Civil Rights Movement - German Student Movement

German Student Movement

Main article: German student movement See also: Red Army Faction

The civil rights movement in Germany was a left-wing backlash against the post-Nazi Party era of the country, which still contained many of the conservative policies of both that era and of the pre-World War I Kaiser monarchy. The movement mainly attracted disillusioned students and was largely a protest movement analogous to others around the globe during the late 1960s. It was largely a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the German government and other Western governments and the poor living conditions of students. A wave of protests, some violent, swept Germany, further fueled by over-reaction by the police and encouraged by other near-simultaneous protest movements across the world. Following more than a century of conservatism among German students, the German student movement also marked a significant major shift to the left-wing and radicalization of student politics.

Read more about this topic:  Civil Rights Movement

Famous quotes containing the words german, student and/or movement:

    “Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
    —John Berger (b. 1926)

    “The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)