Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust
By Hans Kundnani (Hurst and Company, £16.99)

A traveller on the London tube, glancing up from his or her book, may read a series of short aphorisms or poems, supposedly sponsored by Transport for London and the office of the (Conservative) London mayor. At the moment one of these is a quotation from Friedrich Engels, in life a frequent visitor to the city and, in death, the co-occupier with Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Mao or Fidel, of a million revolutionary banners and posters. It reads, “an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

The book that I looked up from was Hans Kundnani’s lucid and fascinating exposition of the intellectual history of the 1968 generation of the German left, a book that shows, contrary to Engels’ assertion, that ideas can have primacy, and that—in certain circumstances—an ounce of