The meaning and legacy of the historical event “1968” have been topics of analysis since the year 1968 itself, an impulse that shows little signs of slackening. As the activist generation that supplied “sixty-eight's” original historians—first in the shadow of the barricades and later in the academy—is supplanted by younger generations of scholars working at greater remove from the events they study, the desire to understand that year remains strong. The upheaval of 1968—a cultural-political disruption that toppled no power structures, quickly disappeared, but nevertheless felt something like a revolution to its participants—seems all the more relevant in light of the global disruptions of the early twenty-first century, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. For better or worse, 1968 is a touchstone for whatever revolutionary potential may lie dormant in late capitalism.

Scholars necessarily grapple with “sixty-eight's” actual history and its mythological quality—i.e., as both event and memory. Rarely are these two elements separable in the scholarship—nor should they be. Like other mythological dates such as 1789, 1848, and 1917, 1968 is as important for what it suggests about the present and the future as for what it has to say about the past. The question of how to interpret a “revolution” that toppled no governments, and that saw many of its impulses quickly reabsorbed into the system it challenged, nevertheless remains. Strategies for dealing with this conundrum abound, many of them revolving around attempts to adduce from the events of 1968 some sort of transformation in values that survived the failure of attempts by students and countercultural radicals to foment a revolution along Marxist or Anarchist lines. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey's new edited volume falls into this category inasmuch as it posits a solution to the “revolution”/“no revolution” conundrum by arguing that whatever else it may have achieved, 1968 produced an important and long-lasting “revolution of perception.”

Although the introduction refers to 1968 as a global phenomenon, the book's essays are primarily about West Germany. Lamenting that the effects of ‘68 have been “more labeled than analysed” (6), Gilcher-Holtey identifies three reasons why, as social movements—a designation she insists on—the movements of 1968 should not be held to an either/or standard of revolutionary efficacy. Social movements, she points out, are, by their nature, fractured, contradictory, and ever-changing, spawning split-offs and successors. At the same time, because their role is to “articulate and communicate societal contradictions” (6), social movements do not necessarily realize the political transformations implicit in their critique. These factors, she argues, account for why 1968 has been, until recently, opaque to research. Pursuing the question of why, then, “social movements matter” (6), Gilcher-Holtey identifies—on the basis of schemata that will seem ponderous, no doubt, to those unused to social-theoretical approaches—“political,” “cultural,” and “biographical” fields of relevance for such movements. Corresponding to these fields, to a greater or lesser degree, the volume's essays address a central research question: “has the 1968 movement had an impact on the schemes of perception and classification, on the criteria of vision and division of the social world?” (7).

The mechanical way in which some of the essays engage with this question makes the volume's guiding framework feel slightly contrived, especially since the intention of the volume is clearly to establish that 1968 did indeed “initiate a ‘revolution of perception.’” Gilcher-Holtey nevertheless makes a strong case for why perception matters. “Perception,” she argues (following Pierre Bourdieu), matters because “the political starts where protagonists call into question dominant schemes of perception and classification,” pose against them “subversive discourses” that “redefin[e] situations and events,” and posit an “alternative concept of order” (7). Clearly, 1968 accomplished these tasks.

As is typically the case, individual contributions differ in quality and in the degree to which they adhere to the volume's overall scheme. Henning Marmulla's chapter on Hans Magnus Enzensberger's engagement with the Cuban Revolution reflects on an enduring theme in Enzensberger's work, namely, the role of the writer. Steffen Bruendel's essay on the under-researched British journals Black Dwarf and Red Mole is a welcome addition to the literature. Aribert Reimann's essay on “left wing anti-Semitism” examines the role of militant anti-Zionism in West Germany in 1968, arguing that its rise “was less an expression of the supposed long-standing traditions of anti-Semitism in left-politics than the result of a sudden shift of priorities in favor of the victims of the U.S.-led military hegemony of Western capitalism” (73). Not “anti-Semitism,” he argues, “but… an unconditional solidarity with Arab anti-Americanism” (77) was characteristic of the radicalization from 1968 onwards.

Essays by Meike Vogel and Petra Terhoeven focus on communication, the former examining the role of West German public television, the latter positing the development of a “new European counter-public” as a consequence of transnational solidarity discourse around the terrorist campaign of the Red Army Faction. Though marred by jargon, Kristina Schulz's chapter on transatlantic, second-wave feminism offers a useful discussion of the emergence of the women's movement from the activism of 1968, with attention to France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Rainer Winter's outstanding chapter traces the development and significance of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, casting it “as a successful attempt of the New Left to create its own radical counter-culture and gain a wider public audience” (152). Joachim Scharloth's essay on the linguistic-communicative aspect of the revolt rounds out the volume with a focused discussion of the revolt's discursive practices, highlighting the centrality of “discussion” to the “communicative practice” (163) of 1968.

In reinforcing the point that “attitudes, conceptions and values” must not be separated from politics, A Revolution of Perception? offers a welcome contrast to studies that focus on cultural revolution at the expense of “sixty-eight's” political claims. Understanding the period's “revolution of perception” as politics, Gilcher-Holtey's book identifies an enduring political significance in the “consequences and echoes” of 1968.