Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• von Dirke, Sabine Beatrice

Titel

Meer Fantasie - und Muscheln. The politics of aesthetics in the West German counterculture from the student movement to the Greens

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1991

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation examines the correlation between political and aesthetic developments within the West German counterculture from the student movement of the 1960s to the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The first chapter traces the student movement's adaptation of Critical Theory for its attack on a "bourgeois" aesthetics. It concludes with a discussion of the debate about the "death of literature." The second chapter follows the literary critical debate into the mid-seventies, the so-called New Subjectivity, and the implications of the Baader-Meinhof-Group's terrorism on the political climate in West Germany. It explicates the ideological ramifications of New Subjectivity, i.e. the alleged return of the West German writers to matters of subjectivity after the politicization of literature during the sixties. It also shows that New Subjectivity goes beyond the confines of literature and represents an important feature of the post-68 counterculture, the so-called alternative culture. The third chapter demonstrates how the return to subjectivity was played out in the public sphere by analyzing the journalistic concepts and practices of the first West German counter-cultural newspaper, die tageszeitung, in comparison to the establishment's journalism. The following chapters mainly use the cultural section of die tageszeitung for an in depth study of the alternative culture's aesthetic concepts and practices with special emphasis given to the West German Greens in the fifth chapter. In comparison to the student movement, the alternative culture neglects the category of class and exhibits strong inclinations towards elements of a past folk culture. A high appreciation of difference within the alternative culture precludes the development of a systematic aesthetics. The concluding chapter analyzes this lack of a systematic aesthetics by focusing on the appreciation of difference as it expresses itself in the Greens' concept of a multi-cultural society. The trajectory of the West German counterculture's development which this disseration traces can therefore be described as follows: The alternative culture of the 1970s and 1980s moves away from a prescriptive aesthetics, which the late student movement's orthodox Marxism had developed based on a rigid construct of a class-subject, and towards a reintegration of a variety of aesthetic positions based on the plurality of subject-positions and the cultural diversity of contemporary West German society.