Global 1968

Cultural Revolutions in Europe and Latin America

A. James McAdams, Anthony P. Monta, A. James McAdams, Anthony P. Monta

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780268200565, 9780268200572
• eBook ISBN: 9780268200558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Global 1968 is a unique study of the similarities and differences in the 1968 cultural revolutions in Europe and Latin America.

The late 1960s was a time of revolutionary ferment throughout the world. Yet so much was in flux during these years that it is often difficult to make sense of the period. In this volume, distinguished historians, filmmakers, musicologists, literary scholars, and novelists address this challenge by exploring a specific issue—the extent to which the period that we associate with the year 1968 constituted a cultural revolution. They approach this topic by comparing the different manifestations of this transformational era in Europe and Latin America.

The contributors show in vivid detail how new social mores, innovative forms of artistic expression, and cultural, religious, and political resistance were debated and tested on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, the desire to confront traditional beliefs and conventions had been percolating under the surface for years. Yet they also find that the impulse to overturn the status quo was fueled by the interplay of a host of factors that converged at the end of the 1960s and accelerated the transition from one generation to the next. These factors included new thinking about education and work, dramatic changes in the self-presentation of the Roman Catholic Church, government repression in both the Soviet Bloc and Latin America, and universal disillusionment with the United States. The contributors demonstrate that the short- and long-term effects of the cultural revolution of 1968 varied from country to country, but the period's defining legacy was a lasting shift in values, beliefs, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities.

Contributors: A. James McAdams, Volker Schlöndorff, Massimo De Giuseppe, Eric Drott, Eric Zolov, William Collins Donahue, Valeria Manzano, Timothy W. Ryback, Vania Markarian, Belinda Davis, J. Patrice McSherry, Michael Seidman, Willem Melching, Jaime M. Pensado, Patrick Barr-Melej, Carmen-Helena Téllez, Alonso Cueto, and Ignacio Walker.

PART ONE

Foundations

TWO

The Slow but Long Coming of
a Cultural Revolution

VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF

The events of the year 1968 shaped my life and my view of the world to a degree I could not foresee at the time. During the Prague Spring I was shooting a film in Czechoslovakia’s capital,¹ a story set in the sixteenth century. What was happening around us, and the echo from simultaneous uprisings in Berlin (the shooting of Rudi Dutschke) and Paris (Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s activities at the Sorbonne), was so overwhelming that I introduced newsreel footage of these events into Kleist’s novella. Later I followed up with films about similarly tumultuous times: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Knife in the Head (1978), and Leaden Times (1981) (Marianne and Julianne, being the U.S. distributor’s title), all of which I produced.

Please allow me to set all modesty aside and let me take my own biography as a case study leading up not only to ’68 but to the violent period of the Baader–Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists, with which I was accused at the time of being a “sympathizer,” if not, as Heinrich Böll, “the spiritual father” of the violence—all ending in 1979 with a number of murders, among them Hanns Martin Schleyer’s (the head of the German Entrepreneurs’ Association), and the multiple suicides of some of the protagonists, as depicted in our collective movie Germany in Autumn (1978).

There was no doubt in our minds that we were living in revolutionary times, even though we did not follow enough the American protests, which were less theoretical and more focused on specific social realities, such as racism and the war in Vietnam. Today I would say ours was more a cultural than a political or social revolution. By culture I mean above all our way of life, our way of communicating and relating to each other, within our generation and toward the generation of our parents. Fundamental changes occurred in the way people thought about the past, present, and future.

Today what I find most remarkable is the almost simultaneous explosion of 1968 all over the world, a truly global event, even though at the time of its happening most people were not aware of this simultaneity. It must have been caused by quite different forces in all these different countries, from France to Chile, from Prague to Berkeley, from Berlin to Turin. I can only speak of Germany—and myself as one of the participants, not causes, of course. For me ’68, defined as an antiauthoritarian movement, started right at the end of World War II with the collapse of the old German middle class. It was fueled by the 1950s, the Adenauer years in the Federal Republic, and finally by the influence of my French education in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Paris.

THE END OF THE GROWN-UPS’ WORLD

My father came from Oldenburg in the north of Germany and was born a few years before 1900, just like his siblings and most of his friends, as a subject of the kaiser, Emperor Wilhelm II. Even their external appearance made that generation look as if they came from another world. In the late 1940s and the 1950s our father, a medical doctor, always wore a threepiece suit with a waistcoat, white shirt, and tie, sometimes an overcoat and certainly a hat, and he also carried a stick that he vigorously employed when taking a walk. Known as “the Doctor” and addressed by all with the respectful “Herr Doktor,” he transferred this honor automatically to me and my brothers, who were known as “the Doctor’s kids.”

Somehow, in the last days of World War II we must have sensed that the grown-ups were abdicating, and that soon the children’s hour would strike. A couple of weeks after my sixth birthday, white bed sheets were hurriedly hung out the windows. My older brother, Georg, was allowed to climb up the still leafless beech tree to raise the sign of capitulation from a high branch. As a precaution, the house was blocked up and abandoned. When we finally got the word, “They’re coming!,” we hid in the forest.

The Americans moved in on the bumpy path through the forest into our small location, by its suffix “Bad” a spa, but in fact rather a village. They sat on Jeeps, heavy trucks, and tanks. A burnt-out Wehrmacht vehicle blocked the road in the curve at the entrance to Schlangenbad.

The GIs were setting off explosions to clear the way, and in doing so they also blew up the old entertainment hall. It was a little casino in which Russian aristocrats, supposedly even Dostoyevsky, used to gamble away their money and the souls of their serfs. The ivory chips were left for us to play with in the ruins; the roulette wheel had been broken.

What impressed us children were the drivers of the U.S. Army trucks. They were Black, though they looked much different from the picture of the little “Moor” in our children books. Tall, and equipped with fearsomely white teeth, they seemed to us like supermen. Only men this big and strong could drive such monster trucks, we thought. Decades later I learned from Arthur Miller, while working with him in New York on Death of a Salesman, that the U.S. Army was only integrated beginning with the Korean War. Under Eisenhower in World War II, white and Black troops were still strictly segregated. Maybe they made friends with us, the children of the defeated, more quickly because of their underprivileged position. It didn’t take long for each of us to take on “his own Yankee” from among the very young GIs from Indiana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. Since these young men had beaten our parents, they were our natural allies.

Authority was no longer a privilege of the elders. A true clash of civilizations ensued from this reversed order. We liked the style of these GIs; they didn’t act like victors, and they were so different from the bitter, tattered figures of the last German soldiers whose retreat we had witnessed during the last days, still hoping for a final victory. Chewing gum, Coca-Cola, Hershey bars, and Butterfingers were the convincing Wunderwaffen² of these young soldiers. We were interested in their guns and vehicles; they were interested in our bicycles and sisters. The first words we learned to ignore were “off limits” and “no fraternization.” We simply defected to the enemy, who cruised around the lawns and flower beds with one leg dangling out of their Jeeps, ignoring all the “keep off the grass” signs—which so far had stopped even German revolutions.

For us, new times began; the adults, however, lived in great fear of the occupiers. All kinds of Nazi publications, knives and daggers, countless editions of Mein Kampf, soup bowls with swastikas stamped underneath, large flags and small, even sports badges and canoe club membership cards were buried in the forest by night.

The world of the youth and that of the adults would drift apart in the next years. I was six and wore Lederhosen. In amazement, we discovered the new world. One day at the height of summer, word of the first atom bomb went around. A Jeep drove through the upper main street, honking wildly, and we children ran yelling alongside. “The war is over, the war is over,” we chanted, to the rhythm of “The witch is dead, the witch is dead.”

DISCOVERING MY OWN WORLD

Way into my teens my “artistic” education was shaped by illustrated magazines in the waiting room of my father’s surgery. Although culture was prized by society, in daily life it was limited to the request hour on the radio and a few quotations from Faust. For my father there were only two categories of art—pleasant and unpleasant. Since in life he experienced enough of the latter, art had to provide him with the former. He tried to undermine my first film, Young Törless (1966), based on Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, resorting to intrigue, and he held that The Tin Drum (1979) was, in a word, “dreadful!” Coming from the world of the kaiser, having rejected the Weimar Republic, it was as hard for him to accept the new, postwar society as it had been to accept the Weimar Republic.

I first rebelled against his world by sneaking off after school to the Roxy, the Rio, the Apollo, or the Valhalla—the biggest cinemas in the nearby town of Wiesbaden—to watch American Westerns and gangster movies, which we did not yet call “film noir.” They appealed to me and my friends because they were shunned as “filth and trash,” the opposite of the bourgeois high culture of concerts and opera. Besides, these movies came from the United States, which made it even worse for the adults and all the more attractive for us.

Film became an ever-greater part of my life. In the mid-1950s, the German Film Industry Self-Censorship Commission (FSK), established by the Allies and conveniently located in my home town of Wiesbaden, classified films according to the values of the Allies. A friend of my older brother, Franz Rath, worked there as projectionist, and by climbing a small iron ladder I was able to enter the screening booth. I watched films during the afternoons caught between two rattling projectors and the heat of their arc lights. For the first time film was not just the light, shadows, and movement on the screen, but something tangible. I pestered my father, wanting to quit school and to become a camera man, which he refused outright. “First graduate and get some university degree.”

UNDER THE (FRENCH) INFLUENCE

In 1956, our school organized three-month sojourns in a French boarding school for the purpose of learning the language and for bringing European youth together. This was exactly what my father wished for, so he agreed to let me go.

It was a Jesuit school where I enrolled; it became the model for the faraway Austrian military academy in Young Törless, and it’s where I saw my first silent film, Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). The Ninth Day (2005) is my belated tribute to my Jesuit priests, who from then on were to educate me. A master–student relationship grew out of the many afternoons I spent in one of the priests’ cells, and that led to a friendship spanning over thirty years. When RP de Solages died, I had the honor of being a pallbearer carrying his coffin down into the Jesuits’ vault in Tours.

One day the entire school was invited to the local cinema to see a film by one of the former students, Alain Resnais. The film was Nuit et Brouillard (Night And Fog) (1955), the documentary about the concentration camps.

Of course I had heard about the camps, mostly through jokes about the use of gas and the making of glue from bones. I cannot recall a genuine description of the Holocaust, nor had I seen images or statistics during our history lessons in Wiesbaden. It was a taboo subject in Adenauer’s Germany, practically willed out of existence by the collective silence on the matter in schools as much as at home. Therefore I was neither mentally nor physically prepared for the horror of the images that unfolded before me. As the lights went up in the auditorium I—the sole German among a few hundred French kids who now looked at me—found it extremely hard to get up. I still see my friends whose silent faces begged the same question that, half a century later, we are still asking ourselves: How was it possible?

I was forced to adopt my own view and not collapse in contriteness whenever the topic was raised. Deep down I have never been able to surmount it, and most of my films, beginning with Törless and up to The Ninth Day, still seek an answer to the question unleashed on that day. When a few years later in Frankfurt the first so-called Auschwitz trials started, this question started to get a few timid answers, and the 1968 students’ revolt resulted from them.

COLONIAL POLITICS

Instead of the three months planned at the boarding school, I stayed in France for about ten years. In 1956, the Budapest uprising against the Soviets was the first political event we discussed vividly with our teachers, the priests. The French defeat in Vietnam and the Algerian war for independence were the next steps of my own independence. We read Sartre and Camus, we wore black turtlenecks and smoked Gauloises. I smuggled the forbidden pamphlet against torture in Algeria, “La Question,” by Henri Alleg, into our school.

French society as a whole was divided by this last colonial war. Graduating in Paris, partly at the Sorbonne, partly at the film school, soon working as an assistant director, I became politically involved, and as a film technician was a member of the communist Union. In 1958 a small cultural revolution started, the French New Wave, and by chance or choice I was there, as the assistant to the very same Alain Resnais of Night and Fog, to Melville, and foremost to Louis Malle, who took me to Algeria for reportage on the last days of the war in that country. We met the young soldiers, the torturers Sartre and others had denounced. My first short, in the summer of 1960, dealt with Algerian freedom fighters. Both French and German censorship prohibited the innocent eleven-minute film. Like the generation around me, I felt that only a revolution could end such a cowardly materialistic republic as Adenauer’s, and such an unjust regime as the colonial power France was at the time. And indeed, after the failed putsch of the generals, de Gaulle did just that. A new République started, Brigitte Bardot was the official Marianne, and I assisted Louis Malle in Mexico during the joyous celebration of anarchy his picture Viva Maria! was meant to be. None of us expected the bloody price the students of Mexico’s national university, UNAM, had to pay a few years later for their anti-imperialist engagement.

The longer I stayed in France, and the more assimilated I felt, the more ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Preface
• One. Revolutionary 1968: Contending Approaches to an Elusive Concept A. James McAdams
• Part 1. Foundations
• Part 2. Images of Change
• Part 3. Reactions to Change
• Part 4. Then and Now
• List of Contributors
• Index