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The youth rebellions of the late 1960s—associated in the popular and scholarly consciousness with the year 1968—were part of a global event. They embraced, in differing forms, the capitalist West as well as the communist East, the countries of the Third World as well as those of the First and Second. The term “1968” has become a shorthand not only for a particular series of events—social unrest in locations as diverse as Mexico and China, France and Japan, Czechoslovakia and the United States—but for a certain type of interconnectedness closely associated with the process of globalization shaping the contemporary world. Yet the study of “1968” poses a set of profound conceptual and practical difficulties. Alongside the basic problem of analyzing an ill‐defined “event” with amorphous contours, decentralized agency, and (in most cases) little lasting institutional signature, there is the question of how exactly its “globality” is to be studied. However global in scope and orientation, “1968” was played out in and around specific national contexts, and it is to these that we must look to understand the larger, world event. Yet the nation‐state cannot function as our primary frame of reference, not only because of the importance of transnational influences in shaping local events, but because of how intimately “1968” was linked to the creation of globalizing imagined communities that cut across national boundaries.1

Work on “1968” has increasingly emphasized comparative perspectives and the investigation of transnational linkages; yet it has also exhibited a tendency to take the “global” somewhat for granted. That is, the global—whether it is understood to function as a “spirit” or Zeitgeist, as an ideological orientation or commitment among actors, or simply as a conjunctural fact—is often treated as little more than a product of the nation‐state multiplied. Perhaps this is unavoidable to a certain extent, and indeed, maybe it makes sense if the goal is to demonstrate fundamental similarities across national cases. Yet this approach does not help us very much in writing about individual national cases, nor does it give us a very concrete understanding of how globality functioned in them. A more useful approach is one in which the globality of “1968” does not merely become a function of “one, two, many nation‐states,” but is understood to arise out of the interplay of global factors at the local level. This approach entails two complementary lines of inquiry. First, we must identify trans‐national influences, analyzing their mode of transmission and exploring how they articulated with local concerns, goals, traditions, and histories. This entails a focus not only on modes of transfer, but on the conditions governing the reception of what is transferred. Second, we must examine how local actors imagined themselves into the world, creating alternative cognitive maps that corresponded to a new type of politics. This approach—situating the local within the global while locating the global at work locally—can enable us to place the history of individual nation‐states in the new perspective provided by an enlarged frame of reference, while capturing, in a concrete way, something of the globality of “1968.”2

The global finds expression in the local in a particularly profound way in divided Germany. Lying as it did on either side of the “Iron Curtain,” divided Germany—by which is meant East Germany and West Germany, the two states created by the Cold War superpowers atop the ruins of the German state defeated in World War II—holds some special advantages as a case study. In the Federal Republic, the global, transnational aspects of “1968” were writ particularly large. The core group of militants who radicalized the West German student movement, leading it into an escalating series of conflicts with the authorities, were motivated by an explicit set of linkages. Some of these—including the desire to import the struggle of the Third World against imperialism into the heart of the metropole—were a general part of the world youth rebellion, at least in the West; others—such as the link between the Cold War (of which the U.S. war in Vietnam was a part) and the partition of Germany and Berlin—were specific to Germany. Their young counterparts in the east also understood themselves as part of a global community, a community that included not only the student movements of the West and the anti‐imperialist revolutionaries of the Third World, but also young people pursuing a democratic socialist alternative in the East.

Both Germanies also took part in an international cultural revolution that has figured prominently in much of the recent literature. International networks of consumption and cultural exchange drew the Federal Republic of Germany into the web of global youth culture, a youth culture that in turn played a key role in the construction of political identities. A similar situation existed in the German Democratic Republic, where, despite intermittent state repression, Western music and fashion—as well as home‐grown variants—became increasingly popular from the mid‐sixties on. The question of how and to what extent this youth cultural wave was linked to specific political protest movements—or the extent to which it is to be seen as “political” in its own right—has been the subject of debate; but it is clear that by the late 1960s, international youth culture had become so closely intertwined with anti‐authoritarian left‐wing politics that the two were increasingly seen, by both friend and foe, as synonymous. One task must therefore be to examine the interplay between the elements of the international counterculture, on the one hand, and the ideas of the global New Left, on the other, for their relationship varied from location to location.3

It is helpful in this regard to think in terms of two “1968s.” The “big 1968” is the emancipatory complex made up of international youth culture, on the one hand, and an associated set of anti‐authoritarian ideas, on the other; the “small 1968” is the form the larger complex takes in an individual national setting. Thus, for example, when we refer to the “East German 1968,” we understand an event that bears resemblance to other events elsewhere around the same time and is connected to them to a greater or lesser extent by more or less organic linkages—an event in which actors understand themselves as part of a global phenomenon and partake of ideas and practices in general circulation. Yet we also understand an event in which both the valence of the political ideas of the “big 1968” and the conditions governing the reception of transnational youth culture are subtly but decisively different than they are elsewhere. Attention to this distinction between the “big” and the “small” must be central to any attempt to write a history of “1968” in a particular nation‐state, for it is out of their intersection that the particular shape of events emerges.4

This is one reason why “1968” must be seen and analyzed in a wider temporal dimension; not only did the political “big events” take place on their own timetables—in West Germany it took more than a decade for the key events of the late sixties (the most important of which arguably took place in 1967) to be retroactively fitted into the scheme of a world‐revolutionary “1968,” and in East Germany other caesurae (1953, 1965, 1971, 1989) loom large—but the reception and processing of international popular culture, the speed and extent to which it could become connected with an emancipatory politics, was decisively affected by local cultural‐political conditions. In the German Democratic Republic, some of the key caesurae having to do with the possibility of an emancipatory breakout (e.g., 1965, 1971) relate precisely to the regime's attempts to come to terms with the local reception of global popular culture. This makes the problem of “1968” in the German Democratic Republic—no less than in the Federal Republic of Germany—a transnational‐historical one; for it was around the issue of reception—primarily of Western popular culture, but also of the political ideas of the Western New Left—that some of the most salient political conflicts in the GDR circa 1968 were organized.5

A key question in considering the effect of transnational influences has to do with the extent to which they are able to have an impact—that is, the extent to which the possibility exists for their use. Here “1968” takes on, alongside the temporal, a spatial dimension, and not only because of the salience of border‐crossing patterns and connections; the possibility of pursuing a democratic‐emancipatory politics was decisively influenced by the amount of political space available. The more totalizing the claims of a regime—the more it aimed at monopolizing public discourse and social organization (as in the Stalinist dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc)—the less space existed for initiative from below. The extent to which the emancipatory impulses of the 1960s (the “big 1968”) could articulate with an emancipatory local politics (the “small 1968”) was in large part a function of the degree to which the state was willing and able to use force to suppress alternative politics. This is one important reason why “the sixties” manifested themselves differently in different locations; local conditions not only determined the prospects for the development of a political movement, but shaped the sorts of claims that could be made by particular movements.6

This is one reason why the transnational element cannot refer simply or even primarily to connections between the two Germanies, as vital, striking, and little‐studied as these are. A more important element of the transnational—and one that makes a new approach useful for scholars working on “1968” in places other than divided Germany—has to do with the parallel interactions of the two Germanies with the broader world. That is, if we understand the nation‐state as a nodal point at which global influences coalesce in response to unique local conditions, then alongside the comparative question (How was “1968” different in the two Germanies?) and the trans‐German or trans‐bloc question (How did the two Germanies interact with each other in terms of the interchange of activists, culture, and ideas?), we are able to ask a truly transnational question, which is also a global/local one: How did elements of the “big 1968” (and for that matter other global currents) manifest themselves in two related but different spatial locations? How did they help create the respective “small 1968” in each half of divided Germany?

This question is somewhat easier to answer in the case of the Federal Republic, where the watershed importance of events is widely acknowledged, the interconnectedness readily apparent, and the evidentiary base rich. The broad thrust of organizations and agendas aimed at opening up the authoritarian political culture of the Federal Republic in the 1960s was contained under the rubric of the “extra‐parliamentary opposition” (APO). The APO represented the confluence of elements of the 1950s West German peace and anti‐nuclear movements with a broad‐based opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Federal Republic in the 1960s, crystallized around the issue of the so‐called Emergency Laws (Notstandsgesetz) pursued by the government as a “safeguard” against future “civil unrest.” Opposition to the Emergency Laws and what they represented was widespread, not only among youth, but among a spectrum of intellectual opinion, captured most famously in the polemic of the philosopher Karl Jaspers published in 1966, Where Is the Federal Republic Going?7

The chief organizational vehicle of the APO—and of the broader rebellion of West German youth with which it was connected—was the Socialist German Student League (SDS). Originally the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the SDS was expelled from its parent organization in 1961 for its opposition to the latter's official rejection of revolutionary Marxism in favor of establishment‐friendly reformism. The ruling partnership between the SPD and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the so‐called Grand Alliance of 1966 created the perceived need for an extra‐parliamentary opposition, since the SPD, it was argued, was now incapable as a governing party of mounting effective opposition to Germany's ruling elites. The youth response to state repression, drastically accelerated from 1966–1967 with the growth of the APO into a full‐fledged protest movement, proceeded in parallel with a growing recognition of West German society's failure to punish those responsible for the catastrophe of the Third Reich. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–1965 focused a new and long‐overdue spotlight on the crimes of the Nazi era. The presence of former Nazis in high places—not least among them Chancellor Kurt‐Georg Kiesinger, who became head of the SPD‐CDU coalition government in 1966—lent weight to the arguments of those who charged that the West German state was a morally rotten Cold War construct pursuing an official ideology of anti‐communism on behalf of an American occupying power.8

The history of “1968” in West Germany illustrates the limitations of an organization‐centric approach to history, for it is really a history less of SDS per se than of a series of interventions on SDS by a small group of individuals who fundamentally altered the nature of the politics it pursued. This group embodied two complementary types of radicalism. One was associated with the name of Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic spokesman and firebrand of the SDS. Like his chief colleague Bernd Rabehl, Dutschke was not from West but from East Germany. A student at the Free University in West Berlin, he was stranded by the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. An opponent of Stalinism and critic of the East German state, he believed strongly in the promise of Marxism and hoped to revitalize it. The other key strain of radicalism was associated with Dieter Kunzelmann, the product of a West German bohemia dedicated to breaking down the boundaries between art and life. Kunzelmann was chief theorist of the collective of Munich painters known as the Gruppe SPUR, a group that scandalized the Munich bourgeoisie successfully enough to see its members, Kunzelmann included, brought up on trial for obscenity and other charges.9

In 1961, the Gruppe SPUR became the West German affiliate of the Situationist International. Offering a radical, total critique of Western consumer capitalism and bureaucratic eastern communism, situationism emphasized the transformation of consciousness through satire, bluffs, and provocation—whatever was necessary, in short—to break through the blinding “spectacle” staged by modern technocratic society. Kunzelmann left the Gruppe SPUR the following year but subsequently played a key role in infusing these tactics into the West German student movement. The group he helped found, Subversive Aktion, was joined by Dutschke and Rabehl at the beginning of 1964. Together they attempted to combine a situationist politics of provocation with an active revolutionary program, a task in which they were influenced by the Provo movement in the Netherlands and by the unfolding politics of direct action in the civil rights movement of the American South and the free speech movement in Berkeley.10

This eclectic mix of influences crystallized in connection with a key field of engagement: the Third World. One of the first public actions of Subversive Aktion was to help organize a protest against the visit of African strongman Moise Tshombe in December 1964. The former head of the breakaway Katanga province in the newly decolonized Congo, Tshombe had been involved in the death of the country's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Heavily supported by Western mining interests, having received aid from the Belgian military as well as from a motley collection of mercenaries (among them former members of Germany's Hitler‐era Waffen SS), Tshombe symbolized the worst of the past at work in the present. His visit to the Berlin Wall, where he was photographed looking solemnly out over the border separating the free world from the world of communist oppression, symbolized the moral bankruptcy of a Cold War capable of transforming a dictator into a friend of democracy. The protests against Tshombe—one in Munich on December 14, a second in West Berlin on December 18—were aimed against his abysmal human rights record; but they were also protests against the persistence of colonial domination in the Third World, against the straitjacket of the bloc system, and against the stifling anti‐communism of West Germany. In this sense they brought together the global and the local, a fusion strikingly captured in the blunt rhetorical question posed in the flyer created for the protest: “What business does the murderer Tshombe have here?”11

Knowledge of Third World human rights issues, carried by journalism, photos, and film, became increasingly available in West Germany in the 1960s.12 Equally important, however, was an often overlooked connection with the Third World: foreign students. A growing presence on West German campuses in the 1960s, international students played a major role in putting Third World issues on the West German student agenda.13 Their involvement in the protests against Tshombe was especially striking; foreign students dogged Tshombe with shouts of “Murderer!” during his appearance before wealthy industrialists in Düsseldorf on December 17 and made up some 150 of the 800 protesters in West Berlin the next day.14 African students, marching shoulder to shoulder with whites, appear prominently in photographs of the December 18 protest in West Berlin.15 These foreign students, Rudi Dutschke noted approvingly in his diary, helped turn what had originally been planned as a “silent demonstration” on December 18 into an assault on public order involving catcalls, thrown tomatoes, and scuffles with the police. “Our friends from the Third World stepped into the breach,” he wrote afterward, “and the Germans had to follow.”16

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Figure 1: Protest against Moise Tshombe, West Berlin, December 18, 1964. The central placard reads “No Berlin Embrace for Tshombe.” Landesarchiv Berlin.

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Dutschke later located the real beginning of the West German student revolt precisely at this moment—the moment at which, following Third World students “into the breach” in physical defiance of the police, young Germans achieved a psychological breakthrough in their relationship with authority.17 Dutschke's romantic attachment to the Third World is clear; but equally clear is the fact that the Third World did not make its appearance in the West German “1968” in the form of a fantasy borne on posters of Mao Zedong and chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,” or any of the other cliché images of young protesters disconnected from reality and blind to the authoritarian realities of Third World nationalist movements. It made its appearance in person, in the form of dictators such as Tshombe and the democracy‐minded foreign students who made up an active Third World presence in the metropole.18

A second major action featuring the alliance of German and African students was the protest in August 1966 against the West Berlin premier of the film Africa Addio. Directed by the Italian Gualtiero Jacopetti, Africa Addio was an exploitation film masquerading as a documentary. Employing footage shot in the Congo in 1964, shortly before Tshombe's visit to Berlin, it depicted gruesome scenes of mob violence, animal sacrifice, and execution.19 The all too obvious message, as the SDS and the African Student League put it, was that “the people of the African continent lack the ability to build civilization.”20 The inherent racism of this depiction of Africans was underlined by the appearance in the film of the well‐known German mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, a former member of Hitler's Wehrmacht who was shown executing a black prisoner. The film thus presented a golden opportunity to protest against racism, against the persistence of colonial exploitation, and against the continuing presence of fascism. The protest began when Dieter Kunzelmann and Adekunle Ajala (head of the African Student League in West Berlin) pulled the curtains closed over the stage of the theater, precipitating several days of disturbances between police and protesters.21 These disturbances were important in foreshadowing the mass protests of 1967–1969, but they also highlight the importance of educational exchange networks that brought foreign students such as Ajala—an exchange scholar with the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)—to West Germany.22

Parallel with the concrete intrusion of the Third World into the politics of the Federal Republic came a growing interest in the Third World as a source of theoretical solutions to the revolutionary problems of the metropole. Several months before the Africa Addio protest, frustrated by the inactivity of SDS in another field of anti‐colonial struggle—Vietnam—Dutschke and others had decided to take matters into their own hands. Over the night of February 3–4, 1966, they distributed a flyer condemning the West German government for its support of the U.S. war in Vietnam. This action—which had an incendiary effect in a West Berlin in which the overwhelming majority of the population as well as the authorities viewed the Americans as friends and protectors—reflects the key importance of the Vietnam War in internationalizing the student movements of “1968” worldwide; but it also illustrates the unique role played by the war in the West German setting: because of the United States' constitutive role in the formation of the West German state, U.S. actions anywhere else in the world reflected automatically back into West German society. The war also had a special meaning in the light of the National Socialist past, a fact reflected in Dutschke's use of the term “genocide” in reference to Vietnam.23

Dutschke's right to undertake actions on behalf of the SDS did not go unchallenged; called to justify himself for the way in which he and his circle had gone it alone, he did so—tellingly—by citing the example of the Third World. Che Guevara had shown in Cuba, argued Dutschke, that a small, determined group could make a revolution. Influenced by the German‐American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Dutschke argued that the industrial proletariat was no longer the motor force of history. The mass base of the revolution was now to be, in his words, the “underprivileged of the world.”24 The Third World thus supplied a new revolutionary subject for the German New Left; but still open was the question of the role of the revolutionary in the metropole. How was the student movement to fit into this new global scheme?25

The answer, characteristically, was borne on the winds of international pop culture. Sometime during the month of February 1966, Dutschke, Kunzelmann, and others went to see the film Viva Maria! directed by Louis Malle.26 It starred Brigitte Bardot and Jean Moreau as two women, both named Maria, who used their cover as performers in a traveling circus to fight in the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. This lighthearted revolutionary sex romp was imbued by its young viewers with deep significance. For Dutschke, the Marxist former East German, the two main characters personified two important revolutionary streams: Moreau's character embodied a theoretical but passive Marxism; Bardot represented anarchism, full of passion but lacking in theory. Dutschke's inspiration was to combine the two. “Marxist theory,” as his close collaborator Rabehl put it, “would make fruitful anarchism's will to revolt, its spontaneity, fantasy, and passion.”27 The response to Viva Maria! underlines both the importance of popular culture in the formation of radical political identities in the 1960s and the necessity for the historian of using an active model of cultural reception; Dutschke and Kunzelmann saw in the movie what they wanted to see, taking from it what was useful in their particular situation.28

The most important idea crystallized by the film was the necessity not just of supporting the struggles of the Third World, or of using its theory, but of bringing those struggles home to the First World.29 This insight underlay the subsequent founding of the “Viva Maria Group.” Meant to function as a vanguard within the SDS, the group helped to effect a theoretical reorientation for the West German student movement and served to channel further transnational connections. Through his American wife, Gretchen, Dutschke made contact with Black Nationalists in New York, familiarizing himself with the writings of Malcolm X, and even visiting the ghettos of New York and Chicago during a trip to the United States in September 1966. Those experiences inspired him to bring into the Viva Maria Group the idea that “colonial” populations in the U.S. were also part of the world struggle, and indeed, that their situation in U.S. cities mirrored that of students in German cities. This position resonated strongly with the thought of Marcuse, which was highly influential for Dutschke, with its emphasis on the revolutionary importance of marginal social groups.30

For Kunzelmann, the film's vision of the revolutionary group as traveling circus reinforced a longstanding conviction: “Revolution must be fun.”31 This formula became central to the major project that was to arise out of the Viva Maria Group's search for an effective revolutionary praxis: the founding of a revolutionary urban commune. This commune would create the basis for a two‐pronged assault: on the one hand, a revolution of lifestyle that would destroy bourgeois rule at its source, in the relationships and conditions of everyday life; on the other, the transplantation of the Third World liberation struggle into the metropole.32 This vision—prepared by intense discussions in the summer of 1966—was realized in January 1967 with the founding of the Kommune I. Famous for its association with sexual liberation—a natural accompaniment to its emphasis on politicizing the personal that nevertheless drew more on myth than on fact—the Kommune I played a crucial role in radicalizing the politics of SDS.33

From the (pre‐Kommune) “strolling demonstration” of December 1966, in which protesters mingled with shoppers in West Berlin's premier commercial district, to the thwarted April 1967 pudding‐bomb assault on the motorcade of visiting U.S. vice‐president Hubert Humphrey, the communards introduced to the West German student scene a situationist‐inspired politics of provocation. This turn was not welcomed by the leadership of the SDS, for whom the iconoclastic voluntarism of the Kommune I's actions seemed to subvert the democratic process. “Smoke bombs, eggs, and pudding,” argued the SDS in clear reference to the sort of individualist actions pioneered by the commune, “are the means of an impotent rebellion.”34 The expulsion of the Kommune I in May 1967 came too late to halt its effect. In the glare of the media, the communards—who spent their mornings scanning the daily newspapers to see what had been written about them in order to find inspiration for fresh outrages—became rebel icons. A voluminous amount of fan mail, directed primarily toward the media stars Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel, illustrated the growing status of the commune as a site on which were projected the anti‐authoritarian fantasies of young people from around West Germany and beyond.35

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Figure 2: Rainer Langhans of the Kommune I, arrested at a demonstration in West Berlin, October 8, 1967. Note the bombed‐out Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the background, an ever‐present reminder of the Nazi past. Landesarchiv Berlin.

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In effecting a shift in emphasis away from the serious Marxism of the student movement, the Kommune I pointed the way toward a lifestyle radicalism increasingly expressed in terms drawn from international pop culture. In a scandalous series of satirical flyers produced in response to the tragic accidental fire in the Belgian department store L'Innovation in May 1967, the Kommune I offered its own take on the Third World national liberation. Styling the fire as “a new demonstration method” designed to introduce “American methods” to a European audience—a pointed reference to the use of napalm in Vietnam—they spoofed the overblown prose style of American advertising copy while drawing a connection between the worlds of consumer capitalism and colonial warfare. The comical malapropism of flyer #8, “Burn, warehouse, burn” (the German for “department store” is Warenhaus), added a further layer of association, recalling the “Burn, baby, burn” of the American ghetto riots.36 In a telling example of life imitating art, the ominous rhetorical question—“When will the Berlin department stores burn?”—was cited by real‐life arsonists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Enslin in justification for their attack on a Frankfurt department store in April 1968.37 Increasingly, the communards' prankster style of activism created a space in which the distinction between rhetorical violence and real violence became increasingly blurred, helping to set the stage for a group of revolutionary desperadoes to begin living out the myth of the urban guerrilla first inspired by Viva Maria!

This development unfolded in response to a real and growing conflict with the authorities, which marked a fateful milestone on June 2, 1967. On that day, a visit to West Berlin by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran provoked protests that fundamentally changed the course of the West German student movement. Like the earlier actions against Tshombe and Africa Addio, this protest arose out of the interaction of West German and foreign students. The Iranian expatriate author Bahman Nirumand played a central role. Forced into exile in West Berlin—where he had studied as a teenager—Nirumand was a leader in the Confederation of Iranian Students, National Union (CISNU), an organization with a particularly strong presence in West Germany.38 His book about conditions in Iran, published in March 1967, had sold 40,000 copies by the time of the shah's visit.39 The city administration's attempt to force the Free University to cancel an appearance by Nirumand scheduled for June 1—the day before the shah was to arrive in West Berlin—set off a fateful chain reaction of events.

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Figure 3: Bahman Nirumand speaking at the Free University in Berlin, June 1, 1967. Note the Farah Diba mask, fashioned from a grocery bag, inverted beside the podium. Landesarchiv Berlin.

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Nirumand approached SDS about organizing a protest against the shah, but was initially rebuffed by SDS leaders Christian Semler and Rudi Dutschke, who worried that it would be a distraction from the issue of Vietnam.40 The members of the Kommune I, by contrast, were keen to participate. It was they who created the signature prop of the protest: paper masks of the shah and his queen, Farah Diba, part absurdist humor, part protection for Iranian students from the shah's secret police.41 The SDS joined in on preparations for the protest, and the General Student Committee of the Free University produced materials contrasting the democratic pretensions of the shah (“We Persians are of the opinion that no price is too high to achieve the human values contained in a democracy”) with the grim reality of a dictatorship that tortured and murdered its own citizens.42 Dutschke's anti‐authoritarian faction produced a “wanted poster” for the shah, which cited specific instances of human rights abuses (“The Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is wanted for the torture and murder of the journalist Karimpour Shirazi”) and called attention to the culpability of the West German government (“last seen in the company of the Federal president, Heinrich Lübke”).43 That President Lübke, like Federal chancellor Kurt‐Georg Kiesinger, was a former active member of the Nazi Party was lost on no one who read the flyer.

The events of June 2, in which a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by an undercover police officer, are well known.44 The killing of Ohnesorg played a major role in spreading the radicalism of the West Berlin SDS to the rest of Germany, and radicalized the Berlin scene even further. Characteristically, these events were a product not of national developments in any meaningful sense, but of fundamentally transnational developments. They arose out of the interaction of two overlapping fields of engagement: West German students protested against the shah as a symbol of neocolonial oppression and Cold War anti‐communism; Iranian students protested as members of a diaspora concerned as much with national (Iranian) as with global issues. In both cases, the issues were understood in global/local terms: there could be no democracy in one country without democracy in the other.

The death of Ohnesorg, followed by the attempted assassination of Dutschke less than a year later, launched the student movement on a new and fateful course. With a severely injured Dutschke off the scene, the SDS spent itself in a final, futile series of street battles with the authorities before splitting up into its various constituent parts. Some activists retreated into a private world of drugs and/or New Age spirituality, while others carried forward the banner of personal liberation into the women's, gay, and other liberation movements. Some joined one of the crop of new small Maoist and/or Marxist‐Leninist splinter parties, while still others gravitated to the “freak” scene of radicalized dropouts in enclaves such as West Berlin's Kreuzberg district. In the latter, the cultural‐political style pioneered by the Kommune I came into its maturity, with popular culture supplying an aesthetic vehicle for the reinvention of lost radical traditions. A vibrant assortment of underground newspapers created a potent collage of guns, dope, sex, and revolution painted against a global canvas. The unlikely blend of hippie lifestyle and revolutionary politics was captured in a coat of arms that appeared in the pages of FIZZ, featuring a Kalashnikov assault rifle and an ornate hash pipe crossed over a red star.45

Such imagery was not ephemeral, but marked the importance of popular culture as a site for imagined linkages between the global and the local. These linkages expressed serious content, moreover, for among these radicalized freaks were a number of those who would become involved in an exacerbated form of protest: armed struggle against the state. Yet in broader terms, this radical scene is but one more example of the transnational in the West German “1968.” Like so many other features of the West German “1968”—the importation of radical traditions such as French situationism; the adoption of protest repertoires drawn from the American civil rights movement and the Provo scene in the Netherlands; visits by foreign dictators drawn to the Federal Republic for the Cold War raison d'état; the presence of diasporic student communities facilitated by educational exchange networks; the rapid spread of cultural products such as music, films, and books; the influence of international media (important in both disseminating information to radicals and disseminating the actions of radicals to the wider world); the spread and local adoption of the fashion and mores of the international counterculture—it illustrates how transnational connections intersected across the physical and cultural terrain of the Federal Republic, producing an explosion with critical repercussions for the development of West German democracy.

Many of the same lines of influence fell across the German Democratic Republic, but although they often produced similar effects, the results differed dramatically. If the extra‐parliamentary opposition in the Federal Republic can be seen as a delayed response to the problem of German authoritarianism—“1968” as the “second founding” of the West German Republic—the problem of democracy in the German Democratic Republic was of an entirely different order. From 1946, with the founding of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), when the Social Democrats were more or less forced into a fusion with the Communist Party under Soviet auspices, the possibility of pursuing an independent democratic politics in East Germany was hindered at best. Historians have traced a change in the nature of opposition in the GDR from “fundamental” in the late 1940s and 1950s to “reformist” in the 1970s and 1980s—that is, from a total rejection of the SED's claim to rule, to a hope that the system of socialism could be subject to democratic reform.46 Notable figures of this reform movement, including the protest singer Wolf Biermann and the dissident scientist Robert Havemann—elder statesmen of the East German “1968”—steadfastly refused to condemn out of hand the socialist experiment in the GDR.47

This stubborn commitment to the promise of the GDR was characteristic of the East German “68ers,” a group that famously included Havemann's sons Frank and Florian. Unlike their counterparts in the West, and in contrast to the dissident intelligentsia in other Eastern Bloc countries, the GDR 68ers believed that theirs was the superior system, one capable of producing real socialism.48 They also experienced the contradiction between the state's humanitarian claims and the reality of lived repression. The key event in the East German 1968—the crushing of the democratic socialist experiment in neighboring Czechoslovakia—was important precisely because it exposed this contradiction in striking fashion. The response to the invasion opens a window onto the actions of a small group of dissenters around the Havemann siblings, a group that protested the invasion, suffered the consequences, and later attempted to elaborate an emancipatory youth politics within the confines of a totalizing communist society. Some went on to found an East Berlin commune in imitation of the Kommune I, an experiment that displayed important similarities with, but also differences from, its western model.

According to an informed estimate, the East German “68ers” were a small group, numbering only some 200–300 persons (as opposed to several thousand in West Germany).49 Their protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was limited; indeed, the Havemann siblings and their friends are well known in part because they were among the few out of their larger circle to protest openly. Because their actions received scrutiny at the time, and because a number of them have since recorded their reflections, members of this group make up an important collective source for the East German “1968.” In a situation in which, as Annette Simon reminds us, the protagonists enjoyed “no public, no media, and above all no … SDS,” attention to this small group of Prominentenkinder [children of notables] can help us trace the imprint of the “big 1968” on East Germany—that is, to follow the path of transnational influences into East Germany from both East and West, to understand which were important and why, and, crucially, to understand how they became significant in the only instance in the GDR “1968” in which someone tried to use them to be politically effective.50

Yet it was young workers, not students, who channeled the most important trans‐national connection of the 1960s. “Beat music” (the music of English groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones) transmitted a new life feeling that flowed across the borders of nations and blocs, carrying with it a sometimes inchoate but always powerful anti‐authoritarian impulse that was much more fundamental than any specific political position of the global sixties.51 Enthusiasm for the new music shaped the outlook, mores, appearance, and behavior of the young generation of the 1960s in the GDR. Music and fashion became a badge of identity, a totem of disengagement from the dull conformity of daily life. The importance of personal style as a political statement is captured strikingly in the term of self‐identification employed in the reminiscences of members of the East Berlin underground scene collected in 2004 by Thomas P. Funk: “longhairs.”52 It is no surprise that not only music but hair became a primary point of attack in the state's counteroffensive against youth identification with “Western decadence.”

The “international feeling” that allowed young people to imagine themselves into a wider world beyond the grim reality of daily life in the GDR was transmitted through a number of concrete routes.53 Before the wall was built, Berlin acted as a zone of exchange between east and west; American cultural products—movies, music, publications—were freely available in the western half of the city, and many young people from the east routinely came to take advantage of them.54 This cultural exchange did not simply cease after the construction of the wall. Young people could hang around the Friedrichstraße crossing point between the two halves of the city—as some of Funk's informants did—in hopes of befriending visitors from the west, or they could establish contact with the American soldiers on patrol with popular hits blaring from their jeep radios. Western records and books, brought in through illegal channels, helped fuel disaffection from the East German regime and influenced the sense of personal identity.55

The most dangerous Western import—popular music—became an obsession of the regime.56 Unable to make up its mind about how to handle the threat, it pursued a zigzag course. After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an unofficial period of relaxation ensued, in which expressions of cultural opening in general, and opening to the West in particular, were tacitly tolerated, even encouraged.57 Attempting to create a homegrown version of what young people had previously obtained from the West, the regime created youth clubs and sponsored the formation of beat groups.58 These developments were interrupted by the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party in December 1965. Attacking notable critics of the regime such as Havemann and Biermann, and cracking down on beat music by forcing groups with English names to change them to German equivalents and banning some groups outright, the Eleventh Plenum struck a heavy blow against the trend toward cultural liberalization.59

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Figure 4: Banned by the party: “The Butlers” (1965). Robert‐Havemann‐Gesellschaft.

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In response, young music fans engaged in the largest protests since the workers' uprising of July 1953. The protests in Leipzig in October 1965 were brutally repressed by police with water cannons, truncheons, and attack dogs. This assault established a pattern in the state's relationship with nonconformist youth culture that would persist, with occasional breaks, through the 1970s.60 The regime launched periodic campaigns against so‐called “Gammler”—a term that can be translated approximately as “do‐nothing” or “lay‐about,” with attendant connotations of dirtiness and laziness—and young “longhairs” were “hunted” by police and sometimes administered forced haircuts.61 Young people fought back against this offensive with any means at their disposal. On more than one occasion, for example, they shouted “Long Live Congo Müller!” in reference to the West German mercenary who had been the subject of a widely shown documentary film aimed at embarrassing the Federal Republic.62 If this bit of youthful rebellion helped fuel the fantasies of a state security apparatus obsessed with the danger of resurgent fascism, its real content comes out in another slogan that often accompanied the name of Congo Müller: “Long live the Rolling Stones!”63

The violence of the regime's measures against youthful nonconformists arguably did as much to harm its reputation as its support for the crushing of the Prague Spring. The writer Brigitte Reimann was shocked by the brutality of the government's dealings with beat fans and hippies, observing: “There were demonstrations; the police used water cannons, arrested people; there was prison and work camps. The laughter in us disappeared.”64 The singer‐songwriter Bettina Wegner, a co‐founder of the Hootenanny Club and one of those who distributed flyers against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, expressed this feeling in a poem about the protest against the demolition of the church at the University of Leipzig in May 1968.65 Titled “Victory over the Gammler,” it read in part: “Twenty years ago in Auschwitz, we found hair in masses, well, raise your glasses, Karl Marx as barber, an army's on the move … armed with shears, the bloody German hair‐collectors, beat the Gammler! Hurrah, the Gammler!”66 The protest over the destruction of the church prefigured and helped fuel a Christian revival that made the Protestant church a main site of opposition to the state in the 1970s and 1980s.67

The line between “Gammler” and “68ers” was in any case never so clear, although the former were often slightly younger and, as the “Congo Müller” slogan suggests, were not always in possession of a well‐articulated politics.68 The two groups tended to embrace the same fashions and music. “The 68ers of the GDR,” writes Annette Simon, “were, exactly like their sisters and brothers in the west, stamped by the music of this time and the life feeling that it transported.”69 Florian Havemann writes: “Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix were at least as important [as the Western student movement], if not even more important. This music established a connection that reached all the way into the provinces, to a far bigger group, to the so‐called beat fans, who at that time were persecuted by the state.”70 These beat fans, Havemann writes, belonged to what was “probably the only truly functioning illegal organization there was: the record club.”71 Havemann himself belonged to such an operation in East Berlin. He and five other people obtained smuggled Western records, taping them and circulating them to others. He did the same with books, along with his friend Thomas Brasch. “We really didn't know our history,” he says, “and we wanted to find it out.”72

There were other means of contact between East and West. Annette Simon, several years younger than the main protagonists, remembers seeing Dutschke's interview with Günther Gauss on West German television in real time, and how impressed she was with his “anti‐authoritarian brashness.”73 Franziska Groszer, a member of the Kommune I‐Ost, saw the interview as well. “We were transfixed,” she recalls, “by the images of the world that flickered … at us from [West German] television … student unrest, Paris, Berlin, the Vietnam War, an interview with Dutschke … We were determined in no case simply to accept something just because it was expected of us, just because it was considered normal.”74 News of the West German student movement and attempts to import Western popular culture along the lines of the Hootenanny Club were, according to Frank Havemann, co‐founder of the Kommune I‐Ost, “things that awakened hopes. 1967 was for me the Hippie Year. But also important were the first reports about the extra‐parliamentary opposition, the anti‐shah demonstration, and the Vietnam demonstrations.”75 “You felt one with them,” remembers his girlfriend at the time, Erika Berthold, “even if you had never seen each other.”76

The “imaginary infiltration” of the West, writes Jan Faktor, a Czech contemporary with firsthand knowledge of the East Berlin scene, was also very much a matter of personal contacts. “Whether in television interviews that one excitedly followed, or in direct conversations with friends from the west who came to visit … here was no matter of dry theories. Through this direct reporting … one could … tell that the posture of these young western intellectuals was not a put‐on and not artificial.”77 At the salon presided over by the sculptress Ingeborg Hunzinger in 1967–1968, visits from West German radicals such as Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel of Kommune I were not uncommon.78 The relationship thus established was by no means one of master and pupil; on the contrary, as Florian Havemann said, “we felt ourselves very much their equals.”79 Burkhard Kleinert, one of those who distributed flyers against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, gave voice to a similar confidence: “At that time we believed, under the impression of the political struggles in the West, with which we were directly connected through friends, that we were taking part in a Europe‐wide, if not worldwide, breakthrough to a purified and modernized socialism.”80

The emancipatory potential of the Prague Spring supplied the GDR 68ers with an alternative source of inspiration as important as, if not more so than, the Western student movement. “The political orientation point for us in the east,” writes Annette Simon, “was above all the attempt to democratize socialism in the CSSR.”81 “At that time we took a strong interest in the developments in the CSSR,” remembers Erika Berthold. “Democratic socialism was something that appealed to us.”82 This interest, like that in the extra‐parliamentary opposition in the west, was driven by intensive contacts. The publication in Czechoslovakia of Ludvik Vaculik's “2,000 Words,” a manifesto of democratic socialist rebirth, evoked a keen interest in the GDR. “The ‘2,000 Words,’” writes Marc‐Dietrich Ohse, “ignited in Czechoslovakia itself, but also in the GDR, an intensive discussion about goals, opportunities, and problems of the Communist attempt at reform. Already in the early phase of the Prague Spring, after the publication of the action program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a naive euphoria had taken hold of many East Germans.”83 Frank Havemann recalled the great interest in his group in the course of the Prague Spring: “I always made sure to get hold of the ‘Prager Volksstimme.’ We went to all possible events, films, above all in the Czech Cultural Center in the Friedrichstraße.”84

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Figure 5: Young East Germans demonstrate their support for the Prague Spring, May Day celebration, East Berlin, May 1, 1968. The banner reads: “A Model for Everyone: CSSR [Czechoslovak Socialist Republic].” Robert‐Havemann‐Gesellschaft.

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Belief in the emancipatory potential of the experiment in Czechoslovakia fueled the aspirations of those who, like Frank Havemann, hoped for a democratization of East German socialism from within. “I read in 1968 an essay by Dutschke,” recalls Havemann. “But it was what was happening in the East in 1968 that awakened the greatest hopes, the student unrest in Warsaw, but above all the Prague Spring. The anti‐authoritarian provocations directed in the 1960s against the western state and the prevailing culture seemed to us to spring from the best motives and intentions.” Fundamentally, however, protests in East and West were understood to be part of the same phenomenon. As Havemann put it: “The protest forms of the 68ers and their models for an alternative way of life made a great impression. Everything about them seemed to us modern and exciting, and they embodied the hope of a human socialism in the West. For us, the Paris May and the Prague Spring were two sides of the same coin—the necessary prerequisite for the end of the [Cold War] bloc confrontation.”85

The Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 produced the supreme moment of cognitive dissonance for those who believed that Eastern Bloc socialism could develop a “human face.” Protest did not spring exclusively or even primarily from the GDR 68ers, however, but was widely rooted in the population.86 As early as the morning of August 21—the day of the invasion—flyers criticizing the invasion and graffiti bearing slogans such as “Russians out of the CSSR” appeared throughout East Germany.87 Open public demonstrations were rare, but official reports record many cases of refusal to go along with the officially prescribed position on the invasion.88 Files of the state security, the Stasi, record nearly two thousand acts of protest—mostly involving the distribution of flyers and the painting on walls of slogans such as “Long Live Dubček!”—stretching into the early September months.89

The dilemma posed by the invasion was particularly poignant for the GDR 68ers. “In the moment of the invasion it was clear,” writes Florian Havemann, “that here something decisive had happened, that here a chance for socialism had been destroyed.”90 Bettina Wegner recalled: “I saw on [West German] television how everything was smashed, how the people cried, how they bled … We had to do something about it, so we distributed flyers: Long Live Red Prague. Up with Dubček.”91 Thomas Brasch, Sandra Weigl, and Rosita Hunzinger, on a summer trip to the Baltic seashore on the day of the invasion, were suspicious when they suddenly found themselves unable to buy a newspaper. They found out what was happening by listening to West German radio, then hurried back to Berlin. There, in Weigl's apartment, with the help of Erika Berthold, they produced a set of flyers bearing slogans such as “Hands Off Red Prague,” “A Dubček to Berlin,” “Ho‐Chi‐Minh—Dubček,” and—tellingly—“No Second Vietnam.”92 Florian hung a Czechoslovakian flag from the balcony of his apartment on the Straußberger Platz.93

The protagonists were arrested in short order. Tried in October 1968, they received sentences ranging from fifteen to twenty‐seven months.94 Most were released after a short time and had their sentences reduced to probation.95 In his post‐arrest comments to Stasi interrogators, Brasch sought to clarify the group's actions. He had welcomed the initiatives of the Czechoslovakian party, he explained, above all its attempt “to actualize the control of the party through the people, to create more ample sources of information, and in so doing, to create more favorable conditions for a democratized socialism.”96 His protest against the invasion was not a protest against Eastern Bloc socialism as such, but against the use of violence to settle disputes: “Differences of opinion should in my opinion be cleared up through negotiations. I take the measures [against Czechoslovakia] to be typical of the era of Stalinism.”97 In the end, the actions of Brasch and the others were aimed at opening the free flow of information and ideas. “My goal,” Brasch told his interrogators, “was that it be discussed in public.”98

This is precisely what was not to be allowed. The effect of the crushing of the Prague Spring within East Germany underlines a key difference between “1968” in the two halves of divided Germany, for it demonstrates the impossibility for the GDR 68ers of realizing any part of an emancipatory political program in the public sphere. Yet the subsequent attempts of the protagonists to pursue their aims within the realm of the private sphere illustrate other, less immediately obvious differences between the two German “1968s.” The centerpiece of their effort was the founding of a commune—dubbed informally by its founders, after their West Berlin model, “Kommune I‐Ost”—which existed with revolving personnel, in several different apartments, from roughly 1969 to 1973.99 The similarities between the eastern and western communes are striking. In Paul Kaiser's words, the communards and would‐ be communards of east and west shared “similar interests in psychedelic theories and anti‐authoritarian child‐rearing, [an obsessive focus on] self‐discovery, and Far Eastern philosophy.”100 They also found common ground, writes Kaiser, in their dedication to “overcoming the illusory opposition between private/public, leisure/work.”101

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Figure 6: An “LSD Cave,” photographed by the East German State Security, date unknown. Robert‐Havemann‐Gesellschaft.

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Yet the similarities between the communards in east and west concealed important differences. Adopting a countercultural lifestyle while supporting official East German demands for “peace,” the eastern communards attempted to walk a line between resistance and accommodation, staging a simulacrum of “68er” politics in the narrow space where their political goals overlapped rhetorically with those of the regime.102 But carrying a banner reading “We Agree with Dutschke” in a party‐organized procession—to cite a particularly apposite moment recounted by Frank Havemann—hardly represented meaningful opposition against the total claims of party and state.103 Indeed, in the GDR, support for Third World guerrillas fighting against American imperialism carried little oppositional content; the Third World struggle was not one that could be “brought home” with any effect when the government itself nominally supported that struggle.104 True, the Third World did reflect back into East Germany, but not in a way that empowered the 68ers; the declaration by their hero Fidel Castro in a speech on August 23, 1968, that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was justified led to a crisis in the Havemann commune.105 The support of Frank Havemann and some others for Castro's statement precipitated a split in the group, which led to both Wolf Biermann and Havemann's father Robert being banned from the premises, and the departure of a number of members, many of whom later fled to the west.106

One of those who went to the west was Florian Havemann, younger brother of Frank. Tellingly, Florian was criticized privately (in correspondence) by his father—a man who had suffered many indignities at the hands of the regime—and publicly by Wolf Biermann, who had been banned from performing in the GDR since 1965 and who had had to burn his papers and go into hiding on the night of the Czechoslovakian invasion.107 Biermann wrote a song about Havemann, “Enfant Perdu,” in which he expressed deep hurt at what he saw as a personal and political betrayal; yet the psychic pressures acting on the GDR 68ers such as Florian Havemann could be crushing. Thomas Brasch wrote in his diary of a chance encounter between the two in early 1970, about a year before Havemann left for the west. Havemann reproached Brasch for his “isolation” and criticized his “relationship to society. He did this spouting strange revolutionary claptrap, lots of quotations, but his face betrayed him.”108

Those who chose to remain and work within the party for change faced a difficult course. Frank Havemann and Erika Berthold met with distrust both from the party and from the “longhairs,” rejected by the latter for their attempts to cooperate with the former.109 Ultimately, a number of the communards went on to become unofficial co‐workers of the Stasi, an act that some of them had revealingly come to see as their only chance to be politically effective.110 This development underlines, again, what is possibly the biggest difference between the communards of east and west. In the latter, the Kommune I functioned not merely as a space in which to revolutionize daily life, fusing the private and the political, but as a strongpoint from which to carry out raids into the public sphere. It was precisely in the interplay between the mainstream media and the Kommune I—whether in the media's scandalized attention to the commune's (largely mythological) sexual freedom or in the effect of its spectacular public actions—that the radical effect of the Kommune I lay. Nothing of the sort could be contemplated in the east, where, as the aftermath of August 1968 proved, the boundaries of the private sphere delimited the possibilities of action. Thus, in the end, rather than expose the vistas of possibility in the East German “1968,” the Kommune I‐Ost experiment illustrated its limits.

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Figure 7: Flower Power East German style. Robert‐Havemann‐Gesellschaft.

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What of the larger youth cultural wave represented by beat music? Prevented from fusing with the “small 1968” rendered stillborn when the Prague Spring was crushed, the youth cultural aspects of the “big 1968” became merely another site of dropout identity in the GDR. International youth culture did provide the raw stuff for the expression of nonconformist identities, but these identities did not supply the basis for the elaboration of a spectacular radical democratic politics as in the West; and if they could imagine themselves into community with young rebels from the other Germany and from around the world—becoming a part of a globalizing “discourse community,” to use the term suggested by Ute Kätzel—they were largely unable to marry discourse to deeds.111 In contrast, the “big 1968” in West Germany could blossom out through a myriad of channels, from the countercultural urban guerrilla groups to the various permutations of the “new social movements.”112 The total effect was to broaden the possibilities for popular action from below, pushing back the boundaries of the permissible and creating democratic space in the political and cultural landscape of the Federal Republic.113 No matter how important these events were for West Germany, however, they were by no means simply West German events. They were a product both of the local reception of transnational influences and of the creation of global imagined communities. The latter were derived from the Cold War (the “free world”), from left‐wing theory (Dutschke's “underprivileged of the world”), or from networks of consumption (the “international counterculture”). At the same time, they arose out of overlapping fields of engagement with the potential to synergize each other (e.g., the relationship between West German students and the Third World student diaspora), and the tendency for events in one spatial location—the Vietnam War, for example—to reflect back onto another (the Federal Republic).

This sort of “reflecting back” occurred in the east as well, as the example of the crushing of the Prague Spring and Castro's comments about it indicate, but with very different effects. The lack of political space for an emancipatory youth politics in East Germany meant that, in a certain sense, there had been no “1968” in the GDR. In the Federal Republic, the traumatic events of 1967 only slowly came to be transformed into “1968,” a process that was not complete until the 1980s. In the GDR, the local “small 1968” disappeared, as it were, into the memory hole. It was only with the Wende (the “change”) of 1989 and its aftermath in German reunification that the search for an East German “1968” as a democratic tradition and sign of resistance against the “second German dictatorship” really began.114 In other words, “1968” is very much a construction of social memory, a fact that is increasingly becoming the object of scholarly investigation.115 Yet the term “1968” maintains a heuristic usefulness, for as a temporal designation for a spatial event, it suggests the key importance of connectedness in the global emancipatory moment of the late 1960s.