The Red Decade

The “red decade” began in West Germany with the shots fired in West Berlin on 2 June 1967 and ended with the shots fired in Stammheim and the murder of Schleyer in the “German Autumn” of 1977. Yet these are merely the most basic facts of the history of a generation about which no coherent account has been written until now.
For years, a considerable swath of the first postwar generation existed within a closed sphere of “revolutionary politics.” It’s impossible to count all the people involved, name all the names of the innumerable Maoist, syndicalist groups that populated the scene during this “red decade.”
But what was it really all about? What were the psychological, material and ideological motivations behind it? From where did this widespread hallucination of a world revolution unfolding before our eyes come? We’ve moved far beyond defending or denouncing this history – what matters is finally to provide a coherent narrative. To unravel the tangle of motives that drove the activists. And to give an account of the psychological and intellectual consequences of these experiences. A gripping read for both younger and older readers now that “the ’68ers are in power”.