Jeremy Varon (7 page)

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Protest is when I say this or that doesn’t suit me.

Resistance is when I ensure that what doesn’t suit

me no longer occurs.

Ulrike Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand”

(“From Protest to Resistance”)

The West German New Left, like its American counterpart, initially sought to unsettle the politics of consensus that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Emerging from the ruins of war and the American-Soviet conflict, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) based its identity on

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three main foundations: its striking prosperity, achieved through its
Wirt-schaftswunder
(“economic miracle”); its staunch opposition to communism; and its adoption of Western-style democracy, typified by the draft-ing of a constitution and creation of parliamentary institutions. Much of the public seemed content to have the new nation pursue an agenda restricted to promoting economic growth and political stability.
“Kein
Experiment”
—the great slogan of the republic’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer—served as the motto for this cautious course.

The left, meanwhile, was weak. With little public reaction, the Constitutional Court banned the Communist Party (Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) in 1956 for allegedly threatening the principles of the constitution. In its 1959 Godesberger Program, the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland, or SPD) essentially renounced its founding commitment to socialism and assumed a voice of only mild and occasional dissent. When, in 1966, the SPD joined the Christian Democrats (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU) and the Christian Socialist Union (Christlich-Sozialen Union, or CSU) in forming the “Great Coalition” government, the SPD’s abandonment of its radical roots was total.

In the early 1960s, perceiving a lack of meaningful alternatives within the political establishment, leftists formed an “extraparliamentary opposition” (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, or APO), which operated outside of party politics and the electoral process. Student organizations played an important role in the coalition of groups comprising APO.26

Chief among the student groups was the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the youth wing of the SPD, which had been expelled in 1959 for remaining too strongly committed to socialism. Early on, APO opposed West German rearmament, the basing of nuclear weapons in West Germany, and the proposed “Emergency Laws”
(Notstandge-setzte),
which would permit the curtailment of democratic rights in times of crisis. To their supporters, these measures were vital to both West Germany’s security and the establishment of its full sovereignty. To APO, they violated the constitution’s stated commitments to peace and democracy. The dissenters additionally questioned whether, in light of the Nazi past, the Federal Republic deserved or could be trusted with greater power.

Germany’s fascist legacy affected the New Left in profound ways.

Young leftists condemned their parents’ generation both for its complicity with Nazism and its conspicuous silence about the Nazi period. The accusation of the
near-total
suppression or evasion of the past, common 32

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in the recollections of the postwar generation, likely represents in many cases the selective application of memory. The postwar society had in fact periodically confronted the Nazi past through high-level discussions of reparations for the Nazis’ victims; various war crimes trials, which received extensive media coverage in West Germany (the most notorious were those of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and the “Auschwitz Trials” of 1963–65); the development of educational materials detailing German crimes during the Nazi period; and the introduction of books, plays, and television programs about the war and the Holocaust (Anne Frank’s
Diary
was a best seller in Germany in the late 1950s, and millions saw theatrical versions of it either live or on television).27 Yet however intense and seemingly pervasive, such encounters were only intermittent, and the reaction of officialdom and the public alike was often self-justificatory and tinged with resentment at the extraordinary burden of guilt that focus on the past entailed. Crucially, such moments of public reflection did not necessarily translate into sustained,
private
discussions in German households about the Nazi era, in which parents shared with their children the truth about their connection to the Nazi movement. As a result, members of the New Left generation felt uninformed or even lied to about events of the past that defined their parents’ generation and, ultimately, the identity of all Germans.

The recollections of Margrit Schiller, who grew up in the new capital of Bonn and later joined the RAF, powerfully convey the reign of silence that many among her generation endured. Schiller’s education about German history ended with World War I.28 Her father, though not a member of the Nazi Party, had fought in World War II. When she asked her parents about the Nazi period, the constant refrain was, “We could not possibly have supported what Hitler did.” About the worst of Germany’s crimes, they “knew nothing.”29 Yet when Margrit was fourteen, her father confessed in a moment of drunken candor that he had tortured a captured Russian soldier to death.30 An additional trauma came when she discovered that songs she was learning on the piano had been written or adapted by the Nazis to promote their cause.31 Thereafter, she disdained all German songs.

For young West Germans, the Nazi past was not only a source of confusion and anger but an impetus to activism. Determined not to repeat their elders’ failings, they reacted strongly to contemporary forms of injustice. In the late 1950s, left-wing journals such as
Das Argument
developed an understanding of fascism as an extreme response of capitalism to economic crises. The transition in the postwar years to democratic

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capitalism, by extension, did not
in itself
represent a decisive break with fascism. More than that, young intellectuals saw fascism—following the lead of the Frankfurt School and the iconoclastic psychologist Wilhelm Reich—as a cognitive structure and a cultural condition, manifest in subjects who were at once extraordinarily pliant and dictatorial, submissive and aggressive. In keeping with this view, West German New Leftists condemned the attitudes and behavior of the adult generation—from the defense of order to disdain for nonconformity—as signs of the persistence of the “authoritarian personality” integral to fascism.

More tangibly, students and youth pointed to the considerable linkages in personnel between the Nazi regime and the new German state as evidence of “fascist continuity.” As of 1965, fully 60 percent of West German military officers had fought for the Nazis, and at least two-thirds of judges had served the Third Reich.32 Students clamored to know the pasts of their professors and conducted research revealing that many of them had been affiliated with the Nazis. Initially, their findings were presented in more or less civil ways, often with the cooperation of the institutions whose faculty they investigated. By 1967, however, students began angrily confronting their professors during lectures. In addition, some high-ranking officials in the Federal Republic had been Nazis. Most notorious was the CDU’s Kurt Kiesinger, who years before becoming federal chancellor in 1966 had held an important position in the Nazi propaganda ministry. At a public gathering in 1968, the twenty-nine-year-old Beate Klarsfeld slapped Kiesinger; Klarsfeld, who then made it her life’s work to hunt down Nazi war criminals, described her audacious act as

“the children of the Nazi generation slapping the Nazi face.”33

The fascist past also helped to shape the opposition of young Germans to the Vietnam War. As for American New Leftists, the war was the primary issue around which West German students mobilized. German activists, relative to their American counterparts, were generally well versed in Marxist principles; the SDS and the “Republican Clubs” found in major German cities generated a dizzying array of “working groups”

that meticulously applied Marxism in analyzing contemporary political phenomena. Far from being a conceptual revelation, then, the view of capitalism as an international system of oppression was something many German leftists took as axiomatic. Early on, they saw the Vietnam War in anti-imperialist terms and adopted the militant position of support for the Viet Cong. In 1965, German activists organized a “Vietnam Summer,” during which they both learned and educated the broader populace about the conflict in Southeast Asia (American activists would do 34

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the same only two summers later).34 At a May 1966 antiwar conference in Frankfurt—fully a year before American activists expressed such views in great numbers—more than 2,000 participants ratified a statement describing the armed “national and social liberation struggle of the South Vietnamese people” as an act of “political necessity,” as well as a model for other anticapitalist movements in the Third World.35

Some activists even claimed a direct affinity with the South Vietnamese rebels (the Viet Cong) based on what they saw as the close parallels between West Germany and South Vietnam: both countries had occupying U.S. armies and “puppet” governments whose true purpose—behind the rhetoric of defending democracy against foreign communists—was to contain indigenous revolts. The poet Erich Fried starkly asserted this connection: “Vietnam is Germany / its fate is our fate / The bombs for its freedom / are bombs for our freedom / Our Chancellor Erhard / is Mar-shall Ky / General Nguyen Van Thieu / is President Lübke / The Americans / are also there the Americans.”36 For its less radical critics, the Vietnam War called into question West Germany’s identity. Seeing the United States engage in mass violence against a poor country struggling for self-determination—as leftists commonly saw the conflict—potentially undermined Germans’ already fragile sense of their own society’s legitimacy, which was derived in part from its effort to emulate the Americans. The United States, one commentator concluded, “forfeited its status as a role model as the result of the Vietnam war.”37

West German anger at the Vietnam War was also stoked by the Nazi past. With deliberate provocativeness, young activists denounced the war as an act of “genocide”
(Völkermord),
which they, as Germans, had a special duty to oppose. The German-born Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who became a leader of the French student movement, explained: “Our parents’

generation had supported the Nazis, whether actively or passively. We did not want to be complicit in the genocide in Indochina.”38 By extension, German leftists regarded the support for the war by the government and much of the public as evidence of how little German values had changed since the Nazi era. The Vietnam War, then, was subject to the double-coding that defined young Germans’ perceptions. The violence in Vietnam was repellent to them both in its own right
and
insofar as it recalled Nazi violence; the apparent indifference of Germans to the suffering in Vietnam was infuriating in its own right
and
as it recalled the public’s tacit support for the Nazis’ terror. Opposition to the war, in short, did not depend upon the drawing of historic parallels. Consciousness of the German past, however, made the war all the more disturbing.

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New Left references to fascism entailed a thicket of often contradictory judgments and associations. At times, leftists drew comparisons between the past and present with blunt and even reckless force. In 1966, banners were secretly placed on the memorial site entrance at the Dachau concentration camp proclaiming, “Vietnam is the Auschwitz of America” and “American leathernecks are inhuman murderers like the SS.”39

By virtue of this elision, to oppose the war was to implicitly denounce the horrors of the German past, if not also to diminish German guilt by relativizing its crimes. Whatever the implications of these comparisons, German leftists’ relationship to their country’s past and present, their stance toward the United States, and their understanding of their protest were mediated through one another. In this complex way, national memory and notions of collective identity played themselves out on a global stage.

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If you plant ice, you’re gonna’ harvest wind.

The Grateful Dead, “Franklin’s Tower”

(lyrics by Robert Hunter)

As the protests in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere erupted in violence, establishment voices increasingly denounced students and youths as hooligans and malcontents with no respect for law and order. Yet such violence and the anxiety it elicited were only a small part of a larger climate of crisis driven by violence in various forms; for New Leftists to gravitate toward violence—whether as a means of self-defense, an expression of outrage, or a broad assault on their society—was to cross a threshold commonly transgressed.

Above all, there was the violence in Vietnam. By the end of 1968, over 30,000 American servicemen had died there, with the television news reporting the daily losses.40 In this manner, violence entered American families and communities, steeping everyday life in bitter and often confusing loss. Through the draft, millions of American men confronted the possibility of killing or being killed in a war whose purpose many questioned. There were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in early June, which produced a widespread sense of devastation and foreboding. To many blacks, King’s assassination was the ultimate affirmation of the virulence of American racism, which claimed the life even of a man of peace. For some, it was an incitement to violence. On the night of King’s murder, the Black Pan-36

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ther Leader Eldridge Cleaver insisted in a radio broadcast that by 1968, King was hated both by racist whites and by black people “who wanted to be rid of the self-deceiving doctrine of non-violence.” Declaring a “re-quiem for non-violence,” he warned that “the death of Dr. King signals the end of an era and the beginning of a bloody chapter that may remain unwritten, because there may be no scribe left to capture on paper the holocaust to come.”41