| During the turbulent 1960s and into the early 1970s, various political and social movements in the
United States (US) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) intersected and provided
overlapping chronologies. Amid the movements with constantly changing alliances and
divergences, the student protest movements, Western terrorist groups, and the women’s rights
movements developed as three of the significant crusades in both countries during the long 1960s,
commonly delineated as 1960 to 1975. The two student movements, best represented through two
entities with the acronym SDS reached their heyday in 1968. Both the Students for Democratic
Society (SDS in the US) and the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS in the FRG) lost
internal cohesion and external impact by 1969. As SDS left the political stage, among the many
groupings remaining or evolving, two on each side of the Atlantic stood out. Radical students
found a new home in the terrorist organizations Weather Underground Organization (WUO in the
US) and Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF – Red Army Faction in the FRG).1 Disaffected female student
activists tended to turn towards the women’s rights movement, soon called second wave
feminism.2
I argue that the combined force of the movements resulted in changes in the political
1 The RAF also came to be known as the Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe after their leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike
Meinhof.
2 In the literature describing the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars and historians writing before
2010 almost exclusively employed the term “second wave feminism.” When citing or referencing those authors and
scholars, I will retain “second wave feminism.” Outside of citing, I choose to follow the lead of gender and feminism
historian Nancy A. Hewitt who made a strong case of an ever-present feminism, rather than one arriving in waves, and
thus strongly favors a move away from “second wave feminism” to “women’s rights movement” or “women’s
movement. Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U. S. Feminism (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2010). However, even in peer reviewed articles of the 2020s, the term “second wave
feminism” still features prominently. See: Miranda Brady, “"I Think the Men Are behind It": Reproductive Labour and
the Horror of Second Wave Feminism,” in Feminist Media Studies, March 2023, 23, no. 2, 606-620.
DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2021.1986093. Felice Amato, “Women and traditional stories in second wave feminism,” in
AOQU, 2024. DOI: 10.54103/2724-3346/27698. Additionally, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry
speak of “movements” to indicate a slowing, and reemerging process. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid
Henry, Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of the American Women’s Movements (New York:
Liveright, 2014).
landscape in Germany to a much larger degree than in the US.
Evidence for my key argument relies on documents from the German archives at the Freie
Universität Berlin (FUB), the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS) and the PhillipsUniversität Marburg (PUM), together with news media reports in both the US and Germany. The
plethora of secondary sources contain biographies of contemporary actors, analysis from former
participants in the movements and scholarly assessments found in books and journal articles. The
secondary sources further include the works of renowned revolutionaries, philosophers,
sociologists, and feminists who laid the theoretical foundations for the movements. My secondary
argument points to the pervasiveness of the works of these theorists, particularly those of the
Frankfurter Schule in underpinning and guiding the protesters.3 The majority of this thesis attends
to familiar historical events and analysis to put them into comparisons. Some of the comparisons
exist in scholarly literature today. However, the main argument that 1968 reverberates through the
German political landscape considerably louder than through the one in the US appears not to have
been made before. This thesis attempts to fill that void.
Key Words: 1960s Student Protests, Second Wave Feminism, Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army
Faction), Weather Underground Organization, Die Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt School), Herbert
Marcuse |