Rearmament and the peace movement, economic crisis and unemployment, census and surveillance state, AIDS and the end of sexual freedom, dying forests and dead rivers, Chernobyl and Wackersdorf, immigration and xenophobia, left-wing and right-wing extremist terrorism, shoulder pads and perms, squatters, drug deaths. The 1980s were by no means a boring "waiting period" between the end of the social-liberal reform era and the revolutions of 1989/90, but an experimental field for pluralism and individualism, for critical consciousness, protest and distinction, which massively transformed West German society and its law.