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We cannot make sense of the West German New Left's conflicted relationship to the Nazi past and the Holocaust without understanding the New Left's involvement in the sexual revolution of the 1960s–1970s. Most of the recent publications about 1968 as a historical watershed have ignored or downplayed the New Left's sexual politics, but in so doing they have missed the opportunity to gain a deepened understanding of the original motive forces of the student upheaval and the sources of its very particular pathos and fury in West Germany. They have also missed a chance to understand the ways the student movement, while styling itself as antifascist, might more usefully be understood as an antipostfascist movement. Many of the transformations in personal politics engaged in by the 68ers—experiments in communal living, antiauthoritarian parenting, and renegotiated sexual mores and gender relations—were elaborated against the background of the perceived legacies of the fascist past. But what the 68ers were most directly rebelling against was the postfascist settlement in West Germany, and their own experiences coming of age in the claustrophobic and conservative later 1950s. The 68ers believed that the sexual conservatism in which they were raised was a watered-down continuation of Nazism's sexual politics, and they built their own activism on behalf of sexual liberation on an interpretation of Nazism as fundamentally hostile to sex and pro-family. As it turns out, however, the 68ers based their convictions on misreadings both of the Third Reich and of the immediate post-Third Reich years.

DOI: 10.1057/9781403982544_6

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