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George Kerevan - Remembering 1968 – one of our landmark years



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LIKE fine wines, some years are destined to go down in history stamped "vintage". Such years are remembered because they mark great historical watersheds, or sum up the cultural essence of an era: 1789, 1848, 1914, 1945.
Since the Second World War, only two such dates qualify – 1968, the "year of revolutions", and 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell.

We are now marking the 40th anniversary of 1968. Curiously, of all the dates I have mentioned, 1968 produced little in...



The full article contains 917 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
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  • Last Updated: 23 April 2008 7:32 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: George Kerevan
 
1

Dr. James Wilkie,

Vienna 24/04/2008 08:54:31
I was at the Sorbonne in May 1968 and I saw the confrontation between the students and the Paris police, the hated "flics". I think I still have the photos somewhere. Years later, I met one of the rebels again, by then a pin-striped lawyer with three children, over a glass or two, and exchanged reminiscences. He was most emphatic that, if he had his time again, he would do exactly the same.

Then the Orient Express to Vienna and the Vindobona to Prague and the Prague Spring - although everybody knew that "they" would be back. And they came - 600,000 Warsaw Pact tourists snapping photos from the turrets of their tanks. Getting out of Czechoslovakia was quite a performance - in a rubber boat down the Vltava through a military closed zone, then the train over the border to Linz in Austria. At the border they even took the hubcaps off the wheels and fished around in the grease for some reason or other. I had a slight contretemps with a Mongolian gentleman with a red star on his fur cap and a peaceful Kalashnikov, and then it was on to Vienna University and a pale shadow of the Paris revolution.

The rebels may have overstated the case, but there were an awful lot of cobwebs then that the feather duster had failed to remove - for example professors doing no teaching at all, just examining and carrying out their own research. When I look at the world today, at the triumph of turbocapitalism and the disdainful rejection of political and constitutional norms that took centuries to establish, I can only pray for a return of the '68ers, for they are badly needed.


 

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