Jeremy Varon (8 page)

Blacks responded to King’s death by rioting in cities throughout America. These riots repeated the massive “civil disorders” in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere of a year earlier, when police violence triggered the eruption of poor black neighborhoods. The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 riots, declared in its 1968 report that “two societies, one black, one white—

separate and unequal” had emerged in the United States.42 Cautioning that “[d]isruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice,” the report warned of more unrest if racial and economic inequality were not addressed by all levels of government.43 What the commission intimated by calling for an end to violence “in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people,” radicals boldly asserted: that poverty, lack of opportunity, and racism
were themselves forms of violence
whose consequences were despair and, inevitably, violent rage.44

The police themselves, as they dealt with demonstrators, set a course of collision. The future Weatherman Jim Mellen vividly described another event from 1968 that provided a chilling sense of things to come. Born in the mid 1930s, Mellen was older than the others who would make up Weatherman. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and being forced out of a teaching job in New Jersey for his opposition to the Vietnam War, he went in the spring of 1966 to teach in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. He returned in April 1969, two days after Dr. King had been shot, to what seemed a different student movement in a different America. A week or so later, he attended a demonstration near New York City’s Rockefeller Center protesting the role of a conservative West German newspaper chain (which had offices there) in fomenting violence against Germany’s young rebels. At the protest, which took place before a throng of tourists, a brash anarchist collective from New York’s Lower East Side called the “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers” burned a German flag, after which Mellen observed:

Immediately, from out of the crowd, came these thugs . . . great big guys with work clothes on, and they began beating the people, not arresting them, but beating the people who had burned the flag. And it turned out

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37

that they [the “thugs”] were policemen. . . . There I was, pushed up against this granite wall, with all these people in their pastel, nylon Easter outfits, screaming and running in all directions. . . . I was petrified. I had no idea that anything like this was going to happen. And then my friend told me,

“This is the way it’s going now and you are going to have to learn that any time we step into the street now, they beat the shit out of us. We are either going to get off the street or learn how to withstand [it.]”45

Within this climate of crisis and violence, the idea of revolution came to define activists’ sense of themselves. Assessing what made the Panthers so challenging to the white power structure, the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton explained: “I am a revolutionary.”46 One chronicler of the student movement remarked: “In 1964 or 1965 someone in SDS declared himself [or herself ] a revolutionary; by 1969 it was impossible for any SDS member to admit that he [or she] was
not a
revolutionary.”47 Such self-descriptions were hardly confined to radical blacks or to militants at select campuses. A 1970 poll estimated that more than one million young Americans considered themselves “revolutionaries.”48

In 1971, fully 25 percent of students polled at the University of California at Santa Barbara—hardly thought of as a bastion of radicalism—believed that change would take place by means of “revolution.” A student there, describing the calling she and her radical cohort felt, declared, “For us there was no future. Revolution was the future.”49 The historian Kirkpatrick Sale concluded that revolution was “the pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties.”50

A description of the New Left as “revolutionary” may well seem an exaggeration or idealization. Historians have recently argued that meth-odological biases and unchecked instincts have contributed to the overestimation of the revolutionary nature of the New Left. These include the narrow study of movement “elites” in major cities; focus on leaders, who were often more radical than rank-and-file activists; and susceptibility to the seductive power of violence to dominate attention. As a result, historians have called for greater study of the New Left’s grass roots, where one presumably finds the more sober and, so the prevailing view goes, more inspiring reality of sustained commitment to nonviolent protest and to institutional reform.51

But these correctives yield their own distortion—one that conceals the extent to which a diverse and overtly revolutionary culture (at least in aspiration and self-perception) had taken shape by the end of the 1960s.

That culture had its theorists, chiefly Marx and Marcuse. The Black Panthers were the vanguard, with the Panther leader Huey Newton and Che 38

“Agents of Necessity”

Guevara heading the pantheon of New Left heroes. Eldridge Cleaver, who blasted American racism and foretold doom for its defenders, served as its prophetic voice. The Yippies played the part of tricksters; San Francisco’s Diggers, who blended art, life, and service to their community, were among the visionaries. The Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and other “political” musicians were the minstrels. The San Francisco Mime Troupe served as bards. The “revolution” had also its cin-ema, such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film
The Battle of Algiers,
which offered a rousing portrait of anticolonial rebellion. Young rebels had their own storied battles, like the Pentagon, Columbia, and Chicago, as well as their strongholds—Berkeley, Madison, and New York’s East Village, certainly, but also the countless enclaves where young people pursued alternative lifestyles and, by means both political and cultural, struck out at “the system.” The New Left even had its own media, the “underground press.” Most American cities boasted at least one grassroots newspaper in which young leftists debated ideology, announced demonstrations, denounced the police, reviewed albums, concerts, books, and plays, and, most broadly, shared their vision of themselves and the world. Combin-ing all of these was a mythology, in which the New Left imagined itself a liberating agent of history. The Weathermen, as they emerged from this culture, declared themselves the revolution’s warrior leaders and shock troops.

.

.

.

So long as capitalism exists,

violence will not disappear.

Rudi Dutschke et al.,

“Gewalt” (“Violence”)

Even more so than their American counterparts, West German New Leftists were radicalized by specific moments of conflict with their state and society.52 Anticommunism, historically strong in Germany, was intensified by Germany’s partition. It was especially virulent in West Berlin, where Cold War tensions were the highest and the student movement was the strongest. Much of the West German public and the media viewed the New Left as a red menace that did the bidding of the Eastern Bloc. This was especially true of Axel Springer’s conservative tabloids, among them
Bild, BZ,
and
Berliner Morgenpost;
all told, Springer publications accounted for more than 70 percent of the West Berlin press

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39

and more than 30 percent of the national daily newspaper market.53 As the press fed a climate of antistudent hysteria, the reaction of the media to the New Left itself became a major object of protest.

Tensions exploded on June 2, 1967, when an undercover policeman shot and killed a twenty-six-year-old protester, Benno Ohnesorg, at a demonstration against a visit to West Berlin by the shah of Iran. Ohnesorg had been attending his first major demonstration and was survived by his pregnant wife. West German students, and those sympathetic to their plight as the scapegoats of the Springer media, found the shooting traumatic. The novelist Günter Grass described it as “the first political murder in the Federal Republic.”54 At an emotional meeting on the night of June 2 of the German SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund), the future RAF founder Gudrun Ensslin exclaimed ominously: “This fascist state means to kill us all. . . . Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them.”55 Following the killing of Ohnesorg, which the police falsely claimed was an act of self-defense, denunciations of the students as threats to law, order, and democracy—themselves reminiscent of the fascists of the past—only intensified. The CDU’s chief Berlin official commented on June 3: “It is high time to remove from the universities the student ringleaders, who study at the cost of the public.”56

The Springer papers falsely reported that Ohnesorg had been shot to ward off a mob of rioters wielding knives.57 Springer’s
Berliner Zeitung
remarked: “What happened yesterday in Berlin had nothing to do with politics. . . . It was criminal in the most sickening way.”58
Bild
announced: “Up until now there has been terror only east of the wall. Yesterday, malicious and misguided people tried for the first time to bring terror into the free part of the city. . . . Creating a racket no longer suffices. They must see blood. They wave the red flag and believe the red flag. Here the fun ends . . . and democratic tolerance. We have something against SA methods.”59

By February of the following year, students had organized a “Springer Tribunal” at the Technische Universität Berlin, in which intellectuals and activists analyzed Springer’s monopoly, documented the defamation of protesters, and issued a “verdict” condemning the Springer press as dangerously reactionary and itself a purveyor of violence. During the presentation, a short film entitled
Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (The
Making of a Molotov Cocktail)
was screened, which plainly showed how to fashion petrol bombs. Its closing imagery suggested that buildings of the Springer press would be ideal targets. That evening, demonstrators 40

“Agents of Necessity”

smashed the windows of Springer offices. The film’s author was Holger Meins, a twenty-seven-year-old film student and future RAF member.60

The near-fatal wounding of the New Left leader Rudi Dutschke on April 4, 1968, by a mentally disturbed right-wing fanatic and avid
Bild
reader was a second tragedy that instantaneously escalated the conflict between the New Left and West German society. As with Ohnesorg’s shooting, students attributed the attack to the “pogrom journalism” of the Springer press. “Springer shot too!” became a common slogan among enraged protesters.61 Here again, New Leftists saw a connection to the fascist past. The Berlin Evangelical Student Union warned: “Since the Third Reich, the object of attack has been switched: the hooked Jewish nose in [the infamous Nazi weekly]
Der Stürmer
has been replaced in the cartoons in
Bild
and
BZ
by the beard of the student, considered subhuman like a gorilla. The demand ‘Jews Out’ prepared the way for the gas chamber.”62 The student movement, in this questionable comparison, was Germany’s new victim.

The students were not alone in blaming the media for Dutschke’s shooting. Important intellectuals, among them Heinrich Böll, Theodor Adorno, and Alexander Mitscherlich, drafted a statement asserting: Fear and an inability to engage the arguments of the student opposition seriously have created a climate in which the intentional defamation of a minority provokes acts of violence against it. This climate has been systematically created by a press that presents itself as a guardian of the constitution and claims to speak in the name of the majority and of order, but that means by order nothing more than its domination of an immature populace and the way to a new, authoritarian nationalism.63

Students reacted to the shooting of Dutschke—a beloved figure on the left, prized for both his staggering intellect and personal humility—with large, aggressive demonstrations over the Easter weekend. The working-class anarchist Michael “Bommi” Baumann, who revered Dutschke, recalls sensing after the attack that “the bullet was just as much against
you
[i.e., oneself ]; for the first time they were really shooting at you.”

Baumann responded by throwing Molotov cocktails at Springer trucks.64

In some of the demonstrations, the students were joined by workers protesting the imminent passage of the Emergency Laws. With the battle cry “Expropriate Springer!” they physically attacked Springer facilities, halted the distribution of newspapers, and destroyed Springer publications. Two people died in the Easter turmoil. The shooting of Dutschke

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41

was also the cause of outrage worldwide, spawning protests at Springer offices or West German embassies in Washington, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and Prague.65

The Easter demonstrations represented a qualitative shift in the goals, tactics, and sensibility of the New Left, captured by the journalist Ulrike Meinhof. Born in 1934, Meinhof was older than most New Leftists. Her father had died when she was just six, and her mother when she was fifteen, leaving her in the care of Renate Riemeck (who had survived the war, with Ulrike’s mother, as a silent critic of Hitler). After the war, Riemeck became a well-respected scholar, and she exposed Ulrike to philosophy, literature, and the progressive causes of the German 1950s, such as disarmament.

Intelligent and free thinking, Ulrike quickly found a place in the budding circle of young left-wing intellectuals who would help to shape the values and politics of the student movement of the 1960s. In 1960, she began writing for the Hamburg-based magazine
konkret,
which blended left-wing political commentary with provocative, if often shallow and brazenly sex-ist, celebrations of the libertine attitudes sweeping Germany. Part pundit, part polemicist, and part moralist, Meinhof addressed everything from relations with the communist East to the arms race, the West’s support for dictators like Iran’s shah, and U.S. aggression in Vietnam. By 1967, her columns were eagerly read by young radicals seeking inspiration, insight, and a language in which to frame their rebellion.