Coming on October 1st: Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Pre-order your copy in our online store, and we will ship it once it is available. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.
Free Radicals
Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s
Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s
by Elliot Neaman
With a Foreword by Timothy W. Luke
Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals presents a comprehensive panorama of the West German youth revolt in the 1960s, as well as its subsequent fragmentation and descent into terrorism in the 1970s. Neaman argues that the activists of the 1960s fundamentally misconstrued the nature of the young German republic, conflating it with earlier problematic German polities, and offered hazy world-shattering utopias to replace it based on artificial historical comparisons. The student radicals at first were swept along by liberalizing forces, but then made a decisive turn against reform in favor of an aggressive rejection of the existing order.
Praise for Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals
“Neaman’s book is truly a tour d’horizon through the magical years of awakening in the sixties, which started in the San Francisco Bay Area and didn’t stop when it came to Germany, as well as covering the depressing slide into years of terrorism that followed.”
—Wolfgang Kraushaar, Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur
“A much-needed, careful, and well-researched history of the leftist radicalism of West Germany’s 1960s and its aftereffects on the leftist terrorism of the 1970s. Free Radicals the best English-language examination of the intersection of ideas, lives, and politics in these tumultuous and very violent years in West Germany.”
—Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland
“Its pages steeped in vast learning, Free Radicals is both accessible and diverting, offering a wonderful reenactment of a fascinating and fateful period in recent history.”
—Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University
“Free Radicals is a radical upending of what we thought we knew about Germany’s most famous generation.”
—Zachary Shore, Associate Professor of History, Naval Postgraduate School
“Free Radicals combines vast reading in memoirs, recent German-language research, and discoveries from the archives of government surveillance agencies, East and West, to cast a new and sober light on this mythicized period of German history.”
—Jerry Z. Muller, Professor of History, The Catholic University of America
“I wholeheartedly recommend the book—it captures the radical spirit of the time and is a must read for anyone that wants to get the complete picture of the Western world’s most unique entertaining revolutionary movement.”
—Michael Werz, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
About the Author
Elliot Neaman is Professor of History at the University of San Francisco. He specializes in intellectual, diplomatic, political, and social history of modern Europe. He is the author of A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism and co-editor of The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory.
ISBN 978-0-914386-63-6 (paperback)
272 pages
Pub. Date: October 1, 2016
