Revisiting memories of 1968: Unfinished business?

Do you remember 1968, 'the year that rocked the world'? That momentous year has achieved almost mythical status, and is associated with powerful images of youthful rebellion against conservative society, sexual liberation, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

But how accurate is that picture? As we remove our rose-tinted spectacles 40 years on, it’s time to reconsider how 1968 is remembered by citizens around the world, and why it remains a source of irritation and conflicting views.

An international conference being held in Leeds from 17-18 April, organised by the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, will look back on 1968 through the prism of contemporary literature, cinema, theory and cultural memory. The conference will also consider how a nation’s memories of 1968 can reflect its own preoccupations with order, violence, freedom, youth, authority and selfexpression.

Around 30 speakers will compare the memories of countries in Europe, South America, Africa, China and the United States, as well as the individual memories of student activists, workers, migrants, and‘the establishment’.

“One of the curious things about 1968 is that it remains ‘unfinished business’ in many countries,” says conference co-organiser Dr Ingo Cornils, a senior lecturer in German at Leeds, “because there are still so many unresolved questions and contradictory answers.”

In some western nations, he says, 1968 is a byword for radical student politics, the Vietnam War, the free speech movement, and the Woodstock festival. But in other parts of the globe, the so-called ‘year of revolution’ is associated with a much darker mood - for example, the Prague Spring allowed the people of Czechoslovakia to enjoy a brief spell of political liberalisation, until Warsaw Pact troops invaded that summer to halt the reforms.

“And while liberal students in the West were buying their little red Mao bibles to support the Cultural Revolution, thousands of ordinary Chinese people died in a revolutionary purge of epic proportions,” he adds.

One of the speakers, Dr Lan Yang, a lecturer in East Asian studies (University of Leeds), will discuss how the Cultural Revolution was denounced in the post-Mao years as a national catastrophe, yet recent sites published on the internet seem to argue that it was both ‘reasonable’ and ‘necessary’.

Several conference papers will also examine the protest movements that emerged under the brutal military dictatorships of Brazil, Mexico and Spain.

“In Mexico, 1968 is still a raw wound, because people have never been able to publicly mourn the deaths of hundreds of students shot by government soldiers just 10 days before the President was due to open the Olympic games,” says Dr Cornils.

“Forty years later, the massacre remains a taboo subject.”

‘Tropicalismo’ was a subversive political arts movement in Brazil during the 1960s and 70s that encompassed theatre, poetry, writing and music. This unique form of resistance to an oppressive regime – which somehow maintained the joy and irreverence of the tropics – will be explored in a paper presented by Marco Antonio Guerra (Brazil).

Another speaker, historian Dr Martin Klimke (Germany), will use newly declassified archives from the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations to retrace the US establishment’s response to the global student protests, which they perceived as a threat to US foreign policy interests.

Dr Klimke will discuss how they set out to win over the hearts and minds of young Americans living abroad.

Conference co-organiser Dr Sarah Waters, a senior lecturer in French studies at Leeds, says the May ’68 commemorations held in France each year have polarised public opinion, particularly since the 2005 immigrant riots in the suburbs of Paris.

“In last summer’s elections, a major theme for the right-wing French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was that the legacy of ‘mai soixante-huit’ has eroded people’s moral values and their respect for authority. He believes that France needs to close the door on that chapter of its history for good,” says Dr Waters.

“At the time in France, many people felt the students were just spoilt young upstarts who’d never experienced the deprivations of war their parents had, while the Communist Party and the main trade unions accused them of being ‘fake revolutionaries’.”

The fallout of May ’68 on two of France’s former colonies, Morocco and Senegal, will be traced by Dr Andrew Stafford, a senior lecturer in French (University of Leeds).

Whereas Senegal’s political uprising was swifter and bloodier than the events in France, Morocco’s revolt did not begin until late 1969, and continued until the failed coup of 1972.

Dr Ingo Cornils (University of Leeds) will talk about ‘magic/tragic moments’ of 1968 in Germany, focusing on recent novels that revisit the shooting of innocent bystander Benno Ohnesorg and the attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke.

“In West Germany, people often talk about the successful failure of the revolution,” says Dr Cornils, “because the students failed to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system, but the protests did lead to a greater questioning of authority and a more liberal society.”

He says the young people of 1968 believed there were remnants of the nation’s authoritarian character that had not moved on from the Nazi period. “They had read about the Auschwitz trials, they watched American soldiers fighting to protect a corrupt regime in South Vietnam, and they were outraged that Germany was supporting this war in their name. They felt the young state of West Germany was heading in the wrong direction and were fighting back against that.”

“What people fail to acknowledge is that the generation of 1968 was very idealistic – they truly believed they could change the world.”

The conference will be opened by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for research Professor Margaret Atack, who authored the book May ’68 in French Fiction and Film.

For further information about the ‘Memories of 1968’ international conference, visit http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/gsm/Memories-of-1968.htm

Photo: Italian protest in 1968 (© Giorgio Salomon).