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

The Student Movement and 1968 - Essay ExampleThe essay The student driving 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 politics lacked. In 1966, the two main West German political parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Christian Democrats (CDU), merged to create the Grand confederation. 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 organic law 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 giving me dication of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The student movement formed part of the 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 big movement. They stress that the term APO never designated a single organization or tendency. Rather, APO was a loosely negative alliance between a diffuse set about 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.