Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen Heft 32
Wilfried Mausbach: The Present’s Past
Recent Perspectives on Peace and Protest in Germany 1945–1973
Much of the recent literature on peace movements and protest activities in postwar Germany
takes its lead either from social movement theory or from the concept of peace culture. Both
approaches can indeed help to overcome the conventional fixation on the political effectiveness
of protest movements as well as an all too often dry organizational sociology or a sometimes
hagiographic preoccupation with important individuals. This essay enumerates some of
the new and occasionally surprising perspectives that these approaches can bring to peace research.
Thus, the history of German peace activism during the 1950s is becoming much
more intertwined with the country’s general social and cultural history of the time, whereas
the 1960s seem to confront peace historians with exactly the opposite challenge, namely to
extricate genuine peace movements from the general social and cultural upheaval of this tumultuous
decade. This article stresses some commonalties between the two periods, including
the theme of nationalism as an undercurrent of German peace activism, the latter’s frequently
bellicose rhetoric, and the importance of emotions both for peace and protest groups
themselves and for their confrontations with authorities and the public at large.