The Communist destruction of East Germany of the medieval Leipzig University Church in May 1968 was an act of "cultural barbarism" by the Germanists and beyond. Although the crackdown on the Prague Spring was only a few weeks away, the deliberate destruction of this monument in a central location, symbolically called Karl Marx, represents a fundamental turning point in the relationship between the communist authorities and the people they claim to serve.

As the largest public protest in the history of East Germany between the revolution of 1953 and 1989, this local shock shows the inner workings of the "dictatorship" system and reveals the ambiguities between the state and the citizens, which included both calm. Open resistance, passive and active cooperation.

Through deep analysis of unexploited journals and archives (including once-classified government documents, Stasi, police records, and private large-scale protest messages), it offers a wide range of characters that helped make the unimaginable possible, A few ordinary citizens from all walks of life who dared in the name of culture, humanity and civil dignity to protest what they saw as an unbelievable tragedy. In this city, which later began the October 1989 revolution that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from all over the social background were hoping to persuade their leaders to retreat from the brink.

But as the dust faded in 1968, they saw with all their meaningless voices that disarmament, demobilization and reintegration was an abnormal democracy full of utopian rhetoric that had nothing to do with their daily lives. If communism died in Prague in 1968, he had already died in Leipzig only weeks ago, with repercussions still trailing the current memory policy..