1967/68 was a time of new beginnings, one which Peter Schneider, one of the protagonists of the student movement together with Rudi Dutschke, Gaston Salvatore and Ulrike Meinhof, and many of his peers experienced as a second birth. Schneider was one of the very few in this group who kept a diary. Now he browses through these diaries and reflects upon the hopes, utopias and eccentricities of that time. The outcome is not a nostalgic review – more of a disputation between the 68-year-old Schneider and Schneider as a student during the spring that preceded the »German Autumn". In doing so, he picks up on the claim that everything political is private and vice versa. In Schneider’s account, the worldwide student movement, which refused to obey the generation of the fathers and aimed to create a new society with new rules, was entangled with an amour fou which possibly disturbed the diarist more than his revolutionary convictions. He describes the conflict between artistic ambition and political activism, the coexistence of the world’s salvation and profound personal despair, the collapse of an historically necessary process of renewal and personal ideological stagnation.
In this disputation, Schneider junior and Schneider senior confront each other as equals. On one issue, the 68-year-old Schneider agrees with the student Schneider: it’s not the people who wanted change who have to justify themselves but the others who – after the Third Reich broke with civilisation – believed they could pursue their careers in their father’s shoes and suits as though nothing had ever happened.
