In her richly sourced and conceptually sophisticated study, Anna von der Goltz argues that 1968 should be understood as a movement of the left as well as the right. By focusing on the Association of Christian Democratic Students, the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (RCDS), von der Goltz succeeds in writing conservative youth "back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives" (267). Adopting a "reflexive use of generation", von der Goltz complicates our understanding of generational unity by comparing and contrasting campus activists from across the political spectrum (270). In doing so, she raises larger questions about social and political change, and makes a significant contribution to Germany's postwar political and cultural historiography.

Von der Goltz, Professor in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and Department of History, challenges collective memories of 1968 by reminding us that not only did the RCDS and the Socialist German Student League, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), claim equal membership, but neither organization attracted more than one percent of West Germany's university population. Like their compatriots on the left, the largely bourgeois RCDS activists were shaped by postwar hardship and loss, read Marx and Marcuse, adopted human rights language, advocated for social liberalization, and projected an anti-bourgeois aesthetic (even if some RCDS members continued to don ties). Critics of traditional morality, they promoted the modernization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the 1970s under Helmut Kohl.

With the rise of left-wing terrorism, an unarticulated sense of '68er solidarity across political lines gave way to partisan warfare. As the RCDS organized events to provoke the leftist students, who too frequently took the bait by enacting violence, activists on both sides fed the vicious polarization that took hold in the 1970s. RCDS activists were quick to pump the press with examples of their opponents' campus extremism, their face-to-face confrontations inspiring the Ministry of the Interior's domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, to secretly deliver suitcases of cash to the RCDS in exchange for information about the SDS (203, 205). RCDS veterans would ultimately capitalize on their organizing experience as they achieved professional success. Among others, Gerd Langguth, Helmut Pütz, Friedbert Pflüger, leading campaign strategist Peter Radunski, and Horst Teltschik ("Kohl's Kissinger," 241) would play influential roles in the CDU.

Von der Goltz' analysis of generational structure and collective memory is especially compelling. Incorporating interviews with 27 participants born between 1937 and 1955, von der Goltz gives voice to RCDS "renegades" who abandoned the movement as well as women who constituted one-quarter of RCDS members, the latter of whom recounted familiar experiences of being sidelined and silenced by their male colleagues (67). If RCDS recollections of their student activist experiences diverged, those gaps paled in comparison to the stark differences between RCDS and SDS interpretations of the Nazi years and 1968. Already in the 1970s, the RCDS articulated a consistent anti-totalitarian line linking leftist '68ers to the Third Reich, a Christian Democratic discourse that would repeat itself in the decades to come as RCDS "memory entrepreneurs" sought to shape public memories of 1968 (265).

The fact that so many RCDS leaders assumed influential roles in the CDU highlights the importance of Christian Democratic organizational associations. It is surprising, then, that the mother party is paid scant heed in this account. We read little, for example, about the pre-1960s CDU except that it was dominated by Adenauer and programmatically weak, obscuring early party dynamics. Absent their historical and ideological context, the RCDS' anti-totalitarianism and embrace of "militant democracy" appear exclusively the products of an American-led Cold War rather than an outgrowth of Catholic personalism (93). That interconfessionalism, a founding and animating principle of the CDU, receives no mention leaves readers incapable of understanding the political environment in which these "other 68ers" came of age.

Relatedly, von der Goltz eschews a constituent feature of West German life with inescapable effects on 68ers, the deconfessionalization of West German life. The 1950s and early 1960s witnessed ongoing ideological and confessional battles between Protestants and Catholics within the CDU and West German society, not least over Catholic complicity in Nazi crimes and confessionally segregated public schools. While the author nods to the "erosion of traditional confessional milieus" that began in the late 1950s, her narrative undervalues the social and political impact of West Germany's precipitous dechurching, most strikingly the CDU's loss of Catholic female voters whose support made its pre-1972 electoral success possible (49).

And yet evidence of ongoing religious influence appears regularly throughout the text. As asides to the actors' confessional backgrounds abound, the reader is left to wonder about the significance of religious belief to RCDS members. Was the majority Catholic? (One gleans that from the biographical information and interviewee quotes provided, but it is impossible to confirm.) Did lapsed Protestantism or Catholicism induce their social liberalism, or did church affiliation explain why most remained in the CDU? The elision of religion, including in references to enemies' accusations, RCDS campus strongholds, and the Catholic press, seems short-sighted for a study of a Christian Democratic movement.

Readers will also be curious about the relationship between the CDU and its "auxiliary" RCDS (216). It is clear the two organizations enjoyed improved cooperation across the 1970s, but the nature of CDU financial support is limited to a footnote's revelation of "funding from the federal board of the CDU and from other CDU organization [sic]" (203, n. 98). One wonders, too, about the RCDS' status vis-à-vis the Junge Union (JU), the CDU's official youth organization. Founded in 1947 and continuously active, the JU appears just twice here, once in reference to a speech by Jürgen Wohlrabe, an RCDS activist and JU leader, at a protest organized with the CDU and once in a footnote. Finally, there are allusions throughout to factions within the RCDS, but its internal politicking remains obscured, even as it shaped veterans' competing versions of their past.

Overall, though, this is a thoughtful, substantial, and fascinating intervention in the histories of generations in general and of 1968 and its memory wars in particular. The author's methodological rigor regarding the complexities of generational identity will make this a standard work for scholars in that field, whereas her spotlight on the RCDS provides a welcome corrective to histories of 1968. By demonstrating the power of postwar youthful activism from the right as well as the left, von der Goltz underscores the value of studying Christian Democracy, the Chancellor's party for two-thirds of Federal Republic history, in all its manifestations.

Maria D. Mitchell