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The Revolution of 1968 1968 – what a year! A liberated, unleashed youth overthrew the rotten moral of the German post-war society, stormed across the broken idols, and with a laughter trod into the dust what had been reputed to be the highest virtues for centuries: chaste abstinence, modest contentment, piously devoted obedience, and submissive respect of law and authorities ... and cheeky and cheery this youth began to build their new world, to live their own life, to find their own moral. "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 ..." 1 "68 has become a myth" 2 . 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. "Revolution", said Rudi Dutschke, one of the leading heads of the Movement of 68 in Germany, "is not a matter of a few days of shooting and fighting. Revolution is a long, long lasting march and process of creating a new kind of people who are able not to replace an old clique by enthroning a new clique after the revolution, but to develop an abundant democratization from below" and so oppose "the bureaucratic domination from above": "This is a struggle where you have to develop your desires and needs, and in this struggle everybody is involved wherever in this world he may be" – and this long, long lasting process is by far not yet finished.
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.
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 1963 60% 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.
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.
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:
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."
4
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.
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. And because the ruling moral is always the moral of the rulers, we first had to break the power of all these established rulers, from the fathers who ruled our families up to the Chancellor who ruled the Republic, in order to be able to free ourselves – this insight which grew in thousands of young heads in these years is the true motor of the whole Revolution of 68.
The political events of the sixties
had gradually deprived us from all illusions
concerning this state and its politicians:
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.
The western moral became suspect to us: Nobody of us wanted to be 'protected' like the Vietnamese.
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.
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:
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.
One movement, however, cannot be suppressed in this rebellious year, not in the USA themselves nor in any other part of the world, and this are "the numerous demonstrations at Amsterdam, Ankara, Athens, Belgrade, Berkeley, Brussels, Chicago, Dakar, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Manila, Milano, New York, Rio, Rome, Sidney, Tokio, Venice, Warsaw, Washington, Zurich" against "the crime committed by the great power USA in Vietnam" 5 .
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."
6
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 ...
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.
Above all, however, our protest was aimed at the German government
which supported this war morally and logistically
and praised the 'engagement' of the Americans in Vietnam
as a 'proof of their meritorious and self-sacrificing
loyalty to the western alliance'
– which was echoed by all media,
and especially by the newspapers of the publisher Axel Springer.
The publishing house of Axel Springer
edited in Germany of 1968
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." 7 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." 8 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!" 9
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
SPRINGER HAD HIS FINGER AT THE TRIGGER! GIVE SPRINGER'S PRESS A SOCK IN THE GOB! and invent even worse slogans, finally we find a few torches, too, and then we go, a small bunch of perhaps fifty people, and roar out our rage through the deserted nocturnal streets. 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." 10 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'." 11 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. 12 Nevertheless, the new Works Constitution Law of 1972 for the first time tries to define how far a publisher has a right to determine the tendency of his newspapers, and how far he has to respect the freedom of the press and the co-determination of his employees. This is a first attempt to confine the omnipotence of a press baron like Axel Springer, and the results are not yet satisfying, but they are a great progress for variety of opinions and democracy in the print media – initialized and promoted also by the Anti-Springer protests of the Movement of 68.
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."
13
"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."
14
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'?
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.
we read on the banners, and EMERGENCY OF DEMOCRACY! and left-wing Social-Democrats carry signs: NO VOTE FOR THE EMERGENCY LAWS! At the final meeting the huge place is still too small for the 70,000 demonstrators, even the side streets are still crowded ... At the same time another protest meeting of the German Federation of Trade Unions in the industrial Ruhr-Area has about 15,000 participants, and further 150,000 people take part in several protest meetings in many more big cities. 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.
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:
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:
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:
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?
They are defeated.
We have stormed the forts of their obsolete moral
and have razed them to the ground.
No victory of the Revolution of 68 is as total
and as obvious as the liberation of the sexuality.
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"
15
.
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.
There is still very much to do
in order to let the equal rights of women become reality
in everyday life.
But that what the women "after 4000 years of stolid
dominance of men" have achieved in this short time,
"that is overwhelming. In spite of the hardest resistance
from the very beginning on", so Alice Schwarzer 30 years later.
"The expectations of a young woman today are fundamentally
different from that what a woman could hardly dare to hope
thirty years ago. Within one single generation,
there was a revolution in the heads."
16
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."
"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."
17
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.
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" 35 . "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." 18 There is no call for violence, no appeal for a violent revolution even in the moment of a threatening defeat, but again and again 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:
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"
19
.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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." 20
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'."
21
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
37
,
the Minister of Foreign Affairs
a former squatter who knew how to defense himself against
police attacks
38
,
and the Minister of Ecology a former maoist
39
.
The Minister of Economic Cooperation,
with her own words, has "grown up under the water cannon"
22
,
and the Minister of the Interior once called himself
"a liberal communist"
23
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.
"The most of them cannot forget their expectations of life,
when history seemed to be the product
of their own self-realization."
24
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.
– 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.
– In 2001 flogging is forbidden also in families.
– Today each child in the Federal Republic has a legal claim to a place in a public kindergarten.
– In 2001 the Federal Government applies for a total prohibition of this party.
– In 1998 more than three million unmarried communities live together in our country, quite legally.
– 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.
– 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" 25 . "Strictly speaking it was a second foundation date of our Republic" 26 , 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." 27 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." 28 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'" 29 , and "no matter if it is its 10th, 20th, 25th or 30th anniversary, each time this event is remembered intensely" 30 . 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" 31 , 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" 32 – that is "a time long, long ago, which appears to many Germans to be stranger than the middle ages" 33 . 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?
Sources: All quotations are translated from German into English language. At the following sources the German version was published.
1
Hellmuth Karasek: Kommentar, Tagesspiegel, 2.1.2001)
© Kai Kracht 2001 |