Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Those facts about the different experiences of Germans born in different years help explain why Germany experienced a violent student revolt in the year 1968. On the average, the German protestors of 1968 had been born around 1945, just at the end of the war. They were too young to have been raised as Nazis, or to have experienced the war, or to remember the years of chaos and poverty after the war. They grew up mostly after Germany’s economic recovery, in economically comfortable times. They weren’t struggling to survive; they enjoyed enough leisure and security to devote themselves to protest. In 1968 they were in their early 20’s. They were teenagers during the 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Fritz Bauer was revealing the Nazi crimes of ordinary Germans of their parents’ generation. The parents of protestors born in 1945 would themselves have mostly been born between 1905 and 1925. That meant that the parents of Germany’s 1945 generation were viewed by their children as the Germans who had voted for Hitler, had obeyed Hitler, had fought for Hitler, or had been indoctrinated in Nazi beliefs by Hitler Jugend school organizations.