On December 6, 1966, raucous scenes took place at the Free University of Berlin (FU), which would become one of the epicenters of “1968” in West Germany.Footnote 1 Since the previous year, a vibrant and vocal student-led protest movement in the city had mobilized a growing number of activists against the US-led war in Vietnam, an escalating Cold War struggle to prevent a Communist takeover of the southern part of the divided country in Southeast Asia. Nguyen Quy Anh, the South Vietnamese ambassador to Bonn, had now come to the West Berlin campus to participate in a student-run event in the Henry Ford Building, a venue named after the university's American benefactor.Footnote 2 In front of approximately one hundred listeners, the diplomat likened the situation in his home country to that in divided Germany and invoked the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949. Much as in West Berlin, he argued, South Vietnamese freedom and independence could not be sustained without US involvement.Footnote 3 In linking the fate of Saigon to that of the emblematic Cold War city, the ambassador invoked a mantra frequently voiced in the era of Containment. US secretary of defense Robert McNamara, for one, had argued since 1964 that the defense of West Berlin started at the Mekong.Footnote 4
Soon after the distinguished South Vietnamese speaker had made this claim, several hundred supporters of West Berlin's Socialist Democratic Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS) interrupted his appearance. Amid shouts of “Long live the National Liberation Front!” (the same organization with which the Viet Cong were affiliated), activists associated with this small but influential New Left group, which had been behind many of the protests in the city, entered the room and demanded an open debate. The atmosphere in the now overcrowded hall grew more and more tense. At one point, SDS activist Rudi Dutschke—the charismatic figurehead of the West German student movement—leaped onto the podium, got hold of the microphone, and began to criticize the war.Footnote 5 A scuffle soon ensued, which caused the ambassador to abruptly end his discussion and exit the building through the back.Footnote 6 The next day's press coverage duly focused on the disruption and Dutschke's presence at the event.Footnote 7 A photograph printed in the first detailed profile of the student leader published in the B. Z., an influential local tabloid owned by the right-wing Springer publishing house, showed the “star agitator of the SDS” and “bogeyman of the middle classes incarnate [leibhaftiger Bürgerschreck]” in his staple leather jacket, standing next to the ambassador and facing a flurry of flashbulbs.Footnote 8
Missing from such depictions, however, was the fact that Dutschke and his SDS peers had been far from the only students at the event. Activists from the local Association of Christian Democratic Students (Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten, RCDS), a national student group affiliated with the governing Christian Democratic parties—the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) and the Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU)—played a crucial role on December 6: they had organized the event and invited Nguyen Quy Anh to talk about the political situation in his home country, and they had also been involved in the scuffle on stage. Wighard Härdtl, an RCDS activist and FU student, born in 1944, had been one of the organizers; he later remembered that it was the first time he had come face to face with the SDS leader. Invoking an image of Dutschke akin to contemporary media portrayals of the iconic activist as a kind of German Che Guevara, Härdtl described the scene this way: “The ambassador was trying to give his presentation. And up in the front row, I noticed a wild looking, dark-haired man with fanatical eyes…. It was my first encounter with Rudi Dutschke.”Footnote 9 When Dutschke leaped onto the podium, Härdtl tried to pull him down by force.Footnote 10 Soon afterward, other SDS activists began to storm the stage, and RCDS members formed a protective circle around the diplomat, who made his unexpected exit not long after.Footnote 11
Wulf Schönbohm, a fellow Christian Democratic activist and FU student born in 1941 who would gain national prominence as federal chairman of the RCDS in 1968, later admitted that the whole event had been designed to provoke. The Christian Democratic students had scheduled it to coincide with a student-run “Vietnam Week,” in which the SDS played a prominent role. Given the vitality of the antiwar movement in the city, they had prepared for disruptions. “Of course we knew that if we, the RCDS, hosted an event with the South Vietnamese ambassador, it would be a provocation for the left,” Schönbohm recalled, “But we liked that idea—that he would come marching in and then mayhem would break loose.”Footnote 12 Their plan worked out well: the protests against the diplomat generated a university-wide inquiry, as well as substantial coverage in the national press. According to a report filed by another West Berlin Christian Democratic activist who had been present, the local RCDS was very pleased with its “great action” because it had helped to promote the group's public profile.Footnote 13 The tumultuous events of December 6, 1966, point to a facet of the 1960s student movement that rarely features in popular memories of the revolt and that has been neglected almost entirely by the historiography of these years: the presence of Christian Democratic activists and their involvement in many of the best-known protest events that took place in 1968 in West Berlin and elsewhere in the Federal Republic. This aspect of those years is the subject of this article.
Specific images of political protest and cultural upheaval around 1968 are firmly established in German historical memory, and many of the most iconic moments took place in West Berlin: young demonstrators being beaten by West Berlin policemen and Iranian secret service agents during the Shah's visit on June 2, 1967, followed by the shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg; the iconic photograph of the naked communards of “Kommune 1”; students marching to spirited shouts of “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh” following the International Vietnam Congress in February 1968, a two-day conference on the war in Vietnam that was attended by thousands of left-wing activists from numerous countries; and the April 1968 assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke on the Kurfürstendamm. For all of these reasons, the walled confines of West Berlin occupy a special place in the annals of the student movement. Apart from Frankfurt am Main, which also had a particularly vibrant protest scene in the 1960s, West Berlin was the undisputed “capital of the revolt.”Footnote 14 What is more, Rudi Dutschke is even memorialized in the cityscape of present-day Berlin. A section of the former Kochstrasse, a central street adjacent to the headquarters of the conservative Axel-Springer-Verlag (housed on the aptly named Axel-Springer-Strasse), was renamed Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse in 2008 to commemorate the SDS leader, who had died in 1979 from the aftereffects of the attempt on his life by a right-wing extremist—a crime that many students attributed at the time to the inflammatory coverage of their movement in the conservative West Berlin press, which was heavily dominated by Springer publications.Footnote 15 Student activists of the far left, then, clearly take center stage in the memory and iconography of 1968.
The historiography, by contrast, has long since moved beyond reducing 1968 to a set of iconic moments and images featuring longhaired student rebels. Since the late 1990s, numerous studies have offered nuanced readings of a climactic protest movement embedded in longer-term processes of social, political, and cultural change.Footnote 16 Certain blindspots have remained in the scholarship, however, not least when it comes to the generational configurations of the protest movement and its antagonists. Several sophisticated studies have furthered our understanding of the complex role that generational conflict played around 1968; yet, the protest events in West Berlin are still primarily described as rhetorical spats and physical confrontations between the SDS-led student movement, on the one hand, and a conservative press and generally hostile, older urban population, on the other.Footnote 17 Young Christian Democratic activists, who contested the ideas and methods of their student peers, do not fit this one-dimensional scenario; as a result, their relationship to the student left and the ways in which they experienced 1968 have been underexamined. By discussing the manifold ways in which Christian Democratic student activists were tied up in some of the major protest events in the city, this article addresses a lacuna in the otherwise extensive scholarship on this period.Footnote 18 The center-right took part in 1968, and some of the most important protest events in West Berlin are, this article contends, only partially understood at best when we exclude Christian Democratic activism from the narrative. In spite of their significant presence in West Berlin in the 1960s, Christian Democratic activists are portrayed in most histories of the student movement as marginal—and often simplistic—characters that enter the scene sporadically to express their “reactionary” views.Footnote 19 To offer a more fine-grained analysis of Christian Democratic activism in 1968, this study examines the background, actions, and experiences of a number of students closely involved in the RCDS at the time.Footnote 20 This research has implications for our ability to grasp more accurately the role that “generation” played during these years. The key argument is that we need to rethink and ultimately broaden our understanding of who counts as a ’68er. As the following study shows, there were student activists other than those on the far left, and many of them would influence (West) German politics for years to come.
If generational interpretations of 1968 have tended to simplify the political and cultural battles of these years, the second major contention of this article is that the ways in which the student movement of the 1960s has been written into popular histories of twentieth-century Berlin have also lacked depth in certain respects. The year 1968 is usually portrayed as the moment when the Cold War antitotalitarian consensus that had shaped West Berlin since the Soviet blockade of 1948–1949 ruptured irreparably, and a city previously identified with fervent anti-Communism and strong support for the United States became defined first and foremost by its left-wing protest culture. Instead of expressing gratitude to their American protectors, radical students now routinely criticized and defied the United States, whose forces still occupied the city. As a result, the story goes, West Berlin began to attract more and more students of a left-wing, radical bent, drawn “by the rumors of a wild student life and the promise of freedom and counter-culture.” Others “came to escape the draft, as West Berlin's four-power status meant that young men with a permanent residence certificate were exempt from military service.”Footnote 21 In essence, one largely homogenous political student culture replaced another.
As this article will show, Christian Democratic students, by contrast, were often drawn to West Berlin for very different reasons; they also had a drastically different sense of what political commitment ought to entail in a city encircled by a socialist dictatorship. The following analysis therefore pays special attention to the effects that German division and life in West Berlin had on Christian Democratic activists, to their anti-Communism, and to their take on the US-led war in Vietnam, a conflict that carried particular resonance in the divided city. The aim here, then, is to rethink the role of the student movement in the history of West Berlin, on the one hand, and, on the other, to reassess West Berlin's place in the history of “1968.”
Much like the most vocal groups of the far left, the RCDS was quite small; in 1967, it had approximately 2,300 members nationwide (the SDS had 2,500).Footnote 22 At just over 100 members, the RCDS chapter at the Free University was relatively large, but only a dozen or so of its members were genuinely active in campus politics.Footnote 23 Christian Democratic student politics nonetheless had a long tradition in the city. In fact, prior to the mid-1960s, the RCDS had dominated the West Berlin student councils.Footnote 24 The radical left-wing proclivities of West Berlin's student population in the 1960s were thus by no means self-evident. Even when left-wing activists began to control proceedings in the middle of the decade, it was arguably not as a result of their overall strength in numbers, but because participation in student council elections was low; this allowed a small, well-organized group like SDS to exert disproportionate influence.Footnote 25 As the event with the South Vietnamese ambassador demonstrated, however, the SDS and other left-wing student groups never operated in a vacuum, neither on campus nor elsewhere in the city. Throughout the 1960s, they had to contend with vocal opposition from Christian Democratic students who mobilized against their peers' crescendoing calls for a socialist revolution and contested the left's anti-American turn in particularly strong terms. As we will see, the far left and moderate right related to each other in myriad ways—staging demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, confronting each other at teach-ins and protest rallies, and generally advancing contrasting visions of the future of the West German democratic system.
The sources for this article include archival records from various German and American archives that pertain to the student movement and to the role of the RCDS in particular, autobiographical texts, and interviews (conducted by the author between 2008 and 2014) with some of the leading Christian Democratic students from the Free University. All interviewees were men, who were identified from archival documents and then via the “snowball” technique.Footnote 26 Oral history interviews do not give us unfiltered access to past experience, of course, but they do provide crucial insights into the subjective dimensions of Christian Democratic activism.Footnote 27 They reveal how former activists have made sense of this period, provide an important counterweight to the reminiscences of left-wing activists that continue to dominate historical scholarship, and allow us to trace the activists' trajectories over time.
Young Christian Democrats and the Student Movement in West Berlin
One of the key figures who shaped the Christian Democratic response to West Berlin's far left was the ever-combative Jürgen Wohlrabe. Born in 1936, Wohlrabe had spent his childhood and teenage years in Gardeleben, a small town in the Altmark province that became part of the Soviet occupation zone in 1945 and, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). After he made an unauthorized visit to West Berlin at the age of fifteen, East German authorities barred him from continuing his high school education. Like so many other young East Germans in the first decade of the GDR's existence, he made use of the open border and fled to West Berlin in 1951, where he joined the CDU as well as its youth and student organizations JU and the RCDS. It is well known that some of the protagonists of SDS in 1968, most notably Rudi Dutschke and his friend Bernd Rabehl, originally came from East Germany, but the same was true of several of their most vocal Christian Democratic critics—a fact that is hardly surprising given that there had been a massive exodus from East to West in the late 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 28
After he began to study law at the Free University in 1957, Wohlrabe embarked on a successful career as a campus politician, serving as chairman of the student council and as Berlin chairman of the Union of German Student Societies (Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften, VDS) from 1960 until 1961. In the following years, he rose swiftly through the ranks of the West Berlin CDU, running the local chapter of the JU and holding a seat in the city's state parliament, before being elected to federal parliament in 1969.Footnote 29 Although he was no longer a student leader in the late 1960s, he remained one of the most vocal young Christian Democrats in West Berlin at the height of “1968.” Having spent some of his formative years under Communist rule, Wohlrabe thought of himself as a “textbook example of an anti-Communist” who was firmly focused on eventually overcoming German division.Footnote 30 His views became especially evident in the febrile climate following the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. A hundred days after its erection, Wohlrabe, chairman of the FU student council at the time, organized a large anti-Wall demonstration by West Berlin's youth. Reflecting the strong anti-totalitarian consensus that had defined West Berlin politics since the late 1940s, he gave a speech that likened the regime of Communist leader Walter Ulbricht to the Nazis and the entire GDR to a concentration camp. If anything, Wohlrabe implied, the East German leader was, in some ways, even worse than Adolf Hitler, because he employed heavily coercive measures to discipline ordinary Germans. The East German leader “used the most abominable methods of the Hitler regime. Ulbricht gave the order to imprison Germans in a concentration camp on an unprecedented scale.”Footnote 31 Wohlrabe could hardly have expressed his contempt for the GDR in more forceful terms.
Wohlrabe's political enemies did not just reside on the other side of the Iron Curtain, however; he was equally focused on combating a domestic left that he suspected of being staffed by Eastern Communist infiltrators. Beginning with his early campaign against anti-nuclear weapons protesters at the FU in the late 1950s, he thrived on confrontation with his political opponents and championed an overtly antagonistic style.Footnote 32 As a somewhat mocking feature story in Der Spiegel observed, “Wherever Wohlrabe appears there is always great alarm. One could say that he walks with blue lights flashing and talks with sirens wailing. He has the figure of a cavalry officer and the striking gestures of a conférencier.”Footnote 33 When the SDS began to gain ground in West Berlin's student politics in the mid-1960s, Wohlrabe became even more focused on combating the student left. He founded the glossy Berliner Studentenzeitung, which he envisaged as the “battle organ” of the student center-right, challenged Rudi Dutschke and other SDS activists at a number of teach-ins, and monitored many of the left's events with a noisy group of his supporters in tow.Footnote 34
By the mid-1960s, the war in Vietnam had taken center stage as the key emotive issue of student politics in West Berlin. Although the government of Christian Democratic chancellor Ludwig Erhard remained reluctant to intervene militarily in the former French colony, the Federal Republic sent considerable funds and humanitarian assistance to South Vietnam. By 1965, it was the second largest donor to the country, topped only by the United States, and it would remain in that position until the end of the conflict.Footnote 35 Moreover, the war initially enjoyed strong cross-party support and public backing in the Federal Republic. Willy Brandt, West Berlin's governing mayor and a rising star of the SPD, publicly endorsed the war, and Erhard interpreted US intervention on behalf of South Vietnam as a show of loyalty by the Americans, designed to reassure West Germans that they would not be alone in any future military struggle against Communism on German soil.Footnote 36
The US-led war struck a special cord in the divided city of Berlin—for those on the left and right alike.Footnote 37 In shifting the focus from political repression in Eastern Europe to a moral critique of American involvement in Southeast Asia, the SDS and other left-wing student organizations directly challenged a central component of West Berlin's anti-totalitarian consensus, according to which the island city owed its security entirely to the American presence. This had involved more than just tacit support for US efforts in Vietnam: at Christmastime in 1965, for instance, a number of West Berlin newspapers ran a campaign that was meant to symbolize the special and enduring bond between the city's population and the US military. All American families that had lost a loved one in Vietnam were to receive a porcelain replica of the Freedom Bell, which the Americans had given as a gift to West Berliners in 1950 as a symbol of the joint fight against Communism.Footnote 38 The far left, by contrast, now cast US soldiers as imperialist warmongers and tormentors of the Vietnamese people. In doing so, the SDS explicitly rejected the Berlin–Saigon nexus, which local politicians and Berlin's conservative press alluded to frequently in an effort to drum up support for the war. “The situation in Vietnam is in no way comparable to the one in this city, as blind anti-Communists seek to make us believe. Berlin's interests are ill-served when we are told to support American operations in Vietnam, or at least not to criticize them,” the SDS declared in early 1966.Footnote 39
The first high-profile moment of direct action in the SDS's anti-Vietnam war campaign was a demonstration of between 1,500 and 2,500 students that took place in the center of West Berlin on February 5, 1966. The demonstrators blocked traffic on the Kurfürstendamm, and several hundred of them subsequently made their way to the Amerikahaus—an important US cultural center located in close proximity to the Zoologischer Garten train station.Footnote 40 In a widely reported incident, a small group of demonstrators took down the American flag and pelted the building with eggs. The mainstream press was predictably outraged by such an unheard-of display of anti-Americanism in this quintessentially pro-American city, whose inhabitants had enthusiastically welcomed the visiting US President John F. Kennedy with broad enthusiasm less than three years earlier.Footnote 41 The Free University's chancellor and governing mayor Brandt both apologized to the US Commander in West Berlin following the demonstration.Footnote 42 Jürgen Wohlrabe and his peers did not wait long to respond either. On February 8, 1966, the CDU, JU, and RCDS organized a counterdemonstration in front of the Amerikahaus, which was meant to display the enduring pro-American sympathies of West Berlin's youth. In his speech, Wohlrabe presented himself as the true voice of the young generation—a community that he thought included young East Germans who were being silenced on the other side of the Wall: “Three days ago a shameful act took place at this site. The flag, the highest symbol of our American protection force, was defiled by the boorish behavior of a small group of students. As a representative of the young generation of our free Berlin, and also as a spokesman for those who are not allowed to open their mouths today, I want to emphasize: We condemn this act in the strongest possible terms!”Footnote 43 The claim to speak for one's generation was clearly contested, then, across the political spectrum.
Wohlrabe went on to assert that students who had recently arrived from West Germany to study in the city dominated the radical minority of left-wing activists and were “not familiar with the true conditions in our free Berlin….” These “spiritless dummies [geistlose Tiefflieger] and students gone wild would not be able to live in the free part of Berlin if the Americans did not stand up anew for the freedom of this city on a daily basis,” he explained. The best indication of the Americans' trustworthiness was their campaign in Vietnam, Wohlrabe concluded. The RCDS at the FU was equally adamant that the efforts of the United States in Vietnam had to be supported in the name of anti-Communism. As one leaflet put it: “All states that back South Vietnam militarily, especially the United States of America, deserve the gratitude of freedom-minded individuals, because it becomes clear here that they are still willing to resist militant Communism's claim to power [den Machtansprüchen des militanten Kommunismus zu widersetzen].”Footnote 44
Some of those present on February 8, 1966, were indeed willing to employ more militant measures to resist the alleged Communist power grab and the threat of infiltration from the East. About six hundred people, including a large number of fraternity students carrying torchlights, attended the counterdemonstration. Amid shouts of “Bums out [Gammler raus]!” some of them pushed a number of young, longhaired spectators into the nearby Zoologischer Garten station and forced them to purchase tickets to East Berlin's Friedrichstrasse. SDS students were shocked by what they perceived as an unmistakable display of West Berlin's continued “fascist potential.”Footnote 45 The incident indeed hints at the potential for violence inherent in such counterdemonstrations by the right.
In the coming years, Wohlrabe became more and more convinced that the major ideological threat to the city and to the entire country emanated from a radical left that had learned the wrong lessons from Germany's recent past and that was willfully ignorant about the country's divided present. In a speech he gave in 1968 at the German Resistance Memorial Center to commemorate the failed plot against Hitler on July 20, 1944, he seized the mantle of the conservative anti-Nazi resistance for those who were determined to defend the Federal Republic from left-wing critique. According to Wohlrabe, left-wing radicals wrongly interpreted their escalating struggle against the “system” as a latter-day anti-fascist resistance. Instead of recognizing the parallels between Nazism and Communism, which were so clearly apparent to him, they were focused on political repression in far-flung places and no longer cared about the fate of Germans to the east of the Iron Curtain. Rather than confronting the legacies of Nazism, Wohlrabe implied, they ignored them: “The Wall has now been in place for seven years and, for some young West Germans, Central Germany [Mitteldeutschland] seems more distant than Persia or Greece.”Footnote 46 The generation that was now coming of age politically had no personal memories of the Nazi past or the years of postwar deprivation, which, he suggested, made them much less committed to the liberal democratic order. They “can no longer understand the democratic state in which they live based on having experienced the alternative,” he insisted.Footnote 47 In Wohlrabe's eyes, the July 20 plotters offered an unequivocal lesson to the activists of 1968: those conservative men and women had been no “revolutionaries,” he argued. They had sought to reestablish law and order—a task, he implied, that young Christian Democrats in West Berlin now had to take up by holding a resurgent left in check. Wohlrabe thus interpreted the connections between the student movement and the Nazi past in ways that differed fundamentally from the views of the activist left, whose members portrayed their own struggle against authoritarianism in the Federal Republic as a way of atoning for the failure of the older generation to stand up against Nazi crimes.Footnote 48 In many ways, Wohlrabe thus matched the image of a right-wing reactionary who opposed the left-wing student movement at every turn—but he was also animated by an understanding of German history and of West Berlin's character as a divided city. This is a point that gets lost in historical accounts in which someone like him makes, at most, a fleeting appearance.
Though particularly verbose and ever-present in West Berlin throughout the 1960s, Wohlrabe was not the only young Christian Democrat from West Berlin who ultimately launched a successful political career by confronting the city's vocal student left. Eberhard Diepgen, who repeatedly clashed with the left as a law student at the Free University in the early 1960s, would later serve as the city's governing mayor. In February 1963, the twenty-one-year-old Diepgen was at the center of a major, but now largely forgotten, scandal that rocked the FU—an early indication of the leftward tilt of student politics on campus. The conservative-dominated student parliament had elected Diepgen, who was not only a Christian Democrat but also a member of the dueling fraternity Saravia, as chairman of the student council in late January. The fraternities, though a considerable force at universities nationwide in the early 1960s (roughly 16 percent of students in West Germany and West Berlin were members), had a difficult standing at the FU. Banned from operating on campus after the university's founding, most students eyed them with strong suspicion.Footnote 49 When Diepgen's Saravia membership became public knowledge in the context of his election, his opponents forced a referendum, in which over 70 percent of FU students participated, thus placing the fraternities under considerable public scrutiny: 64.5 percent thought that the hierarchical educational model that lay at the faternities' core was out of touch with the principles of a modern university and voted for Diepgen's dismissal from his seat as chairman of the student council.Footnote 50 Although this was no doubt a painful defeat at the time, he later conceded that the national publicity generated by the event provided a significant boost to his career.Footnote 51
For Diepgen, the public conflict with his left-wing opponents in the student council seemed like yet another example of an ideological confrontation that had shaped his childhood and teenage years in the Cold War's frontline city. Raised in close proximity to the border in Berlin's Wedding district, in a family with little tradition of political activism but with a basic allegiance to the CDU, his earliest political memories solidified around images of Communist repression. He recalled seeing Soviet tanks roll in on the other side of the border on June 17, 1953, to crush the statewide East German uprising, and also being glued to his radio when the Soviets intervened with even greater force in Hungary in November 1956. Diepgen argued later that witnessing these violent displays of Communist strength, along with daily exposure in his West Berlin high school to the unsettling stories told by classmates from East Berlin, fostered his nascent anti-Communism.Footnote 52 His perspective on student politics in the 1960s was in many ways typical, he explained, for someone who had grown up in West Berlin: “It was the classic West Berlin perspective.… When I assess my behavior with hindsight, it had something to do with this West Berlin … perspective, the division of the city, the constant confrontation and experiences with crossing the border …, when one rode along on the milk truck and was controlled [at the checkpoint]—this experience, the anxious feeling that one already had when crossing even before the Wall was built. And I grew up right at the border.”Footnote 53 According to Diepgen, this meant that he could not relate to the neo-Marxist student activists of the 1960s. For him, deploring repression in the East and combating the domestic left were two sides of the same coin. Much as his peer Wohlrabe had done, he portrayed activists of the far left as dangerous ideologues. Diepgen described hearing Rudi Dutschke speak at a rally on Wittenbergplatz in the 1960s: “I was shocked. This demagogue and the influence and fascination he exerted slid right off me.”Footnote 54
It would be overly simplistic to assume that a West Berlin childhood produced uniform reactions to Dutschke on the part of Christian Democratic students, of course. Peter Radunski, an RCDS activist whose own trajectory was closely intertwined with Diepgen's (he helped to get him elected chairman of the student council in 1963 and later served twice as a senator in his cabinet when Diepgen was Berlin's governing mayor in the 1990s), remembered the SDS icon much more positively. Radunski, who was born in 1939, grew up in West Berlin, and began his studies at the Free University in the late 1950s, liked the SDS leader personally and interacted with him frequently because both studied political science under the same professors. They lived only a short distance from each other and often took the same bus.Footnote 55 In his published memoirs, Radunski also felt a kinship with Dutschke, and even described him as his “role model, mentor, or motivator,” their considerable political differences notwithstanding: “He was a young man of my age on an equal footing [auf Augenhöhe] with politicians and the media.… Although he ultimately failed, he impressed me a great deal and something inside of me pushed me to emulate him. Of all political actors whom I observed in my youth, Rudi Dutschke impressed me the most.”Footnote 56
This sense of admiration did not diminish over time; as Berlin's Senator of Culture in the late 1990s, Radunski signed off on designating Dutschke's final resting place in Dahlem as an honorary grave. Compared to the combative Diepgen and the antagonistic Wohlrabe, Radunski generally felt a much closer sense of connection to the left-wing student movement, both in terms of style and of substance, and his story highlights some of the ways in which activism of the left and right developed in tandem. Unlike some of his peers, he did not think that resistance was the only warranted response. Although he rejected virtually all of the far left's political solutions, he thought that many of the social and political ills they identified in the Federal Republic did indeed need to be addressed in order to overcome the sclerotic political structures of the Konrad Adenauer years. In his Die herausgeforderte Demokratie (The Challenged Democracy), a lengthy tract he coauthored in 1968 as the Christian Democratic students' answer to the protest movement, he advocated “reform as revolution in tolerable dosage”—in other words, evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to the West German political system.Footnote 57
Much like his more belligerent Christian Democratic peers, Radunski nevertheless stressed the importance of his upbringing in the divided city to explain why he was not fully drawn to the left at a time when the SDS and related groups began to dominate student politics at the FU. He recalled being present when West Berlin's governing mayor Ernst Reuter called on the “peoples of this world … to look upon this city” during the infamous Soviet blockade in 1948, and, like Diepgen, he highlighted June 1953 and Hungary's 1956 as important moments in his political socialization.Footnote 58 The first political demonstration he attended was a protest of about two thousand high school pupils, organized by various West Berlin schools in 1956, against the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising.Footnote 59 The fact that his mother had spent several years in Soviet captivity after the war further bolstered his anti-Communism, Radunski related in his memoirs, but, he claimed, the key moment that shaped his political outlook in the long run occurred on August 13, 1961. The news of the Berlin Wall's construction reached him while he was taking a language course in France. This led to “never-ending personal and political deliberations,” he recalled. “The changed situation touched me emotionally, much like the other students who now came to Berlin more than ever.”Footnote 60 It was these thoughts and emotions that led Radunski, who had grown up in a family divided between Social Democratic and conservative-nationalist leanings, into the arms of the Christian Democratic student organization: “In autumn 1961, I joined the RCDS. This was where many of those met who thought like I did.”Footnote 61 In his memoirs, Radunksi also pointed to his concern for the fate of his home city and for intra-German policy (Deutschlandpolitik), along with his robust anti-Communism, as some of the main reasons why he remained a lifelong Christian Democrat.Footnote 62
The Cold War symbolism of the now walled city fascinated in particular the students of the center-right, whereas their peers on the left were often more attracted by its cosmopolitan reputation or their desire to avoid conscription. “We had a different socialization into these [political] topics. Our socialization was the Wall,” Radunski asserted.Footnote 63 In the mid-1960s, the RCDS hosted regular “Berlin Seminars” for students from across Western Europe to foster greater awareness of the day-to-day realities of German division; these seminars attracted young Christian Democratic and conservative students from abroad, for whom, as John Davis has shown in his work on British Conservative students, “traveling in Cold War Europe was … the equivalent of the pilgrimage to Yugoslavia or Cuba for the left-wing teenager.”Footnote 64 Moreover, according to Radunski, many of the Christian Democratic activists who moved from West Germany to the divided city to begin their studies at the FU after 1961 did so to take a stand: “I'm going to study in Berlin now. Berlin has a Wall.”Footnote 65 The influx of West German students did not occur entirely for such symbolic reasons, of course: generous stipends, the FU's growing academic reputation, especially in fields such as sociology and political science, as well as the city's bustling atmosphere, were equally important factors. The number of students at the FU did indeed grow nevertheless, and the composition of its student body changed significantly in this period. By 1965, the number of students from West Germany enrolled on the Dahlem campus had risen to 40 percent.Footnote 66
One of these new arrivals from West Germany was Horst Teltschik, an RCDS activist born in 1940 who would subsequently rise through the ranks of the CDU to become a senior advisor to chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s. He did not have the West Berlin background that Diepgen and Radunski claimed had shaped their opposition to the student left, but his childhood on the shores of Lake Tegern in Bavaria had fostered an equally strong anti-Communist commitment. The Teltschiks were Sudeten Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945, and both Teltschik's father and his older brother had spent time in Soviet captivity. Conscripted in 1960 to serve for eighteen months in the Bundeswehr after completing his studies at the Gymnasium, Teltschik volunteered to stay on for a full two years. He spent the crucial period after the construction of the Berlin Wall in a tank battalion close to the Czechoslovak border. As a young man, he thus experienced one of the Cold War's major crises in very personal terms.
Teltschik arrived in West Berlin in the fall of 1962. He initially stayed with an old pen pal, a former East German who had been on a visit to the West when the Wall had gone up. As a West German living in West Berlin, Teltschik could visit the eastern part of the divided city even before the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin came into effect in 1972 and eased transit between the two halves of the city, and he did so frequently. “I always met with friends from the GDR and from East Berlin in East Berlin. So I experienced first-hand how much GDR citizens suffered,” he explained in an interview. Even the youngest children already knew what was permissible to say in the company of strangers, Teltschik recalled: “This showed the whole brutality and inhumanity of the system. I'm saying this because of course it shaped my conflict with the left.”Footnote 67
When the student protests gathered momentum in the mid- to late 1960s, Teltschik felt that the West Berlin CDU, the local authorities, and the professoriate were unprepared and helpless. Richard Löwenthal, his political science professor at the Otto Suhr Institute, was a notable exception.Footnote 68 He admired this former Communist and émigré, who described his own confrontation with students on the radical left as traumatic—an experience that eventually turned him from a reform-minded Cold War liberal into a political figure much more skeptical about the possibilities for political reform.Footnote 69 Teltschik, who served as Löwenthal's research assistant, found it deeply alarming that the left-wing student movement reminded his mentor—who had Jewish roots and had fled the Nazis in the 1930s—of Hitler's storm troopers. Teltschik began to engage more closely with the ideas of the SDS in an effort to help the RCDS refute its opponents' theoretical assumptions. He wrote internal analyses of Rudi Dutschke's political arguments and studied particularly closely the international outlook of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, APO).Footnote 70 As a budding foreign-policy expert, Teltschik found the radical left's revolutionary internationalism deeply misguided, especially when viewed from the vantage point of West Berlin. Echoing a trope that surfaced frequently in publications of the center-right at the time, Teltschik charged the left with having been perversely ignorant about conditions in the Eastern bloc while, at the same time, cultivating a naïve revolutionary internationalism.Footnote 71 Their veneration of the North Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh was particularly troubling to him: “I never understood it. Even for Dutschke, who came from the GDR.… The Wall had just been built. In the face of the Wall, razor wire, the Wall dead, the Soviet intervention against the Prague Spring in ’68—that all of this wasn't an issue! Vietnam was a huge issue … [that] was quite schizophrenic. I experienced Kennedy's visit [in West Berlin] in 1963. Huge enthusiasm for Kennedy among the students. And all of a sudden … overnight the US was the devil. Just Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.”Footnote 72 Teltschik could comprehend why some students viewed American involvement in Southeast Asia with unease, but still thought that there were many more pressing issues closer to home. “The Wall, human rights abuses in East Berlin, in Moscow. That's where my enemies were,” he recalled.
These diverse stories show that the RCDS was no monolith in the 1960s—as was the case for student groups on the left, including the SDS, which was also made up of different factions. As we have seen, the responses of Christian Democratic students to the SDS-led student movement of 1968 ranged from outright resistance and a penchant for seeking physical confrontation to sustained engagement with the ideas of the New Left. For all these Christian Democratic students, though, being active in the island city of West Berlin was invested with great symbolic meaning, and they faulted their left-wing student peers for what they perceived to be a willful neglect of the realities of the city's Cold War division.
A number of them shared with many SDS activists, born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, childhood or family experiences of flight and expulsion from Germany's former eastern territories and the GDR.Footnote 73 Other young Christian Democrats active in the city had grown up in West Berlin and thus lived through the escalating Cold War conflict and division of the city. Such experiences clearly did not determine upon which side of the political spectrum activists later ended up, but former Christian Democratic students regularly invoked childhood memories of Communist repression to explain the urgency behind their activism and to portray as instinctive their own anti-Communism—and, by extension, their opposition to the SDS and similar groups. Much as it appeared to student activists of the left, they viewed the political struggles of the 1960s as intimately connected to their own family histories.Footnote 74 Like their left-wing peers, they also drew on the Nazi past to make sense of the present, but the main lessons they drew from Germany's history of war, genocide, and postwar displacement centered on the need to oppose the East German dictatorship and combat domestic political radicalism.
Generational Conflict, CDU-Style
In spite of Christian Democratic students' basic adherence to the Cold War anti-totalitarian framework, they were no rigid Cold Warriors in the mold of the 1950s. The RCDS supported the legalization of the West German Communist Party, which had been banned under Konrad Adenauer in 1956, and even favored a limited rapprochement with the GDR before the Social-Liberal coalition government under Willy Brandt began to implement Ostpolitik, i.e., its “New Eastern Policy.”Footnote 75 In doing so, the student activists were far ahead of the Christian Democratic Parties, which still vehemently opposed any accommodation with Communist regimes in the late 1960s.Footnote 76 The West Berlin RCDS chapter went as far as debating the desirability of recognizing the Oder-Neisse Line in 1968—much to the dismay of the West Berlin CDU, which suspended its monthly subsidies to the students because of their refusal to place all written mentions of the GDR in inverted commas (speaking of the “GDR” was the party's preferred way of identifying a state that the Federal Republic did not officially recognize).Footnote 77
Clearly, then, there were signs of generational rebellion among Christian Democrats in 1968, and the fact that the growing generational rifts and anti-authoritarian spirit of these years affected the CDU's internal dynamics has not escaped the attention of historians. In his exhaustive account of the history of the postwar CDU, Frank Bösch showed that the party's younger members regularly clashed with their elders over questions of inner-party democracy, for example.Footnote 78 Whereas most members of the JU were often firmly focused on career advancement and reluctant to criticize their seniors, student activists emerged in the 1960s as the most vocal critics of the party's overly hierarchical structures.Footnote 79 Wulf Schönbohm and Wighard Härdtl, two of Teltschik's RCDS peers who had been closely involved in organizing the December 1966 event with the South Vietnamese ambassador, remembered particularly vividly their conflict with the West Berlin CDU. In fact, Härdtl's criticism of the party's “authoritarian intervention” in student affairs was even covered by the news magazine Der Spiegel.Footnote 80
Like Teltschik, Schönbohm and Härdtl both came from families with recent experiences of flight and expulsion. The Schönbohms had fled the Soviets from the Mark Brandenburg and settled in Kassel; the Härdtls were Sudeten Germans who ended up in eastern Germany in 1945 but fled westward in the late 1950s. Both Schönbohm and Härdtl had cut their teeth in Gymnasium politics and related that they had arrived at the FU with an already ingrained anti-Communism, just as the left-wing student movement was gathering steam in the mid-1960s. The former, who had served as a reserve officer in the Bundeswehr, was elected RCDS chairman at the FU soon after his arrival in West Berlin and quickly emerged as one of the SDS's most vocal critics. Yet, Schönbohm remembered his engagement in student politics in the 1960s as a war on two fronts: “At university we were the ‘fascists’: ‘Schönbohm, the fascist.’ And within the CDU, around ’67/’68, we were [considered] the lefties.”Footnote 81 Like his friend and fellow activist Peter Radunski, Schönbohm thought that the student left had correctly identified a number of pressing political problems in West German politics and thus needed to be taken seriously.Footnote 82 There was something else that distinguished him from most of his conservative peers at the time: he wore a full beard.Footnote 83 This was enough to make him deeply suspect in the eyes of Franz Anrehm, the West Berlin CDU chairman whose anti-Communism was particularly virulent. “Oh my God, that was a real 1950s mentality,” Schönbohm recalled. The more conservative Härdtl, then RCDS chairman in West Berlin, concurred. Although he was not as much of an “RCDS revolutionary [RCDS-Revoluzzer]” as Schönbohm, he remembered that, “for us students, Franz Anrehm … was something of an ossified fossil”—less in terms of his concrete political views than in terms of his style, “his demeanor … this stolidness.”Footnote 84 At one of the organization's federal meetings, Anrehm speculated that the more left-leaning RCDS members had been planted in West Berlin by the Ulbricht regime—a suspicion that chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger said he shared.Footnote 85 Ascribing even the smallest signs of domestic opposition to Communist infiltration from East Germany had a long tradition in the West German politics of the preceding decade, and not even the RCDS, whose members’ commitment to the anti-Communist cause was often deeply personal, was exempt from such treatment. It was therefore not just young leftists whom older conservative politicians perceived as a political “other,” but often their own party members as well.Footnote 86
The rift between the West Berlin party and its student organization became particularly visible when the unarmed student Benno Ohnesorg was shot fatally by a West Berlin policeman (who was revealed in 2009 to have been an informant for the East German secret police, the Stasi) following a demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran on June 2, 1967. That day would turn out to be the emotional anchor of the wider student movement. Polls showed that around one-third of all West German and West Berlin students took to the streets in protest in the immediate aftermath of Ohnesorg's death.Footnote 87 Their indignation was fueled by the fact that much of the West Berlin press and the city's authorities, including the Social Democratic governing mayor Heinrich Albertz, initially blamed the demonstrators for the violence. The West Berlin CDU concurred, pointing its finger at the anti-Shah protesters, who, the party argued, had sought to “undermine the democratic order” and thus bore responsibility for the injuries suffered by a number of policemen. The demonstrators regularly voiced their opposition to the war in Vietnam and to the Iranian regime, but, the party leadership charged, they were silent regarding those who died at the Berlin Wall. In effect, the demonstrators were thus doing the Communists’ dirty work.Footnote 88
In contrast to such one-sided recriminations, many Christian Democratic students expressed their “shock and outrage” over the conduct of the police and, when Ohnesorg's body was transported by car to his native Hanover on June 8, a number of RCDS activists, along with thousands of other students, escorted the coffin en route to the East German checkpoint at Dreilinden.Footnote 89 Some even attended the burial in Hanover the next day.Footnote 90 While Christian Democratic students had traditionally subscribed to an image of West Berlin as the beacon of the free world, their student newspaper Civis now offered a searing indictment of the coverage of Ohnesorg's death in the conservative press and even condemned the reactions of ordinary West Berliners:
The shot was fired 1,000 meters from the Victory Column and 1,500 meters from the bricked-up Brandenburg Gate. This city—where the majority did not vote for the Nazi party in 1933, where the most Jews were hidden from the SS, where Hitler was not liked and Stalin was opposed—has lost its greatest virtue overnight, because Berliners felt no outrage when the shooting of Ohnesorg became known, no shame when the political leadership spread false information and denied the dead his last honors, no compassion for the pregnant wife of the student, no alarm over a parliament that accepted without objection what the Senate said. On the contrary, the mourners were offered beatings; the tires of cars adorned with black flags were slashed; passersby who supported the students were called “Communist pigs.”Footnote 91
Christian Democratic students did not just struggle then with the activist left in 1968. They also began to criticize some of the policies and style of their elders in the CDU and, in some key instances, sided with student protesters rather than with state authorities. Given their reformist and gradualist tendencies, their version of anti-authoritarian revolt was, of course, far more restrained than what we have come to associate with the student left in this period, but it nevertheless underlines the fact that generational rebellion occurred across the political spectrum in 1968.
Christian Democratic Renegades
In some instances, this rebellion even led Christian Democratic students to question their own basic political assumptions. This included Martin Kempe, a member of the RCDS's political strategy unit, which had been set up in 1967 to tackle some of the existential questions of modern society in a theoretically informed way. Joining the RCDS had been at first a natural choice for Kempe. Born in 1943 and raised in a staunchly conservative environment in rural Lippe-Detmold, like many of his fellow student activists, he cited June 17, 1953, and the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, as important first impressions of a political nature.Footnote 92 When he arrived at the FU's Otto Suhr Institute in 1966 to study political science, the various left-wing groups on campus seemed too extreme and peculiar to Kempe, who had recently finished serving two years in a psychological operations (PSYOP) unit of the Bundeswehr. Witnessing firsthand the hostile reactions of the West Berlin authorities and the public to the student movement had a profound impact on his political trajectory, however. As an intern at Der Tagesspiegel, one of West Berlin's major dailies, he was charged with covering many of the key protest events during the student movement's heyday in 1967–1968. This convinced him that there was a huge discrepancy between the actual events and the coverage in the conservative Springer press, even in the reporting in his own more moderate paper. He also saw with his own eyes much of the violence perpetrated against the students. For example, on June 2, 1967, Kempe observed how West Berlin's militarized police force first stood by while Iranian secret service agents beat student demonstrators with batons at the anti-Shah demonstration in front of the Opera House, and how city policemen then hunted and bludgeoned the protesters.Footnote 93 Ohnesorg was killed that evening, but the press initially reported that a policeman had been slain. “This [false report] was later revealed to have been a real canard, a real hoax, designed to rile people up against the students,” Kempe recalled.Footnote 94
The most troubling scenes he witnessed took place in the aftermath of the International Vietnam Congress, which the SDS hosted on February 17–18, 1968, at West Berlin's Technical University. Thousands of left-wing activists from across the globe came together to voice their opposition to the war in Vietnam, which had reached its bloody zenith with the beginning of the Tet Offensive the previous month. At a protest march following the event, thousands of young activists marched through the city's streets to animated shouts of “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh”—a new and provocative display of direct action that many ordinary West Berliners perceived as menacing and reminiscent of the 1930s. Three days later on February 21, 1968, the Berlin Senate and the Springer press jointly organized a large counterdemonstration under the Freedom Bell at the Schöneberg Town Hall, which was attended by sixty thousand West Berliners, many of whom had been given the day off to take part.Footnote 95 Der Tagesspiegel sent Kempe to cover the event, and he remembered it as having been marked by a climate of aggression. “I experienced how emotionally charged the atmosphere was among the population,” he recalled. “Everybody who looked even vaguely like a student had to fear for his life.… It was a horrible experience.” Demonstrators carried signs that labeled Rudi Dutschke “People's Enemy [Volksfeind] No. 1,” and Kempe saw a bystander whom the demonstrators mistook for Dutschke being pushed to the ground. The young man managed to flee, but the crowd suspected that he was hiding in a police van, which was rocked so hard that it nearly overturned. Kempe himself was caught up in the violent commotion when he attempted to help another young man who had been struck by an older demonstrator while trying to take pictures. The journalist was beaten and pushed around by members of the crowd, and the whole atmosphere reminded him of a pogrom.Footnote 96 Less than two months later, on April 11, 1968, the real Dutschke was shot and nearly killed by Josef Bachmann, a young right-wing extremist.Footnote 97 This and other incidents he had witnessed over the previous year eventually caused Kempe to rethink his political commitment: “Experiences like these made me think, “The [left's] criticism of Springer is justified, the criticism of the febrile atmosphere [in West Berlin] is justified. The democratic right to demonstrate and [the right] to freedom of expression are really being threatened. And for me, the scales increasingly tipped toward the student movement in this confrontation between the inflamed anti-Communist population and these students. That was the point at which I could not continue within the RCDS.… It was an ongoing internal process [and] I just developed in a different direction because of all these experiences.”Footnote 98
Partly pushed out by the RCDS's more conservative members, partly pulled away by his changing convictions, Kempe left the West Berlin RCDS shortly thereafterward in May 1968. He had belonged to a faction of the West Berlin RCDS—made up of some of the FU's most committed and visible Christian Democratic activists—that had edged closer to positions advanced by the student left and that now defined itself as “left-liberal.” Since around the time of Ohnesorg's death, its members had attempted covertly to transform the RCDS from within, but had not succeeded in building a substantial following or outmaneuvering the group's conservative wing led by Wighard Härdtl and Jürgen Klemann (the latter also later served in Diepgen's two cabinets).Footnote 99 As the renegades’ impassioned exit declaration explained, “The effort had to fail because of the apolitical, right-wing, … lethargic, and formally democratic-conservative self-understanding of the RCDS [which] never managed to go beyond simply contradicting the SDS and offer a positive statement about changing the university and society with an eye to advancing democratization.” Rather than being a motor for change, the “left-liberal” activists alleged, the RCDS defended the status quo first and foremost.Footnote 100
Most of the fourteen activists who left the student group in May 1968 remained on a leftward trajectory in the coming years. Though still wary of formal political organization, Kempe sought to rally the printers employed by Mercator, the publishing house of Der Tagesspiegel—a move that was, in many ways, emblematic of left-wing activism in the 1970s, much of which became focused on efforts to bridge the divide between young intellectuals and the working classes. In 1979 he joined the staff of West Berlin's newly founded tageszeitung (taz), a cooperative-owned daily that had emerged from the remnants of the left-wing student movement. There he became close friends with the likes of journalist Christian Semler, his former counterpart in the West Berlin SDS.Footnote 101 Kempe's story illustrates that the dividing lines between student activism of the left and right could be remarkably porous, and that individual political commitment sometimes shifted considerably over time. This point has often been made with regard to leftist renegades that veered to the right, most famously the former RAF terrorist Horst Mahler, who became an extreme right-wing nationalist.Footnote 102 As Kempe's biography shows, the political identities of center-right activists could sometimes be similarly fluid in this time of political and cultural upheaval.
The post-RCDS trajectory of Kempe's peer Jürgen Bernd Runge, chair of the Christian Democratic student group at the FU until January 1968, was arguably the most striking example of a political conversion by a young center-right activist. In 1967–1968, Runge had been the SDS's most vocal critic on campus; even Dutschke's widow, Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, remembered his role as crucial: “Runge countered Rudi at every event, and Rudi polemicized strongly but sincerely against him,” she wrote in her biography of her late husband. “In some ways it was admirable how Runge always fought despite great disapproval and never gave up. His appearances stimulated the discussion.”Footnote 103
Runge was the informal head of the RCDS's left-leaning faction—a role that already represented a significant political departure for the young Christian Democrat, who had been born in 1944 and had grown up in staunchly conservative Paderborn, had taken his first political steps in a nationalist Scout group (Deutsche Pfadfinderjungenschaft “Speerwache”), and once had dreamed of becoming a career officer in the Bundeswehr. His subsequent political conversion was the direct result of his intense engagement with the APO. Runge had arrived at the FU in 1965 to study law and politics and, as a student from a lower middle-class background, was firmly focused on continuing on a trajectory of upward social mobility. Photographs from the time show a ruddy-cheeked young man in a dark suit and bow tie.Footnote 104 Through his ongoing debates with the far left on campus, however, Runge felt increasingly persuaded by the student left's wide-ranging social and political critique.Footnote 105 The West Berlin police's hostile stance toward the students in the city and the war in Vietnam were also major catalysts for his political transformation. In conversations with policemen, Runge noticed that they categorically referred to student demonstrators as “troublemakers,” which he found disconcerting, and the left's learned arguments against the war in Vietnam were increasingly difficult to refute, he recalled in an interview. In 1966, SDS activists Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng published a thoroughly researched and widely read book on the origins of the war, and Runge felt compelled to keep up.Footnote 106 “The left wrote books …, and I defended the American position and had few arguments. And that made me angry,” he later explained.Footnote 107 Runge remembered that he had spent several weeks in various libraries to read up on the official US position, “but I could not prove what I wanted to prove.”Footnote 108 This led him to adopt a more nuanced position on the war, moving away from fully backing US policy to supporting neither the South Vietnamese nor the North Vietnamese regime.Footnote 109
After leaving the RCDS in May 1968, Runge briefly flirted with liberal politics and joined the Free Democrats’ youth organization, the Young Democrats (Jungdemokraten), but, over time, he became more and more drawn to Communist ideas. Just as he was ready to make his new stance official and join the recently established German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) in the early 1970s, a step that would have disqualified him from working in secret intelligence, the East German Ministry of State Security successfully recruited Runge as an “informal collaborator.”Footnote 110 The former RCDS leader, now residing in Bonn and working for the Free Democrats, spent the next decade sending secret reports to the East Germans from the West German capital under the codename “IM Richard”—almost as if he had intended to fulfill West Berlin CDU leader Franz Anrehm's worst fears about Stasi infiltration of the RCDS.Footnote 111 Though exceptional in most ways, Runge's path from RCDS figurehead to Communist believer and Stasi spy highlights the remarkable contingency of activist biographies in this age of political commitment.
Conclusion
What, then, do these individual stories tell us? Did it matter that Christian Democratic students were active in West Berlin in 1968? For one, this article has shown that student activism in the city was less homogeneous than often portrayed, and that it involved committed activists with competing ideas and visions from different sides of the political spectrum.Footnote 112 We should not imagine these different sides as stable and uniform blocs, however: just as there was substantial diversity in the SDS and on the student left more generally, the ways in which Christian Democratic activists responded to and engaged with the SDS-led student movement in the city varied considerably as well. To be sure, some, like Jürgen Wohlrabe, subscribed fully to the postwar anti-totalitarian paradigm prevalent in the city. The former RCDS activist and leader of the local JU imagined himself as engaged in a resistance struggle against a resurgent left that he perceived as combining the worst ideological traits of Nazism and Communism. For Wohlrabe, radical left-wing students were on par with the reviled Ulbricht regime and needed to be combated at all costs, even if it involved getting physical. Others, like Peter Radunski and Wulf Schönbohm, were much more willing to engage with the SDS, convinced that their peers had initiated important debates about the Federal Republic's democratic deficits. Both felt a sense of connection to Rudi Dutschke and perceived their contest with the left as one defined by ideas. Their desire for change was difficult to contain within the overly rigid structures of the CDU, and they came to understand themselves as committed reformers of the party apparatus and the wider political system.Footnote 113 Radunski's and Schönbohm's often contentious relationship with party elders underlines the fact that student activism of the left and right, as well as the challenges that activists faced when it came to affecting change within existing institutions, were in many ways more similar and intertwined than the confrontational, anti-left posture of a figure like Wohlrabe would suggest. For some activists, notably Martin Kempe and Jürgen Bernd Runge, an intense engagement with the APO and a growing sense of unease about the darker and more violent aspects of West Berlin's anti-Communist climate led to a slow political conversion that would eventually alienate them from the RCDS and Christian Democratic politics and draw them more firmly into the left's orbit. Their stories remind us that the political identities of ’68ers did not always remain stable: experiencing the political upheaval of these years had the potential to alter profoundly individual trajectories.
Most of the leading Christian Democratic student activists of the 1960s would nevertheless remain lifelong Christian Democrats and go on to define (West) Berlin's politics in the decades to come. Eberhard Diepgen, who clashed repeatedly with the left at the FU in the early 1960s, later served several terms as the city's governing mayor, first of its western half in the 1980s and then of united Berlin in the 1990s. Several of the senators in his cabinets, among them Peter Radunski and Jürgen Klemann, had similarly cut their political teeth on the FU campus around 1968. After rising through the ranks of the CDU, other Christian Democratic activists who had studied in West Berlin in the 1960s, among them senior Kohl advisor Horst Teltschik, would later leave their mark on national politics. Their political prominence in the 1980s and 1990s alone makes it worthwhile to delve more deeply into their activist pasts. It helps us better understand a group of important actors whose policies would have far-reaching consequences for a pivotal period in German history—a period that included the unification of the two German states and the two halves of Berlin after the peaceful revolution of 1989.
If student activism in West Berlin was more varied than often assumed, the same was true of the meaning that activists ascribed to the Cold War city. West Berlin did not just attract students with left-wing radical proclivities or those seeking to avoid conscription: the Cold War symbolism of the walled city exerted a powerful fascination felt by young Christian Democrats, many of whom had only recently left the Bundeswehr. They did not contest the Cold War framework in a fundamental way and viewed the city as an ideal place to demonstrate their anti-Communist commitment. They campaigned fervently in support of the US-led war in Vietnam—a conflict that they perceived as being intimately connected to the fate of West Berlin. The 1960s activist generation of West Berlin students did therefore not just replace pro-American sentiments with anti-American hostility; rather, Germany's relationship to the United States became contested among the student activists. In stressing their gratitude to the American occupation forces and focusing their criticism on the East German regime, young Christian Democrats were arguably attuned—in ways that the student left was explicitly not—to the anxieties and fears of ordinary West Berliners, whose own anti-Communism was fed by memories of Soviet occupation and the blockade of 1948–1949. Throughout the 1960s, Christian Democratic students perceived Germany's division as a much more pressing problem than their left-wing student activist peers did; the internationalist imagination and activities of the latter increasingly focused on the disparities between North and South rather than on the conflict between East and West.Footnote 114
The very presence of young Christian Democrats in West Berlin's “1968” reminds us that there were important—if shifting and sometimes porous—dividing lines other than those that separated politicized students from an older and often more conservative city leadership and population. Christian Democrats’ involvement in some of the most iconic events of the period therefore has larger repercussions for how we assess the factor of “generation” in 1968—and arguably even for more general attempts to write the history of twentieth-century Germany as a history of generations.Footnote 115 Germany has been described as the “country of generations,” with an eye to the many political and social ruptures in its history that made the experiences and mentalities of different age cohorts diverge more strongly than in other countries.Footnote 116 While there is undoubtedly some truth to this assessment, histories of generation often seek to explain political and social transformations over time, with each new generation representing a relatively homogeneous driver of change.Footnote 117 This may be a stylistically seductive trope, but it may mean that we miss the existence of political diversity and division within cohorts. When it comes to 1968, the focus usually lies on intergenerational conflict during these years—be it on the ’68ers’ critique of their parents’ generation for its conduct during the Nazi years and its conservative social morality, or on the frequently antagonistic relationship between the ’68ers and the so-called “’45ers,” a generation born in the 1920s that produced many of West Germany's leading intellectuals, among them many vocal critics of 1968.Footnote 118 Analyses of generation have acquired considerable conceptual sophistication, of course, moving away from reifying specific biographical experiences as key markers of generation toward understanding generations as socially constructed communities. Yet, the role that intragenerational conflict and antagonism plays in creating generational ties and sustaining them over time has largely been neglected in German history writing.Footnote 119 Karl Mannheim, the much maligned but still influential godfather of generational history, made the idea of intragenerational polarization central to his often-cited concept, in fact. But this is an aspect of his theory that is regularly overlooked and hardly applied.Footnote 120
This article has sought to demonstrate that contestation was indeed key in 1968—not just among activists on the left and their older antagonists in the media and other positions of authority, but also among student activists of a similar age. Christian Democratic students and their peers in the SDS-led student movement disagreed, often vehemently—particularly in West Berlin, a heavily militarized city fenced in by the Wall—about what struggling for democracy meant a mere two decades after the collapse of the Third Reich, about the lessons they should draw from the Nazi past, and about how to define Germany's relationship to the United States. Consequently, the familiar narrative that simply pits activists like Rudi Dutschke or the communards Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans against the city's “establishment” needs to be refined. Christian Democratic students—activists who were, in effect, other ’68ers—helped to shape and were, in turn, shaped by the events of 1968 in West Berlin, the capital of the Cold War.
