The SPD’s 1959 Godesberg de-Marxification triggered the founding of competing student leagues.

Evidence

The dissatisfaction of the SPD party executive with the party’s student organization grew in proportion to the increase in the influence of these left intellectuals within the SDS. At the Extraordinary Party Conference of the SPD in Bad Godesberg in 1959, a fundamental policy programme, cleansed of every last hint of Marxism and lacking in any attempt to take account of what had happened since 1933 or in the post-war period, was passed with only sixteen votes against. In February 1960 the party executive decided that `the SPD will support other student associations in addition to the SDS, provided they accept the SPD’s Godesberg Programme.’ Three months later, there followed the founding in Bonn of the Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund (SHB), the Social Democratic University League, by an assortment of social-democratic student groupings. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2380

Categorization

• XREF: The Godesberg Programme’s expunging of Marxism is a key reference point in critical theory’s institutional history and the SDS’s radicalization. — connects to: The SPD expelled the SDS over atomic weapons, Nazi-lawyer exposures, and Godesberg criticism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2381; The SPD expelled its own critical left-wing public sphere when it banned the SDS — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2381; The SPD expelled the SDS to destroy its internal critical public sphere. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2381

Broader Connections

• The SPD expelled its own critical left-wing public sphere when it banned the SDS #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2381
• The SPD expelled the SDS to destroy its internal critical public sphere. #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2381