1968 - the global revolt

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

Barbara Ehrenreich (/ˈɛərənraɪk/;[1] born August 26, 1941) is an American author and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade" and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's three-month experiment surviving on minimum wage as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart clerk, it was described by Newsweek magazine as "jarring" and "full of riveting grit," and by The New Yorker as an "exposé" putting "human flesh on the bones of such abstractions as 'living wage' and 'affordable housing'."

[pieter]

Rudi Dutschke





Alfred Willi Rudolf "Rudi" Dutschke (German: [ˈʁuːdi ˈdʊtʃkə]; 7 March 1940 – 24 December 1979) was a prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s. He advocated a "long march through the institutions of power" to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery. This was an idea he took up from his interpretation of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory; accordingly, the quote is often wrongfully attributed to Gramsci. In the 1970s he followed through on this idea by joining the nascent Green movement.

He survived an assassination attempt by Josef Bachmann in 1968, but died 11 years later from a seizure brought on from brain damage sustained during the assassination attempt. Radical students blamed an anti-student campaign in the papers of the Axel Springer publishing empire for the assassination attempt. This led to attempts to blockade the distribution of Springer newspapers all over Germany, which in turn led to major street battles in many German cities, considered the largest protests to that date in Germany.

Early life


Bleeding demonstrator during a student protest in West-Berlin in 1968

Dutschke was born in Schönefeld (present-day Nuthe-Urstromtal) near Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, the son of a postal clerk. Raised in East Germany (GDR), he attended school and graduated from the Gymnasium there. Interested in the ideas of religious socialism, he was engaged in the youth organisation of the East German Evangelical Church. In 1956 he joined the socialist Free German Youth aiming at a sporting career as a decathlete.


Rudi Dutschke joined the East-German communist Free German Youth

In the same year he witnessed the Hungarian Uprising and began to advocate the ideals of a democratic socialism beyond the official line of the Socialist Unity Party ( Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED ). He obtained his Abitur degree in 1958 and completed an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk. As he refused to join the East Germany National People's Army and convinced many of his fellow students to refuse as well, he was prevented from attending university in the GDR. In August 1961, Dutschke fled to the Marienfelde transit camp in West Berlin, just one day before the Berlin Wall was built.

He began to study sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin under Richard Löwenthal and Klaus Meschkat where he became acquainted with the existentialist theories of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and soon after also with alternative views of Marxism and the history of the labour movement. Dutschke joined the German SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (which was not the same as the SDS in the US, but quite similar in goals) in 1965 and from that time on the SDS became the center of the student movement, growing very rapidly and organizing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.

He married the American Gretchen Klotz (de) in 1966. They had three children. Dutschke's third child, 1980-born Rudi-Marek Dutschke was born after his father's death. He is a politician of the German Green Party as well as Dean's Office staffer of the Hertie School of Governance today. His older siblings are Hosea-Che Dutschke (named after the Old Testament minor prophet Hosea and Che Guevara) and their sister Polly-Nicole, both born in 1968.


Rudi Dutschke's youngest son Rudi-Marek Dutschke


Rudi Dutschke's oldest son Hosea-Che Dutschke


Rudi Dutschke's daughter Polly Bak Dutschke



Political views

Influenced by critical theory, Rosa Luxemburg, and critical Marxists and informed through his collaboration with fellow students from Africa and Latin America, Dutschke developed a theory and code of practice of social change via the practice of developing democracy in the process of revolutionizing society, collaborating with foreign students.

Dutschke also advocated that the transformation of Western societies should go hand in hand with Third World liberation movements and with democratization in communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He was from a pious Lutheran family[ and his socialism had strongly Christian roots; he called Jesus Christ the "greatest revolutionary", and in Easter 1963, he wrote that "Jesus is risen. The decisive revolution in world history has happened — a revolution of all-conquering love. If people would fully receive this revealed love into their own existence, into the reality of the 'now', then the logic of insanity could no longer continue."

Benno Ohnesorg's death in 1967 at the hands of German police pushed some in the student movement toward increasingly extremist violence and the formation of the Red Army Faction. The violence against Dutschke further radicalised parts of the student movement into committing several bombings and murders. Dutschke rejected this direction and feared that it would harm or cause the dissolution of the student movement. Instead he advocated a 'long march through the institutions' of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery.


The logo of the Red Army Fraction


Benno Ohnesorg (15 October 1940 – 2 June 1967) was a German university student killed by a policeman during a demonstration in West Berlin. His death spurred the growth of the left-wing German student movement.

The meaning of Dutschke's idea of a 'long march through the institutions' is in fact highly contested: most historians of '68 in West Germany understand it to mean advocating setting up an alternative society and recreating the institutions which were seen by Dutschke as beyond reform in their current state. It is highly unlikely Dutschke would have promoted change from within the parliamentary and judicial system, which were populated by former Nazis and political conservatives. This is made clear in the SDS reaction to the Kiesinger-led CDU-SPD grand coalition and the authoritarian Emergency Laws they passed.




Rudi Dutschke's wife Gretchen Dutschke Klotz with her children Hosea-Che, Polly and Rudi-Marek

[pieter]

Daniel Cohn-Bendit



Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit (French: [kɔn bɛndit]; German: [koːn ˈbɛndiːt]; born 4 April 1945) is a French-German politician. He was a student leader during the unrest of May 1968 in France and was also known during that time as Dany le Rouge (French for "Danny the Red", because of both his politics and the colour of his hair). He was co-president of the group European Greens–European Free Alliance in the European Parliament. He co-chairs the Spinelli Group, a European parliament intergroup aiming at relaunching the federalist project in Europe. He was a recipient of the European Parliament's European Initiative Prize in 2016.


Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit



European politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit, once known as Dany the Red, led a student revolt in 1968 that helped turn the French government and French society upside down. The former anarchist is now a leading figure in the German Green Party and a member of the European Parliament. He explores the context of 1968 and how its revolutionary spirit applies today.

Hosted by The Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University on March 18, 2008.

[pieter]

[pieter]

The generation of 1968 and the large student revolts in Berlin and Paris and protests in London and Rome changed something in Europe. I come from a upper middle class family which was considered bourgeois or Bourgeoisie by the radical leftists. The protest movement in Western Europe and Paris differed from the communist Socialist Peoples Republics in East-Germany (the GDR/DDR), Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the sense that the protests were not linked and not supported by the West-European French communist party and union and not by the West-German Communists because their party had be prohibited by the West-German authorities due to the existence of the hostile communist East-German state. In East-Germany the East-German branch of the communist KPD party merged with the East-Grman branch of the Social Democratic SPD into the new Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) which was established in 1946.

The communist KPD reorganised in the western part of Germany, and received 5.7% of the vote in the first Bundestag election in 1949. But the onset of the Cold War and imposition of an undisguised Communist dictatorship in East Germany soon caused a collapse in the party's support. At the 1953 election the KPD only won 2.2 percent of the total votes and lost all of its seats, never to return. The party was banned in August 1956 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. The ban was due to the aggressive and combative methods that the party used as a "Marxist-Leninist party struggle" to achieve their goals. After the party was declared illegal, many of its members continued to function clandestinely despite increased government surveillance. Part of its membership refounded the party in 1968 as the German Communist Party (DKP). Following German reunification many DKP members joined the new Party of Democratic Socialism, formed out of the remains of the SED.


An election poster of the West-German communist KPD party for the Bundestagswahl in 1953 - 3 years later the party was prohibited.


An election poster of the West-German communist KPD party for the Bundestagswahl in 1953 - 3 years later the party was prohibited.


An election poster of the West-German communist KPD party for the Bundestagswahl in 1949.


An election poster of the West-German communist KPD party for the Bundestagswahl in 1949.


Demonstration of East-German workers against the prohibition of the West-German communist KPD party


Demonstration against the prohibition of the West-German communist KPD party




West-German police during a police action against the communist KPD haedquarters in Hamburg 17. August 1956


Workers from Leipzig demonstrate against the prohibition of the West-German KPD party

In 1968, a self-named "true successor" to the (banned) West German KPD was formed, the KPD/ML (Marxist–Leninist), which followed Maoist ideas. It went through multiple splits and united with a Trotskyist group in 1986 to form the Unified Socialist Party (VSP), which failed to gain any influence and dissolved in the early 1990s.[16] However, multiple tiny splinter groups originating in the KPD/ML still exist, several of which claim the name of KPD. Another party with this name was formed in 1990 in East Berlin by several hardline Communists who had been expelled from the PDS, including Erich Honecker. The "KPD (Bolshevik)" split off from the East German KPD in 2005, bringing the total number of (more or less) active KPDs to at least 5. The Left, formed out of a merger between the PDS and Labour and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative in 2007, claims to be the historical successor of the KPD (by way of the PDS).

The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, predominantly characterized by popular rebellions against military and bureaucratic elites, who responded with an escalation of political repression.

In capitalist countries, these protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement in the United States, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party. In reaction to the Tet Offensive, protests also sparked a broad movement in opposition to the Vietnam War all over the United States and even into London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Mass socialist movements grew not only in the United States but also in most European countries. The most spectacular manifestation of this were the May 1968 protests in France, in which students linked up with wildcat strikes of up to ten million workers, and for a few days the movement seemed capable of overthrowing the government. In many other capitalist countries, struggles against dictatorships, state repression, and colonization were also marked by protests in 1968, such as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, and the escalation of guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in Brazil.

In the socialist countries there were also protests against lack of freedom of speech and violation of other civil rights by the Communist bureaucratic and military elites. In Central and Eastern Europe there were widespread protests that escalated, particularly in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in Warsaw, in Poland, and in Yugoslavia.

[pieter]

West Germany



The German student movements were largely a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism and hypocrisy of the German government and other Western governments, particularly in relation to the poor living conditions of students. Students in 108 German universities protested for recognition of East Germany, the removal of government officials with Nazi pasts and for the rights of students. In February, protests by professors at the German University of Bonn demanded the resignation of the university's president because of his involvement in the building of concentration camps during the war.

This episode of Die zweite Heimat (Leaving Home) shows the atmosphere of the radical left escalation in Germany and the reaction of the German state to that in 1970:

Watch: 1:02:21 and from 1:11:38 and 1:15:12 shows when the decent and hard working Law student Stefan Aufhauser who is making a film and is hindered in that by radical left readhead poet girlfriend and Red Army fraction member Helga Aufschrey and via her gang of terorists becomes the victim of a German special police force that storms his appartment due to the fact that Helga and her terrorist gang is staying there.


The role of German actress Noemi Steuer as the naive young poet Helga Aufschrey who become a Red Army Front terrorist in Die Zweite Heimat is very good. She is not the nicest and easiest character in the movie series, but she plays the neuroticm introvert, romantic and radical character Helga Aufschrey very well.

I love Heimat, a series of films written and directed by Edgar Reitz about life in Germany from the 1840s to 2000 through the eyes of a family from the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland. The family's personal and domestic life is set against the backdrop of wider social and political events. The combined length of the 5 films – broken into 32 episodes – is 59 hours and 32 minutes, making it one of the longest series of feature-length films in cinema history.

Die zweite Heimat (Leaving Home)



Die zweite Heimat (literally "The Second Heimat"; English title Heimat 2) (subtitled Chronik einer Jugend — Chronicle of a Youth) followed in 1992. It is set during the socially turbulent years of the 1960s and how Maria's youngest son Hermann leaves his rural home and makes a new life for himself as a composer in Munich.



Hermann is a musical prodigy whose teenage romance in 1955 with 26-year-old soul-mate Klärchen was considered scandalous by his conservative home village. It resulted in her being expelled and coerced not to contact him ever again. Hermann was crushed and vowed never to love again and to leave his wicked village forever. He arrives in Munich at age 19, overwhelmed and with no place to stay. He finds a private room opening in a month, leaving the deposit with a flamboyant Hungarian woman. His friend Renate, a law student, allows Hermann to sleep on her floor but he is put off by her sexual advances. He finally rooms with Clemens, a fellow Hunsrücker who plays jazz drums in Munich's clubs. Hermann is accepted into the music conservatory, where he meets the incredibly talented Juan from Chile, whose school application is rejected on the grounds his marimbas are "folklore". Hermann and Juan network with the avant-garde culture surrounding the conservatory, including film students, while Hermann takes odd jobs and Juan works as a gymnast teacher. Both Juan and Hermann have a brief fling with the beautiful cellist Clarissa, who is drawn to those who also fear intimacy. The students are gradually drawn to the Foxhole, a mansion headed by a wealthy art patroness said to be a "collector of artists".

The generation of 68, the anti-Vietnam war protest movement, the hippy movement of that time and the radical left subculture of student and young working academic adolescents is portrayed very well in Die zweite Heimat (Leaving Home).

[pieter]

Social movements


Demonstrators from the National Women's Liberation Movement picket the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City

The Eastern Bloc had already seen several mass protests in the decades following World War II, including the Hungarian Revolution, the uprising in East Germany on 16 June 1953 and several labour strikes in Poland, especially important ones in Poznań in 1956.


"We demand bread!" demonstration in Poznań in June 1956 (secret police photo)

June 28, 1956 – Labour riots in Poznań, Poland, are crushed with heavy loss of life.


June 1956 monument that represents the victims of the Poznan June 1956 demonstrations against the communists

The feminist movement made a generation question their belief that the family was more important than the individual. The peace movement made them question and distrust authority even more than they had already. By the time they started college, many were part of the anti-establishment culture and became the impetus for a wave of rebellion that started on college campuses and swept the world.







Waves of social movements throughout the 1960s began to shape the values of the generation that were college students during 1968. In America, the Civil Rights Movement was at its most violent. So, too, in Northern Ireland, where it paved the way for an organised revolt against British governance. Italy and France were in the midst of a socialist movement. The New Left political movement was causing political upheavals in many European and South American countries. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict had already started. Great Britain's anti-war movement was very strong and African independence was a continuing struggle. In Poland in March 1968, student demonstrations at Warsaw University broke out when the government banned the performance of a play by Adam Mickiewicz (Dziady, written in 1824) at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, on the grounds that it contained "anti-Soviet references". It became known as the March 1968 events.


In America, the Civil Rights Movement was at its most violent. Black Panther members hold a news conference in Oakland after the shooting of one of their members, 17-year old Bobby Hutton, in 1968.



The college students of 1968 embraced the New Left politics. Their socialist leanings and distrust of authority led to many of the 1968 conflicts. The dramatic events of the year showed both the popularity and limitations of New Left ideology, a radical leftist movement that was also deeply ambivalent about its relationship to communism during the middle and later years of the Cold War.

The 2–3 June 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, were the first mass protest in the country after the Second World War. The authorities suppressed the protest, while President Josip Broz Tito had the protests gradually cease by giving in to some of the students’ demands. Protests also broke out in other capitals of Yugoslav republics - Sarajevo, Zagreb and Ljubljana—but they were smaller and shorter than in Belgrade.

In 1968, Czechoslovakia underwent a process known as the Prague Spring. In the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakian citizens responded to the attack on their sovereignty with passive resistance. Soviet troops were frustrated as street signs were painted over, their water supplies mysteriously shut off, and buildings decorated with flowers, flags, and slogans like, "An elephant cannot swallow a hedgehog." Passers-by painted swastikas on the sides of Soviet tanks. Road signs in the country-side were over-painted to read, in Russian script, "Москва" (Moscow), as hints for the Soviet troops to leave the country.


Demonstrations in support of the Prague Spring, Wenceslas Square, March 1968


Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, on his arrival at the Central Committee building, Sept.12,1968.


Unrest in Prague, 1968


Alexander Dubček, Melantrich, demonstration, Wenceslas Square

Alexander Dubček, Melantrich, demonstration, Wenceslas Square

On 25 August 1968 eight Russian citizens staged a demonstration on Moscow's Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After about five minutes, the demonstrators were beaten up and transferred to a police station. Seven of them received harsh sentences up to several years in prison.




Human rights activist Natalya Gorbanevskaya (4th from left) attends a memorial protest action on Red Square in Moscow on August 25, 2013, with the banner "For your freedom and ours."

[pieter]

Hip Hop (Rap) group Public Enemy in the late eighties payed with Black Panther, Black is Beautiful and Black Power imagery. Their album was called 'Fear of a Black Planet'. I bought it in 1990 as a young man because the spirit, energy and raw sound of the album inspired me at that time next to the music of the white Hip Hop fellows of the Beastie Boys, hard rock/heavy metal (Slayer, Motörhead, Iron Maiden and Anhtrax) and other pop music of that time.

[pieter]

Also in 1968

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

June 2 1968 – Student protests have started in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.