The events of 1968 were, on the one hand, a result of transformations under way in the societies of the time, while, on the other hand, they contributed to their further transformation. Some researchers treat them as one of the ‘revolutions’, a date of symbolic importance for world history. They can be looked at from the perspective of the societies of the divided Europe; while the character of the events in the two parts was not identical, this does not mean that they had no common features. In Eastern Europe, in 1968, a crisis of the communist power had manifested itself yet again. In Western Europe, criticism of the political and social system was voiced, moral transformations were occurring, and traditional systems of values and morality were being rejected. A factor common to both the events in the East and in the West, as widely understood, as well as in some developing countries, were the generational changes, the coming to adulthood of people born after the Second World War. 1968 was perceived in terms of factors helping modernisation and providing a new course for social and political life. In the FRG, it brought also a new wave of accounting with the national socialist part.
The meaning of the events of 1968 may be observed in both the short-term and the long-term perspective. This also pertains to their influence on Polish-German relations. In the short-term perspective, the European and Polish events of 1968 had an impact on West Germany’s approach to the normalisation of relations with the countries of the Eastern bloc and on the reception of the German Ostpolitik in Poland, as well as on the then authorities’ field of manoeuvre. The results of the events of 1968 included the issues related to the Poles’ and the Germans’ mutual perception. The new generation, that of 1968, which, in due time, began performing an ever greater role in the cultural, social and political life of the FRG and Poland and in their media, also contributed new forms of perceiving reality and, not infrequently, different sets of values to all these fields.