The 1960s in West German are commonly seen as the decade of cultural awakening, political progress, and social dynamism, indeed as the breakthrough to reform and innovation after the stifling conservatism and stagnation of the 1950s. In fact, most West Germans experienced the time as one of deep crisis. Historical accounts of the period that concentrate on the socioeconomic indicators of material progress and declare it to be the way station to the “social-liberal era” of the 1970s miss the point that the consciousness of contemporaries ran in the opposite direction. The historian Lutz Niethammer is on target in his categorization of the 1960s as the Federal Republic's first “orientation crisis.” He does not say why this change in political discourse and consciousness occurred, but there are good reasons to think that it has much to do with that society's first major generational shift. If the democracy was open to redefinition, it was because in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the forty-fivers were between thirty and forty years of age and were entering the key institutions of cultural transmission, namely, the universities and the media. In the case of the independent writers, they published their first well-known works: Martin Walser his Ehen in Philippsburg in 1957, Günter Grass his Blechtrommel in 1959, and Rolf Hochhut Der Stellvertreter in 1963. Virtually all forty-fivers, irrespective of their varying political commitments, rejected the pragmatic “chancellor-democracy” of Konrad Adenauer. What would replace it?