What was the role of the United States during the German student movement of the late 1960s? In your answer, you should briefly mention the post-war relationship of the two countries and then explain why and how it changed in the 1960s. You might ponder some of the following questions: How did the German student movement differ from its American counterpart? How was the United States perceived by German students? Do you think the German students' perception of America was basically correct or rather distorted? How so?
1. What was the role of the United States during the German student movement of the late 1960s? In your answer, you should briefly mention the post-war relationship of the two countries and then explain why and how it changed in the 1960s. You might ponder some of the following questions: How did the German student movement differ from its American counterpart? How was the United States perceived by German students? Do you think the German students' perception of America was basically correct or rather distorted? How so? Background The years between 1968 and 1977 were a tumultuous time for West Germany. Referred to by some as the "crisis years," this period represents an era of revolt, rebellion, and revolution in German history. The younger generation argued that Germany had failed to "work through" the Nazi past. They rightly suspected that Nazi sympathizers and collaborators had largely gone unpunished and still occupied positions of power in the Federal Republic. More importantly, however, students also claimed to recognize the same authoritarian mentality in public Germany that had led to the rise of Nazism several decades earlier. This belief, together with widespread opposition to the Vietnam War and to unfair university policies, brought students and political activists together, voicing anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments through protests in various cities throughout the country. Nowhere was the spirit of rebellion so prevalent as in West Berlin. In this island of democracy, revolts and protests escalated alarmingly. Marked by various scuffles between students and police, these conflicts reached a violent culminating point in April 1967, when two Frankfurt department stores burst into flames. Shortly thereafter the German Press Agency received a frantic phone call from a university student, Gudrun Ensslin, claiming emotionally that this had been no accident. This was "a political act of revenge!" It also marked the beginning of West German terrorism. Beginnings Figure 9.1. Construction of the Berlin Wall, 1961. The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 by the East German government in order to keep its citizens from defecting to the West. Shortly thereafter, attempting to flee to the West, a student jumped from a building on the eastern side of the wall. He died on impact. Members of the Socialist Students Organization (SDS) held a vigil that night for the dead student, marching silently through the streets of West Berlin. After the official march, hundreds of students attempted to storm the wall, yelling anti-communist cries of "Down with Ulbricht and Mao!" (These were the names of the political leaders of East Germany and China at the time.) The West Berlin police arrived and disbanded the protesters using tear gas and rubber billy-clubs. For the students, this was an inexcusable act on the part of the government. Yet, only a few years later, students were changing their opinions. In 1966, the two major political parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), joined together for the first time in a political union known as the Grand Coalition. Thus, the government had more than a two-thirds majority in parliament, effectively eliminating the separation of powers between the legislative and the executive branches. This development was met with outrage among many of the leftists in Germany, as the SPD had traditionally supported the leftists' views. Furthermore, many Germans feared that this was a return to fascism. By forming the Grand Coalition, the government was perceived to be forming a one-party system, reminiscent of the Nazis. This stirred up various sentiments of fear and distrust in the ranks of the left. On another note, there were also many problems inherent in the German university system at this time. Students protested, among other things, that many of their professors were ex-members of the Nazi party and that the university's internal administrative system was reminiscent of the Third Reich. Moreover, students rightly felt that they were not represented fairly on various university boards and panels. Anti-war sentiment, distrust of the government, and dissatisfaction with university policies led students to search for somebody they could hold responsible. Basing their arguments on such authors as Herbert Marcuse, they blamed, among others, the United States, whose involvement in Vietnam was, to them, clearly an act of imperialistic aggression in order to promote global capitalism. Not only this, but capitalism was seen as a thinly veiled attempt to control the masses through market-based means. According to this line of argument, since people in West Germany already had everything that they needed to survive, capitalism attempted to influence them to believe that they needed excessive and unnecessary goods. Such views fostered and nurtured a growing leftist sentiment, and by the late 1960s, many students were no longer shouting, "Down with Mao," but, rather, were praising such communists as Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Minh (the North Vietnamese leader). These sentiments were expressed through the demonstrations during the visit of the shah of Iran in June of 1967. Thousands of students took to the streets to protest the shah's repressive government. Protesters lined up behind police barricades on the evening of June 2 outside the Berlin Opera House where the shah was to attend an evening performance. Yet, when the shah emerged from his vehicle and was hurried into the Opera House, he barely noticed the spectacle. As protesters slowly began to disperse, they were surprised when swarms of police arrived and began to disrupt the crowd and make multiple arrests. During the melee, one student, believed to be a ringleader, was accosted. Police Detective Sgt. Karl-Heinz Kurras pointed his .45 at the young student's head, and the gun went off. There is some debate as to whether the sergeant's discharging of his weapon was accidental. But, regardless of Kurras' intent, the young student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead while attending his first, and last, protest. The growing ranks of discontents had gained a martyr. The shock of the killing brought students together in the office of the SDS. A young Gudrun Ensslin was outraged and, in a burst of emotional frenzy, she screamed out, "This fascist state means to kill us all! We must organize resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz Generation and there's no arguing with them!" (quoted in The New York Times, July 17, 2007; accessed January, 2008). Ensslin's heated exclamation voiced the sentiment of many fed-up pacifist protesters. Despite their non-violence, the police continued to beat and harass them. The Berlin air was charged with the pent-up energy of the students. Violence loomed on the horizon. From Protest to Praxis In early April 1968, a group of four university students, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein, took a trip to Frankfurt on the Main in Söhnlein's borrowed Volkswagen. Baader had gained a reputation around the university of being a violent upstart with revolutionary ideas. Today was to be the day when these revolutionary ideas would be put into action. Proll, Söhnlein, and Baader's girlfriend, Ensslin, finally took him up on his suggestion to set fire to a department store. After a day of shopping and trivialities, the group broke up into two pairs. Not long before the closing of Kaufhof and Schneider's, two large Frankfurt department stores, the group placed homemade bombs in strategic positions throughout the stores. Around midnight that night, fires broke out on various floors of both department stores. It seemed to the young revolutionaries that their plan had come brilliantly to fruition. They had destroyed a piece of capitalism and had also, in their opinions, given the West a taste of the fear and atrocities of the Vietnam War. They celebrated their victory against the "capitalist pigs" that evening. Figure 9.2. Ulrike Meinhof. Courtesy of Bettina Röhl. The next day at 10:00 p.m., they were arrested by police, who had received a tip as to where they were staying. After their Volkswagen and the premises had been searched, a plethora of incriminating evidence was discovered, from instructions on how to make explosives to the actual materials necessary. The would-be reactionaries had been caught red handed. In October of the same year, they were tried and convicted of arson, each receiving a three-year jail sentence. Shortly after the Frankfurt bombings, on June 11, the prominent leftist student leader Rudi Dutschke walked out the front door of his Berlin home straight into tragedy. Waiting for him outside was the young Joseph Bachmann, holding a gun in his pocket. Dutschke was shot three times, the force of the bullets knocking him out of his shoes. Dutschke survived his wounds, but the young Bachmann took an overdose of sleeping pills in an unsuccessful suicide attempt in order to avoid prosecution. The enraged Berlin students blamed this atrocity on the predominantly right-wing Springer Press Agency for printing anti-communist, anti-left, and, most importantly, anti-Rudi Dutschke articles. Thousands of students lined up outside the Springer Press offices, many of them parking their cars so as to create a blockade. A young female journalist (an uncommon profession for a female in those times) for the leftist magazine Konkret, Ulrike Meinhof, also found herself at this protest. She reluctantly had given in to a friend's nagging and added her car to the blockade (albeit at the very end of the blockade). The familiar hordes of police brandishing tear gas and clubs arrived and made multiple arrests, and Meinhof was one of those arrested. She later avoided conviction by claiming that she was only guilty of an extremely bad job of parking. Meinhof's bad parking job was her first strike against capitalism. However insignificant, it was not to be her last. The Birth of the Baader-Meinhof Gang On June 13, 1969, the four convicted arsonists Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Söhnlein were released from prison pending a review of their cases. Baader and Ensslin soon began work with an "apprentices' collective," an experimental youth home, where Baader spent much of his time teaching runaways and orphans to break the law. Ulrike Meinhof approached the group and showed interest in their work. She began interviews with them for an article in Konkret. Meinhof was impressed with Ensslin's commanding manner and strong political convictions. She soon fell under Ensslin's spell and befriended the erstwhile convict. In November of the same year, federal courts upheld the convicts' sentences, and they were ordered to return to federal prison. Baader and Ensslin fled to Paris, Proll went to England, and only Söhnlein complied and returned to prison. Soon, Thorwald Proll's sister, Astrid, joined the gang in Paris, ironically taking the place of her brother Thorwald, who had been deemed untrustworthy by the band. While the group was running from the law in the winter of 1969, Ulrike Meinhof moved to Berlin with her two daughters. She had recently finished work on her TV play Bambule, when, in late February 1970, two visitors arrived at her door. Meinhof introduced them to her daughters as "Uncle Hans" and "Aunt Grete"; however, Hansel and Gretel were none other than Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. The outlaws had returned to Berlin. During their stay with Meinhof, they established connections with Horst Mahler, a brilliant leftist lawyer who wished to ground an urban guerilla outfit. The two moved out of Meinhof's apartment and began trying to secure weapons for their war on capitalism. On their way to retrieve a stash of buried guns from a cemetery, Astrid Proll and Andreas Baader were stopped by West German police. After quickly deducing that Baader was obviously not "Peter Chenowitz," the name his forged ID stated, they arrested him. The authorities were unsure who exactly it was that they had arrested until Horst Mahler called the police station the next day, asking to speak with an "Herr Baader." The police replied, "Only if you can confirm that the person we have in custody is, in fact, Herr Baader." Baader was soon back in prison. While in prison, Baader received many visitors, including Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof, and a "Dr. Gretel Weitermeier," who was actually Baader's girlfriend, Ensslin. Ensslin complained to friends that she could not live without her "baby." A plan was soon concocted to break Baader out. The prison administration was deceived into believing that Baader would be needed for work on a book about "the organization of young people on the fringes of society." In order to write the book, however, Baader needed to research the topic, and the place suggested for this research was the German Institute for Social Questions, located in the chic suburb of Dahlem. After short debate, the authorities allowed Baader to begin his research. After all, since the administration talked so much about rehabilitating young criminals, was it not logical to put their ideas into practice? At 8:00 a.m. on May 14, 1970, Ulrike Meinhof arrived at the institute. After some confusion about whether the young journalist had permission to be there, the librarians let her in. Baader arrived at a little past 9:30, handcuffed to two policemen. One of the librarians suggested that it would be easier for Herr Baader to work were he not handcuffed. After some hesitation, the police removed his handcuffs, and the two associates pretended to begin work on their book. Meinhof was nervous and her hands visibly shook while she was sorting through bibliography cards. The librarians were kept busy fetching books that the researchers supposedly needed