Klaus P. Fischer

Review by: Albert S. Lindemann
Source: Shofar, Vol. 18, No. 2 (WINTER 2000), pp. 132-134
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42943037

There is good news and bad news. Fischer is an ambitious scholar. He grapples with a wide range of difficult issues and intrepidly negotiates many emotional minefields. He stakes out his interpretive positions and argues them unflinchingly. He has read widely. Most important, he gives evidence of being a scrupulously honest and morally sensitive person, a man who has struggled to prevent his own passionate convictions, his dismay over his subject matter, from skewing his presentation. To an important degree, the bad news has to do with style and a lack of careful editing. Fischer can be wooden; his efforts to brighten his prose with slangy or journalistic expressions often hit a false note: Goebbels was a "spin doctor," book burning was an example of "political correctness," and Hitler was "a kind of armchair sociobiologist." There are a fair number of factual errors (charitably many can be attributed to inadequate proofreading): 1 789 is given as the date of the emancipation of the Jews in France (it was 1791) and Tsar Alexander III is confused with Alexander II. Most of these have to do with the history of other countries, but a few glaring errors also mar Fischer's treatment of German history: Rathenau's assassination is given as occurring in 1 920 (it was 1 922) and H. S. Chamberlain is described as supporting Nazis "into the thirties" (he died in 1927).… (mehr)

America in White, Black, and Gray: a History of the Stormy 1960s. Klaus Fischer. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Reviewed by Elwood Miller

Klaus Fischer speaks from a perspective he names the “silent generation,” that generation born shortly before and during World War II, which, according to him, was drowned out by the baby boomers. Born and educated in Germany and raised by his grandparents, where he witnessed firsthand the difficulties of growing up in war shattered Europe, he tells us he was taught to be disciplined and to respect authority. Having relocated to Arizona in 1959 from his stern German upbringing while he was still in high school, Mr. Fischer tells us, gave him a unique vantage point from which to witness and assess the events which shaped the 1960s in the United States. Mr. Fischer relates how he found students’ cries of oppression during the 1960s hard to understand. He viewed these protestors as shallow and narcissistic, mounting their protests from the security of well financed middle-class backgrounds while disrupting his education. They were, unlike him, students who “never frequented the library.”

Mr. Fischer states that the university as an institution, like most other institutions in America, has been radically transformed and, in his opinion, seriously undermined by the events of the 1960s. Having witnessed these events firsthand and having not been a “camp follower” at the time, Mr. Fischer claims to not be a camp follower of historians who, according to him, have viewed the 1960s with either radical or conservative lenses. It is this unique positioning as cultural outsider witnessing events firsthand, Mr. Fischer believes, which allows him balanced insights which other historians who have more vested interests fail to bring to the 1960s.

Contrasting the decade of the 1950s to the America we now inhabit, Mr. Fischer points to erosion of discipline in schools, the quality of education, and the breaking up of America into distinct and antagonistic ethnic groups who see themselves victimized by white racism and in need of permanent therapy and financial assistance. “Who would have thought it possible in the 1950 that a largely white cultural or educational establishment could engage in periodic bouts of collective self-loathing?,” asks Mr. Fischer. Pointing to the social acceptability of contraception, pre-marital sex, less censorship, interracial marriage, abortion, and gay pride as things some would name as positive gains, Mr. Fischer states they must be measured against their costs: sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, the breakdown of the traditional family, and the harm done to children.

Mr. Fischer does acknowledge that there existed inconsistencies in the America of the 1950s which remained mostly hidden from middle-class view such as racial inequity, poverty, bigotry, and conformity. Mr. Fischer believes the 1960s protest movements, beginning with the civil rights movement and proceeding through the Vietnam War protests, the new left, and the counter-culture movement held promise that remains unfulfilled for various reasons. The youthful idealists, according to Mr. Fischer, knew what they did not want more than they knew what they did want. Their protests awakened the Romantic sensibility of western culture and succeeded in questioning technocratic society with its overemphasis on materialism. But, being part of that system, they could not escape its weight and subverted by consumerism which marketed the revolution back to the would-be revolutionaries thereby subverting the revolution.

This is Mr. Fischer’s most powerful critique of the 1960s and the decades which followed. Unfortunately, he tends to get bogged down in conservative critiques such as blaming everything from skyrocketing divorce rates, the breakup of the family, and increased poverty on Rock and Roll music. Neither is Mr. Fischer a fan of multi-culturism, suggesting that it is leading to an America with no common center, no central set of values. He suggests that sixties era protests turned us into a society of victims demanding instant compensation which twists the constitution into and egalitarian rather than a libertarian document. Although Mr. Fischer does offer some astute analysis and critique, as mentioned earlier, he is not as unbiased as he believes, which only succeeds in diminishing much of the insightful analysis he brings to his subject.… (mehr)