WEST GERMANY-Youth in Revolt


WEST GERMANY Youth in Revolt?
Ramesh Jaura A SPECTRE is haunting West Germany: the spectre of a renewed student and youth revolt which might have more threatening dimensions than the similar protest wave which enveloped western Europe in the 1960s, For months, the campus scene in different parts of West Germany has been witnessing sporadic unrest boycotts of classes. Significantly, stit- manifest in protest demonstrations and dents from the science faculties too have been joining these protests and boycotts. Even though the issues prompting such strikes have been everywhere different, there are still three common points to all these agitations: the general fear of having to do without jobs (the unemployment figure has been hovering around the one- million mark); a return to rigid laws which would undo even the little democratisation which followed in the wake of educational reform at the end of the 1960s; and a steady dismantling of democratic freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution, under the pretext of combating enemies of the State.