by Tony Judt
West German intellectuals vigorously took up this idea. Established writers, playwrights and film-makers—Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Jürgen Habermas, Rolf Hochhuth, Edgar Reitz, all born between 1927 and 1932—now focused their work increasingly upon Nazism and the failure to come to terms with it. But a younger cohort of intellectuals, born during or just after World War Two, took a harsher stance. Lacking direct knowledge of what had gone before, they saw all Germany’s faults through the prism of the failings not so much of Nazism as of the Bonn Republic. Thus for Rudi Dutschke (born in 1940), Peter Schneider (1940), Gudrun Ensslin (1940) or the slightly younger Andreas Baader (born in 1943) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945), West Germany’s post-war democracy was not the solution; it was the problem. The apolitical, consumerist, American-protected cocoon of the Bundesrepublik was not just imperfect and amnesiac; it had actively conspired with its Western masters to deny the German past, to bury it in material goods and anti-Communist propaganda. Even its constitutional attributes were inauthentic: as Fassbinder put it, ‘Our democracy was decreed for the Western occupation zone, we didn’t fight for it ourselves.’
The youthful radical intelligentsia of the German Sixties accused the Bonn Republic of covering up the crimes of its founding generation. Many of the men and women born in Germany during the war and immediate post-war years never knew their fathers: who they were, what they had done. In school they were taught nothing about German history post-1933 (and not much more about the Weimar era either). As Peter Schneider and others would later explain, they lived in a vacuum constructed over a void: even at home—indeed, especially at home—no-one would talk about ‘it’.
Their parents, the cohort of Germans born between 1910 and 1930, did not just refuse to discuss the past. Skeptical of political promises and grand ideas, their attention was relentlessly and a trifle uneasily focused on material well-being, stability and respectability. As Adenauer had understood, their identification with America and ‘the West’ derived in no small measure from a wish to avoid association with all the baggage of ‘Germanness’. As a result, in the eyes of their sons and daughters they stood for nothing. Their material achievements were tainted by their moral inheritance. If ever there was a generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their parents represented—everything: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace, stability, law and democracy—it was ‘Hitler’s children’, the West German radicals of the Sixties.
In their eyes the Federal Republic exuded self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. First there was the Spiegel Affair. In 1962 Germany’s leading weekly news magazine had published a series of articles investigating West German defense policy that hinted at shady dealings by Adenauer’s Bavarian defense minister, Franz-Josef Strauss. With Adenauer’s authorization and at Strauss’s behest, the government harassed the paper, arrested its publisher and ransacked its offices. This shameless abuse of police powers to suppress unwelcome reporting attracted universal condemnation—even the impeccably conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed that ‘this is an embarrassment to our democracy, which cannot live without a free press, without indivisible freedom of the press.’
Then, four years later in December 1966, the ruling Christian Democrats selected as Chancellor in succession to Ludwig Erhard the former Nazi Kurt-Georg Kiesinger. The new Chancellor had been a paid-up Party member for twelve years, and his appointment was taken by many as conclusive evidence of the Bonn Republic’s unrepentant cynicism. If the head of the government was not embarrassed to have supported Hitler for twelve years, who could take seriously West German professions of repentance or commitment to liberal values at a time when neo-Nazi organizations were once again surfacing at the political fringe? As Grass expressed it in an open letter to Kiesinger at a moment of neo-Nazi resurgence:
‘How are young people in our country to find arguments against the Party that died two decades ago but is being resurrected as the NPD if you burden the Chancellorship with the still very considerable weight of your own past?’
Kiesinger headed the government for three years, from 1966-1969. In those years the German Extra-Parliamentary Left (as it had taken to describing itself) moved into the universities with dramatic success. Some of the causes taken up by the SDS, the Socialist Students Union, were by now commonplace across continental Western Europe: overcrowded dormitories and classes; remote and inaccessible professors; dull and unimaginative teaching. But the burning issues of these years were peculiar to West Germany. The liveliest campus was at the Free University of Berlin (founded in 1948 to compensate for the imprisonment of the established Humboldt University campus in the Communist Zone), where many students had gone to avoid conscription.171
Anti-militarism had a special place in German student protest as a tidy way to condemn both the Federal Republic and its Nazi predecessor. With the growth of opposition to the Vietnam War this conflation between past and present extended to West Germany’s military mentor. America, always ‘fascist’ in the rhetoric of a minority of radicals, now became the enemy for a far broader constituency. Indeed, attacking ‘Amerika’ (sic) for its criminal war in Vietnam served almost as a surrogate for discussion of Germany’s own war crimes. In Peter Weiss’s 1968 play Vietnam-Discourse the parallel between the United States and the Nazis is explicitly drawn.
If America was no better than the Hitler regime—if, in a slogan of the time, US=SS—then it was but a short step to treating Germany itself as Vietnam: both countries were divided by foreign occupiers, both were helplessly caught up in other people’s conflicts. This way of talking allowed West German radicals to despise the Bonn Republic both for its present imperialist-capitalist associations and for its past fascist ones. More ominously, it authorized the radical Left to recycle the claim that it was Germans themselves who were the true victims—an assertion hitherto identified with the far Right.172
We should not, then, be surprised to learn that for all their anger at the ‘Auschwitz generation’, young Germans of the Sixties were not really much concerned with the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, like their parents, they were uncomfortable with the ‘Jewish Question’. They preferred to subsume it in academic demands for classes on ‘Faschismustheorie’, obscuring the racist dimension of Nazism and emphasizing instead its links to capitalist production and imperial power—and thence forward to Washington and Bonn. The truly ‘repressive state apparatus’ was the imperial lackeys in Bonn; their victims were those who opposed America’s war in Vietnam. In this peculiar logic the populist, down-market tabloid Bild Zeitung, with its withering criticisms of student politics, was a revived Der Stürmer; students were the new ‘Jews’; and Nazi concentration camps were just a serviceable metaphor for the crimes of imperialism. In the words of a slogan graffitoed across the walls of Dachau in 1966 by a group of radicals: ‘Vietnam is the Auschwitz of America’.
The German extra-parliamentary Left thus lost touch with its roots in the anti-Nazi mainstream. Furious with Willy Brandt’s Social Democratic Party for entering a governing coalition with Kiesinger, the erstwhile Social Democratic student organizations moved rapidly to the fringes. More ostentatiously anti-Western than Sixties movements elsewhere in Europe, their constituent sects adopted deliberately third world names: Maoists, of course, but also ‘Indians’, ‘Mescaleros’ and the like. This anti-Western emphasis in turn nourished a counter-culture that was self-consciously exotic and more than a little bizarre, even by the standards of the time.
One distinctively German variant of Sixties cultural confusion saw sex and politics more closely entangled than elsewhere. Following Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and other twentieth-century German theorists of sexual and political repression, radical circles in Germany ( and Austria, or at least Vienna) sung the praises of nudity, free love and anti-authoritarian childrearing. Hitler’s much advertised sexual neuroses were freely adduced to account for Nazism. And once again, a bizarre, chilling analogy was
drawn in certain quarters between Hitler’s Jewish victims and the youth of the 1960s, martyrs to the sexually repressive regime of their parents.
‘Kommune 1’, a Maoist micro-sect that aggressively promoted sexual promiscuity - as-liberation, circulated a self-portrait in 1966: seven nude young men and women splayed against a wall—‘Naked Maoists Before a Naked Wall’ as the caption read when the photo ran in Der Spiegel in June 1967. The emphasis on nudity was explicitly designed to recall pictures of helpless, naked concentration camp bodies. Look, it said: first came Hitler’s victims, now the rebelliously unclothed bodies of Maoist revolutionaries. If Germans can look at the truth about our bodies, they will be able to face other truths as well.
The ‘message’—that adolescent promiscuity would force the older generation to be open about sex, and thence about Hitler and everything else—provoked SDS leader Rudi Dutschke (in such matters a conventional Left moralist of the older sort) to condemn the ‘Kommunards’ as ‘neurotics’. As no doubt they were. But their aggressively anachronistic narcissism, casually conflating mass murder and sexual exhibitionism in order to titillate and shock the bourgeoisie, was not without consequences: one member of ‘Kommune 1’, who proudly declared his orgasm to be of greater revolutionary consequence than Vietnam, would resurface in the 1970s in a guerrilla training camp in the Middle East. The path from self-indulgence to violence was even shorter in Germany than elsewhere.
In June 1967, at a Berlin demonstration against the Shah of Iran, police shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg, a student. Dutschke declared Ohnesorg’s death a ‘political murder’ and called for a mass response; within days, 100,000 students demonstrated across West Germany. Jürgen Habermas, hitherto a prominent critic of the Bonn authorities, warned Dutschke and his friends a few days later of the risk of playing with fire. ‘Left Fascism’, he reminded the SDS leader, is as lethal as the right-wing kind. Those who talked loosely of the ‘hidden violence’ and ‘repressive tolerance’ of the peaceful Bonn regime—and who set out deliberately to provoke the authorities into repression by voluntaristic acts of real violence—did not know what they were doing.
In March of the following year, as radical student leaders called repeatedly for confrontation with the Bonn ‘regime’ and the government threatened to retaliate against violent provocation in West Berlin and elsewhere, Habermas—joined by Grass, Walser, Enzensberger and Hochhuth—again appealed for democratic reason to prevail, calling upon students and government alike to respect republican legality. The following month Dutschke himself would pay the price of the violent polarization he had encouraged, when he was shot in Berlin by a neo-Nazi sympathizer, on April 11th 1968. In the angry weeks that followed, two people were killed and four hundred wounded in Berlin alone. The Kiesinger government passed Emergency Laws (by 384 votes to 100, with backing from many Social Democrats) authorizing Bonn to rule by decree if necessary—and arousing widespread fear that the Bonn Republic was on the verge of collapse, like Weimar just thirty-five years earlier.
The increasingly violent fringe sects of German student politics—K-Gruppen, the Autonome, the sharp end of the SDS—were all ostensibly ‘Marxist’, usually Marxist-Leninist (i.e., Maoist). Many of them were quietly financed from East Germany or Moscow, though this was not common knowledge at the time. Indeed, in Germany as elsewhere, the New Left kept its distance from official Communism—which in West Germany was in any case a political irrelevance. But like much of the West German Left (and not only the Left), the radicals had an ambiguous relationship with the German Democratic Republic to their East.
Quite a few of them had been born in what was now East Germany, or else in other lands to the east from which their ethnic German families had been expelled: East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Perhaps not surprisingly, their parents’ nostalgia for a lost German past was unconsciously echoed in their own dreams of an alternative, better Germany to the East. East Germany, despite (because of?) its repressive, censorious authoritarianism, had a special attraction for hard-core young radicals: it was everything Bonn was not and it did not pretend otherwise.
Thus the radicals’ hatred for the ‘hypocrisies’ of the Federal Republic made them uniquely susceptible to the claims of East Germany’s Communists to have faced up to German history and purged their Germany of its fascist past. Moreover, the anti-Communism that bound West Germany into the Atlantic Alliance and that constituted its core political doctrine was itself a target for the New Left, particularly in the years of the Vietnam War, and helps account for their anti-anti-Communism. Emphasis upon the crimes of Communism was just a diversion from the crimes of capitalism. Communists, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit had expressed it in Paris, might be ‘Stalinist scoundrels’; but liberal democrats were no better.
Thus the German Left turned a deaf ear to rumblings of discontent in Warsaw or Prague. The face of the Sixties in West Germany, as in Western Europe at large, was turned resolutely inwards. The cultural revolution of the era was remarkably parochial: if Western youth looked beyond their borders at all, it was to exotic lands whose image floated free of the irritating constraints of familiarity or information. Of alien cultures closer to home, the Western Sixties knew little. When Rudi Dutschke paid a fraternal visit to Prague, at the height of the Czech reform movement in the spring of 1968, local students were taken aback at his insistence that pluralist democracy was the real enemy. For them, it was the goal.
XIII
The End of the Affair
‘Revolution is the act of an enormous majority of society directed against
the rule of a minority. It is accompanied by a crisis of political power and
by a weakening of the apparatus of coercion. That is why it does not have
to be carried out by force of arms’.
Jacek Kuroń and Karel Modzelewski, Open Letter to the Party (March 1965)
‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism-
Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate
from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party’.
Leonid Brezhnev (August 3rd 1968)
‘It was only after the Prague Spring of 1968 that one began to see who was
who’.
Zdeněk Mlynář
‘Yesterday came suddenly’.
Paul McCartney
The Sixties in the Soviet bloc were of necessity experienced very differently from the West. De-Stalinization after 1956 stimulated demands for change much as decolonization and the Suez débâcle did in the West, but the destruction of the Hungarian revolt made it clear from the outset that reforms would come only under the auspices of the Party. This in turn served as a reminder that the mainspring of Communism was the authority of Moscow; it was the mood and policies of the Soviet leadership that counted. Until his overthrow in 1964, it was Nikita Khrushchev who determined the history of Europe’s eastern half.
Khrushchev’s generation of Soviet leaders still believed in the international class struggle. Indeed, it was Khrushchev’s romanticized projection of Soviet revolutionary memories onto Latin American uprisings that led him to make the missteps that produced the Cuba crisis of 1962 and his own downfall. The struggle with China that emerged into the open in 1960, and afforded Moscow’s leftist critics a ‘Maoist’ alternative to the Soviet model, was not merely a struggle for geopolitical primacy; it was also in part a genuine conflict for the soul of ‘world revolution’. In this guise, the competition with Beijing placed Moscow’s post-Stalinist rulers in a contradictory position. As the homeland of anti-capitalist revolution they continued to advertise their seditious ambitions and insist upon the undiminished authority of the Party, in the USSR and in its satellites. On the other hand the Kremlin continued to favour co-existence with the Western powers—and with its own citizens.
The Khrushchev years did see real improvements. From 1959, Stalin’s ‘Short Course’ was no longer the authoritative source of Soviet history and Marxist theo
ry. 173 The reign of terror abated, though not the institutions and practices to which it had given rise: the Gulag was still in place, and tens of thousands of political prisoners still languished in camps and in exile—half of them Ukrainians. Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a national pension scheme (extended to collective farmers after 1965). In short, the Soviet Union—and its more advanced satellite states—became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.
However, Khrushchev’s more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964). The cultivation of hitherto ‘virgin’ lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds. In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops. There were food riots in provincial cities (notably in Novocherkassk in June 1962). By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.
At the same time, the private micro-farms that Khrushchev had sporadically encouraged were almost embarrassingly successful: by the early sixties, the 3 percent of cultivated soil in private hands was yielding over a third of the Soviet Union’s agricultural output. By 1965, two thirds of the potatoes consumed in the USSR and three quarters of the eggs came from private farmers. In the Soviet Union as in Poland or Hungary, ‘Socialism’ depended for its survival upon the illicit ‘capitalist’ economy within, to whose existence it turned a blind eye.174