The SPD’s 1959 Godesberg programme purged Marxism and spawned a rival student league

Evidence

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, 589

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the Godesberg Programme and the SHB (Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund) as institutional markers of the SPD’s de-Marxification.
• SHARE: The detail that the programme abandoning Marxism passed with only sixteen votes against is the nerdy footnote a party-history obsessive would want.