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‘Spiel Appeal’ offers a cultural reading of one important element of the youth consciousness which underpinned events in West Germany between 1967 and 1969 and which shaped the legacy of those years: drug consumption. Drugs were part and parcel of a new vision of leftism, primarily among the nation’s young adults, that helped enable West Germany’s 1968. Sixty-eighters did not use recreational drugs as a simple form of juvenile protest or as a pure escape, nor was drug use a regrettable excess, as some rueful sixty-eighters later argued. In the individual life stories of sixty-eighters, as reflected in both autobiographies and novels, the drugs’ primary roles were as facilitators of community and ‘awakening’. They were essential elements of the playful leftist counterculture which youth and leftists invented concretely throughout Germany at the onset of the 1970s in the form of urban sub-cultures and alternative ‘scenes’, the invention of which constitutes one of the most important social legacies of 1968. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]