Preface

Laura Bieger and Christian Lammert

It is hard to think of a decade in U.S. history that conjures up a more vivid iconography than the Sixites-decade of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, of charismatic leaders and their assassinations, of Woodstock and the Summer of Love. If the objective of this book is essentially historical it aims to bring out the mixed, ambivalent legacy of the Sixties. And yet there is an unease with the kind of periodizing that we perform by using a decade as our designation. Hayden White contemplates this problem in his contribution to this volume, suggesting that, despite all pitfalls of historiographic reasoning, the sheer number of youths and their condition of adolescence can be regarded as the substance of the Sixties from which we can begin to speculate about their meaning. Drawing from this substance, life in the U.S. became thoroughly politicized as unprecedented numbers of people involved themselves in debates over the meaning of 'America,' thus generating a spirit of possible change and laying the foundations of the liberal consensus against which a conservative revolution would cast itself with a vengeance in the decades to come-with the effect of dividing U.S. society in deep and troubling ways. Two essays of this volume, the ones by Andrew Gross and Casey Shoop, trace the rise of the New Right from within the Sixties' social texture, arguing that this often underrated correlation is among the most pertinent legacies of the period-one that asks us to rethink not only our understanding of Cold War conservatism but also of postmodernism's intricate relation to it.

If the notion of 'revisiting' implies a departure from the present, in our particular case this present is marked by the severe crisis into which U.S. society has fallen since the banking and the housing crisis of 2008/09 at the very latest. An earlier volume of this series, American Dream? Eine Weltmacht in der Krise (2011), was dedicated to exploring this contemporary crisis in its economic, political, social, and cultural ramifications. Two years later this troubled state prevails, suggesting that it may very well be, as the volume's editors Winfried Fluck and Andreas Etges suggested, a systemic crisis rather than one of those periodical phases of 'creative destruction' that modern societies, according to some of their theoreticians, regularly undergo. Assessing the Sixties against the backdrop of this crisis unmistakably informs the essays of this volume. A first wave of scholarship, emerging in the conservative climate of the Reagan presidency, thought of the Sixties as "a name given to a disruption of the late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony, to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, of the end of history" (Sayers et al. 1984, 2). These early Sixties scholars embraced the implied promise of renewal "without apology" (this was the subtitle of the first major anthology The 60s, published by the editors of the leftist journal Social Text). Later accounts have significantly changed in outlook and in tone.

What the current crisis has added to this scholarly disenchantment is twofold. It has generated a widely shared sense of an imperative need for social activism to counter current problems that takes us back to earlier models-and thus to the Sixties' unapologetic spirit of rupture and renewal; and it has made scholars ever more cautious with regard to the ways in which these models are entangled-for example, with the rise of New Right conservatism and of neo-liberalism. In doing so, the current crisis has closed, at least in this volume, the 'generational gap' that Rick Perlstein has detected in Sixties scholarship: between the period's veterans and non-veterans in the sense that the former are inclined to mythologize and exceptionalize its meaning while the later contest and revise th