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and began arresting demonstrators. At the City Hall demonstrators chanted, “Fascists!” and “Nazis!” The students also marched to the American radio station, where windows were broken. Munich demonstrators did better, actually managing to get inside the Springer building there before being driven off by police. Failing to take over buildings, students burned delivery trucks. Thousands of students also clashed with police in Hamburg, Esslingen, Hanover, and Essen. Mostly it was student clubs pitted against police water cannons, and the high-pressure water won the day. But the demonstrators stopped or delayed delivery of Springer papers. In Frankfurt they also stopped the leading West German business paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, because it was printed at a Springer plant. Demonstrators also appeared in front of Springer buildings in New York, London, and Paris. In London Tariq Ali led a group that broke away from a Martin Luther King memorial in Trafalgar Square and attempted to take over Springer offices. In Paris Alain Krivine recalled, “When Rudi was shot was the first spontaneous violent demonstration in Paris. The police were not even in riot gear, no helmets or shields, when suddenly the students in the Latin Quarter began to hurl tables and chairs at police.”

In Germany, the event fell on an Easter holiday, and five days of street battles followed the shooting. In these riots two were killed—an Associated Press photographer and a student, both from objects thrown by students—and several hundred were wounded. Many hundreds were arrested. It was the worst German street rioting since before Hitler came to power. Remembering the consequences of German political instability, most West Germans did not approve of the street violence. In June 1968 the German magazine Der Spiegel conducted a poll in which 92 percent of Berlin citizens were opposed to “the use of violence by protesting students.” The students were failing to appeal to the working class: 78 percent of Berliners under thirty from working-class homes said they opposed the student violence. Even some students were outspokenly opposed to the violence.

Dutschke survived his wounds and even wrote a letter to his would-be assassin, explaining his ideas of socialism. But Bachmann hanged himself in his prison cell.

Among the 230 students arrested in Berlin was Peter Brandt, the son of Willy Brandt, former Berlin mayor, minister of foreign affairs, and vice chancellor of Germany. Willy Brandt had always been the good German, the socialist who had opposed fascism and had nothing to hide in his past. But Peter said he was disappointed in his father, that since he had gotten into government he had lost his socialist fervor. He was a social democrat, the German equivalent of a liberal. “I never said that my father should leave office. That’s not true,” Peter stated. “But I think that he has changed and I regret it. He is no longer the same man. He is no longer the socialist who went to fight in Spain during the Civil War. We don’t agree anymore.” When his father suggested that he was spending too much time on politics and not enough on his studies, he said, “If I find that something needs to change, I find that it is my duty to do something to make that change happen.”

One of Peter’s professors warned his father, the vice chancellor, “In another six months your son Peter will become a communist.”

Brandt shrugged. “Anyone who has not been a communist at the age of twenty will never make a good social democrat.”

CHAPTER 10

WAGNERIAN OVERTONES

OF A HIP AND BEARDED

REVOLUTION

I had been raised on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the endless hero actor fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyranny. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.

—LEROI JONES, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984

IN FEBRUARY 1968 a group of twenty young Americans arrived in Havana from Mexico City. The trip had been organized by the American SDS. In the group was a twenty-year-old Columbia University junior