Die Rosa-Lux SH lädt ein zum Vortrag mit dem Historiker und Publizisten Christoph Jünke

In the organizer's words:

The "1956s" and their forgotten revolt. A look back at Viktor Agartz, Leo Kofler and the birth of the "New Left"

For Wolfgang Abendroth, Viktor Agartz (1897-1964) was the best economic mind that West German workers had at their disposal in the post-war period. Others saw him as the Leon Trotsky of the West German trade union movement or compared him sometimes with Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes with Oskar Lafontaine. Above all, however, he was one of the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany and, as both a trade union and social democratic pioneer of the 1940s and 1950s, the most important programmer of a socio-political reorganization concept widely propagated at the time as a "new economic democracy". In 1955, however, he was overthrown by his own comrades and ousted from the social democratic trade union movement.

Leo Kofler (1907-1995), on the other hand, was one of the outstanding figures of German post-war Marxism. In his almost forty books and brochures, he produced an extensive body of work that applied his neo-Marxism to areas as diverse as the theory and history of early and late bourgeois society, to questions of Marxist anthropology and aesthetics and to the political theory and practice of the socialist left itself.

What these two political intellectuals and activists have in common is their shared role as protagonists of a new left-wing opposition movement, which entered historiography in the second half of the 1950s as the first generation of a "New Left", as it were, and had to give way to a "second generation", the young intellectuals of the Socialist German Student Association (SDS), in the first half of the 1960s. In his lecture, historian and journalist Christoph Jünke recalls this revolt of the "1956ers" and, against this backdrop, explains what Agartz and Kofler stood for and why it is still worth taking a closer look at their work today.

The historian and journalist Christoph Jünke is the author of several works on German history and the theory and history of socialism. In September, Karl Dietz-Verlag in Berlin published a new collection of Leo Kofler texts (Interventionen. Kleine Schriften zur marxistischen Theorie und Praxis) and in November, the same publisher published a biographical miniature Viktor Agartz oder: Ein Leben für und wider die Wirtschaftsdemokratie.