In the hot summer of 1967, the student Ullrich is struggling to finish a dissertation on Hölderlin he needs to submit to complete his German degree at Munich University. The professor transparently doesn't like him and there are so many distractions on offer to take him out of his sweltering attic room in Schwabing, especially girls, bathing-lakes, and beer-gardens. And then the news comes through that a student called Benno Ohnesorg has been shot by a policeman during a demo against the Shah's visit to Berlin, and Ullrich finds himself caught up in a wonderful new world of leaflets, leather jackets, sheepskin waistcoats, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," communes, sit-ins, pot-smoking and more girls. Hölderlin is set aside for good, and Ullrich moves to Hamburg in time to get involved in the anti-Springer protests that followed the shooting of Rudi Dutschke.

This was obviously written from direct personal experience and before the dust had settled, and it's a very vivid evocation of the excitement of those times, and the width of the generation gap that was opening between the students and their parents. He has a lot of fun showing us what the parents' middle-class lifestyle looks like from the perspective of a young person home for a couple of days (oh, that German furniture of the sixties!). He also enjoys mocking the pomposity and incomprehension of the university authorities.

But it's not an uncritical account: Timm clearly feels that the students were dissipating a lot of their revolutionary energy in undirected and often pointless actions. With their comfortable middle-class families behind them to pick up the pieces, most have only a limited stake in the revolution (he couldn't know then how many 68-ers would turn into ultra-respectable establishment figures later, but he seems to have had at least an inkling). He deliberately contrasts the studdents' situation with that of people a generation earlier facing Nazi terror, or with that of industrial workers for whom a strike means a real sacrifice for their families.

As you might expect from a novel of the time, Timm's ideas about gender are not quite up to modern scrutiny, although he does make a couple of gestures in the right direction, as when he describes the needless unpleasantness involved in procuring an abortion when one of Ullrich's girlfriends becomes pregnant, or when he has Ullrich notice the way the crowd at a demo stops listening when a male speaker is followed by a woman at the microphone. But apart from that, young women come and go in the plot almost unnoticed, and they rarely get to talk about politics or whatever they are studying.