"About one generation ago the last great cultural revolution raged through the western world like a tornado. Like every true revolution it was a revolt of the youth; it was directed against the old order and the old ones, against the proven and the wrong traditions, against the existing establishment.

The revolt of 68 imbued all spheres of thinking and living – the philosophy with the Critical Theory and the Neo-Marxism – the fashion with jeans, long hair and mini skirt – the awareness of life with the feeling of dropping out, of breaking taboos, of consuming dope, of shared flats and anti-authoritarian education. It included politics, demonstrating as an Extraparliamentary Opposition in the streets; and above all the pop culture and the pop music ..."*

"68 has become a myth"*. It was the onset of a totally new age, with a new conception how people should be: They should be free and self-determined, not to be governed by the authorities from above, but able to create themselves a new free and democratic world where they would find room enough to develop their personality all around.

The German post-war society was prudish and ultra-conservative. They had survived the war and Hitler's Third Reich, they kept silent about their own involvements in the nazi regime, but were afraid all the time that they were detected. Do not stir attention, was the common rule of behaviour. Everything had to be, at least seemingly, within the norm which our parents had learnt in their youth: The moral and the understanding of society of the nineteenth century.

• Family life was dominated by strict rules the most important of which was to obey the father unconditionally – this concerned his wife as well as his children, because the man was the head of the household by law, he was responsible for everything, he alone knew his income and the savings balance on the family account book, he planned the needed purchases, he alotted household-money and pocket-money, and he had the last word in all decisions.
• Children had to be well-behaved, had not to disturb the adults, and not to bring shame upon the family. We were dressed up: When I was 13, I was clad in trousers with creases, white shirt and tie and sent to school like this, with my hair neatly parted and pasted to my head with creme. Most parents did not care for what their children did at school or in the afternoon at home, but if someone complained parents didn't hesitate to punish their children, and in general flogging was regarded to be the only really effective punishment, with wooden cooking spoons, coat-hangers, leather belts, and at school with a cane. A slap in the face you could get from everybody: Parents, teacher, vicar, policeman, instructor, even the neighbour when he felt disturbed; if you complained at home you got pasted another one.
• A woman's life was confined to the three 'C': Cooking, Children, Church. Mother was held responsible by father for the whole household and for the education and the school achievements of the children, and if her family duties still left her some spare time she was welcome to spend it with the bible circle or at some charitable institution.
  It was regarded to be a shame for a man if his wife practised a profession because he obviously could not earn enough to feed his family. Still in 1960 63% of all German women held an employed woman to be 'not normal'. Moreover, women were badly underpaid: A woman who did exactly the same work as a man got only about two thirds of his wages.
  Only very few women made a professional career. The leading positions were principally occupied by men.
• After the hopeful beginnings of the pedagogical reformers in the twenties, school and education had been reorganized by the nazis like they were in the nineteenth century, and so they stayed also in the post-war era.
  In the lower classes catholics were separated from protestants, and the higher classes were placed, according to the prudish moral of that time, in extra schools for boys and schools for girls. The high school for girls had special subjects about housekeeping and ended up with a final 'pudding examination' which nobody took seriously.
  In our classroom we sat on hard wooden benches which were fixed to the ground by screws. All seats were directed to the front, where the wall map hang which showed Germany still in its pre-war frontiers, and where the teacher resided behind his massive desk on a pedestal two steps above the floor. At the end of the fifties we finally got desks and chairs, again lined up in rank and file in front of the teacher's desk which still throned on its pedestal.
  The teaching methods dated, like the teachers also, largely from the nazi era: They required firstly obedience, secondly discipline, and thirdly learning by heart. Only very few teachers occasionally gave room for discussions and self-organized learning.
  This was the time when i decided to become a teacher myself in order to give better lessons and a better education one day.
• The vocational training was organized after the Prussian Vocational Code of 1866, which expressively allowed the master to flog his apprentices. This Code was oriented on the handicraft professions of the nineteenth century and was no longer able to prepare young people for the modern industrial world of machines, automats, and the expanding new electronics.
• The universities had conserved their old traditions which they had cherished for centuries, with their elitism and their ignorance of the profane world, their undemocratic structures, and their obsolete, ivory-towered curricula. Here the nazi era was still more alive than elsewhere: "Many professors, who had been prominent by their loyal 'scientific' studies in the time of the fascism, could continue their career after the war without interruption."*
  There was no co-determination of the students, and a deep gap separated the students and the professors who at solemn events – according to the Royal-Prussian Dressing Code of 1810 – appeared in long robes with large white ruffs and monstrous hats.

When Chancellor Kiesinger calls the Federal Army the 'School of the Nation', an outcry goes through the country. The older people remember such words only too good from the Hitler era, and the young people want a democratic school now. Youth federations, the teachers' trade union and many other democratic organizations are protesting, and of course the pupils, apprentices, students, and young teachers in the Movement of 68, who are already for years rattling at the petrified structures of the centuries old school system – what they obtain by their fight in these few years appears like a revolution of the whole educational system:

• School reforms which were overdue long since are executed now:
  • In 1967 the traditional German begin of the school year at Easter is changed to the summer – an overdue adaption to the international norm and a presupposition for the exchange of pupils, teachers, and professors with foreign countries;
  • in 1968 the confessional schools are abolished: children of all confessions sit together in one classroom now;
  • in 1968 the regular school attendance of at least eight years is raised to at least nine obligatory school years, and soon a tenth optional school year is added;
  • from 1968 on English is taught in all regular schools;
  • soon the separation by gender is abolished; boys and girl sit together in one classroom now;
  • flogging is forbidden at schools;
  • education pilot schemes are started to find a quite new form of a Common School to integrate all children and give each of them their special education ...
• New forms of education are practised:
  • Self-organized learning in groups, or with a partner, or finding solutions in a round of talks ... many new forms of teaching and learning are officially recommended now, and the conventional frontal seating arrangement in rank and file is totally out of fashion;
  • the classes are smaller now, more mobile and permeable: working on projects and interesting study groups are offered to children of all classes now;
  • special training lessons and compensatory education for retarded children concentrate on the special individual needs of each single pupil ...
• The school learns democracy:
  • School constitutions come into power, a pupils' co-administration and parents' councils are founded, organize themselves nationwide and obtain a powerful influence on the government's educational politics; representatives of pupils and parents get seat and vote in the school conferences;
  • apprentices get the same rights of co-determination at their vocational schools, and soon they also have a youth representation in their training enterprises;
  • a university reform opens the way to co-determination and self-administration of the students ...
• The educational reform radically changes the learning subjects:
  • New courses of studies are created, and conventional curricula are changed until they are up to date. When I, after twenty years of service as a teacher, continue my studies to qualify myself for special education I have to learn the pedagogical sciences fundamentally new – and now I like them because they are a real help in my everyday teaching.
  • The school is overflowed by a flood of new curricula – published in files with loose sheets, because they are still permanently reformed and corrected ...
• In 1969, a new 'Vocational Training Law' replaces the Prussian Vocational Code of 1866:
  • The 'master' is called 'instructor' now and the 'apprentice' is named 'trainee' – this is may signify that the whole vocational system has left the orientation on the handicraft workshop behind and is oriented on the modern industrial world now.
  • The whole vocational system is reconstructed. Many new vocations are offered now, and several obsolete professions have been cancelled. The whole training system is much more flexible and open for new technical and economic developments.
  • The controversially discussed 'dual system' of public vocational school and private training enterprize is preserved, but all vocational curricula are modernized and controlled by the state ...

At the end of the sixties the German educational system is totally changed and cleared of a whole lot of antiquated lumber. Nevertheless many problems are still far from being solved satisfyingly, and the next decades will bring many more changes and modernizations: That the Revolution of 68 was not only an enormous step forward but also the start of many long-term processes – this is nowhere as obvious as on the educational sector.

Our revolution was young, full of wit and slapstick, and though we never forgot our revolutionary aims many a political action ended up in a happening. The groovy slogans, the demonstrations which grew happier, cheekier, more colourful each time, and the new forms of action invented by the American students, the go-ins, sit-ins, teach-ins, sleep-ins – all this was very exciting ... not to forget the love-ins!

"68 is often characterized as an epoch of grumpy politicians and pernickety theorists, but this is a fatale misunderstanding. These years were trembling with sensuality. Of course there also were book-learnt polit-ascetics; but much more interesting were the greetings from America: 'Make love, not war'. Above all the youth was attracted by the chance of free love, of hearing the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan out of the loudspeaker boxes, and of smoking a pipe of grass during the endless discussions about orgasm and world revolution."*

If you want to find a collective name for this colourful movement then this word would be the best: 'anti-authoritarian'.

We had nothing against true authorities, on the contrary: People whose thoughts appeared to be essential and important and helpful to us – these people were accepted, their books were studied and passed around, we could listen to them for hours, and discuss their ideas the whole night long.

But the arrogant bumptious authoritarians who had nothing but orders and laws and rules for us which we did not understand – these people were only laughed at and ignored. In the darkest epochs of our history always too many Germans had unscrupulously obeyed to every order, even if the laws were inhuman and the orders were criminal, and we were determined to break with this disastrous tradition now.

'Anti-authoritarian' in this sense should also our children grow up from the very beginning.

He who wants to educate has to be a true authority, he has to be accepted by the children on account of his knowledge and his skills, on account of his affection and respect for the personality of each child, and also on account of his ability to install clear and understandable rules, and to carry them through consequently.

But he who does not give his attention to the children, and does not respect their personality, but insults them, belittles and abuses them, who does not keep his own rules, who only roars orders and shoves the children around and perhaps even beats them – this is just a stupid, helpless, bumptious 'authoritarian stuck-up twit' and no real educator.

Anti-authoritarian education intended to make the children sensitive to recognize authoritarian behaviour, and not to imitate it nor to get intimidated by it – and, if possible, to boycott authoritarian orders to show the 'authoritarian stuck-up twit' that education does not work like this.

This most of all hit back to us parents, and so we and our children educated us mutually to be anti-authoritarian – finally also this aimed at the ideal of a new man, who does not execute orders because they come 'from above' or are roared loudly enough, but because he understands their sense and approves of them.

The Movement of 68 is often called a 'revolt of the students', but that is only one half of the truth. It was the insurrection of the whole post-war youth, the rebellion of millions of young people – from pupils and apprentices up to young women and men who were still studying or were, like me, already employed and had a family and children – a rebellion against the hypocrisy and arrogance of our parents' generation who had elected Hitler to come to power, and had served him submissively up to the very disastrous end, who now denied all that but still ruled in the same high-handed, authoritarian way.

And 68 was not only '1968'. That began much earlier and lasted much longer, its consequences are perceptible until today. 1968 was only the climax: The year of the geatest hopes, of the hardest fights and the deepest disappointments, and the year of the breakthrough when all our small victories, won in so many tenacious struggles in the years before, finally became irreversible – the year of the Revolution.

In the preceding years we gradually had learnt that we could not free ourselves individually from the moral of the adults as long as they are in the legal position to force us to respect their moral at every turn.

The political events of the sixties had gradually deprived us from all illusions concerning this state and its politicians:

• The building of the wall through Berlin in August 1961 symbolized the final breakdown of all our dreams of a reunification: The Chancellor of Western Germany, Adenauer, who had stubbornly rejected all eastern offers of negotiations, was as responsible for this as the Prime Minister of Eastern Germany, Ulbricht, who wanted to prevent the eastern population from escaping to Western Germany by bricking up their last loophole.
• The 'Spiegel-Affair' in October 1962 threw a strong light on the authoritarian rule of law by the government of our state:
  A critical report about a Nato maneuver in the journal 'Spiegel' – which Chancellor Adenauer called 'an abyss of treason' – served as pretext for searches of houses and arresting of editors by the police.
  Public protest rose, and there were the first spontaneous street demonstrations in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
  Soon the government had to admit that all accusations against the journal 'Spiegel' lacked any substance, and on account of his exceptionally heavy violations of the law the minister of defense, Strauss, was dismissed.
  We could not trust this government any more.
• In 1963 at Frankfurt the legal proceedings against the murderers of the concentration camp of Auschwitz were instituted. The testimonies of the survivers for the first time gave us a direct impression of the hell in the extermination camps. When we then heard the debates about limitation periods for the nazi crimes in the parliament, where the generation of the perpetrators wanted to pardon themselves, we felt nothing but disgust and indignation.
• The western allied forced soon lost their high reputation as liberators and protectors: France led a cruel war against the people of Algeria, and the USA led a war of annihilation in Vietnam.
  The western moral became suspect to us: Nobody of us wanted to be 'protected' like the Vietnamese.
• The economic recession beginning in 1965, the closure of the coal mines in the Ruhr and Saar Areas, the increase of unemployment and the premature dismission of the unsuccessful 'Economic Wonder Chancellor' Ehrhard in 1966 undermined the belief in the high praised model of the capitalist market economy.
• We admired Gandhi's successful non-violent struggle for the freedom of India from the British colonial dominion, and we sympathized with the liberation movements in the other colonies.
  But we were scandalized at the fact, that we, the rich nations of this earth, exploit also the independent countries of the Third World, that our economic aid to the developing countries is often tied to unfair trade contracts, and that our subsidy is often misused to enrich the small upper class of these countries while the population remains living in poverty.
• When in December 1964 the congolese dictator Tchombe, who three years before after the murder of his prime minister Patrice Lumumba had taken his place by a coup d'état, is welcomed by our government with all honours, there are the first protest actions: Students throw blood-red tomatoes against his car in Berlin.
• When the Persian Shah visits Germany in May/June 1967 we experience how our land is turned into a police state. Wherever the high guest shows himself a wide range around him is shielded by thousands of policemen. Highways are blocked for the normal traffic, the navigation on the river Rhine is stopped, along the streets he uses houses are occupied by policemen, shops are closed. Only the Persian secret police agents he brought with him are moving freely in the streets, disguised as 'rejoicing population'.
  The Shah has good reasons to be afraid: His people lives in poverty, sickness, and ignorance, 85% are illiterates while he misuses foreign subsidies for his own luxury life. Well, he can give orders to shoot critics in his own country, but not here:
  When on the 2nd of June a mighty demonstration gathers in front of the Berlin Opera, the Persian secret police agents slip their mask of 'rejoicing population' and use the long slats of their banners to beat up the demonstrators. After a while the police enters the scene and scatters the demonstrators, while the Persian thugs are provided with coffee by the German Red Cross, and a civil agent of the German Political Police persecutes the fleeing student Benno Ohnsorg and shoots him from behind right into the head.
  'Self-defense', the judge later says, and acquits him.

At this time we no longer set any hopes into this society and its state.

We want a revolution, we want to rouse up the people in our land to rise and to shake off this encrusted felt system with all the old nazis still having so much influence, and with its unjust capitalism which is interested only in profits, and to create a new, truly democratic and solidary community, perhaps like the council system which developed spontaneously after the German revolution of 1918, with direct elections, accountability, and voting out of office for the representatives on all levels ...

We study Marx and Engels and the great revolutionaries of our century: Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Mao, Che – we want to learn from their success as well as from their failures, and we want to make a better revolution: peaceful, and democratic, and without any violence against people.

1968 is an encouraging year for revolutionaries: All over the world we see combattants and the red banner of the rebellion:

• Students from Berkeley/California had started a 'Free Speech Movement' in 1964, which now reaches also other countries: Protest actions of students develop in England, Belgium, Italy, Poland and in several countries of Latin America. In Germany especially the 'Socialist German Federation Of Students' takes up the aims and action forms of the American students.
• Also in Czechoslovakia students demonstrate and finally achieve a reshuffle of the government: in March Alexander Dubcek comes to power and proclaims democratic and market-economic reforms to create a 'Socialism with a human face'.
• In Japan, the central organization of the students, Zengakuren, demonstrates for social reforms in the streets of all big cities.
• When in April Martin Luther King is shot, the USA are on the verge of a civil war with heavy revolts in more than hundred big cities.
• In Mexico, before and during the Olympic Games hundreds of thousands demonstrate against the corrupted government.
• In May, 30,000 students raise barricades around the university quarter of Paris in France to demonstrate their protest against the conservative government of Charles de Gaulle, about one million of frenchmen support them on solidarity meetings, and the three big trade unions proclaim a general strike; de Gaulle leaves the country ...

But de Gaulle comes back, and in an appealing speech to his 'Grande Nation' he announces extensive social improvements – the trade unions are satisfied, the rebellion is at its end.
Also the other protests are soon finished, and some of them are suppressed brutally and bloodily.
In August the tanks of the Warsaw Pact powers invade Czechoslovakia and crush the 'Spring of Prague' under their tracks.
In the USA, in the riots 46 people come to death, 2600 are injured, and 21,000 are arrested.
In Japan, the students are attacked by the police with outmost violence, and their resistance can finally be suppressed only after days of bloody street-fightings.
In October, 500 demonstrators are killed in Mexico when the government tries to scatter a mass demonstration of 500,000 people with army tanks, helicopters and machine guns.

In February 1965, 2500 young people demonstrate at Berlin against the bombardments of the US Air Force on Vietnamese towns and villages; 500 demonstrators finally leave the allowed demonstration route, go to the America House, and set the US flag half-mast.

The publicity is shocked, the newspapers, especially those of the publisher Axel Springer, condemn the demonstrators, and the mayor of Berlin apologizes to the US town major.

But the protests go on and expand. At the Easter March 1966 in the whole Federal Republic about 100,000 people demonstrate on the streets, and in May 1966 a 'Vietnam Congress' takes place at Frankfurt, and Professor Herbert Marcuse from Berlin ends his speech to 5000 trade unionists and students with the appeal:

"There is no necessity ... which could justify what is going on in Vietnam: The slaughtering of the civil population, of women and children, the systematic annihilation of foodstuff, mass bombing of one of the poorest and most defenseless countries of the world ... We have to protest, even if we think it is hopeless, simply to survive as humans – and perhaps also because this might shorten the terror and the horror, and this would be already very, very much today."*

We definitely sympathize with the small people of Vietnam who desperately tries to defense itself against the military superiority of the invaders. We collect money for Vietnam, organize bazaars and flea markets and send the proceeds to solidarity funds; we wear buttons 'The People Of Vietnam Will Win' and rings made from the metal of shot down US bombers; we have stickers 'Americans Out Of Vietnam!' on our cars; on our demonstrations we call 'Ho Ho Ho-Chi-Minh' in honour of this Vietnamese revolutionary, we carry his poster and the flags of North Vietnam and of the Viet Cong with us; and we invent numerous actions to make the inhuman cruelties of this war public ...
Later, when on the big demonstration of the trade unions on the 1st of May 1975 the news is spread that just a few hours ago the last Americans hastily had to leave Vietnam we take each other in our arms with tears in our eyes.

Our protest was a personal confession against this bestial war in Vietnam and against war in general. I have refused to serve in the army in 1967, and everywhere in Germany the number of refusers of war service went up abruptly in these years.

Our protest was also directed to the US government, as a moral appeal to end the killing, and to the American population to force their government to stop this war.

The publishing house of Axel Springer edited in Germany of 1968

39% of the daily newspapers,
82% of the supraregional newspapers,
90% of the sunday newspapers and
48% of the radio and tv journals.

This was the reason for the principally prejudiced, one-sidedly negative, wrong, and partly intentionally falsified reporting of the German press about the whole Movement of 68 which appeared to be largely socialist-revolutionary and, moreover, took the part of the communist Vietnam against the western great power USA.

Springer's 'Bild-Zeitung' (='Picture News'), with four millions of readers the biggest German newspaper at all, defamed the youth revolt by especially malevolent insults and falsifications. The young people were branded as 'rowdies', 'riot-students', 'long-haired monkeys', 'polit-dropouts', 'plague-boils' and 'red SA' (the SA had been Hitler's thug-army), and were caricatured only as silly thugs with thick clubs or as unkempt crazy bombers.

"For years the papers of the pious conservative big publisher had agitated against the protest movement: 'Police truncheons on rowdies' heads in order to loosen the brains that may perhaps still be in there' – so 'Bild-Zeitung' in 1966."* When in April 1967 the US vice-president Humphrey payed Berlin a visit, some young folks planned to throw pudding on him. The 'Bild-Zeitung' liked it hotter, and the next day their headline announced in huge letters: "Planned: Berlin – Bomb Attempt On US Vice-President" and their comment emphasized the bomb lie: "We will handle these bombers! The majority of the Germans appreciates the fight of the Americans in Asia."*

The protest movement defends itself. The demand to decartelize Springer's media trust on account of his monopoly finds its radical expression in the slogan 'Expropriate Springer!' – this slogan is soon heard on every demonstration, and of course we boycott all Springer products.

The Anti-Springer protests reach their climax on Maundy Thursday, the 11th of April 1968.

The news that Rudi Dutschke was shot down by a young rightist this morning is transmitted to us during an evening meeting. We stop our discussions at once – we have no doubt: That is the result of the permanent hatred campaign of Springer's newspapers! Hadn't the 'Bild-Zeitung' provoked lynching with headlines like "Stop the terror of the young reds now!", "Do away with them!", and "Don't leave all the dirty work to the police!"*?

We are excited and infuriated, and the world has to know that. We take our banners with the 'Expropriate Springer!' slogan, and our red flags, and we cut signs out of big cardboard boxes, nail them to broom-sticks, and write on them

In other cities, where there were editorial offices or printing works of the Springer trust, the demonstrators are gathering there. They are already expected: The buildings are surrounded with barbed wire and rows of policemen. This lets the fury still grow. In more than 20 cities the demonstrators raise barricades around the distribution depots to block the delivery of the 'Bild-Zeitung'.

When the Springer trucks try to break through the blockades, and the policemen begin to climb the barricades they produce an enraged and bloody street-fighting. "By the wayside fell two deads, more than 400 injured persons, and the claim of the Federal Republic to be an intact democratic state."*

In the cities of Essen and Cologne the demonstrators really succeed in blocking the delivery of the 'Bild-Zeitung' for one day. In Berlin the struggles are especially spectacular: Here the Springer trucks go up in flames. But the plan for this was not made by the demonstrators – "it was made elsewhere, in a higher place. The secret agent of the German secret service 'Verfassungsschutz' (='Protectors of the Constition', haha!) Peter Urbach had a big woven basket with him, packed out with ready-made petrol bombs. Among the demonstrators he soon found interested customers for his ware. And then the delivery vehicles of the Springer trust were ablaze, incended by Peter Urbach's molotov cocktails. The photos of the burning trucks were published by all newspapers, as a proof of the 'violence of the students of Berlin'."*

More than 400,000 people take part in the nationwide protests but Springer's media trust survives all this undamaged, also the 'Bild-Zeitung' continues its course and compromises itself still 30 years later by the falsification of a photo which pretended to show a left-wing minister among demonstrators armed which truncheons and bolt cutting tools.*

In May 1965 we come to know that the Social-Democratic Party, the biggest party of the parliamental opposition and our great hope in our struggle for more democracy, has made a full turn-about and gave up its strict resistance against the Emergency Laws: The leaders of the ruling Christian-Democrats and of the oppositional Social-Democrats declare their consent to make our Constitution an Emergency Constitution. Their experts are already working on a common draft.

In December 1966 the turned party gets its reward and is allowed to take part in the government. The Christian-Democrats and the Social-Democrats, the two biggest parties in the Federal Parliament, form a 'big coalition', and the Christian-Democratic expert for Emergency Laws becomes Minister of the Interior.

This government is practically free to do whatever they want – the coalition of the two big parties gets them every needed majority; the parliament has degenerated to an applauding machine, and there is no longer an effective parliamental opposition which could control the government.

It is typical for the rebellious spirit of this time that spontaneously an 'Extraparliamentary Opposition' is formed by all those who do not give up the fight against the Emergency Laws. In 1966 a Board of trustees 'Emergency of Democracy' is founded by famous German personalities, among them various winners of literary and scientific Nobel Prices, clergymen, authors, trade unions, students' organizations, and the Easter March Campaign for Disarmament. Their first congress 'Emergency of Democracy' in October 1966 at Frankfurt gathers more than 20,000 participants.

In the next two years, the Extraparliamentary Opposition expands to become a broad movement of people of all ages – on the nationwide Action Day against the Emergency Laws in May 1968 more than 250,000 people take part in protest meetings and demonstrations. The aim of all these actions is to interfere from outside into the parliamental work, to remind the representatives to respect the people's will, and so to avert the passing of the Emergency Constitution.

The Emergency Laws consist of a whole package of laws and alternations to our Constitution which enable the government, after having proclaimed a "state of emergency", to abolish fundamental human rights like the freedom of opinion, secrecy of the post, freedom of the press, or of move, or of free choice of a profession, further to administrate by force the nourishment system, water, and the traffic system, for instance to confiscate all private cars, and, in case of interior riots, to let the army fight against the own population; a 'trunk parliament' of a few selected representatives shall then serve as a democratic legitimation of such governmental measures.

By these laws, so the philosopher Karl Jaspers is warning, "the instrument can be created by which in one disastrous moment, by one single act, dictatorship can be installed, the Constitution can be abolished, an irreversible state of political suppression can be arranged."*

"This legal instrument seemed to be made for defining the state of emergency and eliminating the parliament by constitutional means. The fear that this might come true finally wakened the old trauma: The disaster of the German parliamentarism was exactly that fact that the nazis had been able to install their regime without any violation of the Constitution, only by passing an Emergency Law."*

The way how we experience the authorities in these years – policemen with truncheons, water cannons, and tear gas bombs against mass demonstrations, acquittal for a police agent who shoots a demonstrator, mounted policemen who ruthlessly ride into peaceful sit-down demonstrations, secret agents who film everything and take pictures of everybody – all this only stirs up our general mistrust of this government and its executive organs.

And what at all is 'interior emergency' which is defined only very vaguely as 'danger for the fundamental liberal-democratic order'?
– A general strike of the trade unions?
– Or protest meetings against the politics of the government?
– Or a protest rally of many ten thousands to the capital?

For this rally takes place in May 1968: The Board of trustees 'Emergency of Democracy' has called for a 'Protest Rally to the Capital'.

Late in the evening we gather at the bus which was chartered by our trade union. We ride the whole night through and arrive in the morning at the capital, park our bus far outside the town, and then have still kilometers to walk until we finally meet the mighty demonstration.

Now there is hardly one day without demonstrations and meetings against the Emergency Laws. The protest actions go on at Berlin, Munic, Essen, Frankfurt, Esslingen, Hannover, Hamburg, and many more towns. During the parliamental debates on the Emergency Laws the workers of a lot of factories call for warning strikes ...

But unmoved by all protests the parliament finally passes the Emergency Constitution. Some Social-Democratic representatives vote against the Laws – not too many, not to endanger the passing ...

The hopes of the Nobel Prize winners and authors, philosophers and clergymen, socialists, trade unionists, and radical democrats, and of the whole youth movement of 68 – the hopes of the whole Extraparliamentary Opposition to prevent the disastrous Emergency Constitution, are gone.

But the Extraparliamentary Opposition has to avert still another danger from the young German democracy, and the alliance becomes even broader when it turns against the upcoming radical rightist tendencies.

Whatever the new rightists may imagine when they dream of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich – behind the pompous surface of the ostentatious parades and the imperious master-racist behaviour of the great and small leaders, everyday life was poor, narrow-minded, prudish, and hypocritical.
There were regulations for everything, even the feelings were normed, whom you had to give cheers and whom you had to hate, and everybody had to fit in with concern and was not allowed to commit the least gaffe.
Everybody attentively watched each other: I could hardly speak when I already knew how to rebuke a woman who entered the crowded baker's shop with a merry 'Good morning!' – with my shrill children's voice I cried through the whole shop: 'You mustn't say 'Dood Morning', you must say 'Heil Hitler'!', and the poor woman with a red face apologized and stammered her due 'Heil Hitler'.
That was everyday life in the nazi era: a narrow-minded, fearful world, full of watchers, denouncers, and sneaks ...

This climate of frightened obedience to every authority, and of the collective hatred of these millions of gray mice against all colourful birds who might dare to break through the common norm – this suffocating fug lay on the German society still after the war. Well, the first leaders of the Hitler regime had vanished, but now came the men of the second rank:

• Oberlaender, Minister of Refugees in Chancellor Adenauer's government, had to go, when it was revealed that he as a high SA leader with his special unit had killed at least 3000 polish men, women and children;
• Globke, State Secretary of Chancellor Adenauer, was no longer bearable when the publicity came to know that he had written the legal commentary of the notorious Race Laws of Nuerenberg;
• Krueger, Minister in the government of Chancellor Ehrhard, had to retire when the press published that he as a judge in a special court in Poland had been responsible for death sentences and executions;
• Luebke, however, was even reelected for President of the Republic in spite of the documents which revealed that he had designed construction plans for concentration camp barracks;
• Carstens, formerly a member of Hitler's noble Mounted SA, was as well elected for President of the Republic;
• Kiesinger became Chancellor in spite of his well known former activities in the nazi Ministry of Propaganda ...

All these gentlemen, of course, had been members of Hitler's nazi party, Oberlaender and Krueger, as Hitler's 'old combattants' since 1923, had even been decorated with the exclusive 'Blood Order' – nevertheless they all had been found to be worthy of the highest functions in the Republic. And they were only the peak of the iceberg:

• the nazi policemen were policemen again,
• the nazi judges were still judges,
• the nazi professors were still professors, too,
• the nazi teachers soon were teachers again,
• and nazi generals, too, were generals again soon ...
• And our fathers who in the era of the great victories had put their uniform cap on our heads and had drilled us: 'Forward, March ... Halt! Attention!' around the kitchen table – they still now commanded in their sergeant-major's voice: 'Stand erect!', 'Go to the hair-cutter!', 'Don't argue!', 'Stop that nigger music!'

In this atmosphere the National-Democratic Party is founded in 1964. It wants to appear serious and trustworthy, and officially declares its consent with the Constitution, but in its publications and on its public meetings it shows an unconcealed racism and anti-semitism, and an open hostility against foreigners and the 'mixture of races', it attacks the trade unions and the traditional political parties of the working classes, it plays down and calls in question the nazi crimes, and demands to restore the German frontiers of 1914 which enclosed parts of the actual states Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithunia, and Denmark.

In September 1968 the Regional Court at Hannover declares:

"The National-Democratic Party of Germany is hostile against workers, anti-democratic, neo-nazi, radical right."

Nevertheless this party finds enough voters to become elected at the first go into seven of the (at that time) nine Regional Parliaments of our Republic, and now they concentrate all their powers to became elected also into the national Federal Parliament.

The National-Democratic Party seems to have inexhaustible sources of money for its election campaign. The cities and even the country roads are plastered with posters showing their first candidate, Adolf von Thadden, in expensive four-colour print, they let rain thousands of flyers from trucks, and have their candidates' letters distributed by post into every household.

The Extraparliamentary Opposition can afford only small stickers, hardly larger than a stamp, and we paste the National-Democrat Adolf von Thadden one on the nose wherever we can reach a poster of him. Our stickers show a stylized face of Adolf Hitler, crossed out with two big red lines, and the words: 'One Adolf Was Already Too Much!'

Every public meeting of the National-Democratic Party rouses a lot of anti-demonstrators with banners and shrill whistles. Each time dense rows of policemen march up, and in the side streets water-cannons and busses with reinforcement and police-dogs are hidden, to give this notoriously anti-democratic party a democratic platform.

Our actions against the National-Democratic Party attract attention. Of course the newspapers in unison don't brand the neo-nazi rightists, but the anti-demonstrators to be the trouble-makers. But the critical Germans have learned to read between the lines of their newspapers, and our spectacular actions rouse up many democrats, and open their eyes for the developments at the right margin of the political spectrum. The young people with their ceaseless, often daring actions are the prime movers, but trade unionists, social-democrats, communists, liberals, and christians become their allies in this struggle, and each time the demonstrations grow bigger and more powerful.

Finally the Extraparliamentary Opposition has won: At the nationwide elections of 1969 the National-Democratic Party doesn't get enough votes to win a seat in the Federal Parliament, the rightists stay outside. At the elections in the next years they also lose all seats in the Regional Parliaments again. Several separations of disappointed members weaken this party, which once, as the big collecting movement for all rightists, so briskly started its victorious march through all parliaments – until the Movement of 68 stopped it.

The liberation of the sexuality was, no doubt, one of the most exciting aspects of the Revolution of 68. For apart from the nazi past which the adults tried to make forgotten by a collective conspiracy of silence, sexuality was the strongest taboo of the German post-war society.

Sexual themes principally were not discussed. We were never told the facts of life, neither at school nor at home, and never we had seen father or mother undressed.

When we were boys we had adventurous imaginations about sexual life, nourished by accidentally overheard chats of adults, eavesdropping on our parents, or curious glances through knot-holes in cubicles. Every new insight into this forbidden world was a sensation and at once spread among all our friends. But we were far from knowing anything exactly. Even such a natural thing like birth remained a riddle to us for we had no idea of the female anatomy: Children probably were either operated out of the woman's belly, or born through the anus. But everyone had already heard the repressive unwisdom that masturbation would lead to a decrease of the spinal cord and to a soon death.

Still in the beginning sixties, as a student, I could rent a room only on condition that I never would invite a female there, and the lessor had good reasons for this precaution: He who conceded an unmarried couple to have sexual intercourse in his house made himself liable to prosecution and risked, according to the Procuring Law of the German Penal Code, to be sent to jail for five years. Couples had to identify themselves as married to a lessor, otherwise they could not rent an apartment.

When in 1961 the pill came to Germany, the German Chamber of Physicians gave order to prescribe it only to wives who had already given birth to children, and even then it still depended on the personal moral principles of your doctor if he would give it to you unless there was an urgent medical necessity – tips how to fake the symptoms for such a necessity were exchanged among the young women as eagerly as the addresses of the rare physicians who were more permissive with their prescriptions.

Everyone felt called upon to be a watcher and keeper of moral and virtue, and the youth had widely accepted the enforced abstinence. According to a survey, 66% of the female students were still virgins in 1966, and we young men in full earnest discussed the common opinion that premarital sexual intercourse would be bad because it anticipated the most beautiful moments of being together, and the marriage afterwards would be stale and boring.

On the other hand, many of us already long since slept with their girls as often as we could outwit the prudish precautions of the adults, but always with the bad feeling to offend against all morality and jurisdiction and – also with regard to our very poor knowledge of contraception – to bring on disastrous consequences. Outwards we had at any rate to keep up appearances to be abstinent and virtuous. We soon understood that the narrow-minded moral of the adults systematically educated us to become hypocrites, betrayers, and sneaks.

So it is like an explosion when the youth suddenly finds the courage to shake off all hypocrisy, and to take themselves the right to love each other, how and where and when they want to.

The ignition spark is the group 'Kommune I' (='1st Commune'), which is founded in January 1967 in the apartment of the author Uwe Johnson in Berlin by students and artists in the tradition of dadaism and surrealism, who want to free 'sexuality, the pivot of every interior and exterior suppression', by a 'Subversive Action' with spectacular and provoking self-performances.

'Kommune I' deliberately exposes itself to the lime-light of the media, and soon succeeds in becoming the 'enfant terrible' of the Republic: This anarchic community of young women and men, their free love on a large layer of mattresses, among them so crazy bums like the 'Joy-Guerillero' Fritz Teufel and the 'Senior Mufti of the Chaos' Dieter Kunzelmann, and then their scandalous nude photos, their shrill macabre self-staging ...

The media present all this in detail to the shocked nation, with a malicious delight denouncing this 'climax of communist immorality' – and implant quite new ideas into the heads of the rebellious youth.

Everywhere groups of young people start living together, first in illegally occupied empty houses, then also legally: A married couple rents a flat, and then the others follow as 'subtenants'. Some lessors also turn a blind eye to unmarried folks, because these groups prefer exactly those huge flats in old buildings which nobody else wants to rent. Soon the Procuring-Law is no longer practicable, because in 1972 already 300,000 flats are shared by unmarried inhabitants. Overrun by this stormy development, the obsolete conception of Procuring is officially deleted from the German Penal Code in 1974.

The young folks in the shared flats try new forms of living together: Here young families come together and share kitchen works and care for the children, there all inhabitants are singles; somewhere an intimate living and loving develops within the group, elsewhere everybody goes his own ways; here rosters are planned and controlled, there things go their chaotic way ...

The youth has found their own alternative of living together, apart from family and marriage, and this new style of living, first still notorious as 'anarchistic commune', is soon accepted as a normal 'shared flat' where you live at a low rent and always have a comfortable place for love.

With youthful unconcern and revolutionary radicality the young folks conquer this new terrain of sexuality, get over their inhibitions, enjoy breaking all taboos, and throw all conventions over board.

Premarital intercourse is no subject of discussion any longer. You can do it, and you can take your time until you are convinced to have found the right partner. And why should you still marry at all? Marriage as the formerly single 'license to love' has lost its importance. Also those who are already married develop a looser conception.

Homosexual couples dare to come out now, live together and share the same bed, and nobody objects, though, according to the German Penal Code, homosexual love is still defined as 'unnatural indecency' and is prosecuted and punished hard. But the sexual revolution overruns also this barrier: In 1968 this paragraph is deleted from the Penal Code, and soon gay and lesbian associations are founded, cafés and clubs with the rainbow sign are opened as public meeting places, and in 1971 a movie of Rosa von Praunheim is shown in the cinemas: 'Not the Homosexual is perverted, but the situation he lives in'.

Suddenly sexuality is the 'theme no.1'. Youth journals publish series of sex education and tips for contraceptive measures, and new biology textbooks are introduced into the schools. Works of art, nude paintings and sculptures which had been confiscated in the prudish years under the charge of pornography are released again now and shown in public exhibitions.

If our parents still cannot talk about the unspeakable, if many a teacher still is afraid of teaching sex education, if the reactionaries are disguised as medical men ('Promiscuity will spread venereal diseases!') or as moralists ('Who changes much will soon be small coin!') – Who cares?

The free life in the shared flats and the liberation of the sexuality open a new perspective of life to the women. Until now, jurisdiction and ruling moral had condemned them to be submissive: First to the parents, and after the marriage to their husbands. Now young women experience their independence, they gain self-confidence. They seize an occupation, become economically independent, and live as free as a man. They can choose their partners themselves and – thanks to the pill which is generally available in the meantime – enjoy premarital love without fears.

Even if she has children of her own and cannot place them in one of the rare kindergartens, a woman can stay employed if the fellow occupants of the shared flat look after the children or organize a kindergarten themselves. At this time, all over the land thousands of 'children's shops' are founded by young mothers and fathers who put their money together, rent vacant shop rooms and install a self-organized kindergarten there for their children. Many of these 'free' kindergartens become permanent institutions, but now also the communes and the churches discover this problem and a boom of building kindergartens begins.

With this new self-confidence the women of 68 start to break up the male dominance in their own movement first. In order to protest against the authoritarian behaviour of their male comrades, female students found an 'Action council for the liberation of the woman' at Berlin and a 'Women's council' at Frankfurt. Who doesn't take them seriously is bombed with tomatoes and hissed off the stage.

More essential, however, is the resistance in the society which is completely dominated by men and male interests. This society, for example, refuses women the fundamental right to have their body at their own disposal. That is why already during the demonstrations of 68 we demand to abolish the Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code by which women are forced to carry a child to the full term even against their will, and every attempt of abortion is strictly forbidden and threatened with hard penalties. When the Revolution of 68 slowly calms down, the Women's Movement gets independent and "smilingly accomplishes the most non-violent and most successful revolution of the 20th century"*.

About 1971 a broad campaign against the Abortion Law develops with demonstrations and protest meetings. The journalist Alice Schwarzer soon takes over the role of the spokeswoman and effectively fights for the sake of the Women's Movement with publications and spectacular television occurrences.

In 1974 the taboo is finally broken. Against the fierce resistance of all opponents – nearly all of them are men – the Paragraph 218 is modified, so that an abortion is allowed now, under certain circumstances, during the first three months of pregnancy.

In 1975 Alice Schwarzer publishes her best seller 'The Small Difference and its big consequences' and accuses the sexual violence and predominance of the man in the family.

In 1977 the legal privilege of the man to be the head of the household is abolished, and this is the end of the millenniums old patriarchate. Wife and husband have to organize their household and occupation 'in mutual consent' now: The way to a cooperative and democratic familiar partnership is opened.

In 1918 Lenin is said to have mockered: 'When the Germans in their revolution want to occupy a railway station, they first buy an admission ticket'.
In 1968 he would have been astonished: Our political objectives were at any rate more important to us than any rules or laws.

"Civil courage", that is "to say or do the right thing, even then, when it is in opposition to the ruling opinion", "has in certain situations to ignore even laws", says the lawyer and member of parliament Stroebele today. "That was necessary not only in the nazi era, but also in the sixties and seventies."*

• To force an old nazi like Chancellor Kiesinger, who had been a propagandist already under Hitler, to retire prematurely from his microphone by throwing tomatoes and shrill whistle concerts – that was at least breach of the public peace and duress, sure ...
• To slap him in the face in public – that was at least bodily harm ...
• To follow the groups of rightists who pasted their posters at night, and to tear the posters down again before they had time to dry – that perhaps could be called damage of property ...
• To invade a university seminar and to discuss the acute Emergency Laws instead of obsolete things like Old-Gothic Grammar – that was at least trespass ...
• To block a street crossing or the approach road of a rocket launching site by a sit-down demonstration – that was an offense against all traffic rules, sure ...
• To tear down a red flag from a car and to break the flagstaff to pieces – that was at least damage of property ...
  To shout at the car driver then: 'Get out if you want a sock in the kisser now!' – that was a bad menace of violence ...
  roared into my face by a policeman at the Easter March 1968. I got out of my car, and then he only asked for my driver's license. Well, it was a time of excitement then, and we all were not too pedantic.

If we realized at all to offend against a rule so we put up with that, and put up with the charges, too, which rained down on us after many an action.
Then solidarity helped: Young lawyers gave legal advice and, if needed, we collected money to pay the fines.
When a demonstrator who had carried a banner with the slogan 'The Shah Is A Murderer' was charged with lese-majesty, in a short time 72,000 young people informed the public prosecutor that they had said the same sentence in public – the charge had to be dropped, and also the accusation against Alice Schwarzer, who had declared to have offended against the Abortion Law, when suddenly many hundreds of women indicted themselves for the same offense.

These actions were not directed against jurisdiction in general. Also those who wanted another state with all their might had no plans for a forcible overthrow: All hopes, all actions were directed on the great aim to use the revolutionary verve of the Movement of 68 to create this comprehensive democratization of the whole population which should give birth to a new free community.

"Revolution", said Rudi Dutschke in those days, "this could only mean: A majority of this existing population has become self-conscious in a long process of information and action, and does not accept the existing institutions any longer"*. "The farer the free society still is, the bigger our strains must be to realize the historical chance ... and if we don't succeed we have lost a historical period."*

There is no call for violence in these words, no appeal for a violent revolution even in the moment of a threatening defeat, but the firm orientation on a long-term strategy of a peaceful and patient struggle for democratization. And only when the storm of the events calms down finally, it slowly becomes visible how many various trends there are in this movement, and how manifold their ideas are about the mobilization of the population for the comprehensive democratization of our society:

• About 60,000 young people join the numerous communist groups which spring up in 1968 and the following years; they place their confidence in the 'sleeping giant' – the working class which only had to be enlightened and mobilized to take over the power as the democratic majority in this land.
• 300,000 new members enter the Social-Democratic Party – one third of their membership originates from the Movement of 68 now. They also want to turn the attention back to the working class and to revive the revolutionary traditions of this old workers' party.
• Several thousand radical democratic young people join the Free Liberal Party which until then had been dominated by right national tendencies. They elect a new chairman, a new board, and install a left liberal trend which enables the Free Liberal Party to form a new government together with the Social-Democrats in 1969.
• But the biggest part of the Movement of 68 is too anti-authoritarian to submit to the hierarchic structures of a political party. Many of them rather try to realize the common democratization beginning with their own self-realization, they occupy themselves with psychology and psychoanalysis in order to change first themselves and then, one by one, the whole society.
• The ecological 'green' movement is started when a part of the 68'ers moves to the countryside to lead a simple life with self-woven clothes and biological agriculture, to renounce consum, and to lead the immoderate throw-away society back to nature and to a new social consciousness.
• Anarchists are knotting networks, invisible and entangled like grass roots, to inform, and consult, and mobilize themselves mutually for the 'grass root revolution' which will abolish all forms of violence and dominance by power from below.
• The Women's Movement develops after 1968 independently and struggles against male privileges and female discrimination. They want to realize full equal rights for women in everyday life and so create a solidary and democratic society.

Who is not firmly engaged in one of these directions now soon retires into privacy.

The tornado of the revolution is over. But the work is continued.

The next decade, the seventies of the twentieth century, is dominated by political desperados and their spectacular activities. We have not much in common with them. We sympathize with their protest, but are repelled by their methods. This is a new generation, they speak another language, use other means, have other aims.

From all the names which turn up in the headlines in this decade of terror I remember only the name of Ulrike Meinhof from the sixties. Since her first public speech as a hardly twenty years old student at an Anti-Nuclear Weapons Meeting in 1958, she had become a journalist and wrote many prudent articles for peace and social juctice. But after the shots on Benno Ohnesorg and Rudi Dutschke she cannot believe in a peaceful change any longer. At the end of 1969 she goes underground and commits a series of murder attacks against the mighty of this country in order to encourage the population to start an armed revolution. But this ideology cannot convince anybody, and her tiny group with the arrogant name 'Red Army Fraction' remains completely isolated. When Ulrike Meinhof is finally arrested in 1972, she is charged with five committed murders and more than fifty murder attempts. In 1976 she hangs herself in her cell.

In the meantime a 'second generation of the Red Army Fraction' commits further as spectacular as senseless murders, and from 1973 on 'Revolutionary Cells' cause a stir by their arson attacks and bomb attempts against selected objects. They all want to encourage others to do the same – but the chain reaction, the development of a broad militant-revolutionary protest movement fails to come.

At the same time the colourful 'Sponti' Groups occupy empty houses, and with inventive local actions protest for more kindergartens and against fare increase or atomic power plants. But as the hard core of these groups soon appear those street-fighters who above all want the close combat with the police – until they have to admit in 1976 that they are just "swaying between hopelessness and blind actionism"*.

Altogether their violent actions fail to succeed. Violence, as a privilege of the state, is a language the apparatus of state always speaks better than some angry amateurs. On the contrary, our Revolution of 68 was successful because we never planned any aggressive violent activities – the cheery non-violent mass movement of millions of young people had made the apparatus of state speechless and defenseless, and so we could win.

The violent offenders of the seventies achieve only this: The conservatives, pushed back by the Revolution of 68, can finally come forth again and have their reactionary reprisal:

• Posters with photos of the wanted terrorists – thirty people at the most – hang in every office and every shop, in every station and at advertising pillars. Newspapers and television by turns report about places where terrorists probably were sighted, about probable hiding places, probable disguises, favourite cars and weapons ... The population is asked to keep their eyes wide open. A hysterical fear is spread, and the common hunt for lefties becomes a popular sport. He who confesses to be a socialist or even a communist is soon regarded to be potential terrorist.
• In this overheated political climate the conservative Regional Governments can move the new Chancellor Brandt in 1972 to enact the 'Decree against Radicals':
  Nationwide one and a half million of aspirants to the civil service are spied on by the secret service now, and ten thousands of them, classified as "Radicals", are put under professional ban – until Chancellor Brandt, criticized by the other European governments and repeatedly officially blamed by the International Labour Organization of the UN, in 1978 confesses that this decree was an 'error'.
  Formally the 'Decree against Radicals' is not cancelled until today. It is only (temporarily?) not practised.
• On the pretext of hunting 30 (in words: thirty) terrorists the opportunity is seized to extend the apparatus of state to an Emergency Law quality:
  Within the five years 1969-1974 the public expense for police are raised from 2,500 million to 5,100 million DM;
  the budget of the secret service is doubled;
  the budget of the Federal Criminal Office is increased by six times.
• Mobile Task Force Commands of the regional police and of the federal border defense troops are formed and heavily armed.
• The police gets new equipment and new armament, which seems to be made for a civil war, and their methods become ruder:
  Screen searches with hundreds of arrested people,
  street controls with submachine guns in aiming position,
  house searches without a search-warrant, kicked in doors and demolished furnishings ...
  things like these seem to be normal police behaviour now.
• The conditions of custody are aggravated; solitary confinement, which is experienced as a psychic torture by the prisoners, is extended for months; the rights of the defense councils are curtailed more and more;
• The few public protests against such police state methods, among them the German Literary Nobel Price winner Heinrich Boell with his book 'The lost honour of Katharina Blum', remain without effective resonance in this tense atmosphere of common intimidation and persecution mania.

No, all this has nothing to do with our Revolution of 68, and who doesn't separate this clearly, is either disinformed himself, or he intends to disinform others by "mixing up three historical periods which in reality have only very few in common:

There are, firstly, the late sixties, when the colour of fashion was Red – red like the flags the students waved at the tact of their 'Ho Ho Ho-Chi-Minh'-staccato, red like the plastic cover of the wide-spread zeitgeist-accessoire 'Mao Bible'; red like the omnipresent poster of Marx-Engel-Lenin with the alienated railway ad slogan 'Everybody talks about the weather – we don't!'.

There are, secondly, the seventies, when ... protest was clad in Black – black like the flags of the anarchs and the 'hate caps' of the masked slingshooters at the barbed wire fences of atom plants; black like the legendary BMW = 'Baader-Meinhof-Wagen' (='cars of Baader and Meinhof', two leading terrorists who actually preferred BMW cars) used by the German death squadrons to haste from one scene of crime to the next; black like the mourning-dresses at the funerals of dead terrorists when their combattants swore over the open grave: 'The battle goes on.'

And finally there are, thirdly, the eighties, when Green became the colour of choice – green like the new sprouting German branch of Greenpeace; green like the blooming up ecological movement protesting against the pollution of water and air; green like Green Party which originally was only regionally organized and founded their nationwide organization in 1980."*

In the meantime, the revolutionaries of 68 have remembered their families and professions again, they become "judges, advertising consultants, professors, journalists, lawyers. Some of them are social workers in problematic parts of town, or shop stewards – first started with revolutionary ideas, then got stuck in reformistic everyday trivialities. They are people who care for the public weal, still now, and still they are inclined to keep their distance to the 'system'."*

They set out on the 'long march through the institutions' which will lead them to the control desks of the power one day: In 1999 the Chancellor will be a former chairman of the Young Socialists who took part in demonstrations against the atom industry, the Minister of Foreign Affairs a former squatter who knew how to defense himself against police attacks, and the Minister of Ecology a former maoist. The Minister of Economic Cooperation, by her own words, has "grown up under the water cannon"*, and the Minister of the Interior once called himself "a liberal communist"* and was a lawyer advocating for the rights of the Extraparliamentary Opposition.

Many want to become teachers, to educate the anti-authoritarian democratic new generation. Conservative school politicians get into panic about this rush, and with the 'Decree against Radicals' they succeed in ostracizing many an aspirant. But the most come through. The spirit of reform and democratization cannot be banned from school anyway, and the unconventional, socially engaged, bearded teacher who still comes to school in jeans and leather jacket as if he would go to a demonstration, soon becomes the perfect example of the 'Old 68'er'.

The most of them stay rebels, for they have experienced how self-liberation and liberation of the society go hand in hand, further each other mutually, and finally depend one from the other: One man can free himself only if he frees all men. That is why the one is and stays responsible for the society he lives in, and if this society should ever steer an undemocratic course he has to stem against the stream to preserve his personal freedom and his self-determination.

And what has come out of the revolution and its great aims? – Just wait! Who wants to judge about victory or defeat of the 68'ers and looks only at the results of these two, three years, can certainly list up a lot of great successes as well as a row of defeats, but at any rate has not the full picture:

Revolutions are the locomotives of history, and he who looks only at the engine, at the gigantic power of the movement, and at the people who drive it forward and look always ahead and talk about destinations they will perhaps never reach – he will be disappointed in the end. For no revolution has ever reached all its objectives.
But if you look twice, after the locomotive has passed by with all its noise and steam, you will recognize what a long train of events follows after the locomotive ... The 68'er train is rolling until today, and it has brought, and still brings, results we did not dare to dream of in the stormy sixties:

• In 1968 homosexuality was freed from the official defamation as 'unnatural indecency' and from legal prosecution.
  – In 2001 the 'Law about the termination of the discrimination of homosexual communities' opens the doors of the Marriage License Bureau for all gay and lesbian couples.
• About 1968 the obligatory frontal school instruction was replaced by modern forms of learning which in the following years were modified and improved again and again
  – until the pupil in the 'open instruction' of the year 2000 already in the first classes can determine by himself how he wants to organize his individual learning.
• About 1968 the corporal punishment was abolished in schools.
  – In 2001 flogging is forbidden also in families.
• In 1968 we had to organize 'children's shops' to create a kindergarten for our children by ourselves.
  – Today each child in the Federal Republic has a legal claim to a place in a public kindergarten.
• In 1969 the marching-in of the neo-nazi National-Democratic Party into the Federal Parliament was averted.
  – In 2001 the Federal Government applies for a total prohibition of this party.
• In 1972 three hundred thousand apartments were illegally inhabited by unmarried people and communities.
  – In 1998 more than three million unmarried communities live together in our country, quite legally.
• In 1974 the general ban on abortion was broken, in 1977 the patriarchal family organization was abolished.
  – In 1982 an educational vacation for mothers or fathers is granted, in 1997 it is extended to three years;
  since 1994 women can keep their original family name after marriage, the discriminating address 'Miss' is out of use;
  in 1995 a modified Abortion Law gives women the right to decide on abortion by themselves;
  since 1997 the rape of a spouse is liable to prosecution;
  in 2001 equal occupational chances of women are regulated by laws.
• In 1968 we could not avert the Emergency Constitution.
  – But we have initialized a common and comprehensive democratization which today imbues also the administration and even the army. The will to hold one's ground by democratic co-determination is developed so far in our country now, that every attempt to install dictatorship by use of the Emergency Laws will encounter the broad and bitter resistance of the population.

"In the German post-war history 1968 now plays the role of a myth of origin"*: "Strictly speaking it was a second foundation date of our Republic"*, when the 'democratic republic', decreed in 1949, finally also received its 'democratic population': The word 'democracy', which until then meant only a special form to elect a government every four years, was filled with the quite new meaning of a permanent cooperation, information, and control of all political proceedings. "It is owing to the Movement of 68 that they have helped a great deal to transform this very authoritarian Germany into a relatively normal western democracy."*

This is denied by nobody today, except those who, instead of our actual democratic rights of freedom and equality, would prefer an authoritarian state which is founded on order and obedience like the old German post-war Republic – and, of course, those who were too well-behaved in the wild sixties to join the rebellious youth movement and who now feel sorry for themselves because they have missed the most moving and most moved years of this Republic: "Hatred against 68 is a wide spread hobby of those who were young then and now despise the life they did not share."*

So 68 will be estimated controversially as long as this generation will live. "Beside Hitler (and the nazi regime) no event of the younger German history has been discussed as abundantly, as passionately, and as resultlessly, as this last 'revolution'"*, and "no matter if it is its 10th, 20th, 25th or 30th anniversary, each time this event is remembered intensely"*.

The commemoration days will be forgotten one day, and the 68'ers also, for long since younger generations have taken the education reform, the democratization of the society, the struggle for equal women's rights, the fight against fascism and war in their own hands and promote these problems in their own way, and more modern problems also, like the integrations of foreigners, or the abolishment of atom industries ...

To us 68'ers "the secret joy" is left "to have lived and experienced these years of secret power when we could be narcistic and solidary at the same time"*, because individual freedom could be gained only by collectively fighting for a common liberation – then, at that time.

Today nobody understands that any more. "That last 'revolution' which seems as far away as the moon today"* – that is "a time long, long ago, which appears to many Germans to be stranger than the middle ages"*.

And this fact, that the young people of today with all their phantasy cannot imagine what a narrow-minded, authoritarian, obedient, prudish, hypocritical society of fearful sneaks populated this land only thirty years ago – isn't this the most convincing proof of the victory of our Revolution of 68?