1968 - Mark Kurlansky [87]
On January 23, 1968, a right-wing Hamburg pastor, Helmuth Thielicke, found his church filled with students wanting to denounce his sermon. He called in West German troops to clear his church of the students, who were distributing pamphlets with a revised Lord’s Prayer:
Our capital, which art in the West, amortized be Thy investments,
Thy profits come, Thy interest rates increase,
In Wall Street as they do in Europe.
Give us this day, our daily turnover.
And extend to us our credits, as we extend them to our creditors,
Lead us not into bankruptcy, but deliver us from the trade unions,
For thine is half the world, the power and the riches,
For the last two hundred years.
Mammon.
By 1968 theology students were also demonstrating, insisting that it was no longer acceptable to listen to church sermons without questions and dialogue in the service addressing the immorality of the West German state as well as moral outrage at the U.S. war against Vietnam. In effect the church was to become a discussion group for the purpose of heightening political and moral awareness. The most prominent of these theology student rebels was one of the student refugees from East Berlin, Rudi Dutschke, sometimes called Rudi the Red.
German SDS was well organized in the universities. On February 17, combining a good sense of timing with an impressive display of organization, the group hosted student activists from around the world to an international meeting against the American war in Vietnam. The International Vietnam Congress was the first large-scale international meeting of 1968 student movements and was being held at the height of the Tet Offensive when the Vietnam War was a mainstay of television programming around the world. In most countries, opposition to the war was not only one of the most popular causes—in many cases antiwar groups were the best-organized movements—but it was also the one issue they all had in common. Although an Iranian “revolutionary” attended, as did U.S. and Canadian militants, including two black Vietnam veterans who gave the clenched-fist salute and chanted arm in arm, “Hell, no, I ain’t gonna go!”—too late, as they had already been—it was largely a European meeting of German, French, Italian, Greek, and Scandinavian students. They met for a twelve-hour session of speeches and discussions in an enormous hall of the Free University with an overflow of thousands sent to two other large halls. The main hall was decorated with a huge flag of the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front along with a banner emblazoned with Che Guevara’s hard-to-refute statement: “The duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution.” Speakers ranged from Dutschke, to leaders of other national movements, to the playwright Peter Weiss, whose Marat/Sade was being quoted by students all over the world.
Many of the foreign activists were dazzled by the Germans. One of the speakers, Alain Krivine, twenty-seven, a French Trotskyite who would later become one of the leaders in the spring Paris uprising, said, “Many of the 1968 student tactics were learned earlier in the year in Berlin and Brussels anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. The anti–Vietnam War movement was well organized throughout Europe. Dutschke and the Germans were the pioneers in the hard demonstration tactics. We went there and they had their banners and signs ready and their security forces and everything with militaristic tactics. It was new to me and the other French.”
Anti–Vietnam War poster on a street in Germany in 1968
(Photo by Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos)
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, was impressed with the way the German