The Legacy of 1968: A European Perspective

Hosted by The Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University

The late 1960s were a time of intense student upheaval around the globe, and 1968 was particularly tumultuous. But perhaps no unrest was more dramatic than that in France, in what has come to be known simply as May 1968. Leading the charge against university policies, societal norms, and government authority was a German student with French roots and a mop of red hair named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, better known at the time as Dany the Red. The uprising he launched spread across France, causing university shutdowns, mass riots, and finally, a general strike that rocked the de Gaulle government.

In this lecture, Cohn-Bendit, now 62 and a member of the European Parliament, revisits May 1968 and the social and political circumstances that set the stage for that year of upheaval. “The collective moral of society was guided by the ideology of another century, and the new generation after the war didn’t accept this type of authoritarian society,” Bendit-Cohn explains. But ultimately, he urges the audience to forget 1968. “It’s over now, baby. Now we have another time and a much more difficult time.” Globalization, climate change, and human rights violations represent the crises of today, he says. He worries about the compromising of civil liberties in the U.S.-led global war against terrorism. “The dream of another world is still our task,” he says. “We can reform world governance. When I say forget ’68, I don’t mean forget to dream — just dream the dream of today.”

A question-and-answer session follows.

March 18, 2008, 7 p.m.
School of Management Auditorium

Video length is 01:35:52.

About the speaker:
Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a member of the European Parliament for the German Greens and copresident of the Greens/European Free Alliance in the European Parliament. He was born in France to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany and returned to Germany in 1958. He came back to France in 1966 to study at the University of Nanterre. In 1968, he was a leader of the student protesters during the May 1968 riots that threatened the government of Charles de Gaulle. He was expelled from France, and for the next several years lived and worked in Germany. He was a cofounder of the group Revolutionary Struggle with Joschka Fischer, ran a kindergarten, edited an alternative magazine, and became involved in the environmental movement. In 1989 he became deputy mayor of Frankfurt, in charge of multicultural affairs, and in 1994 was elected to the European Parliament. From 1994 until 2003, he hosted the show Literaturclub on Swiss television. He is a coauthor of Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, written shortly after the events of May 1968. He has published widely in Germany.

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