ABSTRACT
The dominant historical narratives on 1968 regard this year as the marker that separates ‘before’ from ‘after.’ It was when the ‘old world’ — the first decades of the postwar years that were largely a continuation of prewar normatives — was renewed by means of revolving social structures. In the Western collective memory, 1968 is associated with a long-lasting victory of emancipatory discourse in the public sphere, for the Ostblock this year marked the final disillusion with the socialist utopia. In comparing the events of 1968 to the east of the Iron Curtain with those to the west, one has to acknowledge the gap between actors in the two Europes, which is especially visible in the context of the antisemitic purge in the People’s Republic of Poland and the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. Countercultural movements did spread rapidly in the West, but clearly had counterparts in the Soviet Bloc.
