Goethe Institute, Homepage, February 2008-07-08

Gerd Langguth

Dutschke and the “68” Movement in Germany

The distinctive profile of the legendary student leader Rudi Dutschke has impressed itself upon the Germans right up to the present day. Many saw or see in Dutschke, with his talent for intellectual rhetoric and agitation, a hero of the revolution, an idol. Others regard Dutschke as a resolute opponent of liberal democracy.

As late as 1981, the writer Walter Jens expressed the opinion that “Dutschke was a peace-loving, deeply Jesuanic person.” Meanwhile, research, based in part on previously unknown documents, has become increasingly critical of Dutschke. Who was this young man, who in April 1968 was shot by a rightwing extremist – which led to the “Easter Riots” – and who died on Christmas Eve 1979 as a result of the after-effects of these injuries?

Protestant and Marxist

Born in Luckenwalde in the former GDR, as the fourth son of a postman, Dutschke grew up in a strictly Protestant family. In 1956, while still at secondary school, he became a member of the “Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ)”, the Youth Organisation of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) of the former GDR. Since he refused to do military service in the GDR, he was barred from studying as a sports journalist after passing his university-entrance exam, instead he had to train as an industrial clerk in a state-owned company in Luckenwalde. In the summer of 1960, before the building of the Wall in 1961, Dutschke, a trained decathlon athlete, moved to the then still open city of West Berlin, where he took the West German university entrance exam, enrolled at the Free University and began to study sociology, among other subjects.

The building of the Berlin Wall isolated Dutschke from his family, whom he had left behind in Luckenwalde. He suffered from this separation and began to “work off” his GDR heritage, immersing himself in the Marxist classics. He also delved into the existentialism of

Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, read the works of Marx and the historical philosophers Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, also studying the Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer or Herbert Marcuse. He had something of the missionary about him, no doubt due in part to his Protestant roots. Before he was even eighteen, when he refused to do military service, he had written: “If I believe in God and don’t go to the Volksarmee, I still believe that I am a good socialist.” Dutschke’s former companion Bernd Rabehl characterises him nowadays as follows: “He had grown up in Protestant Christendom, and as a student and young man he had replaced the biblical prophets by the great theorists of Marxism and anarchism. He had a devout relationship to theory, and irony and cynicism were alien to him.”

Dutschke had committed himself to Marxism at an early age. Before joining the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the central organiser of the student protest, in 1965, he had been active in the Subversive Aktion, which organised younger intellectuals and students in Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart and Hamburg. This group carried out actions and provocations inspired by utopian-revolutionary ideas. At that time he saw himself as a young communist, who defended the achievements of the Russian October Revolution while condemning the degeneration of Communism under Stalin. Yet at the same time he professed understanding, for example, for the brutal suppression of the uprising of the Kronstadt sailors, who in March 1921 had risen up against Bolshevik one-party rule of the Soviet Union.

The time in the SDS

By entering the SDS Dutschke wanted to subvert and convert a leftwing, socialist organisation from which – as its student organisation - the SPD had separated in 1961, but which was represented in most West German universities. From the very beginning Dutschke and others formed a faction within the SDS, referring to themselves as the “Viva-Maria Group”. In 1966 they triggered an intensive argument within the SDS over the question of violence, there were even attempts to exclude Dutschke from the Berlin SDS. In February 1966 he declared that : “The struggles of the Viet Cong or of the MIR in Peru are our struggles, and must indeed be deliberately re-functionalised by means of rational discussion and in principle illegal demonstrations and actions...". Dutschke wanted a “long march through the institutions”. His “focus theory” saw the universities as the weakest link in West German society. Increasingly he was becoming a professional revolutionary. Nevertheless, on 23. March 1966, he married the American Gretchen Klotz. It was difficult to combine private and political life.

The urban guerillero

Together with the SDS ideologist Hans-Jürgen Krahl, on 5. September 1967 he presented the so-called Organisationsreferat (organisation theory) at a federal conference of SDS delegates. This paper was lost for a long time, but is meanwhile regarded as a central document in the ideological positioning of Dutschke. Both SDS ideologists based their theory on a “certain negation” of the parliamentary order. Illegal fighters were to provide protection against the power and security apparatus of the state. They called upon SDS members to deploy themselves in future as “sabotage and refusal guerrillas”. And they went on: “The ‘propaganda of shots’ (Ché) in the ‘Third World’ must be completed by the ‘propaganda of action’ in the metropolises, which made an urbanisation of rural guerrilla activity the order of the day. The urban guerillero is the organiser of disruption as a means of destroying the system of repressive institutions.” Dutschke wanted to see transferred to Germany the concept of the urban guerrilla fighter, first developed by the Tupamaros in Montevideo and then practised since the end of 1967 in Sao Paulo by the Brazilian Communist Carlos Marighella and canonised in his Minimanual of the Urban Guerillera. Even before the “Vietnam Congress” from 17./18. February 1968, where Dutschke referred to a “ European Cong” as a kind of urban guerilla, in the Netherlands he had already expressed ideas of actions against the “terrible war machinery” of the USA, whereby he spoke of “attacks against NATO ships”. Today Gretchen Dutschke recounts that at the beginning of 1968 her husband had also considered supporting workers’ groups in various European cities who were to carry out “acts of sabotage” inasmuch as this seemed possible and meaningful.

In autumn 1969 the Italian communist and publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a former member of the Communist Party of Italy and a friend of Fidel Castro’s, started to stock up an arms depot and rented conspirative apartments. In her book Rudi Dutschke. Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben. Eine Biographie, Gretchen Dutschke relates that he knocked at their door in February 1968 and showed the two of them the sticks of dynamite concealed in the rear panel of his car. Under cover of darkness these were then brought into their apartment. The next day the dynamite was to be taken to a conspirative apartment in their son Ché's pram. Moreover, according to the Persian intellectual Bahman Nirumand, in March 1968 Dutschke wanted to blow up an antenna mast of the US army channel AFN in Saarbrücken.

No military conflict

In public interviews Dutschke’s statements about parliamentarianism and violence were more open to various interpretations, more moderate, yet not without vehemence: “If I were in Latin America, I would fight with a weapon in my hand. I am not in Latin America, I am in the Federal Republic. We are fighting so that it will never be necessary to take up arms. But this is not up to us to decide.” (1967). Dutschke did not want any military conflict, in this he differed from the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction). Yet he did want a Rätedemokratie (democracy of local councils), he was an opponent of parliamentary democracy, an advocate of targeted illegal and violent actions whereby he wanted to spare human lives. The shots of a rightwing extremist, who was carrying on him a photo of Dutschke from the Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung, completely changed Dutschke’s life. He suffered near-fatal brain injuries. After periods of residence in Switzerland, Italy and Great Britain he became a lecturer in sociology in the Danish city of Århus. He began once again to intervene in German politics, among other things he was a co-founder of the Green Party. On Christmas Eve 1979 he died as a result of the after-effects of his injuries. His tragic fate, with which many young people identified, meant that for a long time Dutschke’s political aims during the period of the student revolts were not subjected to critical appraisal.

The “anti-authoritarian revolt” and the liberalisation boost

“1968” is for many people synonymous with Dutschke. The media styled him as the leader of the students’ revolt which aroused the envy of some of his SDS comrades. In fact the so-called “anti-authoritarian” revolt embraced a much broader political spectrum. It emerged in the second half of the 1960s, originating above all in Berlin, and then spread to the university towns in 1967 – it was on 2. June of this year that the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a police officer during the tumult caused by the visit of the Shah of Persia. The Easter riots of 1968, triggered by the attack on Dutschke, which many blamed on the conservative tabloids owned by Axel Springer, represented the zenith of a protest movement which, while it erupted in almost all western industrial states, must also be seen against the backdrop of German history. It encountered a political and philosophical-intellectual elite which had lost its self-assurance, it was also a reaction against the failure of the German bourgeoisie with regard to National Socialism. The student protest movement regarded itself as a kind of belated resistance.

As long as the protest movement was directed against something – for example against the so-called “emergency laws” passed by the grand coalition of the ruling parties CDU/CSU and SPD – the SDS exerted great power of integration, and the diverse political directions of the protest movement were hardly visible to the public. The dissolution of the SDS in 1970, however, symbolised the failure of a strategy which was directed mainly against the prevailing conditions, but which revealed political divisions when those involved in the protest movement had to define and discuss their positive aims. After this the movement disintegrated into disparate tendencies: from the doctrinaire communism of support for the GDR to Maoism, Trotskyism, anarchism, some “non-political” movements – and to terrorism. There is no doubt that the students’ revolt, which started in Berlin and originally pursued more student-related aims than general political ones, triggered a liberalisation boost in the society of the Federal Republic. The causes and effects of the ’68 movement are still the subject of controversy. Extolling the students’ revolt as a “second birth” of democracy in Germany is an inaccurate glorification – since the analysis of a protest movement should first concentrate not on its effects but on its political aims. The example of Dutschke proves the truth of what the former German foreign minister Joseph (“Joschka”) Fischer recently admitted: “We were not democrats back then.” Incidentally, the invention of the pill and the sex education campaign of Oswald Kolle in popular magazines probably contributed more to the liberalisation of sexual morals (“free love” etc.) than the students’ revolt. The musical revolution and the development of new lifestyles connected with it was already in full swing before the students’ protest: the last Beatles concert took place in 1966. In all western states a new feeling for life had developed among the young generation. The students’ revolt had accelerated the establishment of unconventional lifestyles, but it had not introduced them – perhaps with the exception of the failed commune movement. The critical debate about National Socialism had also started much earlier. But each movement requires a personalisation – in this case, first and foremost, Dutschke – and myths.

Related literature:

• Gerd Langguth: Myth 68 – Reality and Effects, Olzog Verlag, München, 2001
  ISBN-13: 978-3789280658
• Gretchen Dutschke: Rudi Dutschke. We had a barbaric, beautiful life. A biography, Droemer Knaur, 1998,
  ISBN-13: 978-3426608142

Gerd Langguth
The author teaches political science at the University of Bonn. He is the author i.a. of the book Mythos 68, Munich 2001.

Translation: Heather Moers
Copyright: Goethe Institute, online editorial team