, and then again, in the first months of 1969, at the Jewish Museum. In contrast, in France the posters were not exhibited in an official institutional context until 1982 and rather than appearing in an art museum, they were shown in the national library, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. There would also eventually be important exhibitions in Amsterdam, Cannes, Stockholm, and Brussels. This paper will address the implications of these exhibition practices and connect it to the ways the posters have been categorized alternatively as art, propaganda, historical document, or all three.

‘1968 in an Italian Province: Memory and the everyday life of a New Left group in Macerata’
This paper is an attempt to look at 1968 from the unusual perspective of a rural province. Focusing on the marginal and previously unstudied area of Macerata, a town in the Marche region of central Italy, it reconsiders the ‘revolution’ of 1968 by analysing whether the form of the family, an institution traditionally at the basis of social organisation in this province, was subverted or, conversely and perhaps paradoxically, reinforced and employed as part of the political struggle. 1968 has largely been studied with reference to the impact of the movement in large cities. For Italy this has meant Turin, Milan and Rome. We know very little about 1968 and beyond in the provinces. This paper provides a case study that brings a new perspective to the study of 1968 as a local and global phenomenon: 1968 also happened in Macerata, and it also happened to the family; this periphery can also tell us about the centre, and about society.
Employing an oral history and memory analysis methodology, the paper examines memories of everyday life within the local branch of the important Manifesto group (a far-left formation which still survives as a daily newspaper) with regard to both the family and relations within the group itself. My research has concentrated on the Manifesto core-group of about 10 people and, among them, on the women who inspired the formation of the associated feminist group. These activists were the main points of reference for the local political movement (involving at least 300-400 people among the local youth) and were also the first to put into practise new ideas about the family and new lifestyles. In particular, I examine the strong employment of family tropes in the oral memories of the group. Relationships inside the group tend to be recalled through family metaphors, which are used to emphasise its cohesion and, in the case of women, the emancipatory sense of a close-knit group. I relate the use of these metaphors to the strong cultural legacy of the family tradition locally. The cultural legacy of the family is then examined in relation to the memory of alternative lifestyles. In exploring the recollection of the impact of feminism and of the experience of new sexual mores, I show how traditional concepts of family are now producing silences and interference with memory. This paper demonstrates that we are dealing with reflections on the past made in the present. Thus, the research presented is also about the ways in which 1968 has been forgotten and misremembered; it about silences as well as recollective speech.

The Private is Political! Family Politics and German National Identity in the Legacy of 1968

Since the millennium, the German family has been a central topic for political, popular, and literary debates. For example, cultural critic Frank Schirrmacher’s texts The Methusalem Plot (2004) and Minimum (2006), which became instant bestsellers, prophesize Germany’s inevitable downfall in falling birth rates and missing family structures. Conversely, literary critic Iris Radisch’s Women’s Lessons (2007) utilizes these fears to suggest the need for a new configuration of family structures. Even the popular distribution of contemporary German literature into categories such as “Singles Generation” or “Fräuleinwunder” seems to be informed by the apparent dissolution of the German family.

Implicit in these discussions is the legacy of the 1968 interest in the family as a vehicle for political change. Picking up on this continuity, a 2004 article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper attacked the 68-generation for their destruction of the institution of the family to the detriment of today’s society (9 May 2004). Two years later, a very different article suggested today’s German society could learn from 68ers fixation on the family (FAZ 27 March 2006). The following paper probes the connection between 1968 family politics and contemporary discourse. It traces the manner in which the family became the primary site for the struggle in establishing a West German national identity in the 1960s. The paper then investigates how this sheds light on current family discourse and illuminates the difficult negotiation of a postunification, postmillennial German identity. Finally, I anchor these considerations in literature, seeing the critical family satires of 1960s realism and the perceived anti-politics of contemporary pop literature to utilize the literary depiction of the (missing) family to comment on German identity in light of historical change.

Dominos or Dynamics? Understanding May 68 Through Morocco and Senegal
So often an historical event is cut off from its aftermath and its repercussions. In comparing two Francophone examples, this paper traces the influence of May 68 on two very different cases, albeit in North and Western Africa. Whereas Senegal saw its May 68 one month later in June 1968 – the consequences were swifter and bloodier than in France –, Morocco’s événements are ‘delayed’ until late 1969 and then continue until the failed coup and the state clampdown of 1972. Similarly, the two countries’ attitudes towards the former colonial master seem to confer a difference of reactions to what is happening in France: the postcolonial relations between ex-colony and metropolitan France may look similar across the regions, the historical fallout suggests otherwise. The recent growth in ‘Postcolonial Studies’ and its positing of a comparatist approach that comes from the ‘periphery’, allow us to establish a more nuanced view of the May 68 that takes place in the Metropolitan ‘centre’. Different not only in timing but also in social and political content, the paper concludes, these two examples suggest that struggle and political uprisings are both lawless moments and divergent processes in which the internationalistion of revolt negotiates the local dynamics of protest, in ways that pose questions on how to understand the ‘event’ from the vantage point of memory.

Language Violence: the Evidence of “the Skill of Attacking Somebody by Name” in the Culture Revolution.
All high-ranking political leaders downfallen from power in “culture revolution” have been violently attacked by name. At first they are outstanding in mass media. Then, their true names disappear suddenly, and they are usually criticized by another name which indicates their true names. At last they are attacked by names openly and this means the whole end of their political career. Language violence always follows this process and the frequent repetition of the process leads to change of the implication of the attacking. Focusing on language politics, according to articles from governmental media “People’s Daily”, this paper systematically cards procedures of attacking Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Lin Biao, Chen Boda and so on, studies the general and particular characters of these procedures, reveals political context and discusses the particularity of language spreading in the Culture Revolution. Moreover, the paper analyzes the deep political and cultural factors of the language context in that special period. Some aspects of ideological trend in the Culture Revolution have influenced many countries and areas, whereas, language violence like “the skill of attacking somebody by name” perhaps is possessed only by China.

Reflection and Rethinking: The Presentation of the Cultural Revolution on the Internet

The Cultural Revolution (CR for short), the most sensational political movement in contemporary China, has been denied by the post-Mao government; it has been claimed as a national catastrophe by both official propaganda and mainstream scholarship. Nevertheless, the debate over the objectives, significance and impacts of the Cultural Revolution between the official propaganda and underground or semi-official argumentation commenced during the 1980s and has reached its momentum since the mid-1990s. On the one hand, large numbers of official documents and individual historiographies have been published to denounce the political movement, but on the other hand, great quantities of underground and/or semi-official publications have emerged on the internet, which argue the reasonability and necessity of the Cultural Revolution. These internet files cover various explorations including investigation into the campaign’s theoretical foundation and social background and comparison of social reality among pre-CR, CR and post-CR periods. These anti-official or anti-mainstream arguments are significant in assisting scholars to study the movement from a new historically comparative perspective. Through surveying and analysing these data, this paper intends to present the internet writers’ reflection on and rethinking of the political campaign, with an aim to reveal the objectives, significance and impacts of the movement as well as the ideological and cultural background of the CR and the social reality during the CR.

In Mexico, the student movement of 1968 and its subsequent repression marked a historical, cultural, political, and social watershed. The memory of that year served as a point of cohesion for many discourses, especially for a generation of intellectuals and politicians that participated in the protests—whether directly or indirectly, whether in favor or against them.

In the decades following 1968, a group of writers and intellectuals mostly on the left—such as Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II— who were contemporary with the event, produced narrative works that strove to recover the revolutionary struggles in their positivity, as vital and creative forces that helped to shape a new consciousness and, ultimately, a new politics. Although at times critical of the outcome, these writers narrate 1968 as a period of possibility and change.

In recent years, and in contrast to the previous generation, a tendency has developed in young Mexican letters to fictionalize the history of 1968 negatively. Moreover, such writers mobilize this narrative of failure as an equivocal foundation for political action in the present. The new revision of 1968, its aftermath and its sequels seems to cancel revolutionary political action, theory, and aesthetics for today.

My paper will deal with how recent Mexican fiction rereads 1968 and what possibilities of political action this rereading enables or cancels. Some authors I will mention include well-positioned writers such as Jorge Volpi, Héctor Aguilar Camín and Héctor Mendoza.

Looking back on 'the Long '68'. Divided memories, violence, history and nostalgia in Italy

Memory of the ‘long ‘68’ in Italy has tended to underline the ‘spontaneity’ of the early movement, and the violence of the 1970s. Most accounts draw a line between the two in December 1969, with the Piazza Fontana bomb and the beginning of the ‘strategy of tension’. This paper will take a wide-ranging look at interpretations and memories which have emerged from the 1968-1980 period, and will discuss the importance of the concept of divided memory in analysing that key period in contemporary Italian history. Through analysis of previous historical work, monuments, film and the ways in which features relating to the long ‘68 have been celebrated, mourned and forgotten the paper will look to outline different ways of viewing and remembering that period, as well as draw general methodological and historiographical conclusions. In conclusion, the paper will argue that many of the stereotypical accounts of ‘68 fail to understand the importance (and limits) of the movement, which went far beyond the left and made inroads into most of the most important institutions in Italy, transforming them forever. It should be noted that this period is far from a ‘closed’ issue historically, in terms of memory or even judicially, and the debates over the events themselves, as well as their consequences, are ongoing.

Magic / Tragic Moments. Memory Culture and Cultural Memory of the German Student Movement in Recent German Literature

Judging from recent publications, the German Student Movement continues to represent ‘unfinished business’. An important reason for the longevity of the topic in Germany is the romantic, nostalgic, almost palpable sense of loss that many members of the German Student Movement feel for those ‘magic moments’ when young people briefly glimpsed that they could ‘make history’ and change society in the utopian direction that their ideological leaders and intellectual fathers had described. The sense of loss that permeates the consciousness of the 68ers not only relates to the ‘magic moments’ that would sporadically return in later decades during protests against nuclear energy, Cruise Missiles, or the war in Iraq. It relates directly to the traumatic experience of a dream cut short by the bullets of a policeman and a would-be assassin who took out the heart of an idealistic and optimistic movement and, in some extreme cases, turned it into the mindset of terrorists. I will explore this experience in three recent texts: Uwe Timm's Der Freund und der Fremde (2005), Daniel de Roulet's Ein Sonntag in den Bergen (2006) and Peter Schneider's Rebellion und Wahn (2008).