The German society of the Adenauer era feared nothing more than experiments and a return to Weimar conditions. To be heard, the student movement of the 1968 era had to address these very fears, through an anti-bourgeois radicalism whose origins interestingly can be traced back to figures such as Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Albrecht Behmel deconstructs the myth of 1968 by exploring the origins and development of the symbols and role models that the '68ers followed. This creates a contrasting image of an era that can also be understood as a character study of the Germans. If one views the student movement not as a beginning but as a culmination of a nearly hundred-year hysterical phase in German history, many contradictions can be explained.