The Greening of Cold War Germany
12th RCC Lecture at ZUG Wien
21.03.2019 18:15 – 20:00
Speaker: Timothy Brown (Northeastern University, USA)
Location: Universität für Bodenkultur Wien, Schottenfeldgasse 29, 1070 Wien
Situating the development of environmental politics in East and West Germany as part of a transnational and global movement, Brown traces a sea change in the nature of leftist politics in the 1970s and 1980s. In this moment of transition, older notions of revolution rooted in Marxist internationalism gave way to a new holistic vision of humankind’s relationship to nature. Linking the emergence of Green politics to the participatory-democracy impulses of 1968, the study charts how 1968’s antiauthoritarianism merged with anti-hierarchical impulses from second-wave feminism, holistic New Age spirituality, and influences from systems trends in fields like ecology, biology, and physics.