The Free University and Subversive Action Dutschke enrolled at the
Free University in
West Berlin. Formed in 1948 by students abandoning the Communist Party-controlled
Humboldt University in
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 student delegates with common positions decided in advance. Dutschke's scepticism with regard to the democratic credentials of the new institutions in the West were reinforced by his study of
sociology,
ethnology,
philosophy and history under
Richard Löwenthal and Klaus Meschkat. He was introduced to the
existentialist theories of
Martin Heidegger,
Karl Jaspers and
Jean-Paul Sartre, to
György Lukács's theories of
reification and
class consciousness, and to the critical sociology of the
Frankfurt School. Together these sources provided links with the pre-
Hitler and pre-
Stalin left and encouraged alternative,
libertarian interpretations of
Marx and of labour history. While increasingly engaged in consciously Marxist
polemics, bolstered by his reading of the socialist theologians
Karl Barth and
Paul Tillich, Dutschke retained an emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of action. He co-edited their paper
Anschlag, to which he contributed articles on the revolutionary potential of developments in the Third World. In December 1964, Dutschke's group joined a demonstration against the state visit of the
Congolese Prime Minister
Moïse Tschombé. Dutschke spontaneously led the protesters toward
Schöneberg Town Hall, seat of the
West Berlin House of Representatives, where Tschombé is said to have been hit “full in the face” with tomatoes. Dutschke described this action as the “beginning of our cultural revolution”.
SDS, the strategy of confrontation In 1964, Dutschke's group entered the German Socialist Students Union (
Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), the former collegiate wing of the
Social Democrats (SPD). The SDS had been expelled from the moderate SPD for its unreconstructed leftism, although this had amounted to little more than organising lectures on
Marxism. Dutschke, elected in 1965 argued for confrontations in the university and on the streets. The theory as expounded by Dutschke in relation to protests against the 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 authoritarianism, ... to expose itself as a 'dictatorship of force'". The awareness produced by such provocations would free people to rethink democratic theory and practice. Dutschke and his faction had an important ally in Michael Vester, SDS vice-president and international secretary. Vester, who had studied in the US in 1961–62, and worked extensively with the American SDS (
Students for a Democratic Society), introduced the theories of the American
New Left and supported the call for “direct action” and
civil disobedience. In April 1965 Dutschke traveled with an SDS group to the Soviet Union. His hosts, who would have been aware of his critical, in their view anti-Soviet, commentary in
Anschlag, classified him as a
Trotskyite. On his return in May 1965, his group's target was the United States, driven in particular by outrage over its
invasion of the Dominican Republic. In the summer of 1965 Dutschke took part in student protests over the Free University's refusal of speaking rights to the writer
Erich Kuby. This was a prelude to a
sit-in at the university in June the following year. Just as in the
Berkeley Free Speech Movement two years earlier, West Berlin students were making a connection between the imperiousness of the university authorities and the broader absence of democratic practice. Shortly after the birth of their first child, a son they named Hosea-Che, Dutschke and Klotz were forced to leave their apartment after the appearance of threatening graffiti (“Gas Dutschke!”) and attacks using smoke bombs and excrement. The
CSU member of the
Bundestag,
Franz Xaver Unertl, described Dutschke as an "unwashed, lousy and filthy creature".
Revolutionary "voluntarist" On 2 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. Writing in
konkret (since revealed to have been subsidised by the East Germans)
Sebastian Haffner argued that "with the student pogrom of 2 June 1967 fascism in West Berlin had thrown off its mask". Outrage was directed not only at the city authorities. Dutschke called for the expropriation of his (and Haffner's) former employer, the conservative
Axel Springer Press, which at that time controlled around 67 percent of the leading media in West Berlin. Along with many on the left, he accused the Springer press of incitement (the response of Springer's
Bild Zeitung to the death was “Students threaten, We shoot back”). A general wave of student protest shook the universities and major cities. Springer offices were attacked and print and distribution operations disrupted. At a hastily convened university congress in
Hanover, the sociologist and philosopher
Jürgen Habermas charged Dutschke with a “voluntarism” akin "to leftist fascism". 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. Within a month, Dutschke recognized that the campaign against Springer, from which both trade unions and the liberal press distanced themselves, could not "mobilise the masses" and called for a halt. Vietnam, and German complicity in the escalating American war, was to be the new focus. After the Free University refused to host the conference, and despite a concerted campaign in the Springer press and opposition in the
Berlin Senate, the
Technische Universität Berlin agreed to host the two-day event. 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'Étudiants Anarchistes'') from France,
Tariq Ali and
Robin Blackburn (
New Left Review and
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) from
Great Britain,
Bahman Nirumand (of the international
Confederation of Iranian Students) and
Bernardine Dohrn (
Students for a Democratic Society) from the USA. The floor was also given to Dutschke's friend, the veteran Belgian
Trotskyist Ernest Mandel. 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". Under the slogan "Smash NATO," and encouraging 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") 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. He called on the students to "leave here quietly and spread out in small groups across the city to distribute your pamphlets". Three days later, on 21 February 1968, at a counter demonstration of some 60,000 West Berliners organized by the
Berlin Senate and Springer Press at
Schöneberg Town Hall, there were placards identifying Dutschke as "The Enemy of the People [
Volkfeind] no. 1". When the crowd mistook a young man for Dutschke, they pushed him to the ground and chased him to a police van, which they then almost toppled over.
Rejects vanguardist model 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, did not believe this strategy was viable. He advised Mandel that Dutschke was able to maintain his position in the SDS only by virtue of his political flexibility. By this he meant not the pushing aside of Nazi holdovers and conservative careerists in an attempt to promote reform from within existing structures, but instead the creation of new institutions to replace those that are irredeemable in their present state. These institutions include the existing parliamentary system and its party-political apparatus. Such a system does not represent "the real interests of our people", which Dutschke described to Gaus as "the right to reunification, safeguarding jobs, safeguarding state finances, the reordering of the economy". The problem is that "there is a total separation between the representatives in parliament and the people" and consequently no "critical dialogue". Elections are held every four years, and there is a chance to confirm existing parties, but "less and less" an opportunity to endorse new parties "and thus new alternatives to the existing order". The place of universities in this schema remained unclear. On the one hand, Dutschke dismissed them as "factories" geared to the production of
Fachidioten (people incapable of critical thought beyond their narrowly defined field of training). Following the example of similar experiments at
the University of California, Berkeley and the
Paris Sorbonne, in November 1967 he attempted to promote the "Critical University" through a series of seminars at the FU.
The APO and support for the Prague Spring Dutschke did not share the reformist euphoria surrounding
Willy Brandt, the former anti-Nazi resister and West Berlin mayor who, as junior partner to the ruling
Christian Democrats, led the
Social Democrats for the first time into federal government in December 1966. Dutschke joined calls for an extra-parliamentary opposition
(Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO). This loose grouping of disaffected social democrats, militant trade unionists, students and writers believed that with the formation
Grand Coalition the Federal Republic had abandoned any semblance 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". At the same time, Dutschke was concerned that student protests and the APO not be instrumentalised by
Soviet and East German propaganda. In March 1968 the Dutschkes traveled to
Czechoslovakia in solidarity with the Prague Spring. In two lectures for the
Christian Peace Conference (CFK) (and with citations from Marx's
Theses on Feuerbach) he encouraged Czech students to combine socialism and civil rights.
The right to German reunification The interview in October 1967 on Gaus's
SWR programme
Zur Person gave Dutschke the kind of media exposure reserved for the Federal Republic's leading statesmen and intellectuals. It also highlighted a facet of Dutschke thinking that distinguished him from, and disturbed, many of his West German comrades in the SDS. 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. Dutscke believed that, even after Hitler, Germans had the right to decide for themselves whether to live in a reunified state. Ironically, no prominent West German stood closer to Dutschke on this point than his nemesis Axel Springer. In what he described as the "central political event of my life", in 1958 Springer had gone to Moscow to personally press the case for an "Austrian solution": national unity in return for permanent neutrality. 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. Dutschke confessed himself perplexed as to why the German left did not "think nationally"; the socialist opposition in the GDR and the Federal Republic should work together, recognizing that "the GDR is not the better Germany. But it is part of Germany". The "socialist reunification of Germany" would to undermine the "idiocy of the East-West antagonism" and the hegemony of the superpowers in Central Europe. In June 1967, Dutschke proposed that West Berlin, then still under Western Allied sovereignty, declare itself a
council republic. "West Berlin supported by direct council democracy" could "be a strategic transmission belt for the future reunification of Germany," triggering by its example an intellectual, and ultimately also political, upheaval in both German states. ==Attempted assassination and its aftermath==