Consumption and Violence

The history of West German counterculture, the radical Left and the ‘new social movements’ have been thoroughly analysed in the last decades. In his book, Alexander Sedlmaier finds an intriguing and original approach to this topic by looking at it from the double perspective of the history of consumption and the history of violence. The book can be seen in the context of other recent publications, for example by Detlev Siegfried and Sven Reichardt, who have also emphasized the political dimension of consumption for the counterculture from the 1960s to the 1980s. In principle, this idea is not completely new. It has often been noted that one of the key incidents of the prehistory of the Red Army Faction (RAF) was the arson attack on two department stores in Frankfurt in 1968. But Sedlmaier is the first to take this hint seriously and to systematically analyse the connections between critiques of consumption and political violence in the radical Left of the Federal Republic. He argues that this connection was not coincidental and demonstrates how critiques of the consumer society and discourses and practices of violence were often inextricably intertwined.

Arson · Cold war · Consumption (sociology) · CONTEST · Context (archaeology) · Counterculture · Criminology · German · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law

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