The movement was fuelled in part by the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School of philosophers including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and tracts printed by the Suhrkamp Verlag. Local theaters staged productions by Sartre and Brecht and a new kind of thinking started to take shape -- one that rejected previous notions about the formation of identity and focused on individualism.
In Germany, a unique historical factor made it different from the student movements taking shape around the world to protest the Vietnam War: The country was still coming to terms with its recent fascist history and the genocide it had perpetrated against Europe's Jews during World War II.
Dissenting voices from conservative circles who considered nation, religion and tradition more important than modern individualism, died down as a series of trials publicly aired the scope of the elite's participation in the vast crimes committed by Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. And as the Frankfurt "Auschwitz Trials" began in 1963, many young people developed a deep skepticism toward their parents' generation. They saw the generation which preceded them as responsible for National Socialism, and, even worse, responsible for suppressing that terrible history during the first decades after the war -- a time characterized by the country's reconstruction and the ensuing "economic miracle."
Enrollment at universities increased and fears grew among students that they had become politically powerless in the face of the Cold War. They began protesting rearmament and nuclear testing in the East and West. International crises were targeted as well, particularly those where political oppression might have been at play -- the intervention in Congo by England and France, the segregation policies in South Africa, and the dictatorship of the Iranian Shah, who had the powerful backing of the United States.
When US troops invaded Vietnam, the protests grew confrontational. But the activism was also aimed at preventing legislation known as the German Emergency Acts. The Allies had insisted that the German government pass emergency laws so that steps could be taken to protect occupying troops in the event of civil unrest. But many in Germany opposed the emergency decree, which allowed the cabinet to pass laws in times of emergency without parliamentary approval. Opponents noted that a similar law had ultimately enabled Hitler to come to power in the 1930s. When the grand coalition was elected in 1966, fears grew that, with the country's two biggest political parties consolidating their power, a new dictatorship could result should the Emergency Acts be passed.
Tensions increase dramatically in 1967. On June 2, a police officer shot and killed a student protester named Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration during an official state visit by the Iranian Shah to West Berlin. Prior to the incident, protests tended to draw only several hundred protesters. But the police overreaction that led to Ohnesorg's killing caused the number of demonstrators to soar at later marches. Bild blamed the students themselves for Ohnesorg's death -- for creating the tense atmosphere surrounding the protests. It was an accusation that further agitated Germany's students.
The German Emergency Acts ultimately came into effect in May 1968, but the feared totalitarian state never came to pass. And the student movement, after its failure to stop the emergency legislation, began quickly unraveling in 1969.
But not before it spawned the radical violence of the Red Army Faction. The RAF was part of an ideological splintering of the 1968 movement that saw Rudi Dutschke famously part ways with more radical elements. Most of the movement would later merge into former Chancellor Willy Brandt's reform-era SPD, but it also sparked a far-reaching cultural revolution. As happened elsewhere in the world, most of the 1968ers ultimately joined the mainstream, with a number of 1960s activists -- including Rudi Dutschke -- later paving the way to found the Green Party. Dutschke himself was to be a key figure in the party, but he died shortly before its official creation in 1980. Some of them, most famously Joschka Fischer, became ministers in the German government led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Another prominent Green Party member was out on Friday to honor Rudi Dutschke at the demonstration on Kurfürstendamm. Hans-Christian Ströbele, who has been a member of Germany's parliament for a total of a dozen years and who is deputy head of the Greens, honored Dutschke with the words: "Rudi, the fight goes on -- on the streets and in the parliament."
Behind him, bicycles covered the street. On the spot where Rudi Dutschke's bike had been left behind 40 years before.
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