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IV BERLINER LUFT

On 10 June 1967 eight young people discovered a new way of circumventing a recent ban on demonstrations imposed by West Berlin’s mayor Heinrich Albertz. They stood in the middle of the Kurfürstendamm shopping canyon, near the semi-ruined Kaiser Gedächtniskirche, donning white T-shirts each daubed with a single letter. When the eight alphabet protesters formed a line, including a willowy blonde pastor’s daughter called Gudrun Ensslin who wore the exclamation mark, they spelled ‘ALBERTZ!’ Turning round, the group had ‘ABTRETEN’ on their backs, the eight German letters for ‘resign’.

Berlin had a uniquely febrile atmosphere, for it was a barometer of the totalitarian past and present across the Wall; eruptions of international tension rendered the city palpably close and oppressive as I recall when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The louring architectural detritus of Hitler’s Reich stood amid the remnants of the Prussian-German capital; a forbidding concrete wall demarcated garish Western consumerism from ‘real existing socialism’ where, along with freedom, the advertisements and neon lights vanished. Although it was completely untrue that the Third Reich was a closed book until the liberal 1960s dawned, what books there were dealt with morals and spirit and did not directly confront the generous representation of former Nazis in industry, medicine, the law, the police and politics. Many people openly applauded when the Paris-based left-wing activist Beate Klarsfeld smuggled herself into a Christian Democrat conference and slapped the former Nazi propagandist and current federal chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in the face. The writer Heinrich Boll, once a greedy Wehrmacht soldier in occupied France, sent her flowers. The 1960s brought deep inter-generational problems to young people with Nazi-era first names like Gudrun, Sieglinde and Thorwald, who sought deliverance from themselves by hopelessly romanticising the Third World. Older people prided themselves on having raised Germany from dust and rubble, achieving a conspicuously high standard of living through their focused industriousness. The consumer society was their reward, although large numbers combined shopping with going to church. For younger people, ashamed of being German, and taking high living standards for granted, this economic vocation no longer sufficed. They were encouraged in their radical snobbery towards cars, fridges and garden gnomes (but not towards jeans, records and stereos) by the, often Jewish, gurus of the New Left, notably Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and the younger Jürgen Habermas, although only Marcuse wholeheartedly endorsed the attempt to convert theory into action from Berlin to Berkeley.

New Left ideology was a fusion of Freud and Marx, leavened with a bit of Gramsci. It was, and remains, so stunningly tedious, except for a generation of academics, that we do not need to deal with it in any detail. As a former German terrorist quipped: ‘theory was something that we half read but fully understood’. In many universities of the time this arcane secularised theology was served up as degree courses in subjects like economics, history or political science which almost disabled graduates in the marketplace. Consumerism created, but never satisfied, bogus needs - hence the phrase ‘consumption terror’ - with ‘repressive tolerance’ masking the ‘structural violence’ of an imperfectly dismantled Fascist regime. At any time the ‘Brown’ crowd could return. Especially when in 1967-8 the government attempted to amend the Basic Law by assuming some of the emergency powers hitherto exclusively vested in the Allied occupation authorities. In addition to times of invasion or civil war, the Christian Democrats sought to include periods of civil disturbance in the list of circumstances when the government could pass laws, draft citizens, override the federal states, and deploy the police without parliamentary approval. The Social Democrats successfully