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The chapter analyses the politics of memory around the ’68 movement in Germany, a phase of intense mobilizations that still constitutes a controversial issue in German public discourse. Bringing together social movement and memory studies, the chapter explores in how far activists of a recent left movement – the German anti-austerity movement Block – share a counter-memory of this contentious past. For this purpose, the chapter compares public and activists’ memories of ’68 based on media analysis and interviews with Blockupy activists. The analysis shows that Blockupy activists only partially share a counter-memory of ’68 as their memories are similar to public memories in several respects with the exception of their emphasis on ’68’s thematic legacy of anti-fascism and internationalism.

Protest events provide information about social and political conflicts, the state of social cohesion and democratic conflict management, as well as the state of civil society in general. Social scientists are therefore interested in the systematic observation of protest events. With this paper, we release the first German language resource of protest event related article excerpts published in local news outlets. We use this dataset to train and evaluate transformer-based text classifiers to automatically detect relevant newspaper articles. Our best approach reaches a binary F1-score of 93.3 %, which is a promising result for our goal to support political science research. However, in a second experiment, we show that our model does not generalize equally well when applied to data from time periods and localities other than our training sample. To make protest event detection more robust, we test two ways of alternative article preprocessing. First, we find that letting the classifier concentrate on sentences around protest keywords only slightly improves the performance for in-sample data. For out-of-sample data, in contrast, binary F1-scores improve up to +4 percentage points (pp). Second, against our initial intuition, masking of named entities during preprocessing does not improve the generalization of protest event detection models in terms of F1-scores. However, it leads to a significantly improved recall of the models.

This paper analyses the socio-demographic attributes and political attitudes of protesters in Germany. In doing so, the paper studies participation at demonstrations, one of the key forms of non-electoral political participation in Germany and a central political arena in which to negotiate political and cultural conflicts. Methodologically, we draw on original data from nine protest surveys collected between 2003 and 2020. The demonstrations under scrutiny address a wide variety of issues such as peace, climate change, global justice, immigration, international trade and social policy. Analysing protesters' profiles, we focus on differences both within and across demonstrations. We show that demonstrators' socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics diverge considerably across the surveyed demonstrations. In particular, we identify two clusters of demonstrations, differing most prominently regarding participants' political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and perceptions of self-efficacy - the 'disenchanted critics' and the 'confident critics'. Based on a regression analysis across all nine demonstrations, we further show that the distinction of these two demonstration clusters is not the result of the presence or absence of certain groups of demonstrators.

Das Working Paper präsentiert Ergebnisse einer Organisationsbefragung zur Auswirkung der COVID-19 Pandemie auf Vereine und Initiati- ven in Deutschland. Die Studie zeigt, dass die Zi-vilgesellschaft mit großer Wucht getroffen wurde. Viele Organisationen mussten ihre Akti-vitäten einschränken oder ganz einstellen. Den-noch zeigen die Ergebnisse ebenfalls, dass sich bestimmte Organisationsformen besser anpas-sen und ihre Handlungsfähigkeit aufrechterhal-ten konnten. Dies könnte nachhaltige Auswir-kungen auf die Struktur der post-pandemischen Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland haben. The working paper presents findings of an or-ganizational survey on the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on associations and initia-taives in Germany. The study documents wide-spread and profound negative consequences for civil society organizations. Yet, the data also shows that certain organizational forms have been more likely to adapt and continue their ac-tivities. This could have lasting consequences for the structure of post-pandemic civil society in Germany.

This chapter reconceptualises memory construction in the context of social media activism as connective memory work. A form of connective action, connective memory work invites digitally networked individuals to affectively associate with a movement and contribute to its collective identity. This is illustrated by a case study of the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brown, set up a day after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Four types of connective memory work are discerned: networked commemoration, iconic resurrection and appropriation, digital archiving and curation, and crowd reconstruction. The chapter concludes by arguing that connective memory work is the result of both human and ‘non-human’ agency. Studies of memory construction vis-a-vis social movements should therefore take social media seriously as actors in these processes.

In den zahlreichen Beiträgen zum "Jubeljahr der 1968er-Bewegung" kommen oft ehemalige Aktive, Historikerinnen und Experten zu Wort. Doch wie blicken eigentlich Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten des 21. Jahrhunderts auf diese Zeit zurück? Dieser Frage hat sich ein zweijähriges Forschungsprojekt am Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Goethe-Universität gewidmet.