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Philipp Gassert, Bewegte Gesellschaft. Deutsche Protestgeschichte seit 1945, Stuttgart (W. Kohlhammer) 2018, 308 S., ISBN 978-3-17-029270-3, EUR 25,00., Francia-Recensio, 2020/3

This article studies the mass protests that took place all around the globe in 2011 in order to reconsider scholars’ conclusions about the nature of protest since the 1970s. It challenges accounts that describe recent protest movements as overly self-referential by focusing on the protest tactic of occupation, perhaps the 2011 protests’ most self-evident commonality. The article shows how the tactic of occupation allows broad coalitions to develop around specific demands, and also the ways that disparate occupation protests are linked together across space, particularly in the imagination of their protagonists. As a result, it shows how occupations can serve as the basis for a new collective politics in an era when mass parties appear to be in decline. Using the 1975 occupation of the nuclear reactor construction site near the West German village of Wyhl as a model, the article looks closely at how occupations develop, the problems their diverse protagonists confront as they seek to work together, and their potential to help activists imagine alternative worlds. This case study reveals the importance of the “infrastructure of re-creation” that protesters build-up on occupied sites for coalition-building, for the broadening of protesters’ demands, and also for the expansion of activists’ sense of the possible. Paradoxically, I argue, it is precisely their fragmented nature that makes occupations so difficult to define, so open to people from different backgrounds, and thus so significant for the social totality., Moving the Social, Vol 56 (2016): Essays on Social History and the History of Social Movements

The final third of the twentieth century has been described by the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers as an ‘age of fracture’, when the means of talking about the ‘aggregate aspects of human life’ changed dramatically. Similarly, Tony Judt argues in his magnum opus Postwar, old political constituencies based on ‘elective affinities of large groups of voters’ gave way to interest in specific policies by much smaller, more closely defined groups in the 1970s. So it is fitting that two new books on the debate over nuclear technology, which became a seminal subject within West German politics during the late 1970s and early 1980s, approach the issue from the perspectives of particular confessional and professional organizations, and thus contribute to our understanding of the way politics functioned in a disaggregated society.