1968 (26 page)

Our capital, which art in the West, amortized be Thy investments,

Thy profits come, Thy interest rates increase,

In Wall Street as they do in Europe.

Give us this day, our daily turnover.

And extend to us our credits, as we extend them to our creditors,

Lead us not into bankruptcy, but deliver us from the trade unions,

For thine is half the world, the power and the riches,

For the last two hundred years.

Mammon.

By 1968 theology students were also demonstrating, insisting that it was no longer acceptable to listen to church sermons without questions and dialogue in the service addressing the immorality of the West German state as well as moral outrage at the U.S. war against Vietnam. In effect the church was to become a discussion group for the purpose of heightening political and moral awareness. The most prominent of these theology student rebels was one of the student refugees from East Berlin, Rudi Dutschke, sometimes called Rudi the Red.

German SDS was well organized in the universities. On February 17, combining a good sense of timing with an impressive display of organization, the group hosted student activists from around the world to an international meeting against the American war in Vietnam. The International Vietnam Congress was the first large-scale international meeting of 1968 student movements and was being held at the height of the Tet Offensive when the Vietnam War was a mainstay of television programming around the world. In most countries, opposition to the war was not only one of the most popular causes—in many cases antiwar groups were the best-organized movements—but it was also the one issue they all had in common. Although an Iranian “revolutionary” attended, as did U.S. and Canadian militants, including two black Vietnam veterans who gave the clenched-fist salute and chanted arm in arm, “Hell, no, I ain’t gonna go!”—too late, as they had already been—it was largely a European meeting of German, French, Italian, Greek, and Scandinavian students. They met for a twelve-hour session of speeches and discussions in an enormous hall of the Free University with an overflow of thousands sent to two other large halls. The main hall was decorated with a huge flag of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front along with a banner emblazoned with Che Guevara’s hard-to-refute statement: “The duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution.” Speakers ranged from Dutschke, to leaders of other national movements, to the playwright Peter Weiss, whose
Marat/Sade
was being quoted by students all over the world.

Many of the foreign activists were dazzled by the Germans. One of the speakers, Alain Krivine, twenty-seven, a French Trotskyite who would later become one of the leaders in the spring Paris uprising, said, “Many of the 1968 student tactics were learned earlier in the year in Berlin and Brussels anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. The anti–Vietnam War movement was well organized throughout Europe. Dutschke and the Germans were the pioneers in the hard demonstration tactics. We went there and they had their banners and signs ready and their security forces and everything with militaristic tactics. It was new to me and the other French.”

Anti–Vietnam War poster on a street in Germany in 1968

(Photo by Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, was impressed with the way the German SDS had incorporated student issues into the larger protest. The French students invited Karl D. “Kaday” Wolf, the German SDS national chairman for 1968, to speak to students in France.

Born in 1940, Rudi Dutschke was the oldest of the German student leaders. Tariq Ali, leader of a British group called Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, VSC, and cofounder of a short-lived 1968 underground London review,
Black Dwarf,
described him as “of medium height with an angular face and a gentle smile. He always smiles with his eyes.” With his long dark hair shaking and swaying and a stubble of beard that seemed to neither grow nor be shaved off, he was said to be an electrifying orator, but this skill was always met by German youth with an awkward embarrassment. Germans, it seemed, had learned to be wary of electrifying oration and would offer him only polite applause. Other student leaders had advised Dutschke to moderate his speaking style.

His speech at the Congress drew parallels between the struggle of the Vietnamese people and that of Europeans to overthrow the classist system. Then, as he often did, he compared their fight to change European society one institution at a time to Mao’s famous Long March of 1934–1935, in which he gave his besieged movement a national presence by leading ninety thousand Chinese communists on a remarkably arduous trek across China, picking up small enclaves of support as they went. Of course, Dutschke didn’t point out that half of Mao’s original followers died along the way.

The talks had gone on for hours. Eric Fried was speaking. A recognized poet, he was what had become a rarity, a German Jew. Born in Austria in 1921, he had escaped the Nazis after his father was beaten to death. Though of a different generation, Fried was personally very close to a number of German student leaders, especially Dutschke. He was particularly valued by the German New Left because he was outspokenly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. The German New Left, like many of their counterparts in Europe and the United States, saw the emerging Palestinian terrorist organization under the young Yasir Arafat as another romantic nationalist movement. But it was uncomfortable for these young Germans to back an organization so clearly bent on killing Jews, including Jews in Europe, so it was a considerable boost to have an actual Jewish survivor in their ranks. The switch away from supporting Israel had begun with the Six Day War and the rise of Arafat, but it also coincided with a growing lack of interest in nonviolence. That these Palestinians were interested only in violence simply meant that they could be seen as guerrilla fighters—like Che.

The expressions
peace movement
and
antiwar movement
were largely American and even in the United States were fast becoming old-fashioned in some leftist circles. European radicals were not as interested in an end to the war as in a North Vietnamese victory. They tended to see the Tet Offensive not as a tragic loss of life, but as a triumph for an oppressed people. The British radical Tariq Ali, using language that was also heard in Berlin, Rome, and Paris, said of Tet, “A wave of joy and energy rebounds around the world and millions more are suddenly, exhilaratingly, ceasing to believe in the strength of their oppressor.”

We all carry our own history on our backs. The American activists wanted a stop to the aggression. The Europeans wanted a defeat of colonialism—they wanted the United States to be crushed just as the European colonial powers had been. This was particularly apparent in the French insistence that the marines in Khe Sanh might suffer the same humiliating defeat as had the French in Dien Bien Phu. The constant articles in the French press asking, “Is Khe Sanh another Dien Bien Phu?” had a barely concealed wishfulness to them. There was a touch of self-loathing to the European Left, especially the Germans, and all sins were compared to those of their own countries. To the French and British Left, the Americans were colonialists, to the Germans they were Nazis. Peter Weiss’s 1968
Vietnam Discourse
argued that the Americans in Vietnam were a Nazi-like evil.

The following morning an estimated eight thousand to twenty thousand people appeared on Kurfurstendamm, a wide boulevard lined with fashionable shops—used to launch expensive new fashion trends since West Berlin’s isolation simplified market research. Amazingly, the students’ ranks were swollen with hundreds of West Germans who had crossed East Germany, spending the night before in homes of Berlin comrades.
The New York Times,
which estimated “more than 10,000,” called it “the biggest anti-American rally ever staged in the city.” Through the cold, humid, gray streets of West Berlin, they carried with them a curious blend of cultures—portraits of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Rosa Luxemburg, the Jewish leftist from Poland killed in Germany in 1919. They shouted the chant always heard at American antiwar marches—“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!” They marched to the Opera House, where Benno Ohnesorg had been shot, and then to the Berlin Wall for more speeches. Dutschke said to a cheering crowd, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” But for all his apparent anti-Americanism, Red Rudi, said to be the most important student revolutionary in Europe, was married to an American theology student from Chicago.

The police, many on horseback, had been posted mostly to protect American military and diplomatic installations. But the demonstrators made no attempt to approach these areas. Demonstrators climbed two thirty-story construction cranes and attached huge Viet Cong and red flags. The demonstrators then booed as construction workers took the flags down and burned them. The city of West Berlin, working with the trade unions, was able to assemble an equally large counterdemonstration that chanted, “Berlin supports America” and “Throw Dutschke out of West Berlin.”

The students from other countries returned from Berlin’s February Vietnam demonstration exhilarated. The British mounted their own demonstration on March 17, the second demonstration organized by Tariq Ali and the VSC. The first, like most previous London demonstrations, had been smaller and without violence. But on this occasion, thousands filled Oxford Street, a solid river of red flags and voices chanting, “NLF is gonna win!” A German SDS contingent had urged the VSC to try to take the U.S. embassy, but Tariq Ali did not believe this was possible. When the crowd reached Grosvenor Square, to the complete surprise of the VSC organizers, they broke through the police line and started running for the embassy. Armed with clubs, mounted British police charged with a brutality rarely seen in London. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was there and wrote about it in “Street Fighting Man.”

Anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, July 7, 1968

(Photo by David Hurn/Magnum Photos)

Aside from the imported issue of Vietnam and a worsening climate in Northern Ireland, the biggest issue in Britain that year was racism. Led by Enoch Powell, a member of Parliament, the country was seeing a virulent strain of what the American civil rights movement called white backlash set off by the Labour government’s proposed Commonwealth Immigration Bill. As the British decolonized their empire, workers were being told that black and brown people from the former empire would be coming and taking away their jobs. “Keep Britain White,” was Powell’s slogan, and a number of workers groups demonstrated with this slogan. There was some amusement when a Kenyan diplomat was harassed entering the House of Commons by “Keep Britain White” hecklers who shouted, “Go back to Jamaica!” at the East African.

It was Germany that seemed a volatile place waiting for a larger explosion. On April 3 the violent left wing that would gain more prominence in the 1970s for such actions burned two Frankfurt department stores. On April 11, Rudi Dutschke was in front of a West Berlin drugstore about to buy medicine for his baby boy, Hosea Che—named for a prophet and a revolutionary—when Joseph Bachmann, a twenty-three-year-old out-of-work Munich housepainter, walked up to him and fired three bullets from a handgun. One hit Dutschke in the chest, a second in the face, and a third lodged precariously in his brain. This was the first attempt at a political assassination in Germany since the fall of the Third Reich. Arrested after a gun battle with the police, Bachmann explained, “I heard of the death of Martin Luther King and since I hate communists I felt I must kill Dutschke.” Bachmann, who kept a picture of Hitler in his apartment and identified with him as a fellow Munich housepainter, was a devoted reader of a hate-mongering, right-wing paper called
Bild Zeitung, Picture Times.
The tabloid was owned by Axel Springer, Germany’s most powerful press baron, whose papers slavishly supported all U.S. policies and viciously attacked leftist movements, both cheering and encouraging attacks against them.
DON’T LEAVE ALL THE DIRTY WORK TO THE COPS!
read one headline.