ABSTRACT
By the middle of the 1970s any excitement associated either with the student movement or the Social Democratic Party electoral victories had more or less disappeared. Writers were generally on the defensive on a variety of issues which they perceived as threats arising from the new spirit of retrenchment. The attack on alleged sympathisers took off following the murder of the Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback in April 1977, particularly after the appearance of an obituary written by a Gottingen student who signed himself Mescalero. Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt was a very different personality, at least in his public persona, the private man being anything but a Philistine. The major difference between Brandt and Schmidt was that Schmidt’s conception of his political role lacked the moral dimension many writers had so much approved of in the case of his predecessor.
