"Under the Robes Muff of a Thousand Years!" shouted the students on the streets of Germany in 1968. Their protests were directed against the outdated higher education system, the grand coalition, the Vietnam War and demanded an honest coming to terms with the Nazi past.
The triggers of the protest
At the beginning of the 1960s, the situation in Germany was not as rosy as it was during the economic miracle of the Adenauer era. Inflation and unemployment rose. The coal mines began to die out and the dream of German unity was shattered in 1961 with the erection of the Berlin Wall.
One scandal followed the next on the political stage. Despite his Nazi past, Heinrich Lübke was elected Federal President twice by the CDU and CSU. There was a debate in the Bundestag about whether the crimes from the National Socialist era should not be allowed to expire.
In addition, there was the "Spiegel" affair in 1962. Rudolf Augstein, editor-in-chief of the news magazine "Der Spiegel", was arrested on the orders of the then Minister of Defence, Franz Josef Strauss, because of a critical cover story about the Bundeswehr.
Federal President Heinrich Lübke
In 1966 the Union saw itself forced to enter into a coalition with the SPD in order to be able to continue to govern.
Meanwhile, the universities were seething. The student representatives began to publicly and sharply criticize the old structures at the universities. They demanded up-to-date learning content, equal opportunities in education, better learning conditions and the dismissal of teachers with a Nazi past.
Like their fellow students in the USA, the German students also demanded an end to the war in Vietnam and a halt to nuclear armament. The emergency laws enacted by the coalition fueled unrest among students. They feared serious restrictions on basic democratic rights.
Student demonstration against the Vietnam War
The organizations SDS and APO
The driving force behind the student movement was the "Socialist German Student Union" (SDS), founded in 1947. He fell out of favor with the mother party SPD because of its pro-GDR attitude and was expelled in 1961. Now it increasingly became the reception camp for the "New Left".
At the beginning of 1965, Rudi Dutschke, Dieter Kunzelmann and Bernd Rabehl joined the Berlin SDS and soon held important posts there. From this point on, the Bund became an anti-authoritarian, left-wing organization with anarchist tendencies, which also played an important role in the so-called extra-parliamentary opposition (APO).
From the mid-1960s, the APO influenced large sections of the student movement. It saw itself as the only counterforce to the ruling government, because the grand coalition meant that there was practically no opposition in parliament. The APO vehemently protested against the planned emergency laws and denounced the federal government's inaction against the Vietnam War.
Rudi Dutschke, student leader and SDS ideologist
She established "go-ins", "sit-ins" and "teach-ins" as forms of protest. This involved the siege of university rooms, public places and facilities, where the APO members drew attention to their concerns with speeches, posters and other actions and blocked ongoing operations.
The "Frankfurt School"
Parallel to the SDS, the "Subversive Action" also criticized social conditions in the 1960s. In this group around the sociologists and philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse there were mainly artists and intellectuals from the big German cities. They questioned the radical, revolutionary forms of action of the SDS. Their goal was a more peaceful revolution in society.
The movement, also known as the "Frankfurt School", fundamentally criticized consumer society and had a neo-Marxist approach. However, violence was not on the agenda here, but rather change through targeted, constantly recurring actions in schools, at work, in art and also in the family.
The members of the "Frankfurt School" did not believe in the success of large protest actions, such as the demonstrations organized by the SDS. Nevertheless, with their social criticism and their ideas of a more modern and fairer form of society, they also formed an important ideal pillar of the student movement. The time for change was ripe.
The death of Benno Ohnesorg and the consequences
When the Persian Shah Reza Pahlavi arrived in Berlin on June 2, 1967 for a state visit, events escalated. The students demonstrated against the official visit of the dictator, who in his homeland had members of the opposition tortured in prisons and did nothing to stop the impoverishment of the Persian population.
They also protested against the support that the Shah received mainly from the US and Germany:financial and material resources, such as tanks and weapons. In front of the Berlin Opera, where the Persian head of state was watching the "Magic Flute", the students protested loudly against the dictator.
When panic suddenly broke out for an unknown reason, the police fired. The 26-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg was killed. Until then, the demonstrations had been playful and anti-authoritarian happenings, but that changed abruptly from that evening. The students were no longer satisfied with just throwing pudding bombs and tomatoes. The protest actions became more radical.
Benno Ohnesorg is transported to the hospital
Especially after April 11, 1968, the day of the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, the figurehead of the German student movement, the students could no longer be held back. The protest movement, which had been peaceful until then, turned into a student revolt that affected almost all university towns.
The end of the student movement
University events were regularly loudly disrupted and sit-ins blocking traffic were the order of the day. Delivery vehicles of the Springer group were set on fire.
At that time, the powerful and high-circulation Springer press controlled around 50 percent of the West German newspaper and magazine market. She was blamed by the students for manipulating the population. Further large-scale demonstrations took place when the emergency constitution was passed in May 1968.
Towards the end of 1969 the student movement ebbed away. The cause was - especially from autumn 1968 - the fragmentation within the movement. The SDS could no longer appear as a whole because the members had fallen out internally. It was about power struggles and different political goals. At the end of 1968, part of the student movement merged into the newly founded parties DKP (German Communist Party) and the KPD/ML (Communist Party of Germany/Marxist Leninists).
Another part of the movement saw only the active struggle with violence and weapons as a solution to political and social grievances. From this formed, among other things, the members of terrorist organizations such as the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Other representatives of the 1968 movement later emerged as founding members of the "Greens". Some protesters like Joschka Fischer later even made it into the federal government.
Ex-activist Joschka Fischer
The political implications
The student protests had a strong impact on the political culture and legal politics of later decades. Even if many of the ideas and conceptions of the 1968ers could not be implemented in reality, they still got many a stone rolling.
For example, the student movement had consequences for the reorganization of criminal law. The sex criminal law and the case law for offenses against public security and order were also changed. However, the abolition of abortion paragraph 218 took several years and the land reform demanded at the time was never implemented.