There is a definite date for the clamorous and widespread beginning of the 1968 movement in Federal Germany. On 2 June 1967, during a student demonstration against the Shah of Persia Reza Pahlevi on a visit to Berlin, a gunshot, fired by a police officer, killed the student Benno Ohnesorg. The reaction to that death was enormous and conferred a powerful acceleration on the student movement that had been gradually radicalizing throughout the span of the whole decade. Since the mid 1950s there had been friction between the SPD (the Social-Democratic party) and its student organization, the SDS (Sozialistischer deutcher Studentenbund), especially with regard to questions such as armament of the Federal Republic and atomic deterrence, that had then fallen into open conflict after the moderate turning-point of the SDS at Bad Godesberg and the creation of a new Social- Democratic student organization, the SHB (Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund), which would subsequently in its turn be radicalized. The protest against nuclear armaments and obligatory conscription, the struggle against emergency legislation (the notorious Notstandsgesetze) proposed by the right-wing since 1958 and accepted by the SPD in 1966, were, together with the struggle against the authoritarianism of the scholastic institution and of the academic system, the dominant themes of the student movement in the first half of the 1960s and, at the same time, the points of rupture with Social-Democracy that was travelling towards the government of coalition with the Demo-Christian right-wing of the CDU/CSU of Kiesinger and of Strauss. Starting from the middle of the 1960s the economic miracle of the reconstruction of Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard was gradually coming to an end, until the recession of 1966/67, while the pall of the cold war, which had made it possible to close more than an eye on the Nazi past and banished, in the sign of a visceral anti-Communism, every social conflictuality, began to wear thin.  This new climate had opened the way to the entrance of Social-Democracy in the area of government, on condition of a decided renouncement of every aspiration of radical reformism and class conflict.  Towards the end of 1966 therefore the "great Coalition" with Kiesinger as chancellor and Willy Brandt as vice-chancellor was launched. It is from this moment on that, in the absence of any parliamentary opposition, a strong area of extra-parliamentary opposition begins to be established. This is the APO (ausserparlamentarische Opposition) into which student organizations, trade union franges, intellectuals and deserters from the SPD all flow.  After the 2 June 1967 the movement spreads throughout the universities and the high schools. The model of "counter-university" directly administered by the students, developed in Berlin, spreads to other universities. The solidarity with the people of Vietnam and the protest against the American war in Indochina, on the increase since the middle of the decade, become a dominant theme of the student movement and the demonstrations and protest actions are multiplied. In Berlin there is a protest against the visit of the USA Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The denouncement of the genocide in Vietnam for the young Germans is also a way for putting on trial the removal of the Nazi past and the silence of their fathers. Together with the conventionality of the post-war period and its removals, the revolt of the young people also attacks the rites and myths of consumerism, the family and social hierarchies and sexual morals and experiments with new types of relationships, such as the communes (the first is founded in Berlin in January 1967) and, later the anti-authoritarian kindergartens. The influence of the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas (with whom the movement is nevertheless animatedly argumentative, especially through its most brilliant theorist Hans Juergen Krahl) is strong, as is that of the English "New Left", of thinkers like Marcuse and Ernst Bloch, of radical psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich and heretic Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg or Pannekoek. There is no lack, moreover, of contacts with the contemporary critics of real Socialism. It is an extraordinary moment of elaboration and circulation of ideas, accompanied by the most prestigious magazine of the new left, "Kursbuch", founded by Hans Magnus Ensenzberger in 1965. The reaction of the right against the students movement is virulent. The Springer group, which controls 78% of the Berlin press and 33% of that of the whole of Germany orchestrates a frantic press campaign against the students in which they are accused of fomenting the disorders and anarchy and of acting in the service of the Soviet block.  The right considers Berlin and South Vietnam as brothers inasmuch as they are both bastions of the free world against Communism. The year 1968 opens in February with a congress and a great demonstration against the USA aggression in Vietnam, to be followed by a counter-demonstration organized by the Berlin senate, by the trade union and by the Springer group. On 3 April Andreas Baader, together with Gudrun Ensslin, Soehnlein and Proll, with anti-imperialist motivations, carry out an incendiary attack on two department stores in Frankfurt. They will be arrested the following day, but this is the beginning of the parabola of the armed struggle in the German Federal Republic, which will lead to the establishment of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion), after the escape of Baader, with the assistance of Ulrike Meinhof, in 1970.  On 11 April, just a few days before Easter, Joseph Bachman, a young painter and decorator with confused ideas of the right, fires three pistol shots at Rudi Dutschke, the most famous and charismatic exponent of the SDS. Dutschke will miraculously survive the attack, but not without sustaining serious injuries which will cause, eventually, his death on 24 December 1979. Bachman, immediately arrested and then condemned to 7 years in 1969, in spite of the defence, desired by the movement, of the most famous lawyer of the SDS Horst Mahler, will die by suicide in prison. In Berlin a revolt explodes immediately, the demonstrators clashing violently with the police and attempting to storm the offices of the Springer group. In the following days the revolt will spread to 27 other cities, targeting the offices and vans of the editor, considered responsible for the climate of hate that had inspired the attacker. The so-called "disorders of Easter" are considered the most serious since the time of the Weimar Republic. By the time they are over the wounded will be counted in hundreds and there are two deaths in Munich. In May a very vast mobilization tries to prevent the approval of the emergency legislation: a package of restrictive measures of the constitutional rights, to which the SPD has been converted for some time. But after the surrender of the trade union opposition (only the Ig Metall, the metal-workers trade union will fight to the end), the Notstandsgesetze will be approved by the parliament with the requested two thirds majority. With this defeat the decline of the SDS begins, torn apart by the fractions and by the conflict between "spontaneists" and supporters of the Leninist organization, while, on a completely different side, in September, at the congress of Frankfurt, the women of the organization contest the prevailing male chauvinism of the SDS. At the end of the year the first Communist small parties are founded, the DKP (Deutsche kommunistische Partei) and the Maoist KPD. Then it will be the turn of the Spartakusbund (youth organization of the DKP), of the Rote Zellen (the red cells), and, later, of non-dogmatic and more lasting formations such as the Sozialistisches Büro. The movement moves from the universities to the neighbourhoods, to some workers and trade union situations, to the sectors of the apprentices, while in September of 1969 even the Federal Republic is assailed by spontaneous strikes of the workers against the trade union signing of contracts. The two years of the movements concludes with the electoral victory of the SPD at the elections of 28 September, which will permit the exclusion of the CDU/CSU from the government and the creation of a Social-Liberal coalition, led by the chancellor Brandt, committed to a policy of distension but not however lacking in authoritarian and repressive traits. The SDS will be officially dissolved in March 1970. From the rebellion of 1967-69 are born, on the one hand, an "alternative" movement, orientated towards intervention within the social sphere and on the creation of its own autonomous spaces of life, destined to be to a great extent channelled, through the pacifist and anti-nuclear protest, into the environmental culture and organizations; on the other the two antithetical clandestine organizations of the RAF and of the "2 June Movement". The first, anti-imperialist and hyper-militarized, will consume its tragic course within the bloody series of attacks in the spring of 1972 and the mysterious killing in prison of Baader and his companions in October 1977. The second, of anarchical inspiration, between armed struggle and underground culture, will carry out its most spectacular action in 1974 with the kidnapping of the Democratic-Christian leader Peter Lorenz and is registered in a current destined to flow into the area of autonomy.