1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Indeed, in 1950 West Germany, with U.S. and Allied approval, declared an amnesty for low-level Nazis. In East Germany, 85 percent of judges, prosecutors, and lawyers were disbarred for Nazi pasts, and most of these resumed their legal profession in West Germany by qualifying for the amnesty. In East Germany, schools, railroads, and post offices had been purged of Nazis. These Germans also were able to continue their careers in West Germany.

  To many in both the east and west it was the Globke affair that crystallized how things were to be in the new West German Republic. In 1953 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose for state secretary of the Chancellory a man named Hans Globke. Globke was not an obscure Nazi. He had written the legal argument supporting the Nuremberg laws that stripped German Jews of their rights. He had suggested forcing all Jews to carry either the name Sarah or Israel for easy identification. The East Germans protested Globke’s presence in the West German government. But Adenauer insisted that Globke had done nothing wrong, and he remained in German government until he retired to Switzerland in 1963.

  In 1968 Nazis were still being discovered.

  Edda Göring was in court trying to keep possession of the sixteenth-century painting by Lucas Cranach, Madonna and Child. It was of sentimental value since it had been given to her at her christening by her now deceased father, Hermann Göring. Göring, who had stolen the painting from the city of Cologne, had been founder and head of the Gestapo and the leading defendant at the showcase of de-Nazification, the Nuremburg trials. He killed himself hours before the scheduled time of his execution. The city had been trying to get the painting back ever since. Though Edda Göring had lost in court yet again in January 1968, her lawyers predicted at least two more rounds of appeals.

  At the same time, evidence surfaced, actually resurfaced, that Heinrich Lübke, the seventy-three-year-old president of West Germany, had helped to build concentration camps. The East Germans had made the accusations two years earlier, but their documents had been dismissed as false. Now Stern, the West German magazine, had hired an American handwriting expert who said that the Lübke signatures by the head of state and the Lübke signatures on concentration camp plans were made by the same hand.

  By 1968 questioning a high official on wartime activities was not new, except that now it was on television. The French magazine Paris Match wrote, “When you are 72 years old, and at the summit of your political career, the highest ranking person of state, and you are shown on television in front of 20 million viewers in the role of the accused, that is the worst.”

  In February two students were expelled from the university in Bonn for breaking into the rector’s office and writing on the honor roll next to Lübke’s name “Concentration Camp Builder.” Following their expulsions, a petition signed by twenty of the two hundred Bonn professors demanded that Lübke address the issue publicly. The German president met with the chancellor, the head of government and the more powerful position in the German system. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger reviewed different options with the president, ruling out retirement or resignation. A few days later the president went on television denying the charges but saying, “Naturally, after nearly a quarter of a century has gone by, I cannot remember every paper I signed.” It took more than ten months before he was finally forced to resign.

  Chancellor Kiesinger, who had worked for the government of the Third Reich, had his own problems in 1968. He was called as a witness to the war crimes trial of Fritz Gebhard Von Hahn, accused of complicity in the murder of thirty thousand Greek and Bulgarian Jews in 1942 and 1943. From almost the moment the chancellor took the stand, it appeared that he himself was on trial. The defense had called him to explain that while he was serving in the Foreign Ministry, news on the deportation and killing of Jews was not passed on by his radio-monitoring department. But first he had to explain why he had a position in the Foreign Ministry. He said it was “a coincidence,” but he did admit having been a Nazi Party member. He explained that he had joined the party in 1933, “but not out of conviction or opportunism.” For most of the war, he said, he had thought Jews were being deported to “munitions factories or places like that.” Then did the radio department pass on news about the fate of deported Jews? “What information?” was Kiesinger’s response. He denied knowing anything about killing Jews.

  The Kiesinger government had come to power two years earlier in a reasonably successful attempt at a compromise coalition that offered political stability. But it was then that the student movement became most visible. A new generation had been angered and worried by the end of de-Nazification and the decision to remilitarize West Germany. The universities had become crowded owing to a policy, first established by the Allies, of offering military deferments to college students. Yet by 1967, despite growing university enrollment, only about 8 percent of the population attended university, still a small elite. Students wanted to be less elite and demanded that the government open up opportunities for enrollment. In March 1968 the West German Chamber of Commerce and Industry complained that German society risked producing more graduates than the number that could reasonably expect appropriate career opportunities.

  On March 2, the day of the announcement, a prosecutor released Robert Mulke from prison on the grounds that the seventy-one-year-old was not in good enough health for prison. Mulke had been convicted three years earlier of three thousand murders while serving as assistant commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.

  In 1968 German student leaders estimated that they had six thousand militant students behind them. But they had the ability to mobilize many thousands more over a variety of issues. The Vietnam War, the illegal military dictatorship in Greece, and oppression by the shah of Iran were the three most popular foreign issues, but German issues occasionally rallied even more protesters. Fritz Teufel’s Commune I organization and a Marxist student study group by coincidence also called SDS, Socialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, were experienced and well organized.

  One of the central themes of the student movement was that Germany was a repressive society. The implied word was “still,” Germany was still repressive—meaning it had failed to emerge from the Third Reich and become truly democratic. The presence of Nazis in government was only an underlying part of this. The suspicion on the part of many students that their parents may have either done or countenanced horrendous deeds had created a generation gap far wider and deeper than anything Grayson Kirk was seeing at Columbia.

  The fear of the past, or in many cases lack of a past, was recognized by many psychiatrists and therapists as a special problem of Germans of the postwar generation. Sammy Speier, an Israeli-born psychoanalyst in private practice in Frankfurt, wrote, “Since Auschwitz there is no longer any narrative tradition, and hardly any parents and grandparents are left who will take children on their lap and tell them about their lives in the old days. Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past.”

  One of the surface issues was academic freedom and control of the university. The fact that this often stated issue was not at the root of the conflict is shown by the place where the student movement was first articulated, developed most rapidly, and exploded most violently. Berlin’s Free University was, as the name claimed, the most free university in Germany. It was created after the war, in 1948, and so was not mired in the often stultifying ways of the old Germany. By charter a democratically elected student body voted with parliamentary procedure on the faculty’s decisions. A large part of the original student body were politically militant East Germans who had left the East German university system because they refused to submit to the dictates of the Communist Party. They remained at the core of the Free University so that thirteen years after its founding, when the East Germans began erecting a wall in 1961, students from the Free University in the West attempted to storm the wall. After the wall was built, students from East Germany were unable to atten
d the Free University and it became largely a school for politicized West German students. With far greater intensity than American students, the students of West Berlin, the definitive products of the cold war, were rejecting capitalism and communism at the same time.

  Berlin, partly because it was located at the heart of the cold war, became the center of all protest. East Germans were slipping into West Berlin, West Germans were slipping into the east. This second traffic was less talked about, and West Germany kept no statistics on it. In 1968, East Germany said that twenty thousand West Germans were crossing to East Germany every year. They were said not to be political, but this myth was disturbed in March 1968 when Wolfgang Kieling moved east. Kieling was a well-known German actor, famous in the United States for his portrayal of the East German villain in the 1966 Alfred Hitchcock movie Torn >Curtain starring Paul Newman. Kieling, who had fought for the Third Reich on the Russian front, was in Los Angeles at the time of the Watts race riots for the shooting of Torn Curtain and said he had been appalled by the United States. He said that he was leaving West Germany because of its backing of the United States, which, he said, was “the most dangerous enemy of humanity in the world today,” citing “crimes against the Negro and the people of Vietnam.”

  In December 1966, Free University students fought in the streets with police for the first time. By then the American war in Vietnam had become one of the major issues around which the student movement organized. Using American demonstration techniques to protest against American policy, they quickly became the most noticeable student movement in Europe. But the students were also revolting against the materialism of West Germany and searching for a better way to achieve what East Germany had promised, a complete break with the Germany of the past. And while they were at it, they began demonstrating about tram fares and student living conditions.

  On June 2, 1967, students gathered to protest Mayor Willy Brandt entertaining the shah of Iran. Once the guests were safely installed in the Opera House for a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the police attacked the Free University students outside with violent fury. Students fled in panic, but twelve were so severely beaten that they had to be hospitalized, and one fleeing student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot and killed. Ohnesorg had not been a militant, and this had been one of his first demonstrations. The policeman who shot him was quickly acquitted, whereas Fritz Teufel, leader of the protest group Commune I, faced a possible five-year sentence in a lengthy trial on the charge of “sedition.” The national student movement was built on anger over this killing, which was protested not only in Berlin but throughout Germany, demanding the creation of a new parliamentary group to oppose the German legislature.

  On January 23, 1968, a right-wing Hamburg pastor, Helmuth Thielicke, found his church filled with students wanting to denounce his sermon. He called in West German troops to clear his church of the students, who were distributing pamphlets with a revised Lord’s Prayer:

  Our capital, which art in the West, amortized be Thy investments,

  Thy profits come, Thy interest rates increase,

  In Wall Street as they do in Europe.

  Give us this day, our daily turnover.

  And extend to us our credits, as we extend them to our creditors,

  Lead us not into bankruptcy, but deliver us from the trade unions,

  For thine is half the world, the power and the riches,

  For the last two hundred years.

  Mammon.

  By 1968 theology students were also demonstrating, insisting that it was no longer acceptable to listen to church sermons without questions and dialogue in the service addressing the immorality of the West German state as well as moral outrage at the U.S. war against Vietnam. In effect the church was to become a discussion group for the purpose of heightening political and moral awareness. The most prominent of these theology student rebels was one of the student refugees from East Berlin, Rudi Dutschke, sometimes called Rudi the Red.

  German SDS was well organized in the universities. On February 17, combining a good sense of timing with an impressive display of organization, the group hosted student activists from around the world to an international meeting against the American war in Vietnam. The International Vietnam Congress was the first large-scale international meeting of 1968 student movements and was being held at the height of the Tet Offensive when the Vietnam War was a mainstay of television programming around the world. In most countries, opposition to the war was not only one of the most popular causes—in many cases antiwar groups were the best-organized movements—but it was also the one issue they all had in common. Although an Iranian “revolutionary” attended, as did U.S. and Canadian militants, including two black Vietnam veterans who gave the clenched-fist salute and chanted arm in arm, “Hell, no, I ain’t gonna go!”—too late, as they had already been—it was largely a European meeting of German, French, Italian, Greek, and Scandinavian students. They met for a twelve-hour session of speeches and discussions in an enormous hall of the Free University with an overflow of thousands sent to two other large halls. The main hall was decorated with a huge flag of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front along with a banner emblazoned with Che Guevara’s hard-to-refute statement: “The duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution.” Speakers ranged from Dutschke, to leaders of other national movements, to the playwright Peter Weiss, whose Marat/Sade was being quoted by students all over the world.

  Many of the foreign activists were dazzled by the Germans. One of the speakers, Alain Krivine, twenty-seven, a French Trotskyite who would later become one of the leaders in the spring Paris uprising, said, “Many of the 1968 student tactics were learned earlier in the year in Berlin and Brussels anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. The anti–Vietnam War movement was well organized throughout Europe. Dutschke and the Germans were the pioneers in the hard demonstration tactics. We went there and they had their banners and signs ready and their security forces and everything with militaristic tactics. It was new to me and the other French.”

  Anti–Vietnam War poster on a street in Germany in 1968

  (Photo by Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos)

  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, was impressed with the way the German SDS had incorporated student issues into the larger protest. The French students invited Karl D. “Kaday” Wolf, the German SDS national chairman for 1968, to speak to students in France.

  Born in 1940, Rudi Dutschke was the oldest of the German student leaders. Tariq Ali, leader of a British group called Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, VSC, and cofounder of a short-lived 1968 underground London review, Black Dwarf, described him as “of medium height with an angular face and a gentle smile. He always smiles with his eyes.” With his long dark hair shaking and swaying and a stubble of beard that seemed to neither grow nor be shaved off, he was said to be an electrifying orator, but this skill was always met by German youth with an awkward embarrassment. Germans, it seemed, had learned to be wary of electrifying oration and would offer him only polite applause. Other student leaders had advised Dutschke to moderate his speaking style.

  His speech at the Congress drew parallels between the struggle of the Vietnamese people and that of Europeans to overthrow the classist system. Then, as he often did, he compared their fight to change European society one institution at a time to Mao’s famous Long March of 1934–1935, in which he gave his besieged movement a national presence by leading ninety thousand Chinese communists on a remarkably arduous trek across China, picking up small enclaves of support as they went. Of course, Dutschke didn’t point out that half of Mao’s original followers died along the way.

  The talks had gone on for hours. Eric Fried was speaking. A recognized poet, he was what had become a rarity, a German Jew. Born in Austria in 1921, he had escaped the Nazis after his father was beaten to death. Though of a different generation, Fried was personally very close to a number of German student leaders, especially Dutschke. He was particularly valued by the Ge
rman New Left because he was outspokenly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. The German New Left, like many of their counterparts in Europe and the United States, saw the emerging Palestinian terrorist organization under the young Yasir Arafat as another romantic nationalist movement. But it was uncomfortable for these young Germans to back an organization so clearly bent on killing Jews, including Jews in Europe, so it was a considerable boost to have an actual Jewish survivor in their ranks. The switch away from supporting Israel had begun with the Six Day War and the rise of Arafat, but it also coincided with a growing lack of interest in nonviolence. That these Palestinians were interested only in violence simply meant that they could be seen as guerrilla fighters—like Che.

  The expressions peace movement and antiwar movement were largely American and even in the United States were fast becoming old-fashioned in some leftist circles. European radicals were not as interested in an end to the war as in a North Vietnamese victory. They tended to see the Tet Offensive not as a tragic loss of life, but as a triumph for an oppressed people. The British radical Tariq Ali, using language that was also heard in Berlin, Rome, and Paris, said of Tet, “A wave of joy and energy rebounds around the world and millions more are suddenly, exhilaratingly, ceasing to believe in the strength of their oppressor.”

  We all carry our own history on our backs. The American activists wanted a stop to the aggression. The Europeans wanted a defeat of colonialism—they wanted the United States to be crushed just as the European colonial powers had been. This was particularly apparent in the French insistence that the marines in Khe Sanh might suffer the same humiliating defeat as had the French in Dien Bien Phu. The constant articles in the French press asking, “Is Khe Sanh another Dien Bien Phu?” had a barely concealed wishfulness to them. There was a touch of self-loathing to the European Left, especially the Germans, and all sins were compared to those of their own countries. To the French and British Left, the Americans were colonialists, to the Germans they were Nazis. Peter Weiss’s 1968 Vietnam Discourse argued that the Americans in Vietnam were a Nazi-like evil.