FEBRUARY 1968. The bar of the Bristol hotel is a nerve center for journalists, who come and go from the Franco-German negotiations at the Élysée Palace, returning with news and gossip.
The day ends, and the ministers accompanying Chancellor Kiesinger enter the bar for off-the-record press briefings in a relaxed atmosphere. Franz Josef Strauss, the finance minister, joins the small group of journalists surrounding me. I really dislike Strauss, the tough guy of the German right. It is nearly 9:30 p.m. and he is practically drunk. Strauss willingly answers questions and downs glasses of whiskey. Soon, he is ignoring the journalists’ questions and has begun an interminable monologue while holding his head in his hands and staring at the carpet. The son of the German press magnate Axel Springer comes over to tell me that my campaign against Kiesinger is “utterly pointless” and that I should cease talking about his past, as the chancellor has been “democratically elected.”
Later that evening, Willy Brandt enters the Bristol’s lobby. The journalists rush over to speak to him. He stops in front of the elevators. He is tanned, relaxed, elegantly dressed, very different from the man I met in the summer of 1966. I take the opportunity to remind him about the interview I had requested for Combat about his personal memories of living in France before the war. He tells me he will answer my questions soon. He never does.
When the campaign against Kiesinger has grown even more bitter, Brandt’s attaché, Mr. Sonksen, will explain to me: “You must understand that Mr. Brandt, as Chancellor Kiesinger’s foreign minister and as a member of the coalition, cannot grant you this interview. That would imply that he supported your campaign against Kiesinger.”
* * *
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1968, I wrote in my regular column for Combat:
Europe’s democrats should rejoice at the youth rebellion against the resignation, conformism, and culture of consumption. This movement is growing rapidly in the Continent’s university towns … In the Bundestag, Mr. Kiesinger congratulated the police for their “great patience” in dealing with students, while most newspapers are condemning them [the police] for their excessive brutality … Here in France, we should be aware that the battle raging in Germany concerns us all, because one day Germany will be reunified.
It is 9:00 a.m. on March 20, 1968. I have arrived in West Berlin after three weeks spent traveling on my own through the German Democratic Republic. I nervously ring the bell at the house belonging to a theology professor, Dr. Gollwitzer, who is granting asylum to Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the SDS, the radical German student movement. There is no answer.
I keep trying, and at last the door is opened. A girl with disheveled hair looks at me blearily.
“I’m here to see Rudi Dutschke.”
“He’s asleep, but you can come in.”
A few days before this, I had talked to him on the phone, so he knows my name.
The girl calls out, “Beate Klarsfeld is here to see you!”
“Ah, show her in!”
I walk toward the sound of his voice and find myself in a living room with a sofa bed at its center. The blinds are drawn, so it is difficult to see very much. My eyes gradually adjust to the dimness, and I make out Rudi, who is still in bed. Next to him is his wife, Gretel, and between them their baby, Che, still only a few weeks old.
Rudi props himself up on an elbow. He is very natural, direct. Just as he is in public life, when speaking onstage. He has a natural charisma.
I invite him to take part in a meeting I am organizing in Paris: “Young Germans and young Jews joining forces to combat the neo-Nazis.” He tells me he would like to, but it is possible he’ll have to go to Prague soon, because the situation is growing tense there, so it is not certain that he’ll be able to make it to Paris in time for the meeting.
Rudi is very different from the other members of the SDS I have met in recent days. Behind their long hair, flamboyant clothes, and loudly proclaimed sexual freedom, Rudi’s friends speak in a convoluted vocabulary of theoretical ideas that barely masks the shallowness of their thinking. They also treat the movement’s many young female followers with sexist contempt.
Rudi, by contrast, is clear and precise. He is a leader. With his intelligence, dynamism, and talent for speaking, he could probably have made a comfortable living, but Rudi is not a product of the West German consumer society. He is in exile here from East Germany, where he fought against the excesses of dogmatism. In the West, he has continued to attack the fundamental flaws of the society in which he lives. With charisma and hard work, he has succeeded in making the students of Berlin—and then of Germany—the most politicized in Europe.
* * *
MY ACCUSATIONS AGAINST the chancellor had not, up to this point, created the impact I was hoping for in the mainstream French and German press. Every time I went to a newspaper office with my thick dossier in my arms, the journalists and editors all responded in the same way: “Yes, yes, that’s very interesting, but what can we do? He’s already chancellor!”
It was time to switch tactics. Deciding to draw on the ingenious methods used by Rudi Dutschke’s friends, I went to visit Kommune 1, a group of young men and women who proved themselves expert at using humor to mobilize public opinion. For example, they announced that students were about to block traffic on the Kurfürstendamm, a major street in the center of Berlin. Vast numbers of police were deployed and traffic was rerouted. And then a student—just one student, all alone—proudly marched down the deserted avenue.
I’d spent a long time thinking about the best way to ensure maximum press exposure and begun to realize that my dossiers would only have the impact I desired if I could accompany them with some sort of grand gesture. I decided to go to the Bundestag on a day when I knew Kiesinger was due to speak. Arriving in Bonn on March 30, I found a photographer from the German press agency DPA and told him about my plan.
At the Bundestag, I left my coat in the cloakroom and went up to the seats reserved for the public, opposite the lectern where the politicians spoke. I was at the end of a row of seats guarded by ushers. Soon after my arrival, Kiesinger took the stage. This was the first time I had seen him in the flesh. I did not take much notice of his features or his facial expressions. To my mind, a person—particularly a person with an important role in public life—is the sum of their actions, and their physical appearance or private personality means nothing to me.
Of Kiesinger, all I would say is that he was a tall, handsome man of about sixty-five years old (though he looked ten years younger), silver haired, intelligent eyes, the very image of the respectable father figure, with just a hint of sexual attractiveness. As for the private man, this interested me even less than the physical man: I knew that Kiesinger was an irreproachable husband and father who loved animals and once even took his boat out on Lake Constance to rescue a drowning dog. All of this was honorable and might conceivably have given me pause had I taken it into account. But I didn’t. If there is one thing I feel certain about, it is that there is no connection between the morality of a man’s private behavior and of his public acts.
I had decided to shout at the German chancellor in the middle of his parliamentary speech, but now that I was here, in this large, packed room, I feared I would not have the courage to open my mouth. I watched the clock in the hall and told myself that I had to act before the second hand reached the 12. I stared anxiously as the hand kept moving around the face of the clock. Then suddenly, raising my fists, I yelled very loudly: “Kiesinger, Nazi, resign!” Once I had started to chant this, it was easy to keep going.
The chancellor stopped speaking. Even from afar, I could tell he was disturbed. He looked over in my direction, as did all the deputies in the hall. Meanwhile, the ushers ran toward me. One of them clasped his hand over my mouth and brutally shoved me out of the room and into a small office.
I refused to disclose my identity, and they brought me to the nearest police station. Only there did I agree to answer questions. The chief of police, who had heard about me, ordered a policeman to fetch my suitcase from the baggage locker where I had left it. He detained me for three hours before letting me go.
The next day, the German newspapers published photographs of me raising my fist (which pleased the left) or of my being gagged by an usher (which suggested that the truth was suppressed in Germany). And, naturally, all the papers discussed Kiesinger’s Nazi past and the dossier that I had put together. Serge—in Sofia that day on business—saw my photograph on the front page of Bulgaria’s most important newspaper. The wall of silence was crumbling.
* * *
ON APRIL 11, 1968, three weeks after our encounter, Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head several times at point-blank range. He spent weeks in a coma and was unable to speak for a long time. He survived but was marginalized from German political life, and twelve years later he died from health problems caused by his injuries. His attacker was supposedly a loner, a madman. But there were swastikas in his house, SS badges, a bust of Hitler. This assassination attempt was the fruit of a hate campaign against Dutschke led by Axel Springer’s newspapers and by politicians like Kiesinger.
It was the first time a young person had been able to create a movement in Germany, and his enemies realized the danger he represented. Unfortunately, the attack had the desired effect: after Rudi’s shooting, the far-left youth movement became rudderless and divided.
The day after the shooting, Germany was in turmoil. Students raised barricades in the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Essen, and Cologne. The Springer Trust’s buildings came under siege. There were violent clashes with police.
I felt close to those young people. Rudi’s shooting was proof that his theories were well founded: in Germany, the real danger lay on the right. The day before, Kiesinger had vehemently attacked Dutschke; now, he sent a hypocritical telegram to Rudi’s wife, expressing his sympathy. In reality, though, he was gleefully rubbing his hands together, and he was not the only one. I drew from this tragedy just another reason to continue my battle against Kiesinger.
* * *
I HAD BEEN in a meeting with some young Germans in Paris that April when we found out about the shooting of Rudi Dutschke. That night, we decided to organize a protest march. The French student leader Alain Krivine promised us his support. He and his followers took charge of printing leaflets. At home, I made banners.
We protested outside the German embassy, where I was surprised to find a thousand students—and a dozen riot-police buses waiting on the opposite sidewalk. There were red flags everywhere. It was still only April, but this was the first sign of the coming convulsion of May 1968.
The students chanted, “Springer, murderer!” A few French students carried signs proclaiming: KIESINGER—NAZI. I was very surprised by this. Was my campaign beginning to bear fruit?
After brief speeches by the leftist leaders Krivine and Cohn-Bendit, the protest was supposed to end, but through word of mouth everyone headed to the Latin Quarter. When we got there, we were greeted by droves of heavily armed riot police. I gave my banners to a German student, who—frightened by this show of force—hid them in a doorway and ran off.
There were a few clashes with the riot police, but for me that was not the important thing. Violence only diverted attention from the political meaning of our actions. It should, I believed, only be used as a last resort and always against those who were actually guilty.
* * *
OUR MEETINGS BEGAN attracting larger numbers of students, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the French police. One evening, a student told us that he had seen two men outside the door, dressed like laborers, who kept coming and going and staring at the passersby. We leaned out the window and saw them doing this: they would move about fifty yards away, then quickly return.
One night, most of the Germans who came to our Paris meetings were contacted by phone. An urgent meeting was arranged at the apartment where we usually gathered. When the students showed up, they were greeted by the police, who took them to the station for two or three days and then sent them back to Germany.
In the meantime, I learned that some young activists from the APO (Außerparlamentansche Opposition), a political protest movement, had, during an electoral meeting in Baden-Württemberg, occupied two-thirds of the room and chanted “Kiesinger Nazi, Nazi!” To placate them, the chancellor had declared: “You are young. You never knew Nazism. You have the right to know what your chancellor did during that period.” He did not keep that promise.
That same month—April 1968—I also attended a meeting in a large public square in Esslingen, Germany. I took with me three huge suitcases stuffed with pamphlets. One of the students at the meeting told me that I could speak if I wished. I had not prepared anything, but I decided to do it anyway, so I stood in line for an hour.
When my turn came, however, I panicked. That huge square, all those people, all the things I had to say … I introduced myself, explained my campaign. I started talking about Kiesinger’s past. I probably went on too long. People started losing interest. I announced that I would be distributing leaflets.
Afterward, I rushed to the car and asked two guys to help me distribute the leaflets and handed one of them my precious Kiesinger dossier for a moment. When I turned around, they were gone. They had fled, taking my documents with them. I went back to the microphone and appealed for help; I searched everywhere, to no avail. Were those men right-wing activists or just ordinary thieves? I never found out. Furious, I returned to Berlin.
* * *
IN BERLIN, I went to see Günter Grass to invite him to take part in a meeting. He welcomed me into his ivy-covered house, and he let me talk for a while. Then he said, “I don’t really want to speak in that kind of environment. For some time now, I have been scandalized by the behavior of those students.” He only agreed when I pointed out to him that it was a group of Jewish students whom I wanted him to address.
Subtly, insinuatingly, he asked me about my life, before declaring, “You live in Paris. You sent me a letter with the translation of one of your articles. I advise you to read more in German, because you are losing your native language. You have become very French. It is obvious that you live abroad and that you no longer speak much German.”
Everything in his attitude and his tone revealed a man well aware of his undeniable intellectual superiority. And yet, with his wonderful novels, he had helped to liberate German youth of many of its taboos and cultural constraints. His commitment to social democracy had made him, at that time, along with the great Catholic novelist Heinrich Böll, the most famous and talked-about writer in Germany, part of the nation’s conscience.
The meeting took place on May 9 in Berlin. With Serge’s help, I had carefully prepared my speech. Nearly three thousand students—many of them long haired and bearded—had gathered in the large auditorium of the Technical University.
Günter Grass’s speech, strongly attacking Kiesinger, was met with passionate enthusiasm. The tone was set. When my turn came, I was propelled to the microphone.
I told the audience that we had to keep escalating our protest. “To break the wall of silence around Kiesinger’s Nazi past, I give you my word today, that I will slap the chancellor in public.” The reaction was lively and skeptical. There were shouts of “Naïve!” “Stupid!” “Do it if you dare!” One group chanted, “Promises, promises!”
Günter Grass, who was next to me, did not react at all.
After the speeches, the students were invited to speak. One of them addressed Günter Grass: “Mr. Grass, your words are all very fine, but tomorrow you will be able to show your hostility to the Christian Democrats by coming with us to protest the emergency laws. Are you ready to participate in our great protest march on Bonn—but not by getting there in comfort, on an airplane? You should take the train, sitting on the hard second-class benches, surrounded by students from all over Germany!”
Günter Grass stood up, red-faced with anger. He rushed over to the microphone and yelled, “How insolent, talking to me like that! What does it matter if I take the train or the plane? If that’s how it is, I won’t go tomorrow.” He knocked over his chair, grabbed his papers, and abruptly left the room, to hisses and boos.
A resolution calling on Kiesinger to resign was voted for by three-quarters of the room. It made the headlines in the East German and West German press. I had taken the risk of publicly announcing my intention to slap Kiesinger because I wanted to give the act a premeditated, symbolic quality. I chose the slap after a great deal of thought; that gesture, I sensed, would make a strong impression on the German people.
The next evening—May 10—I caught a train to Bonn for the Sternmarsch, the “Star March.” The plan was for anti-fascists to converge on the capital the following day to protest the coming vote for the emergency laws that would establish a form of dictatorship by the chancellor in the event of mass violence. The train had been made available by the East German government, and it left the Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin filled with eight hundred young people—the oldest was maybe thirty—dressed in velvet pants or blue jeans and long green anoraks. Rucksacks and motorcycle helmets were piled up in the nets above the seats.
The protesters proved just as critical of the East German regime as they were of the West Germans. As they went through the stations of the GDR, they yelled slogans like “Bureaucracy leads to fascism and Stalinism!” and “Citizens, stop watching us, come and join us!” while the East Germans stared at them openmouthed with disbelief. Another frequently shouted slogan was “Kiesinger Nazi!”
We entered Bonn at about 8:00 a.m. on May 11, and the law-abiding citizens of Bonn looked just as horrified as their Communist counterparts had been. The Star March was a complete success. The organizers had expected forty thousand protesters, and about sixty thousand ended up parading peacefully through the streets of the capital.
The next day, the barricades went up in Paris. This was the start of the famous May 1968 protests. I set up a Franco-German action committee at the Sorbonne, but it soon became clear to me that the French students were not interested in Germany’s problems. And yet, to my mind, the stakes were much higher in Germany than in the streets of Paris.
In Combat, on May 4, I wrote, “We must not let the German democrats fight alone. We must help the Social Democratic Party to leave the coalition government and become, once again, the party of hope and honesty … Don’t confine the making of history to your own doorstep. Lift up your heads and look clear-eyed at what is actually happening in Europe. Germany needs you.”
* * *
ON MAY 29, I and a half-dozen others occupied the offices of the Franco-German Youth Office. We got there at 6:00 p.m., three minutes before the arrival of the police, who, in the absence of instructions, withdrew. We asked the employees to leave and hung three huge banners from the windows: FRANCO-GERMAN YOUTH OFFICE OCCUPIED; NO TO THE EMERGENCY LAWS IN GERMANY; FRENCH STUDENTS AND WORKERS IN SOLIDARITY WITH GERMAN STUDENTS AND WORKERS.
Mr. Clément, the director of the French section of the Youth Office, made no attempt to oppose the occupation. The riot police turned up for a second time later that night but disappeared after discussions. I even went down to their bus: they were asking the Ministry of the Interior for instructions on the police radio, but the government seemed unsure what to do. My former colleagues were outraged at the sight of me taking over the offices where I used to sit quietly typing. They were hoping to see me arrested, but it never happened. We withdrew peacefully after twenty-four hours.