Author Description

Product Description One thing above all separated the radical students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts in Berkeley or New York. In the US, the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation. In its place, Germanyhad the so-called Auschwitz generation. What became known in Germany as the '68 generation' or just the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their mothers and fathers were directly or indirectly responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did notmerely dream of a better world as some of their contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. Kundnani shows that the struggle of Germany's '68 generation also had a darker side. Although the'Achtundsechziger' imagined their struggle against capitalism in West Germany as 'resistance' against Nazism, they also had a tendency to see Auschwitz everywhere and, by using images and metaphors connected with Nazism to describe events in other parts of the world, they relativized Nazism and inparticular the Holocaust. Even more disturbingly, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the 'Achtundsechziger', there were also anti-Semitic and nationalist currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement.Utopia or Auschwitz traces the political journey of Germany'spost-war generation and examines the influence that its ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past had on the foreign policy of the 'red-green' government between 1998 and 2005, which included several former members of the student movement like Joschka Fischer. The red-green government's schizophrenicforeign policy, manifested its response to the crises in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past. Review "A major new study of the evolution and legacy of the German New Left."--Forward"A fascinating.... useful guide in understanding German foreign policies of the last several decades.... Highly recommended."--Choice"[Kundnani] formulates a clear hypothesis and, based on two main currents and its ramifications, traces the 1968 generation's ambivalent handling of the role of their parents' generation in Nazi Germany up to the present."--Shofar About the Author Hans Kundnani is a journalist based in London. He studied German and philosophy at Oxford and journalism at Columbia University. He was a correspondent in Germany for theObserver and has also written for theGuardian,Wall Street Journal,Prospect and theTimes Literary Supplement and variousnewspapers in Germany.