Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Black Power, Black Panthers

Sharon Riley did an interview with Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., co-authors of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012) for Harper's The Stream 03/15/2013; the interview has the same title, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Apparently they made joint responses to her questions.

They talk about the period in the 1960s when urban rioting began and Black Power came to be a popular slogan among many African-Americans. This period turned out to be paradigm-setting for segregationists. Because their framing for issues of racial conflict often sound as though they are living in 1969.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966 in Oakland. I sketched the history of the BPP in The sixties: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party 06/247/2008. It emerged from the conditions that faced African-American urban communities in the 1960s.

The peaceful protests of the civil-rights movement proved powerless to address urban poverty and ghettoization. Large numbers of blacks had migrated to the cities of the North and the West for wartime jobs. White and industrial flight left concentrated urban black poverty, and municipalities responded with brutal containment policing. Urban police and fire departments remained almost exclusively white. Blacks were shut out from political machines, underrepresented electorally, denied access to elite white colleges and universities, and mired in poverty. In the mid-1960s, inspired by the civil-rights victories over legal segregation, young black people in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and cities throughout the country took up the cry for "Black Power!" They sought new ways of organizing to achieve economic and political power.

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party emerged as the exemplar. The Black Panthers weren’t alone in theorizing that the black community was a "colony in the mother country" and calling for self-determination as part of a global struggle against imperialism. What distinguished them was their advocacy of armed self-defense against the police. They recognized that young urban blacks were ready to stand up to police, as evidenced by Watts and the spread of urban black rebellion, and sought to organize armed resistance into a political force. Initially, the Black Panthers used the law to challenge police brutality while bearing loaded weapons. Soon, hundreds of black people were rallying armed in legal protests against police brutality. The State of California responded by changing the law to restrict the right to bear arms. But the party adapted. Attracted to both armed self-defense and such community programs as Free Breakfast for Children, young black people from across the country contacted the Black Panthers asking to open chapters. During the party's peak, from 1968 to 1970, thousands of young blacks in close to seventy cities dedicated their lives to the party and to revolution, often at great personal risk. [my emphasis]

The year 1968 was the year membership in the BPP soared nationwide. As they say in their book:

As late as February 1968, the Black Panther Party was still a small local organization. But that year, everything changed. By December, the Party had opened offices in twenty cities, from Los Angeles to New York. In the face of numerous armed conflicts with police and virulent direct repression by the state, young black people embraced the revolutionary vision of the Party, and by 1970, the Party had opened offices in sixty-eight cities from Winston-Salem to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. set off urban riots in cities across the country and gave the BPP a sudden new appeal.

But their heyday was a short one. As they recall in the book, "In the early 1970s, the Party rapidly declined. By mid-1972, it was basically a local Oakland community organization once again."

But their memory still haunts today's segregationists.

Many whites found it easy to ask in the 1960s why, after the federal government and white taxpayers had "done so much" for blacks Americans, they were still so angry and staged urban riots. But the lived experience of African-Americans wasn't one of continuing improvement. As John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr, put it in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003):

Between 1949 and 1964 the relative participation of African Americans in the total economic life of the nation declined significantly. During that period the unemployment rate of blacks was at least double that of whites. Even in 1963, a prosperous year, the unemployment rate for blacks was 114 percent higher than for whites. Where blacks were employed, more than 80 percent worked at the bottom of the economic ladder, as compared with 40 percent of employed whites. In later years it was no better. In 1964 the unemployment rate among blacks was 9.6 percent versus 4.6 percent among whites; in 1971 it was 9.9 percent among blacks and S.4 percent among whites. In 1969 the median income of blacks with eight years of schooling was $4,472, while it was $7,018 for whites with the same amount of schooling. In 1970 the Census Bureau, defining poverty as a median income of less than $3,968 for a family of four, reported that one in every three blacks as compared with one in every ten whites was in that category. And the chances for African Americans to move up were greatly restricted not only by general race bias but also by the meager opportunities for apprenticeship training and by discrimination in many labor unions. [my emphasis]

Tags: 1968, black panther party, confederate heritage month 2013, huey newton, sixties

Tags: 1968, black panther party, huey newton, sixties

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

Wolfgang Kraushaar's 1968

Wolfgang Kraushaar of the Hamburg Institut for Sozialforschung is an academic expert in protest. He writes a column called the "Protest Chronicle" in each issue of the periodical Mittelweg 36, in which he describes some significant act of past protest in countries all over the world. He has also published several collections of such vignettes, including 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (1998).

In book form, these are something of a mixed blessing. They are excellent references for particular periods. But reading it as a single work requires the reader to digest straight narrative with minimal analytical commentary and context. And, in the case of "1968" it may be particularly challenging. Because, as he writes in a concluding essay, "1968" is a broad concept similar (though he doesn't mention this specifically) to the way in America "the Sixties" stands for a period variously dated but usually including 1964-73. In Germany as in America, it also has become over the years a symbolic touchstone by which people situate themselves culturally. Whether the "culture war" over that symbolic collection of events has been as intense in Germany as in the US is something I find it impossible to judge at this point. Since one side of the Culture War recently gave us such contributions as the Iraq War and the Cheney-Bush torture program, I would find it hard to see how Germany has experienced more toxic effects from it that the US has. But I'll leave that to others to judge.

This book's "just the facts, ma'am" approach to recounting the political events of those years with particular references to those in Germany (West and East) is a valuable presentation of the history of that year just because it does concentrate on recounting the factual events without reference to their later cultural significations. But even factual accounts are bound by their time and perspective. The event that really began "the Sixties" in 1967 was the shooting of a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967 by a West Berlin policeman named Karl-Heinz Kurras. All evidence indicates that it was a really unnecessary shooting, murder really, although Kurras was twice acquitted on related charges. The shooting took place as part of a police riot against demonstrators against the visiting Shah of Iran. Those events and the exceptionally ham-handed response of Berlin officials to the shooting set off student protests all over West Germany. The German press the last two weeks has been devoting a lot of news and opinion attention to very recent revelation that the shooter, Kurras, had been a member of the East German Communist Party (SED) and an active spy for East Germany. Not just a lower-level snitch, either, but a serious spy. A big reminder that history is not always what we think it is, even in the case of Kraushaar's book published 31 years after the Ohnesorg murder.

Kraushaar quotes philosopher Hannah Arendt in a letter to Karl Jaspers in June 1968: "Mir scheint, die Kinder des nächsten Jahrhunderts werden das Jahr 1968 mal so lernen wie wir das Jahr 1848." (It seems to me that children of the coming century will learn about the year 1968 as we learned about the year 1848.) "1848" doesn't have a lot of resonance for Americans. But it is was one of the most important years in the history of democracy in Europe, in which democratic revolts swept the western and central parts of the Continent. Although the revolts initially failed in their goals and were followed by monarchist victories and restorations, they established the democratic tradition in Europe that eventually led to the democratization of the "Old World".

Kraushaar evaluates the lasting effects of 1968/the Sixties in light of several categories: the role of utopian thought in politics, democratization, how the experience of "1989" (the crisis in the East German and other Soviet-bloc socialist countries that then quickly produced the fall of those governmental forms) affected the public perception of "1968", the mixed experience of "1968" both in the Federal Republic and internationally as a year both of outbreaks of protests and their defeat, the combination of emancipatory and left-totalitarian impulses within the broad APO (extra-parliamentary opposition), the fact that few of those who became prominent in the APO remained leading public figures in 1998 (two major exceptions: Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit).

He makes some important empirical observations. For instance, in the Federal Republic (West Germany), the late 1960s were not the high point of protest movements. More protesters were participating in demonstrations in the 1950s and early 1960s against West Germany joining NATO and against nuclear weapons, and then in 1981-3 against the stationing of mid-range nuclear weapons in West Germany, than in the mass protests of the late 1960s.

He summarizes the lasting effects of "1968" in this book as follows (my translation from the German) in the following ways:

• A minority can move political mountains in a parliamentary democracy, even if they immediately seem to be fully powerless.

• No one is simply an object of politics. Everyone can exercise influence themselves on political events. That seems to sound entire different from [student leader Rudi] Dutschke's emphatic, "History is something we make" ("Geschichte ist machbar", literally "history is make-able"), but leaves enough hope for change in a basic sense - as the practice of various groupings and citizens' initiatives shows.
  

• Political activity can only be grasped in the international context, and thereby its undergoes and redefinition and new definition of its establishment of goals. The horizon has become complete different.

• To change a society means to democratize the institutions. If that fails to be accomplished, political goals must also in the end fail of realization.

He argues that what made "1968" a turning point was the way in which Germans started to understand politics as an individual responsibility and a part of daily life in a new way. That, of course, is an analytical rather than an empirical conclusion.

In 2009 terms, we might restate point #2 as saying it validates a "Yes We Can" attitude. And point #4 could also be seen in terms of "change we can believe in". I'm just saying.

In his conclusion, he quotes the highly respected German President Richard von Weizsäcker in his speech on the first Day of German Unity, October 9, 1990: "Die Jugendvevolte am Ende der Sechziger Jahre trug allen Verwundungen zum Trotz zu einer Vertiefung des demokratische Engagements in der Gesellschaft bei." (The youth revolt at the end of 1960s despite all the wounds brought a deepening of democratic engagement in society.)

See further:

"Wir hielten die DDR für das bessere Deutschland" Die Welt 30.05.2009

Ohnesorg, Springer und die linke Einäugigkeit Die Welt 31.05.2009

Tags: 1968, wolfgang kraushaar

Bettina Röhl on Karl-Heinz Kurras and the Stasi revelations

Der Tod des Demonstranten (Death of the Demonstrator)- a memorial to Benno Ohnesorg by Alfred Hrdlicka, 1971: photo in Berlin 1990

I posted earlier about the story that came out in the German press last week about how Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West Berlin policeman who shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, had been an East German spy and an illegal member of the East German Communist Party (SED) since 1967. Ohnesorg’s death is generally understood as having been a decisive event in spreading the militant German student movement throughout West Germany, when it had been primarily a West Berlin phenomenon prior to that. And the movement in response became even more militant and, in part, violent.

In her blog post Tod von Benno Ohnesorg: Staatsmord aus Ostberlin?, journalist Bettina Röhl Die Welt 22.05.2009 gives some quirky interpretations of the history of that event and its aftermath. I’ve laid out my understanding of the Ohnesorg killing and its repercussions in my earlier post, so I won’t do another overall recap here. She argues that the biggest impetus to the spread and increased militance of the student movement after June 2 was due to the resignations of West Berlin's Mayor and Police President, which signalled to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), i.e., the militant left opposition, that state authorities were weak. In other words, she argues that insufficient authoritarianism by West German officials let the student movement flourish that otherwise could have been restricted.

In doing so, she makes contradictory arguments about the power of the student movement, which she heavily implies was essentially a creation of East Germany. In one place, she argues that the movement would have developed pretty much the way it did, violence and all, without Ohnesorg’s killing. Yet she also argues that if the public had just known then about Kurras' Stasi (East German Security) ties, that the movement couldn’t have gotten any traction from the killing.

But the West German state hardly showed itself to be weak in dealing with protesters, then or later. On the contrary, their training in crowd control was based on a scenario of crowd actions in support of an act of Soviet/East German military aggression against West Berlin. In the situation of the late 1960s, the overly aggressive police tactics had the effect of polarizing the situation in university cities all over West Germany, including conservative Bavaria. The Ohnesorg killing became a symbol of that, but it became a symbol because police excesses were real.

"Enteignet Springer" (Expropriate Springer) became a popular slogan of the student movement shortly after Benno Ohnesorg's death

Her self-contradicatory argument that the APO would have been undercut by the immediate knowledge that Kurras was a Stasi agent is essentially based on the notion that the APO admired the East German version of socialism, which for the most part wasn’t really the case. APO activists expressed solidarity with protest movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia and were generally critical of East German "Stalinism“. She also ignores the ham-handed pugnacity of Social Democratic Mayor Heinrich Albertz in the immediate wake of the killing, as well as the hysteria of the Springer press. On the latter, she is explicitly in denial, writing that they were "die einzige, die damals einen kühlen Kopf bewahrte" (the only ones who kept a cool head back then). That’s imaginative, for sure, but it‘s astonishing revisionism that could only be defended by defining "cool head“ as something like "recklessly irresponsible“. (Die Welt was then and is now a Springer paper.)

Her post also carries a tone of what we in America would call "culture war" polemics, i.e., she still wants to discredit the DHF's (darn frigging hippies, in the nice version) of those days while imagining that their malign influence is present all over the place in present-day German culture. She talks, for instance, about the "die 68er-Ideologen und auch das gigantische Millionenheer der Mitläufer von 68" (the Sixties ideologues and also the gigantic army of millions of fellow-travelers of the Sixties) who are supposedly resistent to facts about that period. DFH's, in other words. And historians of the period who don't share her dismissive atitude toward the DFH's are acting as "security guards" to protect some DFH conventional wisdom about the 1960s.

Having fairly recently read a number of accounts of the period - not least of them Röhl's own highly informative book on the subject, which shows a level of care in narrative and analysis that is missing in her blog post - I don't know who she may be talking about there. I've reviewed here two 2008 books on "1968" by leading German historians Norbert Frei and Götz Aly. Neither strikes me as some DFH ideological position paper. On the contrary, most of the analysis I've seen from German writers on that period seem to take a critical view of events, especially on the ideology and practice of violence.

Röhl also paints with a very broad brush in her post when she writes:

Indes war die Propaganda der APO eine ganz durchsichtige Angelegenheit: Die 68er-Bewegung, die damals noch APO-Bewegung hieß, baute auf dem Tod von Ohnesorg ihre Legende auf, dass der Staat derjenige war, der zuerst Gewalt angewendet hätte, auf die die friedliche Massenbewegung nur reagiert habe.

[In this way, [Ohnesorg's shooting] was a very obvious opportunity for the propaganda of the APO. The Sixties Movement, when then was still called the APO Movement, built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence, to which the peaceful mass movement only reacted.]

Here she seems to be so intent on denigrating the APO that she manages to simultaneously exaggerate and minimize the significance of the Benno Ohnesorg shooting. Sure, his death became an element of the APO's propaganda. Just as the events of that day became an element of the Springer press' hysterical campaign against the student movement - a cool-headed hysterical campaign, according to Röhl. But it became a widespread symbol for the APO because the image and the context resonated strongly with so many young people given how they saw the police acting.

And I'm not sure what it means to say that the APO "built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence". However emotional a turning point the Ohnesorg may have been for many APO activists, for those among them who advocated some form of political violence, I don't get the impression that "who shot first" was a particularly important question.

A video accompanying the following article addresses some of these issues: Stasi-Fall Kurras: Birthler weist "rätselhafte" Vorwürfe zurück Die Welt 26.05.2009

Other related links:

Dutschke-Sohn fordert neue Suche in den Stasi-Akten von Einar Koch Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Der Fall Benno Ohnesorg: Jetzt spricht die Frau des Todes-Schützen Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

Other links on Benno Ohnesorg's murder by Stasi agent Karl-Heinz Kurras

These are a variety of links with mostly no commentary by me on the Curious Case of Benno Ohnesorg and His Killer Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi Agent:

Stasi-Debatte: Vorwürfe gegen die Birthler-Behörde Frankfurter Rundschau 25.05.2009

Given the notorious role the Springer press in general and the Bild-Zeitung in particular played in inciting fear and hatred against young political activists in the 1960s, there something weirdly ironic about citing Bild's articles on the revelations that Benno Ohnesorg's killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a Stasi agent. But here's one link, Der Ex-Innenminister zum Fall Benno Ohnesorg: War es ein Auftragsmord, Herr Schily? 24.05.2009.

Bild's Web site has an aggregator page of at least some of its articles on the Ohnesorg case: Alle Infos zum Fall Benno Ohnesorg.

Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009

The current issue of Der Spiegel makes the story its cover feature:


Fall Kurras: Ohnesorgs Todesschütze gesteht SED-Mitgliedschaft Die Zeit 24.05.2009

Ohnesorg-Todesschütze: "Mein Fall ist längst verjährt" Frankfurter Rundschau 24.05.2009

Benno Ohnesorg: Mit einem Schuss in die Geschichte von Uwe Schlicht Die Zeit24.05.2009

Fall Kurras: Neue Details: "Ich komme wegen der Schießabteilung" Süddeutsche Zeitung 23.05.2009

Birthler-Behörde: Stasi-Spitzel erschoss Ohnesorg Die Zeit23.05.2009

Studentenbewegung 1967: Zu Besuch bei Ohnesorgs Todesschützen von Uwe Soukup Die Zeit23.05.2009

Stasi-Spitzel: Schuss mit Fragezeichen von Steffen Hebestreit Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009

Stasi-Vergangenheit: Erneut Strafanzeige gegen Kurras gestellt Die Zeit22.05.2009

Taumeln von einer Lüge zur anderen: Ohnesorg und die DDR von Willi Winkler Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Wolfgang Kraushaar Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009

Der Stasi-Kurras: Ohnesorg, die DDR und die 68er von Heribert Prantl Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Oskar Negt über Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Eine gespenstische Wende" Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Karl-Heinz Kurras: Stasi-Agent tötete Ohnesorg Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Karl-Heinz Kurras: Strafanzeige gegen Ohnesorg-Todesschützen Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Benno Ohnesorg: Die Geburt der 68er von Michael König Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Kurras: "Können die uns nicht endlich in Ruhe lassen?" Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Neue Berichte: Ohnesorg von Stasi-Spitzel erschossen" Süddeutsche Zeitung 21.05.2009

Tod Benno Ohnesorgs: "Die Polizisten haben geprügelt wie blöd" Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.05.2007 (Interview mit Friederike Hausmann)

Benno Ohnesorg: Der Tod des Träumers von Willi Winkler Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.05.2007

Der 2. Juni 1967 und Ohnesorgs Tod: "Zynischer ging's nicht" Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.2007

Spätes Bedauern in Berlin: Polizeipräsident legt Kranz für Ohnesorg nieder von Oliver Das Gupta Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.2007

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

Wow! And, wow! New wrinkle on a notorious event in recent German history

Friederike Dollinger (now Friederike Hausmann) with the dying Benno Ohnesorg, who had just been shot in the head by a West Berlin policeman who was secretly a Stasi agent (June 2, 1967)

I'm really surprised at this one. The West Berlin policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras set off a long wave of violence when he murdered a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. A photo of Ohnesorg bleeding out from his head wound is one of the most famous images of recent German history. It was a crucial turning point in the student movement in West Germany.

Now the 81-year-old Kurras is admitting that he was a secret member of the East German Communist Communist Party (SED) and spied for East Germany!

Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009 reports that Kurras initially denied it last week when documents from the archives of the Stasi (East Germany secret police) were published showing his role. But now he admits it straightforwardly. He denies getting paid for his spying, though. Höll reports that a new charge against Kurras over the shooting of Ohnesorg is unlikely, since he was acquitted in two trials related to the killing already. He also reports that there is no indication that the Ohnesorg shooting was somehow ordered by East Germany.

Whether or not those trials were genuinely fair ones from the victim's viewpoint, it's clear that there was no good reason for Kurras to shoot Ohnesorg to death. The incident took place after the second of two demonstrations against the Shah of Iran, who was paying a state visit to Germany. There was a politically active community of pro-democracy Iranian dissidents in West Germany who were highlighting the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. One of them was a young intellectual named Bahman Nirumand who had fled Iran in 1965 and had published a book in 1967 called Persien: Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der freien Welt [Persia [Iran]: Model of a developing country or the Dictatorship of the Free World]. Nirumand criticized the support of the Western democracies for the Shah's brutal government, and his book was one of the most influential books for the activist German students of the 1960s.

Stasi expert Helmut Müller-Enbergs on discovering the Kurras Stasi files: "Ich bin vom Stuhl gefallen." ("I fell out of my chair.")

The German authorities had made a spectacularly ill-advised decision to allow a group of thugs run by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, to act as guards to the Shah. During a peaceful demonstration during the daytime of June 2, the SAVAK thugs had attacked a few hundred anti-Shah demonstrators while the Berlin police looked passively on and let it happen. Then the police moved in themselves against the student demonstrators, arresting some of them but none of the SAVAK attackers.

This raised the emotional temperature for a second demonstration already planned that evening outside the Deutsche Oper, where the Shah and his wife were attending a performance of Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The demonstrators were more militant, and a few tomatoes and paint balloons flew, injuring no one but embarassing the Berlin officials. Erich Duensing, the chief police official (president), had directed the police to proceed aggressively against the demonstrators, beating them with clubs (men and women alike) and firing water cannons at them, like in the infamous photos from Birmingham, Alabama, of a few years before. The demonstrators were in full flight when Kurras shot Benno Ohnesorg in the back of the head in a parking garage.

Ohnesorg was a 26-year-old literature student who apparently wasn't taking part in the demonstration at all. Nor was he armed or threatening the police in any way. The reaction was intense. Part of the problem, aside from the bad judgments of the moment by German officials and police, was that the Berlin police weren't really trained to deal with street demonstrations at that time. Their training for emergency situations was predicated opposing street actions coordinated with a Soviet invasion of the city. Which also meant that city officials were also pretty clueless about how to respond to such an event as the Ohnesorg shooting. So the Social Democratic Mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, said the demonstrators were to blame for the death, adding, "Die Geduld der Stadt ist am Ende." (The patience of the city is at an end.") Not especially diplomatic in a situation where a cop has just made a very questionable fatal shooting, in a situation that was already tense because of blatant police misconduct.

This video shows the report on the German channel ZDF about the Kurras revelations, including footage of the fatally wounded Benno Ohnesorg with Friederike Hausmann:



The Springer press empire, which included the sensation-oriented Bild-Zeitung, accused the demonstrators of acting like Hitler's SA Brownshirts back in the day. Bild on the day after the Ohnesorg murder declared, "In Berlin gab es bisher Terror nur östlich der Mauer. Gestern haben bösartige und dumme Wirrköpfe zum erstenmal versucht, den Terror in den freien Teil der Stadt zu tragen." ("In Berlin up until now, there was Terror only east of the Wall. Yesterday, malicious and dumb crazies attempted for the first time to bring Terror into the free part of the city.") Again, it was the demonstrators they were accusing of Terror, not the police and the SAVAK thugs. A particularly awkward comparison to place against state terror in Communist East Berlin. And even more ironic in retrospect, knowing now that the killer was an East German agent.

Protests grew against the police and the Springer press, as well. Within a few weeks, the slogan "Enteignet Springer!" (Expropriate Springer!) became popular among left-leaning student demonstrators. It's generally assumed among German historians that the killing of Benno Ohnesorg touched off "1968" or "the Sixties" in West Germany, insofar as that meant a mass political movement among the young (though it was not only young Germans who were outraged by the Ohnesorg shooting). As historian Norbert Frei describes it in 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (2008), the fate of Benno Ohnesorg, shot down by a cop because he looked like a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was one in which it was easy for many students to imagine themselves.

The shooting didn't create the student or youth movements, they were already under way. But, referring to the SDS, the leading militant political group among German university students (not to be confused with the American SDS of the same time), Frei writes that at their national conference in Frankfurt a few weeks later, "nobody was talking about tomatoes any more." The Ohnesorg shooting marked a militant and violent turn in the student movement.

Wolfgang Kraushaar writes in Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009 that Ohnesorg's death was "the spark that ignited the student revolt". There had been something like a student revolt at the Freie Universität in West Berlin before that, he writes, but the Ohnesorg killing and the general official misconduct around the demonstrations on June 2 created such a shock and outrage among univerisity students and other young people that activism took off among them all over West Germany.

Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi agent and killer of Benno Ohnesorg, in 1967

When Karl-Heinz Kurras was acquitted on November 21, 1967 of murder in the Ohnesorg case, the chief judge in the case indicated that he was unhappy with the outcome of the case in words that retroactively take on a new meaning in light of the revelations that Kurras as an East German spy: "Kurras weiss mehr, als er sagt, und er macht den Endruck, als wenn er in vielen Dingen die Unwahrheit sagt." ("Kurras knows more than he's saying, and he gives the impression that he is speaking falsehood in many things.") The judge was more perceptive than he knew.

Despite Kurras' acquital, both police president Erich Duensing and Mayor Heinrich Albertz wound up resigning their posts after the details of the Ohnesorg killing became public.

According to Höll's report, Kurras provided intelligence reports to East Germany on the West German police and the West German Verfassungsschutz, an internal security agency. The Stasi reduced their contacts with him after the Ohnesorg murder. But the files show a Stasi contact as late as 1976. He provided information to the Stasi about East German refugees and planted microphones in offices. He wasn't just passing on office gossip.

I hate to speculate. But who can resist speculating about a spy story? One obvious speculation is that the East Germans could have put him up to shooting somebody at that demonstration to cause trouble. Or, he could have seen himself as a convinced Communist - which he presumably did if he wasn't taking money for his information - a made a similar calculation on his own, although that seems more far-fetched. But there's apparently no evidence of either, so far.

Then it's always possible that the West German authorities somehow greased the skids for Kurras' acquitals on charges related to the Ohnesorg murder because he was working as a double agent, or because they were secretly aware of his spying activities and were using him to feed misinforation to the Stasi. But there is no evidence in the public record of that either, so far as I know.

Still, it is a remarkable coincidence that a policeman whose shooting of student played such a key role in the politics of West Germany in the 1960s turns out to have been a secret Communist and a spy for East Germany!

Kraushaar recalls something I don't recall seeing described before. Benno Ohnesorg's funeral procession of over 100 cars had to pass through East German territory to get from West Berlin to Hannover, where he was buried. Normally, the East German officials required cars to wait for hours to pass. The funeral convoy was waved through. Along the way, young people greeted the convoy along the highway, and East German soldiers along the route even paid honor to the deceased. As Kraushaar says, these unusual occurences looked like an act of state by the East Germans. At a minimum, it meant that East Germany wanted to make the incident as much of a pain as they could for the West German government. Kraushaar cautions that this is not to say that it was some kind of genuine act of solidarity by the East Germans. The leaders of the East German SED regime generally weren't interested in the "anti-authoritarian" goals of the western student movement except as it further their own state goals. Some twenty years later, they were rejecting Michael Gorbachev's brand of reform Communism as way too liberal for their liking.

But he also cautions that there is no evidence of an East German order to Kurras to shoot somebody. And he warns that we may never know. Since Kurras is still alive and apparently lucid, he himself could reveal for the first time what his motive in the killing was. But, as Kraushaar notes, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so by talking openly about his motives, Kurras could open himself to another prosecution on the Kurras killing. So it's unlikely to happen.

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

"1968" in Germany

Rudi Dutschke, the most famous leader of the German student movement in 1968

Der diskrete Charme der Rebellion: Ein Leben mit den 68ern (2008) von Reinhard Mohr

Unser Kampf: 1968 - ein irritierter Blick zurück (2008) von Götz Aly

The now-departed year 2008 was the fortieth anniversary of the legendary "1968", which has become a symbol for the political and cultural upheavals that affected much of the world during that time. I've made a few "anniversary" type posts myself, including a review of German historian Norbert Frei's book 1968 (2008), which gives special attention to the German experience but also explains those events in the larger world context of "the 1960s".

Both books discussed here focus more particularly on events in Germany. And both involve some autobiography. Reinhard Mohr's book title, The Discrete Charm of the Rebellion in English, captures the perspective of his book well. Mohr relates some his experiences in the alternative scene in Frankfurt in the 1970s, where he knew some stars of the "68ers" like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka, Dany the Red, and Joschka Fischer. From Mohr's perspective as a young man in the Frankfurt scene, the experiences of what in America we call "the Sixties" were already something of a mythical past. His book doesn't sentimentalize that period. But his focus is on showing to readers of today why so many people found the experiences of that time charming and appealing to their sentiments and passions. That part of the story can get lost.

Götz Aly is one of Germany's leading historians, known in particular for his histories of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. His book focuses on both the key events that were most politically significant in that period and also is a kind of personal reckoning. Aly relates having been a leftwing activist of college age during that time. At times his book almost sounds like an American neoconservative villifying "the Sixties" while trying not to sound like a Christian fundamentalist or holy-roller. But that's not what he's doing.

Still, Aly's account does have some of the feel of a "god that failed" story. And self-analysis is certainly not a bad thing. As another one-time leftwing activist, Spain's Javier Solano, once put it, only idiots never change their minds. Yet it does seems to me at places in the book that Aly is a bit too hard on himself for once having been young.

The events that have come to symbolize "1968" in Germany are generally agreed upon: the anti-Shah protests of 1967 that included the police murder of a young protester named Benno Ohnesorg; the political role of groups like the German student organization SDS and its most famous leader Rudi Dutschke; the attempted assassination of Dutschke in 1968 by a young nationalist fanatic; the Grand Coalition (SPD and CDU/CSU) government of 1966-69; the Notstandsgesetz (emergency law) and the protests against it; the outrage of the now-adult children of those who were adults during the Nazi period at the failures of their parents and their parents' generation; the 1968 bombing of a department store in Frankfurt that first made two young revolutionaries named Andreas Baader and Gundrin Ensslin famous, the pair who along with Ulrike Meinhof and a few others would found the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), aka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang; the practice of terrorism in various forms mostly notoriously that of the RAF but also others like the Tupamaros Westberlin and the Bewegung 2.Juni; protests nonviolent and otherwise against the Axel Springer press empire; the sexual revolution and the appearance of alternative lifestyles scenes, such as the legendary Kommune 1 in Berlin.

Shocking the comfortable: the most popular German SDS poster, showing Marx, Engels and Lenin with the slogan, "Everybody talks about the weather. Not us."

It strikes me from today's perspective that one advantage that the 68er movement bequeathed to later decades was the fact that directly protesting against the press, particularly the Axel Springer papers of which the Bild-Zeitung was the most significant. The Bild-Zeitung was and is more of a sensational tabloid than part of the "quality press".

But while there was certainly a fourishing "underground" press in the United States, there was not the broad perception in America that there was among the German movement that the press itself was seriously flawed in a way that was a menace to freedom. Southern segregationists' railed against the alleged failure of the Yankee press to report how well the whites and the "nigras" got along with each other in the segregated South. The Republican Party under Nixon and Spiro Agnew picked up that theme and broaden it to accuse the press of being unpatriotic in its reporting on the Vietnam War and domestic protests, to the point where complaining about the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! has beome part of the Party's DNA. With Nixon and Agnew on the warpath against the press, and with a mainstream press that still practiced actual journalism as with the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and the Washington Post with the Watergate scandal, leftwing dissident groups were more likely to look on the Establishment press as at least a sometime ally.

Sexual revolution in Germany

That experience partially explains the fact that so many Democrats, both former "68ers" as well as others, failed to recognize for years how badly the national political press had begun to malfunction by 1992 with the Whitewater pseudo-scandals. Even today, it can be like pulling teeth to get liberal Dems to acknowledge that the national press is a serious, big-time mess.

Part of the challenge for anyone writing about a series of events as vaguely defined as "1968" or "the Sixties" is determining a focus. When people talk about "1968" in Germany, it's largely events and trends like those described above that come to mind. But one could make an argument that the birth control pill, the widespread diffusion of television sets, and the "economic miracle" in western Germany in the 1950s were more important in determining the direction of German society. Even more strictly in the realm of politics, it can certainly be plausibly argued that the beginning of Willi Brandt's Ostpolitik to ease tensions with the eastern European Communist bloc and the SPD leading a government under Brandt's Chancellorship were more significant events.

And the latter was not a direct result of the activism of the "68ers", though most of them presumably marginally preferred an SPD government to a hidebound conservative one. But the Social Democrats were attacked by many New Left activists as no longer being a revolutionary party, something which the SPD hadn't much pretended to be since 1918, at the latest.

But the activists of the 1960s challenged aspects of German society - such as authoritarian university practices, the excessive influence of ex-Nazi jurists in the judicial system, sexual practices, gender roles, reflexive support of American policies like the Vietnam War, passive attitudes toward politics, the ham-handed brutality that municipal police often displayed - that needed to be challenged. Ther ewas no New Left party at the time that was able to take any kind of direct political power, by electoral means or otherwise. But it can scarcely be said that the protests had no effect on the mainstream parties, on lifestyles, and even churches.

One characteristic of the youth movements of the German New Left and alternative-lifestyle movements was that they were largely youth movements. Certainly there were older people like the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse who were well-regarded by the movement. But even so, the influence of older and more experienced politicians on the Movement of the late 1960s was very limited. The German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentendbund) was orginally the student group of the SDS. It eventually broke with the SPD altogether because the SDS assumed a more militant ideology and was highly critical of the political course the SPD had assumed with the Godesburg Program of 1959. Even Marcuse's Frankfurt School collaborator Max Horkheimer became a bogey-man of the young militants for his criticism of their dogmatic revolutionary rhetoric.

There were several effects of this youth focus. One is that they often placed too high a value on the essentially adolescent joys of shocking the stereotypical good solid citizens for the sake of shocking them. Now, protest movements are, well, protest movements. It's almost by definition their role to shock or at least annoy people into thinking differently about the aim of the protest. But when protesters adopted popular slogans like "Frei sein, high sein, Terror muss dabei sein" (be free, get high, and you have to have terrorism along with it"; it rhymes in German and doesn't sound so clunky), it mostly sounded charmingly shocking only to those using it. To others it was more likely just disgusting.

"Gewalt gegen Sachen" (Violence Against Things) by Kai Uwe Niephaus

And terrorism is inevitably part of the story. It would be false to see the terrorism of the RAF, which created a genuine political crisis in Germany in 1977, as some inevitable, teleological product of the protest movements of the 1960s. But it's also a fact that the terrorist groups did emerge from the "68er" scene. It's part of the story. And both Aly and Mohr include that aspect in their accounts. Mohr provides a bit more insight into the tragic aspects of it, Aly focuses more on the grim aspects of it. But with a fairly narrow definition of who the "68ers" were, any meaningful look at the terrorist phenomenon in Germany in the 1970s would have to recognize that it drew sympathy only from a limited segment of even those who considered themselves radical, although the RAF in particular has to be counted as group that made a significant mark on German history.

Aly focuses more on some of the questions that would particularly concern professional historians. And he makes some very thought-provoking observations about the 68er movement and its notions about existing Marxist governments, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the continuing historical burden of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. On these subjects, he sometimes sounds like a grumpy neoconservative wagging his finger at the alleged shameful hypocrisy of the Left. But, for the most part, he raises some valid issues, though his particular analysis isn't always convincing.

For instance, he takes himself and other young "rebels" to tasks for being naive about the Great Chinese Culture Revolution. As presented by Chinese propaganda, the Cultural Revolution was a process by which the Chinese Revolution was breaking new ground, fighting against the kind of bureacratic socialism which the Western New Left tended to see in the Soviet Union. In reality, it was a mass movement that Mao promoted to tighten his control over the Chinese Communist Party. And there's the body count, which Aly puts at a minimum of three million people dying between 1966 and 1976 as a result of the Cultural Revolution. And Aly argues that based on reliable information available in Germany at the time, the young German radicals could have known this.

There are a couple of problems, though, with his argument as presented in Unser Kampf. One is that it's not at all clear just how widespread this alleged admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution was among German activists. He cites some who were. And here's where the vagueness of an historical concept like "the Sixties" becomes an issue. If you define the 68ers as those who adhered to some full-blown revolutionary ideology, it's easy to imagine (though even then he doesn't really demonstrate) that admiration for the Cultural Revolution was typical. If you define the Movement in broader terms, it becomes more doubtful.

And he also plays a bit of a rhetorical trick here. It's one thing to criticize someone who's writing history for failing to appreciate the significance of the best German sources on the Cultural Revolution. It's another to look at what the Cultural Revolution symbolized in the minds of those German activists who did find it attractive in some way. Very few of the young people today who wear some kind of Che Guevara logo are likely to be able to give you an exposition of Marxist dialectical materialism, if they even know that Che was some kind of Marxist. His iconic image is a symbol of rebellion. And for the German 68ers who actually did find the Cultural Revolution symbolically appealing, it was very likely more as a symbol of rebellion, with the added shock value of it being something happening in the Communist world. China was an exotic, far-away place to most Germans. And with both the US and the Soviet Union carrying on propaganda wars against China in the 1960s, anyone who didn't have a healthy dose of skepticism about claims of the horrors of Communism in China probably wasn't thinking very hard about the subject.

Yes, those youthful admirers of Mao's Cultural Revolution were often wrong about it. And they were committing the sin of being young. But it hardly represents some kind of widespread callousness toward mass murder, which conclusion a reader might easily choose to draw from Aly's account.

Aly is on stronger ground when he argues that in terms of long-term historical signficance, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a more consequential historical event than the protests in Germany or even the May-June revolt in Paris that same year. But his account also does carry the weight of the impression he leaves that most West German activists were indifferent to it or unsympathetic to it. In fact, the New Left in Europe and America was not generally attracted to the Soviet model of society, nor especially sympathetic to the Soviet Union. For adherents of the Soviet line, the New Left was largely "anti-Communist".

But what the New Left had to deal with, as did any mainstream critics of particular Cold War policies, was the fact that all sorts of military and political policies were justified by the US and its allies as necessary to combat Communism. Anyone serious about bringing about drastic changes in Western foreign policies would need to be very hesitant about helping promote attitudes and analyses that would reinforce their governments' Cold War positions. That context doesn't really come through in Aly's arguments along those lines. Here, I get the impression that his own need to renounce the less edifying aspects of his own youthful ideas gets in the way of his historical account.

Free speech poster by Ina Weiss

I find his thoughts on the relationship of the radicals of "1968" to the memory of the Third Reich far more valuable. The memory of the Third Reich and the Holocaust is a subject on which Aly is an actual expert. From Aly's as well as other accounts, it's clear that the skepticism of the younger generation about their elders' role during the Third Reich provided an important background to the events of the Sixties in Germany.

But the actual issues the movement raised from 1967 on had very little to do with the working out of remaining issues of the Nazi past. He argues that some of the revolutionary purism of the militants was in part a way of declaring themselves innocent of the sins of their parents' generation during the Third Reich. And he has a good case in noting that reflexive embrace of the Palestinian cause by many militants after the Six-Day War of 1967 was often taken with little thought of the complex relation of Germany to Middle Eastern affairs as a result of the Holocaust.

He cites a couple of actions by leftist activists that showed a particularly bone-headed attitude toward the anti-Semitism of the Nazi period. Activists associated with the Tupamaros West-Berlin group planted a firebomb in 1969 in Jewish Community House in West Berlin. It was meant to explode on November 9, the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom action of 1938. Fortunately, it failed to explode.

In June of 1969, Israel had sent its first Ambassador to the Federal Republic (West Berlin), Asher Ben-Natan. Soon after his posting, he was invited to speak on June 9 at Frankfurt University on the topic, "Peace in the Near East". Leftist demonstrators protested his appearance with chants of "Ha, ha, ha - Al Fatah ist da" (Ha, ha, ah, Al Fatah is there) and "Zionisten raus aus Deutschland" (Zionists out of Germany).

Again, it's important to be careful about overly-broad generalizations about a vaguely-defined movement. But occurrences like this do give some reason to think that young German activists sometimes assumed a revolutionary purity without much thought of the extent to which they were affected by old-fashioned anti-Semitism or much reflection on the responsibilities of contemporary Germany in relation to the crimes of the Third Reich.

The fascination of the events of the Sixties is still with us. Maybe it's more of a Baby Boomer phenomenon than anything else. But there's no question that the events of the Sixties shook up most Western societies to one degree or another. For all the movement's faults, not least of them the terrorist offshoots, it did represent what Jerry Brown calls a "democratic moment" for Germany, in which citizen activism asserted itself without the initiative of the political elites.

Tags: 1968, deutschland, german+politics, germany, götz aly, reinhard mohr

Norbert Frei on "1968"

One of the numerous books appearing on the 40th anniversary of the eventful year 1968 is German historian Norbert Frei's 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. "1968" tends to be used in German much as "the Sixties" in the US to refer to a wide range of events. The May-June revolt of students and workers in Paris that year and the short-lived Prague Spring experiment in Communist Czechoslovakia made 1968 a particularly notable year in Europe, as it was in the Americas, as well.

The bulk of Frei's book is devoted to "the 68ers" in Germany. But he also gives accounts of events that convey an idea of how widespread various forms of militant activism and youth revolt were. He discusses the movements in France, the US, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the DDR (East Germany), with briefer comments on events in other countries like Mexico and Greece.

Frei argues that there were common features in many countries that encouraged such revolts. One was the demographics of the postwar birthrates, which meant in the 1960s in a number of coutnries that universities were overcrowded and underfunded, conditions which gave rise to particular student protests that often widened to larger movements.

He emphasizes two features related to the US that had worldwide effects on the student and youth movements. One was the example of the civil-rights and student movements in America. Ironically for protest movements that often were highly critical of American policies, the example and inpsiration of militant democratic movements in America were particular influential.

(That was 40 years and more ago, long before Dick Cheney's "Unitary Executive" and the shameless criminality of the Cheney-Bush Presidency. I can only wonder how long it will be before a popular democratic movement in the US could have such effects again.)

In the 1960s, the leaders and participant of student movements of various coutnries had personal contacts and in some cases had direct personal influence on movements in other countries, e.g., Tom Hayden from the US, Rudi Dutschke from Germany, and Danniel Cohn-Bendit of France and Germany.

The other broad American influence was the Vietnam War, which became a theme of student protest all over the world. Obviously, participants int he protest movements had a boroad range of involvement and commitment. As Jackson Browne put it in his song, "Before the Deluge":

Some of them were dreamers
And some them were fools
And for some of them
It was only the moment that mattered

But Frei arguest that it would be wrong to dismiss the moral impulse many protesters felt. For many, the protracted Vietnam War threatened to reveive the kind of wars that European nations hoped to avoid permanently after the Second World War.

He also argues that across the Western world, which for this purpose would include Japan and Eastern Europe, the youth revolt was both a product of and a promoter of widespread social changes that were building around attitudes to authority, family life and sex, and the demand for wider democratic particpation. The fact that such attitudes found active expression in the Soviet bloc as well as in Western capitalist countries, in dictatorships like Greece (beginning in 1967 with a military coup) as well as demcoracies like Britain, is an idications that broad trends were involved.

And despite the general waning of the protests movements after 1968-9 in most places, the effects of "the Sixties" have shown up ever since, affecting the women's movement and minority rights, The relationships of political parties to their voter bases, tolerance for what it now seems a bit quaint to call "alternative lifestyles", in attitudes toward sex and marriage, in child-rearing practices, in the operation of churches, and in the behavior of government bureaucracies and police departments.

Not all of the effects were postive, as our "culture warriors" never let up forget. Drug problems and STDs were made worse problems in some ways as a result of "the Sixties". In some cases like the Rote Armee Faktion ("Baader-Meinhof gang") in Germany or the far less destructive an non-murderous Weather Underground in the US, the movements of the Sixties produced groups of frustrated terrorists, hoping to lead an armed struggle that was not in the cards.

Frei also discusses at some length how in Germany the demand by young protesters for a more honest puzblic accounting for the Thrid Reich played a particular role in the rise of the protest movement. This was not just a matter of kids bickering with the parents at the kitchen table over the parents' gereral inadequecy, though much of that certainly occurred. It was a matter of current politics because many prominent figures in the German government and especially in the courts, as well as in business leadership, had been committed Nayis to various degrees back in the day. The issue acquired special currency when Kirt Georg Kiesinger, a former NSDAP (Nazi Party) member became the Wester German Chancellor. His replacement by former anti-Nazi resistance activists Willy Brandt led to a much wider discussion and re-evaluation of the Third Reich and the Holocause.

One point I found particularly striking is that the student protests in Germany took as one of their targets press baron Axel Springer, publisher of the popular talboid Bild-Zeitung. They were particularly angered by what they saw as his paper's incidtement of violence against demonstrators. I can't help but wonder if the press in the US had been a target of protest in the 1960s to something like the extent the Springer press was in Germany, if American liberals over the past 15-20 years might have been more willing to call our own Establishment press on some their outrageous misconduct. Instaed, we have a badly broken press corps and many liberals who are reluctant to describe it for what it is. If only...

Tags: 1968, norbert frei

The sixties: George Kennan vs. the hippies

George Kennan, who puzzled over protesting students in 1968

George Kennan is best known as one of the leading advocates of the "realist" school of foreign-policy thought and as the author of the containment strategy adopted by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. He quickly became disturbed by the over-emphasis on military means in the application of the containment policy. He became a leading advocate for nuclear arms control agreements and was an early critic of the Vietnam War.

So I was surprised when I picked up a book called Democracy and the Student Left (1968), which contains the text of a speech he gave which was printed as an article in the New York Times Magazine of 01/21/1968; responses from students and professors to the article; and a longer essay by Kennan responding to the letters and expanding his comments.

What surprised me was that Kennan's views from the speech on the "student left" and more generally on the New Left and youth movements of that time in the US came off like any crotchety-minded conservative dismayed and perplexed over why he had to take notice of these funny-dressed hippies and rowdy students who were so presumptuous as to think they had a right to be concerned about public affairs. I didn't expect Kennan to be jumping for joy over student protests. But I didn't expect to see such shallow, knee-jerk reactions from him either. Here's one sample from what I'd like to think he later found an embarrassing piece of writing:

One cannot, therefore, on looking at these young people in all the glory of their defiant rags and hairdos, always just say, with tears in one's eyes: "There goes a tragically wayward youth, striving romantically to document his rebellion against the hypocrisies of the age." One has sometimes to say, and not without indignation: "There goes a perverted and willful and stony-hearted youth by whose destructiveness we are all, in the end, to be damaged and diminished."

Amazing that an intellectual of Kennan's stature would have such a clueless reaction to events of that time. "Tragically wayward youth" who are also "perverted and willful and stony-hearted"? Good grief! No wonder there was a student revolt!

I'm not familiar at all with Kennan's family biography. But there are several mentions in the initial essay and in the longer follow-up to his own family. Along with the seemingly uncharacteristic emotionality of his words, I couldn't help but wonder if he had experienced some of these conflicts very close to home. In the second essay, he comments in a footnote about one letter-writer who had rather bizarrely suggested that he stage a nervous breakdown in from of his kids. In one of the only flashes of humor in this book, he comments, "I cannot believe, actually, that my own children are so unaware of my own awareness of my faults that they would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects."

In his speech and Times article, he was already quite alarmed about the state of American civil society, and that was well before most of the events of 1968. He wrote, "Not since the civil conflict of a century ago has this country, as I see it, been in such great danger", making it clear that he was referring mostly to internal conflicts in the US.

Knowing that Kennan was a very religious Christian, I was surprised most of all at the position he took in the speech on civil disobedience:

If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications: either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority. It is surely the latter of these two implications which we must read from the overwhelming majority of the demonstrations that have recently taken place. ...

People should bear in mind that if this - namely noise, violence and lawlessness - is the way they are going to put their case, then many of us who are no happier than they are about some of the policies that arouse their indignation will have no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades. (my emphasis)

This kind of thing is virtually indistinguishable from the early-stage "culture war" narrative that was already developing around "the sixties". Even rock-ribbed reactionaries would usually make some vague pretence that they were concerned about the evils of society but just put off by the rowdy tactics they saw. In the Deep South, such language was routinely applied to even the most orderly and peaceful civil rights activities. If black Southerners had just been more patient, you see, things would have gotten better on their own, sometime around the time that Hell freezes over. But they were making things worse by demonstrating and such.

He went on to make it clear that he was including the kind of Ghandian civil disobedience that was such a crucial part of the American civil rights movement:

These observations reflect a serious doubt whether civil disobedience has any place in a democratic society. But there is one objection I know will be offered to this view. Some people, who accept our political system, believe that they have a right to disregard it and to violate the laws that have flowed from it so long as they are prepared, as a matter of conscience, to accept the penalties established for such behavior.

I am sorry; I cannot agree. The violation of law is not, in the moral and philosophic sense, a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it. It is not like the privilege of breaking crockery in a tent at the county fair for a quarter a shot. Respect for the law is not an obligation which is exhausted or obliterated by willingness to accept the penalty for breaking it. (my emphasis)

I'm still gobsmacked to see Kennan writing like this. It's impossible to believe that he wasn't aware in some way or another that democratic societies were precisely the environment in which civil disobedience was the most likely to be effective. Because there were voting publics involved who could respond favorably to acts of courage on the part of protesters willing to be arrested and negatively to excesses on the part of the authorities. Those fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators in Alabama changed a lot of white voters minds about the benevolence of the segregation system practiced in the Deep South.

Civil disobedience actions of that kind were not so much of an option in National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia, which Kennan knew well from firsthand experience as a resident diplomat in both places.

Not only would Kennan's position have meant the tactics used by Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement or Ghandi in the Indian independence movement not have been possible. It also means that in situation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, one of the most notorious pieces of legislation in American history, that citizens would have had no choice but to obediently do everything in their power to help returned escaped human property back to their slavemasters. The Underground Railroad that helped so many to reach freedom and kept the hope of final liberation from slavery alive could never have functioned as it did. Civil disobedience is a serious thing. But so are some of the ills that persisted for far too long.

The letters reproduced in the book don't include all the ones he received. But it's clear that his correspondents took issue with quite a lot about his Times article. A recent UC-Berkeley graduate named David Lee wrote:

Many of Kennan's criticisms of the hippies and New Left have also been made repeatedly by people like myself, offspring of the "Establishment but alienated from the status quo. I agree with his criticisms but I can add only that any man who is not angry and not militant about changing America either does not know or does not care about the brutality perpetrated every day upon the streets of America under the cloak of "freedom" and "democracy."

His letter cited the situation in the African-American Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

Nicholas MacDonald of Harvard challenged Kennan's attitude in the following passage, which he introduces with the fundamentalist-sounding comment, "But it is science that has become man's worst enemy." (!!!) It's clear in the context he is referring to the application of science to weaponry and other less than humane projects:

And why should anyone wait while more evidence (people killed, cities bombed, troops increased, nuclear war threatened - in Vietnam - and black people humiliated, killed, and oppressed here, at home) is collected. There is plenty of evidence NOW. We do not have the luxury of waiting, in our monastic cells, studying the speeches of LBJ; people die, as time passes, and we study - not to mention that the world could come to an end while we study. It is the Victorian cry of a long-lost century: WAIT - detach yourself, take on the nun's garment, forget the world - WAIT, until you are married.

He's got a point. More recently, we've been through years of that already with the Iraq War: things are improving, The Terrorists are in their "last throes" (Cheney), a tipping point here, a turning point there, the next six months will be decisive, The Surge is working, the Iraqi troops are being trained, violence is down and that's a good sign, violence is up and that's a good sign, and on and on and on. Patience is not always a virtue. Congress has been far too patient on starting to put an end to US military involvement in Iraq.

Barbara Bernstein and Susan Brown of Barnard gave a good statement of something that I think gets lost a lot today in discussions of antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s. Today, in 2008, a large majority of the public is against the Iraq War, and that's been the case for years. That was not the case with the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968, although when the 1968 Tet Offensive completely blew the credibility of the lying generals and administration officials who had been talking about how great things were going and how we were defeating the Communists all over the place and yadda, yadda. When you're in the minority opinion, a big part of the point of protesting is to shake people up enough to make them think about the problem at hand in a new way. Bernstein and Brown wrote:

The government and the establishment would like us to demonstrate and protest - quietly, that is, so as not to make any threatening vibrations. But we are demonstrating, and intend to demonstrate, in a way that the government can neither applaud nor fail to notice. We want to cause discomfort among the apathetic because we want to cause change. The biggest struggle is to shock people like Mr. Kennan out of their smugness.

I had much the same reaction to reading Kennan's Times article here 40 years later! And my reaction comes with the experience of knowing that I've needed to be shaken out of apathy and passivity at times myself.

I was relieved to see that Kennan, in his much longer "Mr. Kennan Replies" essay, at least partially redeemed himself. He takes up the question of civil disobedience again, particularly with reference to Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on the topic, which several writers had commended to him. A big part of his criticism has to do with the individualistic nature of Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience. Kennan at least makes more thoughtful and sensible comments on civil disobedience in the longer essay, though I certainly don't find it convincing on the larger subject. He has a point, though, about Thoreau's individualism in that connection.

Kennan seems to have caught a glimmer of one of the more poignant aspects of his position in his Times piece. He himself was a critic of the Vietnam War. But he somehow couldn't connect his own position, as a scholar and former diplomat used to more orderly ways of asserting his opinions, with young antiwar protesters with their long hair and such. He grumped that many of his correspondents over the article had a "dangerously oversimplified view of a complex situation". Again, the old-as-the-hills argument: you people who want to change what's going own just don't understand the complexity of matters as we, your betters, do. He writes:

For those who may not know it (numbers of people appear not to; several even wrote me that instead of criticizing the students I should get out and oppose the war), I was long an opponent of the policies that brought us to the Vietnam involvement; I made my views public on a number of occasions in ways (including five hours on national TV on one occasion alone) that could scarcely have been more emphatic without defeating their own effectiveness. I continue to regard the war as one devoid of favorable prospects, highly dangerous to world peace, and dreadfully adverse in its effects on our domestic life and world position.

Oh, yes, preserving one's "effectiveness". A lot of Democrats, including many who should have known better, preserved their "effectiveness" by voting for the Iraq War resolution of 2002. Look where that got us.

Kennan seemed to be unaware of the emerging environmental movement among young activists (the essays are specifically focused on the student movement), though in early 1968 it wasn't as prominent as it was to quickly become in the following years. But he himself was very much aware of the issue. Noting toward the end of the second essay that he agreed that ending the Vietnam War was "a prerequisite to almost anything constructive that one can think of in our [national] life" and that nuclear weapons were an "apocalyptic" danger, he proceeded to discuss other issues "that cast no less threatening a cloud over the future of our society":

There is first the question of what is happening, physically, to the natural environment necessary not only to sustain life in this country but to give it healthfulness and meaning. This is a question not just of our own once so magnificent continent, which we are treating with the blind destructiveness of the army ant; it is a question of the purity and life-sustaining quality of the seas and the global atmosphere within which this continent, and we with it, has its existence. How long can man go on over-populating this planet, destroying its topsoils, slashing off its forests, exhausting its supplies of fresh water, tearing away at its mineral resources, consuming its oxygen with a wild proliferation of machines, making sewers of its rivers and seas, producing industrial poisons of the most deadly sort and distributing them liberally into its atmosphere, its streams and its ocean beds, disregarding and destroying the ecology of its plant and insect life ? Not much longer, I suspect. I may not witness the beginning of the disaster on a serious scale. But many of the students who have written me will. And let us not forget that much of the damage that has already been done is irreparable in terms of the insight and effort of any single generation. It takes eight hundred years to produce a climax forest. It will take more than that, presumably, to return the poisoned, deadened waters of Lake Michigan, on the shores of which I was born, to the level of plant and fish life and natural healthfulness that they had at the time of my birth. And even to begin to reverse this process will require a human society far more conscious of its obligation to the continuity of life, and not just the possibilities for life's immediate enjoyment, than anything we see before us today, or have seen in the past. To make it this way will require a vast process of education, which has scarcely yet begun.

Not all of this damage, of course, could be combated or remedied just within the framework of our continent alone. But much of it could be. As the world's greatest industrial nation, as the possessor of the largest single component of its industrial machinery, also as its most wasteful and industrially dirty society, and finally, as the world's foremost nuclear power and one which has yet to give any very satisfactory explanation of the manner in which it disposes of its nuclear wastes, we have a very special responsibility here.

I see in the preoccupations and behavior of our governmental leaders very little recognition of all this. The paltry million or two dollars they devote to the study and treatment of these problems is as nothing compared to what is spent on the Vietnam conflict alone. One wonders whether men have gone mad, to spend such tremendous sums on what they consider to be the military defense of a country which is so extensively destroying the prerequisites of its own life from within. (my emphasis)

It really puzzles me how a guy that could make this kind of concerned, sweeping criticism, that was far from widespread in 1968, could fail to see sympathetic aspects in the student and youth movements of that time that connected with this very concern.

Among his other long-term concerns, he includes race relations (more on that below), the negative effects of advertising, the excessive use of cars, and the need for some kind of regional governments between the states and the federal government.

But I can't say very much for his views of racial problems in the US. Based on the positions he takes in his longer essay, the most charitable thing to say is that he didn't seem to have a particularly well-informed view on the matter. This, for instance, is just downright embarrassing:

Nor is there any evidence [in his correspondents' letters] of a recognition that the Negro has had any part in the creation of his own problem, or is to have any part in its solution. The idea that he could improve his situation in any degree, either by his own effort or by his electoral action, appears to be strange to this cast of thought. He is seen only as the helpless ward of public authority. One gains from the reading of these letters the impression that in the view of their writers, the American Negro is to be held to no standards — that all qualities on his part, whether laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and violence of behavior or their opposites, are to be rewarded alike.

Yes, it sounds like Rush Limbaugh. You can't really dress that one up. And, unfortunately, there's more along that line. So even when he gets around to recongizing that something like white racism exists, it's kind of painful to read that what he really appreciates about "the American Negro" is ... good manners:

I say these things with great reluctance, because I know they will be distorted and interpreted as evidence of an outlook I do not really entertain. I yield to none in my admiration for many of the qualities I see in the American Negro. Aside from the distinction of his contributions to music and the drama and humor, he has an exceptionally high sensitivity to people and situations. He has a gift for casual social intercourse that many of us could envy, and one made all the more impressive by the respect and solicitude for the dignity of the other person that underlie it. When not upset by painful racial reactions or demoralized by the various strains and artificialities of urban life, he tends, accordingly, to have better natural manners than a great many American whites. To anyone who believes, as I do, in the overriding importance of good form as an essential of civilized living, these are formidable qualities; and our country, in my opinion, would be distinctly poorer without them. I am perfectly willing, furthermore, to recognize that the responsibility for the present situation of the American Negro is considerably greater on the part of the white community than it is on his. (my emphasis)

He even managed to echo - let's assume it was unintentional - Southern "states rights" defenders of segregation when he wondered at the oddity of a "student in Maine" who felt some sense of responsibility "for the customs and conditions that prevail in Amite, Mississippi." And who went on to assume that if those "fail to crrespond to what he, from his vantage point at a distance of two thousand miles, finds proper and acceptable, it is his business to act personally - not, mind you, through his elected representatives, but directly and in person - to set things to rights". Kennan just seems to have not had much understanding or knowledge about the civil rights movement as it actually unfolded in the decade or more preceding his essay. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that he was more than a little limited in his views by the institutional racism that was very much present then and is still with us today.

But to close with one of Kennan's more enlightened observations, he has some interesting things to say in connection with military conscription and the real issues of duties and obligations to the community involved, even when draftees are being required to fight in a misguided and even immoral war. While I don't fully share his view on draft resistance in the context of that time, this observation does shed some real light on a point that generated a lot of genuine concern and misunderstanding, aside from the cynical ways politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon exploited and twisted them:

The fact remains that the present student attitude toward obligations of military service stands in stark and almost dangerous contrast to concepts that prevailed up until quite recently among the majority of our people. To many older people it is almost bound to appear as a provocation offered to some of their most deeply held feelings. Many will question whether the emergence in so short a time of so drastically altered a concept of the relation of the individual to the state does not spell a fundamental change in the very nature of American national feeling. (my emphasis)

What surprised me was his comment on how much of the attitude of young people of that time against the draft, which appeared to the more traditional-minded to be insufficiently patriotic, cowardly or treasonous, might well be a legitimate and healthy reaction to this:

I wonder whether this attitude is not in part a predictable reaction to the silly cultivation of the externals of an exaggerated hurrah-patriotism that has come over our schools in the past twenty years: the oaths and songs and flaggings and renderings of the National Anthem on any and all occasions. These things are, unless I am much mistaken, relics of the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940's and early 1950's, when the pious and frequent performance of such ritualistic manifestations of love of country became a means of self-defense before the aroused bodies of super-patriots who swept through libraries, schools and colleges, their nostrils quivering for the smell of Communist treason. Many of the students would say, of course, that it is not the country itself but the "establishment" they are rebelling against — not the nation but the reactionary and oppressive policies to which the nation has allowed itself to be committed — that what they are doing reflects not lack of any love of country but rather a shame of country which the very love for it has induced. And in this there would be much truth.

Go, dude! Kennan may have had an irrationally negative reaction to hippie hair and clothing styles. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't the kind of guy to judge a politician's "character" by whether or not he wears a flag pin in his coat lapel. To take an example at random.

Sadly, the superpatriots we have with us always.

Tags: 1968, george kennan, racism, sixties