I've been known to quote Daniel Cohn-Bendit sympathetically here, because a lot of times he has good things to say.
But he certainly seems to have gotten thoroughly caught up in Realpolitik lately. Or at least, Realpolitik as in Very Serious People policies. He bowed out of French Green Party politics over his passionate support of Angela Merkel's Fiscal (Suicide) Pact, which permanently locks in Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies in the countries that abide by it.
The famous "68er" of the May-June 1968 uprising in France, the one-time more-or-less anarchist author of Linksradikalismus, Gewaltkur gegen die Alterskrankheit des Kommunismus (Leftwing Radicalism, Strong Medicine Against the Old-Age Diseases of Communism) (1968), onetime key Green Party Leader in Germany, France and the European Parliament, has now settled in to being an advocate of mildly left-leaning neoliberalism and, in the case of Syria, an advocate for "American imperialism." He says:
Eine Strafaktion ohne politische Strategie wäre falsch. Aber der Westen muss militärisch mobilmachen. Als Voraussetzung - entweder für einen Militärschlag oder um einen Waffenstillstand zu erzwingen und das Blutvergießen zu beenden.
[A punitive action without a political strategy would be wrong. But the West must mobilize militarily. As preperation - either for a military strike or to compel a ceasefire and to end the bloodshed.]
He does go on to say that the US shouldn't go it alone and should try to get an EU consensus and UN authorization for any attack. Both are conditions that are unlikely in the extreme to be achieved, especially in light of the British Parliament's very surprising rejection of the idea. If such a such a loyal lackey ally of the US as Britain has been with our Middle East wars won't go along with this one, an EU consensus is highly unlikely.
But I don't think Cohn-Bendit is trying to be cute, saying he supports intervention but only under conditions he knows are impossible. He comes across in this interview as clearly in favor of intervening in the Syrian civil war against the Assad regime. "Wir müssen uns politisch und moralisch gegen Assad stellen," he says. ("We {the West} must stand against Assad politically and morally.")
And he's highly critical of the German Greens for opposing a military attack on Syria.
Cohn-Bendit's position strikes me as highly unrealistic. For Assad's regime and the Allawite minority which is its main power base, this is an all-or-nothing situation. They have everything to lose. The US and NATO countries have little to gain - and actually nothing in terms of substantial national interests to lose by staying out.
I wish US policymakers could get out of the history-starts-today mentality they seem to apply. How we handle one intervention affects how other countries respond in future situations. Unlike Cohn-Bendit's fantasy in that interview, we can't re-create the international consensus of either the First Gulf War or the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions.
The US overreacted across the board to the the 9/11 attacks. Our torture practice genuinely repulsed a lot of people in other countries, including key allies. The lies of the Cheney-Bush Administration and the Tony Blair government in cooperation with them have damaged our credibility in making a case for war to even as subservient an ally as Britain. See Juan Cole, The Ghost of Iraq haunts Obama on Syria as British Parliament DefectsInformed Comment on this issue.
David Lightman reports on the (for Americans) sad contrast between the British Parliamentary debate on making war against Syria and what passes for such a discussion in the US Congress, Washington, London: A study in contrasts over Syria debate 08/29/2013.
The fact that the US, Britain and France took the UN resolution on Libya that was aimed at preventing massacres of civilians and used it as a fig-leaf for full-blown military intervention of the side of rebel forces is a factor in the lack of cooperation by Russia and China at the UN over Syria.
Robert Fisk has covered plenty of war in the Middle East, and is no fan of it. He's chronicled a lot of them in his book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005), which provides some great background on broad Middle Eastern politics. And is stylistically very well written, which is good because it's a long book.
But I'm surprised at how dimly he views the idea of the US and Britain bombing Syria in Iran, not Syria, is the West's real targetIndependent 08/30/2013: "Before the stupidest Western war in the history of the modern world begins – I am, of course, referring to the attack on Syria that we all now have to swallow ..."
(The Independent has added a 5-article-limit firewall, so keep that in mind.)
German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel and French President François Hollande got together on Saturday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a speech by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 that is considered one of the landmarks on the road to European unity. Platitudes about the importance of the European Union were plentiful. (Diskussion über Europas Zukunft. Pathos reicht nichtSpiegel Online 22.09.2012)
News of the failure of Frau Fritz' austerity program keeps coming. Portugal's conservative government agreed in the face of active public protests to ease up at least a bit on their austerity program. Greece's projected budget deficit is looking to be twice as big as previously projected. Cyprus is negotiating terms for a bailout which will bring down Angie's austerity guillotine on them, as well. Italy is raising its debt targets. Spain's conservative government wants to use the crisis and the terms of the new bailout which it hasn't formally requested yet to cut pensions.
Recession-hit Spaniards will this week be told to swallow yet more austerity as the government prepares a fresh round of reforms and another budget filled with spending cuts and tax increases that will allow it to seek a bailout from eurozone partners.
Pension freezes are also expected to form part of a raft measures to prepare the way for the European Central Bank (ECB) to give Spain support to control borrowing costs that will eat up a large chunk of next year's budget.
The budget is to be announced on Thursday, alongside the reform programme. Neither seemed likely to contain measures to immediately ease Spain's chronic 25% unemployment, which some analysts expect will rise to 26.5% next year.
What an awful mess Frau Fritz has created!
In a disappointing moment, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a major figure in the French Green Party and one of the legendary figures of the May-June uprising in 1968 in France, resigned from the French Green Party because they opposed the adoption of Frau Fritz' fiscal suicide pact, officially called the Intergovernmental Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. French Greens' Cohn-Bendit quits party in fiscal pact row Reuters 09/23/2012)reports, "The French Greens voted overwhelmingly against the terms of the pact at a grassroots assembly on Saturday, concluding that it would not provide long-term answers to the EU crisis nor help foster environmentally friendly policies."
Cohn-Bendit is co-president of the Green Party caucus in the European Parliament, a position he will presumably have to relinquish now. I think Cohn-Bendit has been a constructive voice in his role in the European Parliament, and I hate to see him leave.
But his party in France took the right position on the treaty. Reuters reports:
The French Greens voted overwhelmingly against the terms of the pact at a grassroots assembly on Saturday, concluding that it would not provide long-term answers to the EU crisis nor help foster environmentally friendly policies.
France is expected to ratify the pact early next month, though a major revolt within the coalition could force the Socialists into an embarrassing reliance on the conservative opposition.
Hollande's Socialists should be embarrassed. The fiscal suicide pact fixes a major feature of Merkel's austerity policies permanent in the approving countries, an arbitrary limit on debt to 60% of GDP. To a significant degree, it would outlaw Keynesian counter-cyclical economic policies in recessions. It's just nuts to write that into constitutional law in any country.
Angeline Benoit and Ben Sills report for Bloomberg in Spanish Bonds Fall Even as Rajoy Unveils More Budget Cuts 04/10/2012 that Spanish bonds yields are climbing near 6% (600 basis points) again, a level that has become a signal in the EU crisis that the cost of borrowing is becoming unsustainable:
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy yesterday unexpectedly announced the 10 billion-euro package, less than two weeks after unveiling the most austere budget in more than three decades. Rajoy is targeting basic public services for the first time since his election in December in a bid to convince investors he can bring order to the nation’s finances.
"There are growing fears that the Spanish economy is caught in a pernicious circle," Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London, said in an e- mailed response to questions. "The weakness of government finances, the fragility of banks and worries about the scale of the recession all feed on each other."
Spain’s 10-year borrowing costs have jumped more than one percentage point since March 2, when Rajoy announced that Spain will miss its 2012 budget-deficit goal approved by the European Union. Spain overshot last year’s target and the nation is battling its second recession since 2009.
What role pure speculation plays at a given moment is hard for most of us to know on any given day. But the record of eurozone and non-eurozone EU countries the last several years have shown clearly that a country's commitment to balanced budgets, that sacred devotion of the Great God Free Market, is not what is driving bonds rates and investors' risk evaluations. It's the investors' expectations of whether the country's economy is healthy enough to be able to pay back its loans.
Spain, like Greece and Italy and other countries currently in debt trouble and operating under German Chancellor Angela Merkel's austerity economics, is caught in a gruesome circle. The worse their economy gets, the more expensive their borrowing becomes. Then the EU (read: Angela Merkel) insists that the country impose more extreme austerity economics, which makes the economy worse, which makes their borrowing costs go up, and so on.
The One Percent is making use of this depression to push deregulation, reduction of government services, shrinking of labor unions, and rolling back workers rights. The result is the reduction in living standards of the majority of the population in countries like Spain and Greece, high unemployment, increasing poverty and all the evil results that go with those things.
And it all threatens to erode democratic governance. Hungary is now operating with an authoritarian regime, which the EU is only feebly protesting. It's hard to imagine that Hungary at this moment is still in compliance with the basic democracy requirements for EU membership. Greece and Italy are operating under Post Democracy governments imposed by Angie to act as debt collectors for the country's creditors. But democratic institutions are at least still in place and competitive elections can still take place. To what extent the dominant parties are all in hock to corporate and financial interests and the toxic neoliberal/austerity economics that support is another question.
Paul Krugman has being saying for a while that, for all the problems Greece alone has caused, it's Spain that is the real danger point for the unraveling of the euro and whatever consequences flow from that. Benoit and Sills report:
"As a result of Spain’s challenges, sentiment towards its sovereign bonds is now the bellwether for Europe’s debt crisis," Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief currency strategist at UBS AG (UBSN), wrote in an e-mailed note on April 7. "If investor appetite wanes, then currency markets will start to price in either ECB rate cuts to help restore sentiment, or Madrid requires external assistance from its European Union partners."
The fragility of the current economic situation was highlighted at the presentation of this year’s first-quarterly report on the Greek economy by the Foundation for Industrial and Economic Research (IOBE) on April 2.
The country’s leading private sector think-tank predicted that the economy would contract for the fifth consecutive year, reaching “at least 5 percent” after last year’s slump of 6.8 percent, with unemployment reaching 21 percent and consumption plummeting 7 percent.
Both Athens and the European Union are to blame for Greece’s economic catastrophe, Eurodeputy Daniel Cohn-Bendit told a Greek audience on a visit to Athens on March 27. ...
Cohn-Bendit and Greens co-chair Rebecca Harms came to Athens at the invitation of the Ecologists-Greens (EcoGreens), in the hopes of giving the small party an international boost ahead of national elections. Some recent polls indicate that EcoGreens may for the first time pass the three-percent threshold needed to enter parliament.
It was no surprise, then, that Cohn-Bendit blasted the record of successive Pasok and New Democracy governments, while deriding the nepotism that has allowed members of a few political families to come to power over the past decades. "We believe that the EcoGreens can contribute to the creation of a new Greece, which you need," the MEP [Member of the European Parliament] declared.
Dany Cohn-Bendit is the leader of the Green Party caucus in the European Parliament and has been a committed "European," i.e., an advocate of the European Union and its continued development and political integration.
But his attitude toward the Angie-fied, neoliberal version of the EU, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now using a vehicle to impose her disastrous austerity politics on all of Europe, has him taking a different aprpoach.
The current official negotiating group dealing with Greece to solve their sovereign debt issues is known as the "troika": the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The EU Commission acting for the EU, and the European Centra Bank (ECB). The ECB is run by a committed Angiebot, and the other two are agreed on pushing the neoliberal austerity plan Angie is demanding.
In case of the latest Greek bailout the troika just agreed upon this past Monday, they came up with yet another solution that won't solve the Greek debt problem but will actually make it worse. Paul Krugman characterizes the latest agreement this way (Greece 02/21/2012):
What can I say? As Felix Salmon says, this really isn’t credible. The problem with all previous rounds here has been that austerity policies depress the economy to such an extent that it wipes out most of the topline fiscal gains: revenue fall, so does GDP, so the projected debt/GDP ratio gets, if anything, worse.
Now we have another round of austerity — which is assumed not to do too much damage to growth. The triumph of hope over experience.
OK, nobody here is an idiot (although see my next post). What’s happening is that nobody is prepared to take the plunge into either of the paths that might eventually lead out of this: sustained aid (not loans) to Greece, or departure from the euro, leading eventually to higher competitiveness and faster growth. Both options would be politically catastrophic, which means that they can’t be taken until there is literally no alternative.
The more serious deficit in the EU isn't on the government financial statements. It the democracy deficit that is a bigger problem.
The Troika not only blackmailed the Greek government into accepting its ruinous, unjust conditions for the current tranche of the bailout. They even made the leaders of the two major parties sign written agreements that they would stick to those conditions regardless of the outcome of parliamentary elections in Greece in March.
Propping up undercapitalized banks - still the basic problem in the sovereign debt crisis - and imposing Angie's secular-Protestant vision of virtuous economic austerity have become higher priorities for the EU than defending democracy.
I've pretty much tried to ignore the Roman Polanski extradition case. But it seems to be well on the way to becoming an international "culture war" issue. I hate these kinds of issues for two main reasons. One is that the "ick" factor of an fortysomething adult accused of having sex with a 13-year-old is high no matter what, whether it's in Hollywood or Afghanistan. The other is that probably no one but a legal specialist in this particular area of law actually has a good and reasonably objective opinion on what should actually be done or is customarily done in these kinds of cases.
But it's already become a symbolic issue, I'll state my own position, such as it is, up front. Really more of an understanding of the facts than a "position". It makes good sense to me that the Los Angeles District Attorney would seek extradition. The State of California has a real interest in seeing its judicial processes upheld. But it appears likely that no additional penalties will be because of some combination of the victim's wishes, the time since the crime, and serious concerns about improper conduct by the judge in the original case.
And, this being the real world, French and Polish concerns about their citizen Polanski's expedition shouldn't be dismissed out of hand out of anti-European sentiment or even genuine concern over the nature of the crime. An apparently unintentional AP leak has suggested that the Switzerland is cooperating in the extradition request due to political efforts related to defusing conflicts over criminal misconduct by the Swiss bank UBS rather than to the merits of the case. And Americans need to remember that it's not 2000 any more. The US is a country that tortures people and refuses to prosecute known torturers. Even if there is no particular concern that Polanski would be tortured, it is a serious concern that casts a shadow over all extradition cases involving the US. (This report, French government drops support for director Roman Polanski as he faces extradition to the U.S. over child sex charge by Peter Allen Daily Telegraph 10/01/09, says that the French government is now taking the position that Polanski should be freed from Swiss jail while extradition is pending but that it is not opposing the extradition.)
The "culture war" aspect comes out in this piece by Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply, France Divided Over Polanski CaseInternational Herald Tribune/New York Times 09/30/09. In fact, it was skimming the first few paragraphs of this article that made me think it might be worth knowing a bit more about the case, because it's become an issue because the French government has publicly defended Sarkozy's case against extradition to California.
Apparently in France as in the US, politicians not surprisingly think that the safer position is not to side with people in Polanski's current situation. I can't say the Carvajal/Cieply article was necessarily enlightening on the case. But they note in the third paragraph opposition to the conservative-led government's defense of Polanski from both the Greens and the "extreme right" party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Given it's the New York Times, the writers and/or editors probably think that the xenophobia Le Pen party is their "this-side-says, the-other-side-says" style of reporting on what the Green leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit says. In the fifth paragraph, they at least get around to telling us that Polanski is a citizen of France and Poland, so the French government would have some reason to take some public position on the case.
Dany Cohn-Bendit was the most famous leader and symbol of the famous/(infamous) May-June 1968 uprising by students and workers in France. Carvajal and Cieply say he "criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime". It's probably a good thing that the Times article didn't go into it. And maybe not a good thing that I'm mentioning it. But Cohn-Bendit does have a special reason to look like his siding against Polanski in this situation.
Several years ago, the German journalist Bettina Röhl dug up an embarrassing quote from Cohn-Bendit. As I explained at some length in an earlier post, Bettina Röhl harshes on former "68er" activists with a zeal that outruns the case she tries to make against them. She has her own family demons to deal with: her mother was Ulrike Meinhof of the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", her father Klause Rainer Röhl is a former flaming leftwinger turned flaming rightwinger and both parents were secret members of the East-German-directed underground Communist Party in West Germany. But she's a good researcher. And she turned up an interview with Cohn-Bendit that he had given years ago when he worked as a teacher in school with young children which seemed to suggest that he had engaged in inappropriate play with young children in that capacity.
Cohn-Bendit denied ever having done such a thing. And he said the quote was a poor attempt at humor, and a very inappropriate one. But from what I've seen of the case, there was never any reason to question his version. There were no such complaints at the time and no collaboration of such a thing from parents or students. I would say it was questionable ethics on Röhl's part to publish that information without any substantial collaboration. But, according to what Digby calls the Cokie Roberts Rule, the information was "out there" - it had been published in a small-circulation but public magazine before - and therefore it was fair game to report.
Still, it's a reminder of how sloppy reporting can damage people unfairly. The one time I saw the late great Molly Ivins speak live, back in the mid-1990s as the current plunge of press quality into the bottomless abyss was still in its early years, she was talking about factors in how reporting had deteriorated and become more irresponsible. And one example she gave was that it had for a long time been the practice of most papers not to publish the name of someone who had been accused but not convicted of molesting children. Because even if the charge was totally false and the accused unquestionably exonerated, the stigma was such that it could damage the accused permanently.
So I decided I would see what I could find that had been factually reported on the Polanski case before I tried to wade through the "cultural war" accusations.
Dismissal denied in Polanski child-sex case by Harriet Ryan 02/18/09. This is an interesting piece because it is recent but still months before the high-profile controversy of the past couple of weeks. This was an piece about a legal effort by Polanski to have the original case thrown out:
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza told a packed courtroom that he found the core argument in Polanski's request for a dismissal of charges -- allegations of unethical and, in some instances, illegal conduct by a prosecutor and a judge three decades ago -- to be credible.
"There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct that occurred during the pendency of this case," Espinoza said.
But, the judge said, Polanski's fugitive status left him no choice but to deny the request. ...
In 1997, a prosecutor and a defense attorney worked out a plan for the director to surrender, be arrested at the airport, brought to court, sentenced and immediately released. The agreement fell apart with Polanski's side saying he objected to television coverage in court. ...
The victim, Samantha Geimer, settled a civil suit against Polanski and publicly forgave him. She has asked that the case be dismissed. Her attorney on Tuesday argued to Espinoza that she could make the motion to dismiss the charges if Polanski's fugitive status prevented the judge from doing so, but Espinoza said in a written ruling that there was no "legal justification" to support that argument. [my emphasis]
Judge the Movie, Not the Man by Samantha Geimer Los Angeles Times 02/2303. In this op-ed, the victim describes clearly what occurred as non-consensual sex, i.e., rape. She also says, "He should have received a sentence of time served 25 years ago, just as we all agreed."
Roman Polanski arrest: Hollywood unties in his defenceThe Guardian Online 09/28/09. This article refers to the victim as "the girl whom Polanski raped at the age of 13", but includes what appears to be an editorial note appended at the end saying, "Some commentators have simply used the term 'rape' in relation to Roman Polanski's 1977 conviction. The offence he pleaded guilty to is often described as 'statutory rape' but more precisely as 'unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor'." This article also discusses the AP leak connected the Swiss action to concerns over banking controversies.
Finally, in a caricature of European cosmopolitanism, France's culture minister fumed that the harrying of such a cultural icon revealed the face of "a scary America."
Some of these arguments are more persuasive than others. For example, Polanski may have a due-process claim based on improper behavior by the judge in his case. By contrast, he shouldn't be left alone because of tragedies in his life or his status as a legendary director. Nor is it relevant that his victim seeks no further punishment for him. Prosecutions are brought in the name of the state, not the victim.
Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country.
The one part of that quote with which I would disagree is the sneer at the French culture minister, an implicitly at the French Foreign Minister who made an even stronger statement about his concerns over the extradition, as "a caricature of European cosmopolitanism." And while it's true that the state prosecutes on its own behalf and not in the name of the victim - an important legal reality that some of the rhetoric around "victim's rights" over the years has tended to obscure - it's unlikely in practice that in the event the original charges were thrown out that the DA would attempt to reprosecute the case with a victim unwilling to proceed on a now decades-old charge.
So, we have a case in which the accused accepted a plea bargain and served the agreed sentence, where there is substantial reason to believe there was prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, in which the Los Angeles prosecutor had agree in 1997 to another deal in which the accused would have appeared in court and then gone free, and in which the victim actually agrees that the original charges should be dropped.
The "ick factor" notwithstanding, this doesn't seem like a very good case to make another totem in the "culture war". And while it may be a reminder that the criminal justice system in the US generally thirty years ago tended to treat perpetrators in such cases too leniently, it seems unlikely that this 32-year-old case is likely to produce a very satisfactory outcome for anyone if it's retried. And the prospects seem good that the the original charges will be dropped, for better or for worse.
A number of prominent Hollywood movie-industry figures have publicly come to Polanski's defense over the extradition. So far as I've seen from the news reports, they haven't made a terribly strong case. At the least, they would have presented a more sympathetic case if they had focused more narrowly on due process and official misconduct in the original trial.
At least some of those who are treating it as a straight-forward outrage that anyone would express reservations about official conduct of the case also seem to be more concerned about immunizing themselves from conservative culture-war attacks than sorting out the issues raised by the case. But so long as they are doing it, it's worth flagging that a number of liberals have take a hardline anti-Polanski position in the case:
Katha Pollitt, Roman Polanski Has a Lot of FriendsThe Nation Online 10/01/09: "The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. ... No wonder Middle America hates them." Seeing as how even TV news has morphed into infotainment, I'm not convinced that "Middle America" hates Hollywood stars and directors.
Glenn Greenwald gets into the act with Post editors should read their own columnistsSalon 10/01/09. He seems to be genuinely disgusted at Polanski's defenders. But his main point is that the Washington Post's editorial position attacking Polanski's defenders is in pathetic contrast to its staunch opposition to prosecution of Bush officials for official crimes that include offenses regarded by the law as even more serious than the crime to which Polanski pleaded guilty.
Glenn criticizes three particularly fatuous defenses of Polanski:
The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski by Anne Applebaum Washington Post Online 09/27/09. Applebaum is married to the Polish Foreign Minister, who in his official capacity has expressed concern about Polanski's extradition, a fact she didn't bother to disclose in this piece.
The Smoking Gun site has the transcript of the victim's grand jury testimony from 1977 (if you're thinking about reading it at work, remember that it involves descriptions that screening software could flag as pornographic).
Das Ende der Utopie: Herbert Marcuse. Vortrage und Disckussionen in Berlin 1967 (1980) collects two speeches that "critical theory" philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) gave in Berlin in June of 1967 at the time the most militant phase of the German student and youth movement had just begun in the aftermath of the fatal shooting by a policeman of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2 of that year. The book includes: the speeches and the text of the discussions that followed them; a podium discussion on "Die Dritte Welt und die Opposition in den Metropolen" (The Third World and the Opposition in the Metropoles) featuring, along with others, Marcuse and two other famous names from the German APO (extra-parliamentary opposition) movement, Rudi Dutschke and Bahman Nirumand; and, a 1980 discussion of Marcuse's appearances of June 1967 and their signifance that included Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernd Rabehl and Detlev Claussen.
Tillman Fichter describes the effect this way in the 1980 discussion: "Marcuse ist wirklich damals aufgetreten als einer der letzten Zeugen einer Revolte, die in den 30er Jahren gescheitert war und als einer der letzten, die überlebt hatten und auch versucht hatten, unter ganz schwieriger Bedingungen politisch weiterzuarbeiten." ("Marcuse appeared at that time as one of the last witnesses of a revolt that failed in the 1930s and as one of the last who had survived and also attempted, under very difficult political conditions, to keep on working.") By which presumably he meant that Marcuse kept on working on that defeated revolt.
Fichter's comment refers to conditions and understandings that were present in 1967 that wouldn't be so self-evident to people today, particularly outside of Europe. Marcuse's audience for both speeches were primarily students who were politically active in what we could broadly call the German socialist tradition. Some number of them, probably most, viewed themselves as Marxists. Some West German Marxists, including some members of the leading student organization, the SDS (Sozialischtischer Deutscher Studentenbund, which only coincidentally shared the initials of a militant student group in the United States), were sympathetic to the Soviet-line Communism that was in power in East Germany. Most were not. Rudi Dutschke, the most famous of the student leaders in Germany, and his fellow SDS militant Bernd Rabehl, had come from East Germany (the DDR from its German initials) and considered themselves Marxists and revolutionaries but rejected the DDR model.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of today - currently the junior partner in Germany's ruling coalition government - was founded in the 19th century as the workers' party. Karl Marx himself was part of the Party. The SPD emerged in 1875 from the fusion of the Allgemeinen deutschen Arbeiterverein founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863 and the Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands founded by August Bebel und Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869. The Gotha Party Congress of 1875 formally established the union.
The SPD specifically considered itself a revolutionary Party but envisioned the revolution as one that could be achieved through democratic means. That meant in 1875 and for decades to come, fighting for their right to participate openly in parliamentary politics, expanding suffrage for workers and establishing the Parliament as the supreme governmental authority to replace the Imperial system, in which the Parliament was not entirely powerless, but close. They worked for union rights and other reforms to improve conditions for workers, but also had as their goal the replacement of capitalism by socialism, which meant for them public ownership of the major industrial and financial institutions. In terms unfamiliar in American politics, they considered themselves a class party of the working class, not a "popular" party appealing to all classes.
The First World War (1914-1918) split the SPD between the majority faction that supported the Kaiser's war and a minority faction that held that the SPD should oppose the war as one that was fundamentally an imperialist war, waged on behalf of competing nations' capitalist ruling classes against the interests of the workers and in pursuit of competition over colonies in what we now called the underdeveloped world. The war was a massive catastrophe for those who initiated it, resulting in the end of five great empires: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman Empires. A little more restraint after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand strongly recommends itself in retrospect.
The Russian Revolution in 1917 put the Russian Communist Party into the role of the leading socialist party in the world, a status previously held by the German SPD. The Western European social-democratic parties split in the coming months into Communist factions and parties that supported the Russian model of revolution and those who favored a road to socialism through parliamentary democracy. That split acquired extreme bitterness in Germany. In the 1918 democratic revolution, the Kaiser abdicated and turned power over peacefully to the SPD, headed by Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann.
The popular pressure for this change came in particular from the formation of self-governing workers' councils, soldiers' council and sailors' councils, a form of workers protest and opposition that had first emerged in the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. ("Soviets" were workers councils.) Ebert and Scheidemann initially cooperated with the councils. But they did not try to pursue the option of governing on the basis of the councils, which would have meant replacing the existing partliamentary institutions.
But in January 1919, another mass wave of workers protest broke out which has gone down in history as the Spartakusaufstand, the Spartacus uprising, from the name of one of the left socialist groups that had merged into the new German Communist Party (KPD) that had formed at the turn of the year 1918-19. Official Communist history viewed this event as a revolt led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, son of Wilhelm Liebknecht. That's a shaky picture of the event at best. But what is not in dispute is that the SPD government crushed the revolt by force. And it is also not in doubt the Social Democratic Minister of the Army, Gustav Noske, used the Freikorps in doing so; the Freikorps were rightwing militias organized by reactionary officers and politicians after the war. Even in the world of hard-nosed politics, the SPD-Freikorps alliance was a genuinely unholy one.
The political repercussions were long-lasting. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), the SPD and the KPD both enjoyed substantial electoral strength among workers. But they were never able to cooperate with each other politically to preserve Weimar democracy. There were other factors involved in that result. But the bloody suppression of the 1919 workers' uprising/protest by the SPD government was certainly a major one.
The SPD during Weimar officially still stood for a program of ending capitalism and having state ownership of industry and finance. But even during the war, the party under the more conservative leadership of those like Ebert and Scheidemann became known as "the Kaiser's social democrats", an indication of a definite ebb of revolutionary enthusiasm. And realistically, the SPD had in practice accepted the basic structure of the capitalist economy in the 1920.
During the Third Reich, both the KPD and the SPD were suppressed and both to some extent actively supported the anti-Hitler international coalition. (This is apparently that to which Tillman Fichter refers in speaking of the failure of the the "revolt" in the 1930s.) After the Second World War, the Soviets in their occupation zone, which was later to become East Germany, forced a merger of the SPD and KPD into the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which became in reality the East German Communist Party. The Western SPD under the leadership of the remarkable Kurt Schumacher (1895-1952) insisted on maintaining the SPD as an independent party in the West and clearly rejected the Soviet-style Communist model in East Germany. Meeting at Bad Gotesburg in November 1959, the SPD adopted the Godesburg Program which formally recognized what had largely been the case for decades, that the SPD accepted the basic structure of the capitalist economy, their commitment to Western-style parliamentary democracy, and embraced the NATO alliance. They also formally gave up their self-understanding as a "workers party" and defined themselves as a "popular party".
And this is the immediate background for the politics of the 1960s German student movement. The Godesburg Program was generally understood as the abandonment of any Marxist worldview, even a reformist variety. The SDS at that time was the student group of the SPD. But its leadership rejected the changes of the Godesburg Program and the SDS was expelled from the SPD, after which the SDS continued as an independent organization. The Godesburg Program set the stage for the first Grand Coalition government, which ruled Germany from 1966 to 1969. This was a government headed by the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) with the SPD as a junior partner. At the time, those were the two major parties and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was the only other significant parliamentary party. So the CDU-SPD government had a two-thirds majority, meaning they could amend the Constitution with a party-line vote.
For the SPD, the Grand Coalition experience allowed them to increase their credibility with voters to the point that in 1969 they could form a government with the FDP, headed by Willy Brandt as Chancellor. But during the Grand Coalition, it seemed to many activists that the country was dangerously lacking in a real opposition. One effect was an increase in votes for the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). One of the worries on the part of many unions and student groups and activists was an Emergency Law to define procedures for setting aside the German Consitition in a severe national emergency. Not surprisingly, for many this sounded awfully similar to the Emergency Law of 1933 that allowed Hitler to set aside the Weimar Constitution permanently without ever formally abolishing it.
This situation dramatized Herbert Marcuse's notion that Western capitalist democracies had largely become societies without opposition. The student movement came to understand itself as an extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), a concept that applied to the broader movement rather than to any particular organization. And the hardline responses of the Berlin police and the SPD-controlled city government to protests, which came to a head with the events surrounding the killing of Benno Ohnesorg and the aftermath. It's not surprising that Berlin activists would have related the conduct of the Berlin SPD to the approach taken by Ebert's SPD government in crushing the workers' movement in 1919.
The two speeches of Marcuse's preserved in this volume are "Das Ende der Utopie" and "Das Problem der Gewalt in der Opposition". English translations of both appear in a collection rather unimaginatively titled Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (1970), translated by Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry Weber, along with three other essays on Freudian psychoanalysis. The discussions after those lectures is included in Shapiro's translation in somewhat abbreviated form.
Marcuse, as Ficther indicated, was for the leftist students in Berlin a living link to those long-ago events of 1918-19 and the Weimar Republic, and one who overtly sympathized with their activism. In this comment, Marcuse reflects some of the resentment that lingered from those days (Shapiro/Weber translation):
Q[uestion from Wolfgang Lefèvre of SDS]. On the definition of revisionism mentioned in the previous question: revisionists are those who think they can change something in this society within the established institutions, while a large number of students thinks it is necessary to form an anti-institutional and extra-parliamentary opposition.
M[arcuse]. It is necessary to see important differences and make significant distinctions. Let me say something personal. If you mean by revisionism the German Social-Democratic Party, I can only say to you that from the time of my own political education, that is since 1919, I have opposed this party. In 1917 to 1918 I was a member of the Social-Democratic Party, I resigned from it after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht [by the Freikorps], and from then on I have criticized this party's politics. Not because it believed that it could work within the framework of the established order - for we all do this, we all make use of even the most minute possibilities in order to transform the established order from inside it - that is not why I fought the S.P.D. The reason was rather that it worked in alliance with reactionary, destructive, and repressive forces.
Since 1918 I have always been hearing of left forces within the Social-Democratic Party, and I have continually seen these left forces move more and more to the right until nothing left was left in them. You see that I am at least not very convinced by this idea of some kind of radical work within the party. [my emphasis]
The "until nothing left was left in them" is a bit of cutsiness on the translators' part, but the English word play captures the meaning well. Marcuse's German wording was "bis von der Linken nichts mehr übriggeblieben ist." Which translates more literally as "until nothing more remained of the leftists."
Marcuse had been part of one of the soldiers' councils (Soldatenrat) in 1917, so he had direct experience in his youth in the revolutionary events of that time. Marcuse studied philosophy in the 1920s and worked for a publisher. In 1933, he joined the Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung, whose work and tradition is known as the Frankfurt School. Marcuse was not only a leftist but Jewish, so he emigrated in 1933 and in 1934 came to the United States and taught at Colombia. During the Second World War, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) doing analyses of Germany on behalf of the war effort, which for the German students of 1967 enhanced his "anti-fascist" reputation. After the war, he taught at Columbia and at Brandeis, moving to the University of California at San Diego, where he taught from 1965-69.
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.)
Klaus Rainer Röhl, now a conservative nationalist (in American terms), "national-liberal" in German terms
This is the fourth of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET. The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.
Klaus almost inevitably becomes a secondary character in Bettina's book about her parents, given the drama and infamy of her mother's later career as a terrorist with the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). I've touched on some of the most significant parts of his role in the book in the previous posts. He comes off in Bettina's account - in which he is heavily quoted from interviews she did for the book - as an entreprenuerial type of guy. Even though it's more than a bit unorthodox of him to have take "venture capital" for his Konkret magazine from Communist East Germany (DDR, after the German initials).
But after he and Ulrike broke from the underground Communist Party directed from the DDR and they cut off funds for the magazine, he made it work in good entrepreneurial fashion, selling advertisements, getting donations for the magazine, and coming up with marketing techniques to boost circulation. He seems to have been especially good with the networking/smoozing/social-climbing aspects of the publishing business in Hamburg.
His (and Ulrike's) accomplishments with Konkret are illustrated by this brief (and not entirely flattering) description from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:
Die Zeitschrift "Konkret" erscheint bis heute und bezeichnet sich selbst als einzige linke Publikums-zeitschrift Deutschlands. 1955 von Klaus Rainer Röhl aus dem Vorläufer "Studentenkurier" gegründet, wurde die Zeitschrift zunachst vom Zentralkomitee der FDJ und von der verbotenen KPD finanziert. Zeitweilige Chefredakteurin und Star-Autorin war Ulrike Meinhof, bis diese sich, nach ihrer Beteiligung an der Befreiung Andreas Baaders, zum Untergrundkampf entschloss. Röhl musste sich von seinem Nachfolger Hermann Gremliza (ab 1974) den Vorwurf gefallen lassen, "Konkret" danach zu einer "Yellow Press der APO" gemacht zu haben, da die Inhalte mit der Zeit immer populärer und auch sexistischer wurden. Gremliza hatte den Anspruch, "Konkret" wieder zur "Speerspitze eines seriösen linken Journalismus zu machen. Und zumindest hat von Theodor W. Adorno über Heinrich Bö11 bis Jean Paul Sartre die Speerspitze der europäischen Linken mindestens einmal in den letzten Jahrzehnten in "konkret" geschrieben.
[The magazine Konkret still appears today and syles itself as the only German magazine for the popular left audience. Founded in 1955 by Klaus Rainer Röhlfrom its predecessor Studentenkurier, the magazine was first financed by the Central Committee of the FDJ [DDR-directed Communist Youth organization] and by the outlawed KPD [DDR-directed West German Communist Party]. It's sometime chief editor and star author was Ulrike Meinhof, until she decided for the underground strugge after her participation in the freeing of Andreas Baader [from police custody]. Röhl found himself accused by his successor Hermann Gremlize (beginning 1974) that he had made Konkret into the "Yellow Press of the APO" [extra-parliamentary opposition], because the contents over time became more and more popular [i.e., less intellectual] and also more and more sexist. Gremliza had the ambition to make Konkret again into the "spearhead of a serious leftist journalism". And at the least, the spearheads of the European left from Theodor W. Adorno to Heinrich Bö11 to Jean Paul Sartre have written at least once in recent decades for Konkret.]
That last sentence leaves the impression that it was only under Gremliza's ownership and editorial direction that his occurred, but that was not the case. Röhl also published such high-profile writers in the magazine.
In Bettina's book, Klaus appears most sympathetic during the time immediately following Ulrike's going underground. The stress of having your ex-wife become a fugitive from justice on attempted murder charges would have been bad enough. But as I described in the first post, Ulrike also sent their twin daughters to Sicily and almost sent them to a Palesinitan orphans' camp in Jordan. They were missing for four months before Stefan Aust, a former Konkret staffer, retrieved the kids from Sicily thanks to a tip from someone who had left the RAF group.
In the weeks following, Klaus had to contend with the constant threat that the girls would be kidnapped again and sent to a Palestinian camp. Working his connections, he got a commitment from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which ran the orphans' camps that they would protect the children and refuse to let the RAF put them into a camp. Soon the RAF turned their immediate attention more exclusively to bank robberies and burglaries of government offices to steal documents like passports to facilitate their illegal activities.
One can easily imagine that going through such an experience would make a person rethink certain aspects of his life. Whatever the motivation, Klaus changed his public persona. In a book published in 1974, Fünf Finger und keine Faust, he described his years as a secret Communist acting on the behalf of the DDR in publishing Konkret. Bettina's books adds documentation to those activities through interviews and through documents from the archives of the Stasi, the DDR's secret police.
As Bettina recounts it in her Epilogue, Klaus joined the SPD (Social Democratic Party), which had been considered little more than fascists with clean shaves by the APO, not to speak of how the terrorist groups saw them. He did some more publishing ventures, none of them notably successful. As Bettina rather delicately puts it, his later magazines, all of them short-lived, were "increasingly filled with naked girls".
In 1992, he began studying with Ernst Nolte, an historian who had by then become notorious for some seriously revisionist history, such as the argument that the Holocaust was the fault of the Russians. Klaus became a member of the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party) - liberal in the European sense, not the American - and became a conservative nationalist, which is called "national liberal" in Germany. (Again, "liberal" means something different in most of the world than it does in the US.)
In his articles and in books like Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus (2002) [Forbidden Mourning: End of the German Taboos] Deutsche Tabus: Ungefragte Antworten (2004) [German Taboos: Answers to Questions Not Asked], he has expounded the dreary liturgies of German nationalist types in undistinguished prose. In Verbotene Trauer, he begins by defending Hitler against accusations that he had lost faith in the greatness of the German Volk by the end. The rest is a long recitation of rightwing whining about how bad the Germans had it during the Second World War, with no meaningful political context other than whiny nationalism, and how the tyranny of leftist political corrections and the guity-tripping about the Jews has prevented the German people from properly understanding it all.
In the history of the real world, the "de-Nazification" program after the war was little more than a joke. But Klaus argues that it was instead horrendously effective and continues to this day, thanks in particular to those Jews of the "Frankfurt School", in the form of "collective guilt". In particular, collective guilt for the Holocaust. Again, in the real world, German leaders and intellectuals have pretty much always rejected any notion of "collective guilt". The formula used by German officials is that there is no such things as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. (A formula that American politicians could usefully import.)
You get the drift. And there's no lack of complaining about how the Germans paid Israel and other Jews a lot of money and yadda, yadda. You could describe both the books I mentioned in the terms Stefan Reinecke uses in reference to Horst Mahler, a founder of the RAF who later became a flaming rightwinger, as "germanische Donnergrollen." Mahler went even further to the right than Klaus did, but that's another story.
The sad state to which Klaus has come in his rightwing politics is illustrated by an essay called "Götterdämmerung: Was wird bleiben von 1968?" (Twilight of the gods: What will remain of 1968 ["the Sixties"]?) from Deutsche Tabus:
Was hat die Generation '68 geschaffen, und was war positiv an 1968? Nichts. Das Land ist vernachlässigt wie seine Städte und seine zersiedelten Dörfer. Der Beton der nach dern Krieg wieder aufgebauten Hauser brockelt, die Fassaden und Wände der einstmals vorbildlich modernen Schwimmbäder und Bibliotheken werden rissig und verrosten, die Farbe blättert ab. Die fabelhaft künstlichen, autofreien Stadtkerne sind von jener gesetzlich vorgeschriebenen "Kunst am Bau" befallen, den die ideenlosen Nachfahren von Joseph Beuys und Fritz Wotruba für viele zehntausend gute D-Mark aus Stahl und Beton verfertigt haben. Manchmal hat eine Stadt auch eine der wie ein Hefeteig unförmig auseinanderlaufenden Plastiken von Henry Moore erworben, fast jede Stadt im Ruhrgebiet hat er für würdig befunden, eines seiner Kunstwerke an einem öffentlichen Ort aufzustellen. Der Rest der verbleibenden Mauern und Wände ist wie von einem Pilzbefall befleckt mit Grafitti und alltaglichem Schmutz. Unwohnlich und unbewohnt, fremd und unheimlich erscheinen die Städte. Sie sind einander bis zur völligen Gleichheit ähnlich, gleich öde und trostlos am regnerischen Alltag wie in sommerlicher Hitze, und die sogenannten Stadtteilfeste mit Flohmarkt und Glühwein genormt und langweilig von Flensburg bis Pforzheim. Tags werden diese Städte von Arbeitslosen und Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach Ausbildungsplatzen und Arbeit, rat- und hilf esuchenden Alten und Schlüsselkindern glücklos bewohnt, nachts atem- und ratlos durchstreift von Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach dem letzten Kick, nach der schrillsten Disko, nach der neuesten Aufputschpille, die das seit ihrer frühen Schulzeit schon zur Gewohnheit gewordene Haschisch übertreffen soll.
[What did the "Sixties" generation achieve, and what was positive about 1968 {i.e., "the Sixties"}? Nothing. The country is as neglected as its cities and its depopulated villages. The concrete of the house rebuilt after the war are crumbling, the facades and walls of the once model modern swimming pools and libraries are cracked and rusted, the color fading. The fabulous artistic, auto-free city centers have smitten by that legally imposed "art on buildings", which for many thousands of Deutschmarks {which hadn't been the German currency for years when that book was published} the idea-less successors of Joseph Beuys and Fritz Wotruba have been prefabricated out of steel and concrete. Sometimes a city also will have acquired one of those vaguely-shaped plastic sculpture by Henry Moore like piece of dough spread all around; almost every city in the Ruhr District has found one of his artworks worthy to be displayed in a public place. The rest of the remaining walls is dirtied with graffiti and everyday dirt. The cities look unlivable and empty, strange and eerie. They are like one another to the point of complete sameness, equally deserted and bleak on a normal rainy day in the summer heat, and the so-called city district festivals with a flea market and hot spicy cider standardized and boring from Flensburg to Pforzheim. Some days these cities are inhabited by the unemployed and young people looking for training spots and work, old people looking for counsel and help and latchkey kids, in the nights tramped through breathlessly and cluelessly by youth looking for the next kick, for the newest disco, for the newest stimulant pill, which will outdo the hashish to which they have become accustomed since their earliest school years.]
And all of it the fault of dirty hippie leftwingers like these:
Now, the guy on the right in the second photo is Fritz Teufel, who eventually became an RAF terrorist. But what did even that have to do with sculptures in the pedestrian zones in German cities that Klaus doesn't like?
It sounds to me like the short version of Klaus' rant just quoted would be: I'm old and grumpy and resent anyone and everyone who still wants to get out of their house on the weekends.
It calls to mind Tom Tommorrow's memorable portrayal of Rush Limbaugh as the Presidency of Barack Obama began:
This is the third of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006). The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.
Bettina's criticisms of the German left scene in the 50s and 60s have quite a bit of what I would call a "neoconservative" tone to them. By which I mean great familiarity with the scene but a not only critical-minded but somewhat moralistic, scolding tone. However, the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) has been far more intensely discussed in Germany than in the US, where they are scarcely known. So there are a lot of nuances to navigate for anyone deep into the discussions and polemics in Germany over the facts and meanings of political events connected to the RAF.
Although I'm focusing here on what I see as weaknesses of her historical analysis, I think she does an exceptionally good job of providing a balanced and dispassionate analysis of her parents' particular political positions in the events she relates. And of their strengths and weaknesses.
And her criticisms of the left scene more generally don't read like the "repentant leftist" tone her father Klaus Rainer Röhl has long used. The criticisms she makes are serious-minded. But they suffer from the substantive problem that often affects political discussions of a vague concepts like "the 60s". In Germany, like in America and many other countries, the "left" activists of the 60s fit the description of Jackson Browne's old song, "Before the Deluge":
Some of them were dreamers and some of them were fools
And for some them it was only the moment that mattered
Her comments are more relevant to especially political-minded activists on the ideological left, like her parents at the time, and stars of the student left like Rudi Dutschke. She seems particularly annoyed at those who made a hero out of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung in the standard English spelling at the time which is still used in German). But her criticisms sometimes have an all-or-nothing air to them. She gives no indication that what a political figure symbolizes for someone can be quite different that what the symbol-figure himself actually thought or did.
Juan Perón of Argentina in the last years of his political career managed to appeal to a broad public, from pretty much fascist types to "mainstream" liberals and conservatives to social-democratic minded labor activists to Maoist guerrillas. Ché Guevara to this day is a popular symbol of rebelliousness, though most of the young and even not-so-young people who have a Ché t-shirt or other Ché kitsch probably know next to nothing about his actual career.
She actually explains that very point (S. 533):
Fakt ist, die dicken Bucher mit Mao-Zitaten, die man im Fischer Verlag bald uberall in Deutschland kaufen konnte, wurden zu Bestsellern, die Spruche Maos zierten bald jedes studentische Plakat an der Universitat oder wurden in Zeitschriften, wie beispielsweise auch in KONKRET, in dicken Lettern unter einem Mao-Portrat abgedruckt. Grund fur diesen Schwung von Ideen aus China war natürlich die chinesische Kulturrevolution, die ihre Wellen mit Beginn ihres Wirkens in China nach Europa und in den gesamten Westen aussandte und die von Rudi Dutschke und vielen anderen aufgesaugt wurde, als sei Mao der neue Gott und seine Spruche und Buchlein Bibelworte. Scharenweise werden die Linken in Westdeutschland in diesen Jahren der guten alten Sowjetunion untreu und schliessen sich euphorisch der chinesischen Kulturrevolution an, die sie mit der eigentlich im Westen stattfindenden "Kulturrevolution", der Popkultur in Amerika, verwechseln und zu einem eigenen Modegemisch verarbeiten, das ein echter Mix aus Cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, den Rolling Stones und dem Revolutions- und Weltkriegsgetöse Mao Tse-tungs wird. Anders als Mao Tse-tung, der jeden Drogenkonsum brutal bestrafte, oftmals mit dem Tode, gesellten sich sehr schnell bei den Westlinken zur Popmusik die Drogen und wurden eine Art essentieller Bestandteil ihrer Ideologic, Bewufitseinserweiterung usw.
[The fact is that the thick books of Mao quotes in Fischer Publishers editions that one could suddenly buy all over Germany became bestsellers. Quickly the sayings of Mao decorated every student placard in the university. Or they were printed in magazine, as for example in Konkret, in thick letters under a Mao portrait. The basis for this fad for ideas from China was, of course, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which with the beginning of its workings in China sent its waves to Europa and the entire West. And they were sucked up by Rudi Dutschke and many others as thought Mao were a new god and his sayings and pamphlets words from the Bible. The leftists in West Germany in these years were untrue in droves to the good old Soviet Union [she means that ironically] and fastened themselves euphorically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Which they confused with the "cultural revolution" that was actually taking place, the pop culture in America, and with their own fashionably constructed mixture that became a real mix of cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Mao Zedong's revolution-and-world-war racket. Differently than Mao Zedong, who the consumption of [illegal] drugs brutally punished, often by death, the Western leftists joined themselves to pop music and drugs and those became a kind of essential element of their ideology, consciousness expansion, etc.]
But she uses that as part of her criticism of the moral/intellectual failings of young Germans who read Mao pamphlets, and doesn't seem to register that the very mixture of contradictions she describes means that to be an "admirer of Mao" in West Germany in the 1960s didn't mean that someone was an enthusiast for every page of his ideology or every act he took as China's leader. And in fact, however incongruously, Mao symbolism often went together with libertarian and radical-democratic ideas in that scene.
And, as her quote above alludes to, embracing "Maoism" was also a way in which people so inclined could advocate a revolutionary Marxist ideology that also rejected, radically rejected, the brand of Soviet-style Communism practiced in the DDR.
She seems to forget that anyone who hasn't believed something stupid at one time or another was either never young or has been missing a brain. So, for instance, when she claims that Rudi Dutschke, of whom she had fond personal memories as a child, had as a goal (S. 530) "nicht etwa, um die dritte Welt an das Niveau der ersten [Welt] heranzuheben, sondern um die erste Welt auf das Niveau der dritten Welt abzusenken" (not for instance to raise the Third World to the level of the First, but rather to sink the First World to the level of the Third World), and includes him among the group that "versuchten ... die vietnamesischen Kriegs-Verhältnisse auf deutsches Terrain zu übertragen" (attempted to bring the Vietnamese war conditions over onto Germany terrain), and:
Mit Vietcongschen Untergrundmethoden und Gewaltaktionen sollte die Bundesrepublik von innen angegriffen werden und gemäss den Idolen von Mao Tse-tung und Ho Tschi-minh zur Revolution aufgerufen werden.
[The Federal Republic should be attacked with Vietcong-like underground methods and violent actions, and, following their idols Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, should be aroused to revolution.]
... she produces a stereotypical hostile "culture war" type image that doesn't tell us much more than that she didn't like that particular group's politics. And while that's understandable, Dutschke himself was a former East German - and therefore had some direct experience of left in a dictatorship - who viewed himself as a Christian and whose revolutionary ideology was a hodge-podge. (Bettina does say explicitly that he was a "Christian and neo-Marxist".) His actual influence came through his eloquence, activism and good publicity sense. Although he is credited with the famous phrase, "the Long March through the institutions", his actual intellectual influence as such on the German left was minimal.
Dutschke did talk quite a bit about the need for violent revolution, although he did decline to lend his support to the creation of the RAF. On the other hand, he attended the funeral of RAF member Holger Meins, who starved himself to death in a hunger strike in jail, and famously said, "Holger, the struggle continues." Yet he later said that was an emotional response and sent a political message he hadn't intended to send. And Dutschke was consistently opposed in public and private of the brand of terrorism that the RAF practiced, despite the inconsistencies he undoubtedly displayed in his public and private discussions of revolutionary violence.
German student leader Rudi Dutschke: he envisioned an "urban guerrilla" movement in West Germany
Rudi Dutschke was not a pacifist. And he did at times advocate a German version of the "urban guerrilla" that he derived from the "Foco" concept of Regis Debray, who was then and still now thought to represent Che Guevara's theories of revolution. Few if any today would defend the idea that Debray's theories of that time were any kind of meaningful guide to political activity in the developed world. And Dutschke's own ideas on the subject were eclectic and not particularly well-thought-out.
The extent to which Dutschke's influence promoted violence and/or the kind of terrorism practiced by the RAF is a hot topic of dispute among historians of that particular time. Bettina's account of that issue is more vague and polemical than analytical.
But the balance she manages to maintain in her approach is illustrated by the fond personal memories she expresses toward, Dutschke, who was a friend of her parents. In this German-language video, she reads a passage from the book about meeting him when she was a young girl:
Still, outside a few idealizers of poverty here and there - or revolutionaries with ascetic tendencies like Gudrun Ennslin - it wasn't really the case that Dutschke and his admirers wanted to pull the "First World" down to the level of the "Third World". They actually did have something like the opposite in mind. You can say they were unrealistic or misguided or whatever. And you can say that the actual effect of their actions taken to some practical extreme would have resulted in destroying the wealth and prosperity of the rich countries. But it's misleading to present that as the goal of their ideology, even if we're focusing on the highly politicized, activist left like Dutschke and the SDS.
But Bettina seems more than a little frustrated that "68ers" like former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Rudi Dutschke's widow Gretchen are unwilling to renounce - engage in "self-criticism"? - a "Maoism" they claim they never embraced in the first place.
Bahman Nirumand, who became a close friend of her mother Ulrike in the years before she went underground, gives a better historical generalization in "Sehnsuchsräume: Warum die Revolution ausblieb" (Areas of longing: Why the revolution didn't happen) (from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:
Diese Solidarität, die allgemein den Angehörigen der Länder der sogenannten Dritten Welt schwärmerisch entgegengebracht wurde, entsprang nur bei weningen aus politischer Einsicht und Überzeugung, sie speiste sich vielmehr aus einem sehnsuchtsvollen Romantizismus, sie spiegelte die exotischen Sehnsüchte einer zorningen, rebellierenden Jugend, die dem eigenen Dasein entfliehen wollte und nach Weggefährten Ausschau hielt. Die Jugendlichen waren entschlossen, sich um jeden Preis von dem erstickenden Muff der Nachkriegszeit zu befreien, mit der Vergangenheit, mit der Geschichte ihrer Eltern zu brechen, der Wohlstandsgesellschaft, der Konsumgeilheit eine Alternative entgegenzusetzen, die verkrustete Ordnung, die irrationale Autorität des Staates, der Univeristät, der Schule zu zerschlagen, sie wollten vor dieser Gesellschaft fliehen und suchten - unter anderem - Zuflucht in einer ferngelegenen, fremden Welt, bei den Befreiungsbewegungen der sogenannten Dritten Welt und später bei religiösen Sekten. Es war ein Streich der Geschichte, dass sich die Modernisierung Deutschlands teilweise über die Entwicklungsländer vollzog.
[This solidarity that was generally enthusiastically provided to those connected to the countries of the so-called Third World, originated only with few from political insight and conviction; it nourished itself much more on a wistful romanticism. It reflected the exotic longings of an angry, rebellious youth who wanted to flee from their own being and looked for fellow travelers. The young were determined to liberate themselves at all costs from the suffocating mustiness of the postwar era; to break with the past, with the history of their parents;, to set up an alternative to the affluent society and its rank consumerism; to smash the encrusted order, the irrational authority of the state, the university, the school. They wanted to flee from this society and sought - among other things - flight into a faraway, alien world, in the liberation movements of the so-called Third World, and later in religious cults. It was a trick of history that the modernization of Germany played partly on the developing countries.]
Not that Nirumand was unaware of the potentially very destructive side of such romanticism. On the contrary, in the same essay he describes trying to talk Ulrike out of her desire to go underground and take up a violent struggle. Bettina interviewed him for her book, also, and recounts part of a story about Ulrike that Nirumand relates in the essay just quoted.
Nirumand himself became a huge influence on the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition) in West Germany through his 1967 book Persien, Model eines Entwicklungslandes (Persia [Iran]: Model of Development). According to his account in the essay quoted above, the Iranian exile community in West Germany was also influential on the student activists because the politicized members of that community were well-organized and could set up demonstrations and political events quickly. They also provided a kind of community feeling and sense of solidarity which were goals that the alternative movements among Germans also hoped to achieve for themselves.
And specifically on the subject of "Maoism" (which was not the same as Debrayism), it's also the case that an interest in Mao Zedong's theories of political warfare was scarcely limited in developed countries to those who wished to emulate them. Anyone interested in understanding wars like that in Vietnam in the 1960s is likely to have paid some attention to Mao's ideas. Certainly, the US military and counterinsurgency experts outside the military were doing so.
The Great Helmsman Mao Zedong: he wasn't German
In fact, I just read an essay by Sebastian Haffner, a leftist writer who was published in Konkret, about Mao Zedong's theories. It originally appeared as the introduction to a 1966 German collection of Mao's writing, Theorie des Guerillakriegs oder Strategie der Dritten Welt. A large part of the essay is devoted to describing the particular situation in China in the 1920s, 30s and 40s which Mao was addressing in those works, conditions of which his original audience would have been intensely aware and therefore would need little background explanation. But, as Haffner wrote, that was not the case for most Europeans in the 1960s. He even includes a section explaining the reason why Mao's theories of warfare were not appropriate to any situation in Europe.
But, again, these ideas were influential among the "68ers", however eccentric or derivative their West German versions of understanding them were. Bettina in her book mentions that in his first article for Konkret, Rudi Dutscke, one of the key leaders of the radical student movement, recommended Nirumand's book, Mao's "Little Red Book" and a book called Vietnam - Genesis eines Konfliktes by Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng. And she notes that even today, those three books are recommended for those who want to understand the radical APO movement in Germany at the time. She adds that she would also include Edgar Snow's book Red Star Over China in that list.
None of those books are about Germany. But they were influential in forming the romantic Third Worldism of the APO at that time, which found its most extreme form in terrorist groups like the RAF.
The four posts on this book:
Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike MeinhofDie Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike MeinhofDie Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings
Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl
bettina röhl, raf, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, rudi+dutschke, ulrike meinhof
