1968 - Mark Kurlansky [140]
On June 17 the last of the students who had been occupying the Sorbonne for more than a month left. They were faced with offers for book contracts. At least thirty-five books on the student uprising were signed up by the day the last rebel left the Sorbonne. Typically, the first one published was a collection of photographs of street violence. Cohn-Bendit had been right—when there is violence the message gets lost. But many other books followed, including books by and about Cohn-Bendit. In his book Le Gauchisme—Leftism—with the subtitle Remedy for the Senile Illness of Communism, he began with an apology: “This book has been written in five weeks. It has the blemishes of such speed, but the publisher had to get the book out before the market was completely flooded.” With typically edged Cohn-Bendit humor he also wrote,
In the market system, capitalists are ready to prepare their own deaths (as capitalists, naturally, and not as individuals) in divulging revolutionary ideas that could in the short term earn them money. For this, they pay us handsomely (50,000 DM in the account of Dany Cohn-Bendit before having written a single line), even though they know that this money will be used to make Molotov cocktails, because they believe that revolution is impossible. Here’s to their readers to fool them!
Revolution may be possible, but it didn’t happen in France in 1968. Classic Marxists insist that revolutionaries have to slowly build their bases and develop their ideology. None of this happened that year. There was simply an explosion against a suffocatingly stagnant society. The result was reform, not revolution. It was only the students who had wanted revolution. They had not sold the idea to the workers or the larger society, which, to paraphrase Camus’s comment in the early 1950s, so longed for peace that they were willing to accept inequities. The universities became slightly more democratic; teachers and students could talk. The society left the nineteenth century and entered the late twentieth century, but for Europe this turned out to be a time of tremendous materialism and little of the spiritualism for which the young students had hoped.
Cohn-Bendit thought he would be able to return to France in a few weeks, but it was ten years before he was allowed back in. “It saved me,” Cohn-Bendit said of his expulsion. “Becoming so famous so quickly, it is difficult to find yourself. In Germany I had to reconstruct myself.”
In September, while the Frankfurt Book Fair was honoring Léopold S. Senghor, president of Senegal, to the strings of a Mozart quartet inside a Frankfurt church, thousands were outside being pushed away by police water cannons while shouting, “Freidenspreis macht Senghor Weiss”—The freedom prize makes Senghor white, it whitewashes him. The students were protesting this peace award going to a leader whose regime was extremely repressive to students. While bottles and rocks flew and the police tried to contain the crowd, a small redheaded man, the reconstructed Dany the Red, leaped over the metal police barricades and was beaten a few times with a rubber truncheon on the way to being arrested.
When it was time for Cohn-Bendit to appear before a judge, he realized that by coincidence, it was the same week as the scheduled trial in Warsaw of the Polish student movement leaders Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. Such things had been watched closely back in Paris, especially championed by Alain Krivine and the JCR, who would frequently chant in demonstrations, “Free Kuroń and Modzelewski.” Back in the days when police breaking onto a campus was unthinkable in France, the Trotskyites used to circulate this joke: Who are the best-educated police in the world? The answer: The Polish, because they are always going to the university.
When Cohn-Bendit went before the judge in a Frankfurt courtroom crowded with his young followers and the judge asked his name, Cohn-Bendit sensed that he had the moment and the audience. He answered in a clear, loud voice, “Kuroń and Modzelewski.”
“What?” said