Rudi Dutschke Strasse

Events in France bring to mind Paris May 1968. A friend reminds me of the East German Rudi Dutschke who had escaped to West Germany the day before the Communists commenced building the Berlin Wall.

At first, his generation wanted to examine why Hitler had been allowed to gain support. They were met with silence and concentrated their efforts on protesting about, and removing former Nazis from office. Dutschke joined the German Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) and became central in organising demonstration and protests especially against the war In Vietnam. The publisher Axel Springer , publisher of the tabloid Bild-Zeitung campaigned against Dutschke ..."Stop Dutschke NOW" was the headline.An impressionable young house painter(!) stalked the vilified “Red” Rudi Dutschke, shooting him five times in front of his apartment. Shocked and outraged German students immediately cried for vengeance, and attacked the hated Springer Press headquarters (they believed that Springer’s relentless campaign against Dutschke inspired the attack on him). Ulrike Meinhof attended the massive protests against Springer that night and a friend persuaded her to use her car as part of the blockade of Springer’s printing plant. Worried about damaging her car, she parksed it on the very end of the blockade. As tenuous as it is, this is Ulrike’s first timid steps towards putting her Marxist beliefs into action.

Rudi studied at (the then) Berlin Free University, (designed by Shadrach Woods et. al - new building recently by Norman Foster), now with the half the student numbers and 1% of the idealism of the founders.

Bild was famously attacked by German novelist Heinrich Boll in his novel 1974's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Boll said that Bild, “isn’t cryptofascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism, agitation, lies and dirt.” In an attempt to put their violent campaign into perspective, Böll would call the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s efforts “the war of 60 against 60 million.”

At this time, with the Baader Meinhof gang acheiving a huge cultist following , with their oenchant for stealing the easily hot-wired BMW 2000, it rapidly became called the Baader-Meinhof Wagen - some say it saved the ailing Bavarain morot company from oblivion.

Naturally after the excesses of the Baader Meinhof gang the Bundestag rammed through changes to the Basic German Law aimed squarely at the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The laws, which become known as Lex Baader-Meinhof.

With his American wife Gretchen Klotz, whom he married in 1966 and their three children, he struggled and eventually ended up in England at Cambridge University. In 1971 he was expelled by the Tory Government (along with his family) as an undesirable alien who had engaged in subversive activity.

He moved to Denmark and died there, drowning in the bath having an epileptic seizure 24th December 1979.

Rudi Dutschke had re - entered the German political scene after protests against the building of nuclear power plants activated a new movement in the mid-1970s. Dutschke recognized that this movement (The Green Party) had a far broader base than the student movement had, and that its ecological orientation was going to define the progressive direction for the next generation. He also worked with dissidents in eastern Europe, in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and what was then Czeckoslovakia.

This August the City of Berlin decided to rename the Kochstrasse (seee map) after him… and from his grave, he cocks a snook , crossing the Axel - Springer Strasse where you can visit the Springer Publishing HQ.

The Revolution is not an event that takes two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out process in which new people are created, capable of renovating society so that the revolution does not replace one elite with another, but so that the revolution creates a new anti-authoritarian people who in their turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke on March 7, 1968 as quote by the obese Andrea Dworkin in Woman Hating, 1974

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