The Student Movement and 1968 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

The Student Movement and 1968 - Essay Example The essay "The student movement and 1968" will help to understand, that political oppression is one of the main factors that encouraged student action in the 1960s, where students wanted to offer an alternative opposition that the government lacked. In 1966, the two main West German political parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Christian Democrats (CDU), merged to create the Grand Coalition. The Grand Coalition selected Kurt Georg Kiesinger of the CDU to become the chancellor. The decision sparked controversy because Kissinger served as the radio propagandist of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), also called the Nazi Party (Allinson, 2013, p.141). In addition, the formation of the Grand Coalition created social unrest because it decreased and curtailed parliamentary opposition (Allinson, 2013, p.142). With the union of CDU and the SPD, the only remaining opposition party was the relatively small organization of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The studen t movement formed part of the â€Å"extraparliamentary opposition† or APO (Von Dirke, 1997, p.34). Andrei S. Markovits, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and American sociologist Philip S. Gorski assert that APO is not a monolithic movement. They stress that the â€Å"term APO never designated a single organization or tendency. Rather, APO was a loosely negative alliance between a diffuse array of groups united against a shared opponent† (cited in Von Dirke, 1997, p.34). The Socialist German Student Union served as the leader of the student movement in Germany.