After looking at this book sit on the shelf for a long time, I picked up Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists, which tries to map how certain '68ers like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit became interventionists who could support going to Afghanistan and other wars. Berman starts out with the scandal surrounding Fischer's connections to RAF radicals in his student days, and to allegations of violent radicalism, but takes the book in other directions too. Most interesting was Berman's extended analysis of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and his examination of how once strident Marxists like Nafisi viewed the Iranian revolution and how they came to value individual freedoms above all while living under Iran's totalitarianism. Even though these '68ers didn't live through WWII, Berman is convinced that it informs their views and that their activism has crystallized and matured into a resistance of totalitarianism. Of course I write this while I'm in the middle of the book, so perhaps things will change by the last page....