Rudi Dutschke

Dutschke enrolled at the Free University in West Berlin. Formed in 1948 by students abandoning the Communist Party controlled Humboldt University in the East Berlin, the constitution of the new school incorporated a degree of student representation unknown elsewhere in Germany. But the "democratic" faculty and city officials appeared to Dutschke and his classmates to have broken faith with the model of student co-determination. At senate meetings they confronted students delegates with common position decided in advance.[8]

Dutschke's scepticism with regard to the democratic credentials of the new institutions in the west would have been reinforced by his studies: sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history under Richard Löwenthal and Klaus Meschkat.[9] He was introduced to the existentialist theories of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre,[10][11] and to the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School which provided a link to the pre-Hitler left and to alternative interpretations of Marxism and of the history of the labour movement.[12]

In 1965, with a small libertarian-socialist grouping, Subversive Action (Subversiven Aktion), Dutschke joined the German Socialist Students Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), the former the collegiate wing of the Social Democrats (SPD). The SDS had been expelled from the liberalising party for its unreconstructed leftism, although this had amounted to little more than organising lectures on Marxism.[13]

Dutschke and his faction argued for confrontations in the university and on the streets.[14] The theory as expounded by Dutschke in relation to protests against Vietnam War, which soon dominated the agenda, was that "systematic, limited and controlled confrontations with the power structure" would "force the representative 'democracy' to show openly its class character, its authoritarian, ... to expose itself as a 'dictatorship of force'". The awareness produced by such provocations, would free people to think democratic theory and practice anew.[15]

In June 1967, SDS member Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a policeman in West Berlin. Heeding Ulrike Meinhof's call in the journal konkret, he had been among students protesting a visit by the Shah of Iran. Dutschke directed the outrage not at the police, but also at the conservative Axel Springer press whom many were to accuse of incitement[16] (the response of Springer's Bild Zeitung to the death was “Students threaten, We shoot back”).[17][18] Dutschke called for Springer's expropriation.[19] A general wave of student protest shook the universities and major cities. Springer offices were attacked and print and distribution operations disrupted.

In the midst of the disorder the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas accused Dutschke of “voluntarism”. He argued that Dutschke’s notion of calculated disturbance to unmask the veiled force of the state was mistaken. There was not a revolutionary situation in Germany. Dutschke, he said, was putting the lives of other students at risk.[13]

Dutschke responded that he was honoured by the accusation of voluntarism; Habermas's “objectivity” served only to hold back a rising movement. In his diary Dutschke cited Che Guevara: “Revolutionaries must not just wait for the objective conditions for a revolution. By creating a popular ‘armed focus’ they can create the objective conditions for a revolution by subjective initiative”.[13] After Che's guerrilla death Bolivia in October 1967, Dutschke and the Chilean Gaston Salvatore, translated, and wrote an introduction to, Che's last public statement, Message to the Tricontinental, with its famous appeal for "two, three, many Vietnams."[20]

Within a month, however, Dutschke recognised that the campaign against Springer, against which there was a strong public reaction, could not "mobilise the masses" and called for a halt. The new focus was to be German complicity in the escalating American war in Vietnam.[21]

Already in 1966, Dutschke and the SDS had staged the "Vietnam - Analysis of an Example" congress at the University of Frankfurt, with Herbert Marcuse as the main speaker and around 2,200 students and trade unionists attending. At the beginning of 1968 they decided to organise an even larger event, an international conference.As the "intersection" of the rival Cold War blocs and as a "provocation" to the city's American military presence, Berlin would be the venue. After a rejection by the Free University of Berlin, and despite a concerted campaign in the Springer Press and opposition in the Berlin Senate, the Technical University of Berlin accommodated the two-day event .[22]

Forty-four socialist-youth delegations from fourteen countries (including the FDJ from East Germany) attended. In addition to Dutschke, who appeared to direct much of the discussion, they were addressed by Alain Krivine and Daniel Bensaïd (both Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, JCR) as well as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Liaison d'Etudiants Anarchistes) from France, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn (New Left Review and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign ) from the United Kingdom, Bahman Nirumand (of the international Confederation of Iranian Students) and Bernardine Dohrn (Students for a Democratic Society) from USA. The floor was also given to Dutschke's friend, the veteran Belgian Trotskyist, Ernest Mandel.[22] Characterising the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people as an active front in a worldwide socialist revolution, the final declaration charged "US imperialism" with "trying to incorporate the Western European metropolises into its policy of colonial counterrevolution via NATO".[22]

Under the slogan "Smash NATO" and with an invitation to American soldiers stationed in West Berlin to desert en masse Dutschke wanted to lead the closing demonstration of more than 15,000 people ("above a sea of red flags rose huge portraits of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh")[23] in a march on the U.S. Army McNair Barracks in Berlin-Lichterfelde. But once the U.S. Command cautioned that it would use force to defend the barracks, and following discussions with the novelist Günter Grass, Bishop Kurt Scharf and the former West Berlin mayor Heinrich Albertz, Dutschke was persuaded that this was a provocation from which it would be best to desist.[22]

From the summer of 1967, Ernest Mandel had been trying persuade Dutschke to transform the Marxist wing of the SDS into a revolutionary socialist youth organisation on the model of the French JCR; to "select the best comrades to create an organisation within the SDS . . . to form a cadre . . . and to build a vanguard from inside the social-democratic union." Klaus Meschkat, who had founded the rival Republikanischer Club in response to what he saw as the anarchist tendency within the SDS,[24] did not believe it possible. He advised Mandel that Dutschke maintained his position only by virtue of his flexibility.[23]

In a televised interview with Gunther Gaus in October 1967, Dutschke was unequivocal: "we are not a Leninist cadre party, we are a completely decentralised organisation". It was something he claimed was a "great advantage". Because the SDS was "set up in a decentralised manner" it was "in a position to set the movement in motion at any time, that is, people are always ready to participate, we don't need to force them, it is a voluntary matter". They know that there is no "apparatus" giving precedence to the interests of office holders, or of professional politicians.[25]

At the same time, Dutschke asserted that, while it might be otherwise for the right, "in organised late capitalism" there could be "no victory for left minorities". The SDS was but a small grouping. In West Berlin, he suggested it might have "90 very active people and maybe 300, 400 active people", and in the wider movement, four to five thousand people ready to take part in its "awareness-raising events" and in the campaigns.[25]

The interview on Gaus's SWR programme Zur Person, gave Dutschke an exposure reserved for the Federal Republic's leading statesmen and intellectuals.[26] Gaus's first question to Dutschke was why he wished to upend the republic's social order. Dutschke replied first with a classic socialist observation:

[In 1918] the German workers 'and soldiers' councils fought for the eight-hour day. In 1967 our workers worked a measly four or five hours less a week. And that with a tremendous development of the productive forces, the technical achievements, which could really bring about a very, very great reduction in working hours. Instead, in the interests of the ruling order, working-time reduction is resisted so as to maintain the lack of consciousness that the [long] hours induce.[25]

Then, as an illustration of this system-induced lack of political consciousness, Dutschke offered not the mendacity of the mass-circulation Springer Press, the shooting of Ohnesorg, complicity in the Vietnam war or other contemporary issues that might have been anticipated from his billing as a generational spokesman, but the lack of progress on German re-unifcation.

For example: after the Second World War, governments talked incessantly of reunification. But in twenty years and more instead of reunification we have had a succession of governments that we can describe as institutional instruments for lying, for half-truths, for distortions. The people are not being told the truth. There is no dialogue with the masses, no critical dialogue that could explain what is going on in this society: why the economic miracle [Wirtschaftswunder] suddenly came to an end; why no progress has been made on the question of reunification?[25]

Dutscke believed that, even after Hitler, Germans had the right to decide for themselves whether they to live in one state more. Perversely no prominent West German stood closer to Dutschke on this point than his arch nemesis, Axel Springer.[27][28] In what he described as the "central political event of my life",[29] in 1958 Springer had gone to Moscow to personally press the case for an "Austrian solution": national unity in return for permanent neutrality.[30] The difference was that German neutrality for Dutschke was a condition not only for national unity but for social transformation.

We criticise the GDR and we have the task of overthrowing capitalist rule in the Federal Republic in order to make a whole Germany possible, which is not identical with the GDR, which really has nothing in common with today's Federal Republic, but a whole Germany, where producers, students, workers and housewives, the different strata of the people, can really represent their interests.[31]

Dutschke did not in share the reform euphoria surrounding Willy Brandt, the former anti-Nazi resister and West Berlin mayor who, as junior partners of the ruling Christian Democrats, had led the Social Democrats for the first time into federal government. The SDS formed party of a broader extra-parliamentary opposition,(Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), a loose grouping of students, left trade unionists, writers and others who believed that with the formation in December 1966 of the Grand Coalition there was no longer even the semblance in the Federal Republic of a democratic counterweight to vested interests. "We have to say no", declared Dutschke, to a parliament in which "we are no longer represented! We have to say no to a grand coalition ... created to maintain the rule of the government clique, the bureaucratic oligarchy".[32]

At the same time, Dutschke was concerned that student protests and the APO not be instrumentalised by Soviet and East German propaganda. He travelled to Czechoslavakia to express solidarity with the Prague Spring that was then challenging the Soviet-imposed party hegemony.[32]

On 11 April 1968, shortly after his return from the east, Dutschke was shot on a West Berlin street by a young right-wing extremist. Again, Springer was accused of complicity ("Bild schoss mit!"). Serious unrest followed. Demonstrators tried to storm the Springer offices in Berlin and set fire to Bild delivery vans. The Hamburg print shop was besieged to prevent the paper leaving the presses, and in Munich a demonstrator and a policeman were killed after students ransacked the Bild editorial offices. There were over a thousand arrests.[33]

On 11 April 1968, shortly after returning from the Czechoslovakia, Dutschke was shot outside the SDS offices on KurfürstendammJosef Bachmann, his assailant, a builder's labourer and petty criminal, had left East Germany as a child. In 1961, aged 17, he made contact with a Neonazi cell in Peine with whom he handled weapons.[34] Bachman suggested that immediate inspiration for his attack was the assassination the week before of Martin Luther King Jr..[35]

Bachman had waited for Dutschke outside the SDS offices on Kurfürstendamm. When the student leader stepped into the street to collect a prescription for his young son Hosea Che, Bachmann approached him and shouting "you dirty, communist pig", and fired three shots striking him twice in the head and once in the shoulder. Bachmann fled to a nearby basement, where, after a shootout with the police, he was arrested.[36]

Springer once again was accused of complicity ("Bild schoss mit!"). Demonstrators tried to storm the Springer house in Berlin and set fire to Bild delivery vans. The Hamburg print shop was besieged to prevent the paper leaving the presses, and in Munich a demonstrator and a policeman were killed after students ransacked the Bild editorial offices. There were over a thousand arrests.[37]

The Federal Chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, cut short his Easter holiday, and claiming on his return to Bonn that a planned political action was in progress which had revolutionary character. He appealed to all those who felt responsible for the maintenance of democracy to show vigilance and calm.[38]

Dutschke survived, but struggled to recover memory and speech and to manage recurring epileptic seizures. The Dutschkes began his convalescence in Italy, guest of the composer Hans-Werner Henze, but, when the press found them, they left for England. Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge had offered Dutschke the opportunity to complete his doctoral thesis (an analysis of the early Commintern). Denied a student visa by the Conservative government, the journalist Neal Ascherson secured them refuge in Ireland.[39]

Between January and March 1969, the Dutschkes were guests, outside Dublin, of Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien who had been distinguished since his UN service during the Congo Crisis by his criticism of U.S. policy both in Vietnam and at home in the repression of the Black Panthers. During their stay, Rudi and Gretchen Dutschke were visited by their lawyer Horst Mahler who tried to persuade them to join him underground in the group that was to become the Red Army Faction.[39] (After serving a ten-year sentence for his RAF activity, Mahler drifted to the far right and was twice imprisoned in the 2000s for Holocaust denial).[40]

As the student movement back home splintered and radicalised, the Dutschkes considered staying in Ireland but returned to the UK in mid-March 1969[39] accepting the condition that he not engage in political activity. At the beginning of 1971 it was a condition the UK Home Office believed he had breached, ruling that his meetings with visitors from Germany, Israel, Jordan, Chile and the United States had "far exceeded normal social activities".[41] A position teaching sociology was offered at the University of Aarhus and the Dutschkes moved to Denmark.[42][43]