Free Radicals

Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s Youth Revolt

of the 1960s and 1970s

by Elliot Neaman

With a Foreword by Timothy W. Luke

Also available in ebook format from Amazon.com (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (NOOK).

Silver Medal Winner, Europe: Best Regional Non-Fiction, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner of the 2015 London Book Festival Award in History

Free Radicals offers both a comprehensive panorama of the oppositional politics of the "Generation of 1968" in Germany and a trenchant interpretation of the ideas and politics of the movement, placing them in a larger historiographical framework. The book argues that the activists of the 1960s fundamentally misconstrued the nature of the young German republic, conflating it with earlier problematic German polities, particularly the doomed Weimar Republic, and offered a hazy world-shattering future based on artificial comparisons to past revolutionary models. This book situates the German student movement within the spectrum of major social changes that occurred in postwar West Germany, arguing that the student radicals at first were swept along by the liberalizing forces of the young democracy, but then made a decisive turn against reform and gradual political evolution in favor of an aggressive rejection of the existing order. The student radicals borrowed many of the ideas and the cultural styles for the anticipated revolution from global trends, particularly from those emanating from the United States, but since the collective trauma of National Socialism was still fresh—the majority of the student radicals grew up in the direct aftermath of World War II—the contours of the German student movement were formed by uniquely German dilemmas and a deep generational clash. This book tells the story of the struggles of the first free republic on German soil and the generation that came of age adamantly refusing to accept its legitimacy.

Praise for Elliot Neaman's Free Radicals

"Neaman's book is truly a tour d'horizon through the magical years of awakening in the sixties, which started in the San Francisco Bay Area and didn't stop when it came to Germany, as well as covering the depressing slide into years of terrorism that followed."
—Wolfgang Kraushaar, Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur

"The German terrorist movements of the 1970s that grew out of the left-wing radicalism of the late 1960s were comprised of a handful of actors. But beyond the active perpetrators were wide circles of sympathizers who shared a deep ideological antipathy to the liberal democratic institutions of the Bonn Republic, a Republic that was shaken by its need to respond to the new brand of ideological terrorism. Free Radicals combines vast reading in memoirs, recent German-language research, and discoveries from the archives of government surveillance agencies, East and West, to cast a new and sober light on this mythicized period of German history."
—Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of History, The Catholic University of America

"Elliot Neaman has tossed a Molotov cocktail into our understanding of Germany's youth protests. The 68ers have long been idealized for finally bringing Germany the liberalism that was thwarted by the Kaisers, shaken under Weimar, and crushed beneath the Nazi jackboots. Think again, says Neaman. Through skillful research and narrative panache, Free Radicals depicts a directionless youth movement—a hodgepodge of hippies, hooligans, and self-serving anarchists, each animated by an anti-colonial Zeitgeist, yet feckless in their function. They dreamed of revolution but in fact impeded social change. Free Radicals is a radical upending of what we thought we knew about Germany's most famous generation."
—Zachary Shore, Associate Professor of History, Naval Postgraduate School, and author of A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind

"Elliot Neaman's pioneering and sensible account of Germany's 1968 and its aftermath shows brilliantly how revolting youth, intending to free their society, fell captive to revolutionary myths that distorted the realities of their societies and too often led them in implausible directions. Its pages steeped in vast learning, Free Radicals is both accessible and diverting, offering a wonderful reenactment of a fascinating and fateful period in recent history."
—Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University, and author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

"Elliot Neaman's Free Radicals is a much-needed, careful, and well-researched history of the leftist radicalism of West Germany's 1960s and its aftereffects on the leftist terrorism of the 1970s. With judicious examination of both the biographies and the key texts by leftist luminaries such as Rudi Dutschke, Dieter Kunzelmann, and Ulrike Meinhof, among others, as well as of the now extensive memoir and secondary literature in German, Neaman shatters the romantic haze that has, at times, descended on these events. Free Radicals is the best English-language examination of the intersection of ideas, lives, and politics in these tumultuous and very violent years in West Germany."
—Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland

"Elliot Neaman revisits the German student movement of the mid-sixties in equally fascinating and provocative ways. His eminently readable and amazingly detailed incursions into the turbulent era of the 1960s and 1970s are as combative as the objects of his critique: German rebels that, during the mid-sixties, mistook the emerging democracy in their own country for a Third World battlefield. I wholeheartedly recommend the book—it captures the radical spirit of the time and is a must read for anyone that wants to get the complete picture of the Western world's most unique entertaining revolutionary movement."
—Michael Werz, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

* Honorable Mention at the 2016 Northern California Book Festival

ISBN 978-0-914386-63-6 (paperback)

272 pages
Pub. Date: October 1, 2016