More on the Sixties in Germany

Wolfgang Kraushaar has the unusual distinction of being a specialist in the history of protest. He writes a column on protest, "Aus der Protest-Chronik", for the bi-monthly journal Mittelweg 36, published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

These two books by Kraushaar, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (2000) and Achtundsechzig: Eine Bilanz (2008) deal with overlapping themes, the latter volume being the more systematic, the earlier consisting of various essays of his on the subject of the protest and alternative-lifestyle movements and events we in the United States tend to call "the Sixties", or simply "1968" in Germany.

The most interesting of the essays in the 2000 volume is a subject with which he also deals in the 2008 book, the notions of protest leader Rudi Dutschke (1940-1979) toward German unification. It's a seeming paradox of the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition) in Germany of the late sixties that they made internationalism a key feature of their protest and ideologies, while the main expression of their internationalism was their support of the national liberation struggle being waged by the North Vietnamese and the NLF (National Liberation Front, or "Viet Cong") against the United States.

Yet on the more immediate national question in Germany, they tended to avoid taking a position at all. There is perhaps less to these seeming contradictions than might appear on the face of it. West German "anti-imperialist" activists were backing the Vietnamese enemy of their own country's American ally, a position which they saw as supporting a principled anti-colonialist position which West German leaders didn't consider to be in the national interest of West Germany. That could be legitimately called a form of internationalism, whether or not one agrees with their overt sympathy for the Vietnamese Communists in that fight.

By 1967, it was generally considered a very conservative, even revanchist position in West German politics to support near-term unification of Germany. The politics of that question can't be easily summarized in bumper-sticker slogans, though. Neither West Germany nor East Germany ever formally renounced the goal of national unification. In the 1950s, the Social Democrats (SPD) were actually more hardline in their insistence on making that a priority than the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). That was the major reason they opposed entry of Germany in the NATO alliance, fearing that it would much postpone the possibility of German unification.

The East Germans periodically looked on making major moves toward unification as a practical policy. But among the desires of the Soviet Union to prevent a unified Germany from ever again becoming a military menace to them, the insistence of the East Germans on having a unified Germany be under am East German-style Communist regime, and the immediate military pressure of the Cold War, unification remained a distant possibility for the East German Communist regime throughout its existence.

Rudi Dutschke and his friend and fellow student leader Bernd Rabehl both came from East Germany. Dutschke was about as radical as they came in his politics. But he also understood himself as a Christian, not just nominally but as an integral part of his worldview. (This didn't stop him from also considering himself a Marxist revolutionary.) Although Dutschke didn't make German unification a priority in his career as a student leader in the time before he was severely wounded by a would-be assassin's bullet in 1968, his papers that became available after his untimely death in 1979 resulting from 1968 attack made it clear that he did have consider Germany unification an important priority.

Dutschke envisioned West Berlin becoming a kind of liberated zone in which an APO version of revolutionary socialism would provide an appealing alternative to both East German, Soviet-style socialism and West German "social market" capitalism. This example would then become a focal point around which German unification could take place, of course adopting in the process the Dutschkian/APO version of socialism. Dutschke didn't have anything resembling a systematic political program for making this happen. It was a political daydream.

But it's significant for a couple of reasons. One is that it adds an important biographical detail to our understanding of his political conceptions. The other is that his former comrade Rabehl became a flaming rightwinger and has tried to recast Rudi Dutschke's politics as a brand of narrow German nationalism. As he does in this interview with the far-right National-Zeitung from 2004, Dutschkes deutscher Weg zum Sozialismus: Interview mit Professor Dr. Bernd Rabehl, einst engster Vertrauter des Studentenführers.

This interpretation of Rabehl's doesn't have much to recommend it. But, as Kraushaar and others have analyzed in some detail, some aspects of the revolutionary enthusiasms of the German APO in the 1960s may not have been as free from the heritage of the Third Reich as they would have liked to have thought at the time: their anti-Americanism, elements of anti-Semitism, a credulous romanticizing of Palestinian guerrillas. But since Americans are often quick to find signs of the Third Reich in any German political phenomenon, I should point out that even though there were prominent examples of Sixties leftists in Germany later becoming far-rightists, that was not general evolution of the ideas of those activists.

In fact, one of the major accomplishments Kraushaar discusses is that the APO highlighted the danger of resurgent far-right sentiments, in particular in the form of the National Partei Deutschlands (NPD), which enjoyed an upswing during the late 1960s during the joint SPD-CDU Grand Coalition government of 1966-69. In the 2008 book, he also discusses the success of the labor movement and the APO in mitigating the worst aspects of the Emergency Law passed by the Grand Coalition, a law defining the conditions in which regular constitutional government could be set aside during a critical national emergency. And the development of the German environmental movement, including the Green Party which is a major force in German politics, he argues is the most significant lasting effect of the "1968" movement. None of those effects of that movement indicate that it was somehow a rightwing movement in left disguise.

Kraushaar's 2008 book does an admirable job of describing the larger social and historical context of the "1968" movement and its various longer-term effects, such as the development of the women's movement and, on the less constructive sides, domestic terrorism and various cult groups.

And in both books he traces ways in which "1968" has become a polarizing symbol in German politics, not unlike how the "culture war" images of the 1960s still play a significant role in American politics.

Tags: 1968, german politics, germany, wolfgang kraushaar