Marcuse and the German New Left

The students, teachers and university hangers-on who have achieved notoriety through riots at Berkeley, Wisconsin, and more recently at Columbia, are part of a loose international movement. This movement has left its scar on England; it has convulsed France, and currently it dominates the political scene at most West German universities. Student affairs at the Free University at Berlin are largely controlled by the Left, the most militant sector of which is the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, whose leader, Rudi Dutschke, was shot and seriously wounded April 11, 1968.

The more flamboyant exploits of the German “New Left” have included mass demonstrations against the Shah of Iran during his state visit in June, 1967, and the notorious Communarde leaflet celebrating the Brussels department-store fire (in which over 100 were burned to death) as a Maoist coup and suggesting What Fun a similar Happening in Berlin would afford. The attack on Dutschke provided the excuse for something the New Leftists have wanted to stage for a long time: a wholesale attack on the newspapers of Axel Springer, which are strongly anti-Communist and have not dealt kindly with student radicals. Mobs of students succeeded in blocking part of Springer’s circulation in Berlin and six West German cities for a day or two, at a cost of two deaths, hundreds of injuries and arrests, and an immense amount of property damage.

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Kurt Glaser

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The students, teachers and university hangers-on who have achieved notoriety through riots at Berkeley, Wisconsin, and more recently at Columbia, are part of a loose international movement. This movement has left its scar on England; it has convulsed France, and currently it dominates the political scene at most West German universities. Student affairs at the Free University at Berlin are largely controlled by the Left, the most militant sector of which is the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, whose leader, Rudi Dutschke, was shot and seriously wounded April 11, 1968.

The more flamboyant exploits of the German “New Left” have included mass demonstrations against the Shah of Iran during his state visit in June, 1967, and the notorious Communarde leaflet celebrating the Brussels department-store fire (in which over 100 were burned to death) as a Maoist coup and suggesting What Fun a similar Happening in Berlin would afford. The attack on Dutschke provided the excuse for something the New Leftists have wanted to stage for a long time: a wholesale attack on the newspapers of Axel Springer, which are strongly anti-Communist and have not dealt kindly with student radicals. Mobs of students succeeded in blocking part of Springer’s circulation in Berlin and six West German cities for a day or two, at a cost of two deaths, hundreds of injuries and arrests, and an immense amount of property damage.