Thanks for the kind words about Utopia or Auschwitz and for the interesting questions. In the book I discuss the Historikerstreit in the mid-eighties, which focused on exactly the question you raise about the uniqueness or otherwise of the Holocaust, but that debate was largely among West Germans who had experienced the war (Habermas, Nolte, etc.) rather than the Achtundsechziger. My sense is that there was a tension in the thinking of the 1968 generation about the Holocaust: some wanted to learn lessons from it but in the process relativised it; others saw it as unique but wanted to draw a line under it. I’ve blogged about this question here and here.

I’m not really sure how the Achtundsechziger in general reacted to the release from prison of Speer and von Schirach. But Ulrich Enzensberger, a member of Kommune 1 (and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s brother), did mention to me that he remembered being angry on hearing that Willy Brandt had sent Speer’s daughter a bunch of flowers when her father was released. To him, this discredited Speer and illustrated what in the book I call the “continuity thesis” (i.e. the argument that the post-war Federal Republic was a continuation of the Nazi dictatorship).

You’re quite right that some of the Achtundsechziger were more political than others. Dutschke seems to have been the most austere among them – apparently he rarely watched movies or listened to music. The communards, on the other hand, could be pretty frivolous – Rainer Langhans famously said he didn’t care about the Vietnam war because he had trouble having an orgasm. However, I was always struck by just how political even the communards were. Langhans told me that for the first few months they didn’t listen to music either; instead they relentlessly interrogated each other. It seems to me that there was a seriousness and urgency about all the Achtundsechziger that distinguished them from their counterparts elsewhere in the West.

Thanks for the comment – and for buying the book! You’re quite right about Ulrike Meinhof imagining she was a Holocaust victim – when she and Gudrun Ensslin were in prison they exchanged letters in which they explicitly compared the conditions under which they were being held to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They seem to have felt it proved the Federal Republic was a fascist state, as the West German student movement had claimed all along. In a sense it was the culmination of a general tendency among the Achtundsechziger to imagine they were, as one member of the student movement put it, the “new Jews”. I hope you enjoy the book!

Regards Matt