1968 - Mark Kurlansky [129]
But the teachers and professor were not given a voice, either. Alain Geismar, who had become a young physics professor and director of le Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, the National Union of Professors of Higher Education, the SNE.Sup., recently said, “The young generation had a sense that they did not want to live like the generations before. I reproached the generation of the Liberation for having missed the opportunity to modernize society. They just wanted to put things back the way they were. De Gaulle had done the resistance, he had done the liberation, he had ended the war in Algeria, and he did not understand anything about the young people. He was a great man who had grown too old.”
In chemistry it is found that some very stable elements placed in proximity to other seemingly moribund elements can spontaneously produce explosions. Hidden within this bored, overstuffed, complacent society were barely noticeable elements—a radicalized youth with a hopelessly old-fashioned geriatric leader, overpopulated universities, angry workers, a sudden consumerism enthralling some and sickening others, sharp differences between generations, and perhaps even boredom itself—that when put together could be explosive.
It began with sex, back in January when France was still bored. Students at the University of Nanterre, an exceptionally ugly four-year-old concrete campus where eleven thousand students were crowded on the edge of Paris, raised the issue of coeducational dormitories, and the government ignored them. François Missoffe, the government minister of youth, was visiting Nanterre when a small red-haired student asked him for a light for his cigarette. Cigarette lit and smoke exhaled, the student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the more outspoken and articulate students at Nanterre, said, “Monsieur le Ministre, I read your white paper on youth. In three hundred pages there is not one word on the sexual issues of youth.”
The minister responded that he was there to promote sports programs, which was something he suggested the students should take more advantage of. To his surprise, this did not brush off the redheaded student, who instead repeated his question about sexual issues.
“No wonder, with a face like yours, you have these problems: I suggest you take a dip in the pool.”
“Now there’s an answer,” said the student, “worthy of Hitler’s youth minister.”
That exchange alone made Cohn-Bendit known to almost every student in Paris simply as “Dany.” The brief nondialogue between student and government was a formula that was to be repeated over and over on an ever escalating scale until all of France was shut down and Dany was famous around the world as Dany le Rouge—Dany the Red.
He had been born in newly liberated France in 1945 to German Jewish parents who had survived the war hiding in France. His father had fled when Hitler came to power, because he was not only a Jew, but an attorney known for defending leftist dissidents. After the war he returned to his work in Frankfurt. Being a surviving Jew returning to Germany was a strange and isolating experience. Dany stayed for a while in France with his mother, an educator. But they were not particularly comfortable in France, with its history of collaboration and deportations. Every few years they switched from one country to the other. Dany was brought up to identify with the radical Left. He has said that the first time he felt Jewish was in 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of spying for the Soviets, were executed in the United States. In Germany he and his brother would guess the age of passersby and speculate on what they had been doing during