Postwar

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.[175]

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.[176]

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 Sturmer; 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. Jurgen 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.