Beginning in 1964, unprecedented numbers of students in West Germany mobilized to protest the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. As the United States bombed North Vietnam almost daily from March 1965 onward, injuring and killing unknown numbers of civilians, two lasting ruptures emerged in the Third World activism of students in West Germany. The first was in the language of protest. For many leftist students, seeing the standard-bearer of liberal values in the postwar world acting as the bellicose aggressor in Southeast Asia discredited the language of liberal freedoms and human rights. In the words of a former member of the West Berlin SDS, the war “consigned the ‘free West’s’ entire arsenal of ideological legitimation to the dustbin of history.”1 As American imperialism replaced European colonialism as the central object of criticism, increasing numbers of students began to see the United States as the primary oppressive force in the postwar world. In the process, the demand for human rights that had underwritten almost all Third World activism in the early 1960s lost the status of consensus. The gap between liberal norms and reality opened up by the war inspired many, including former reformists, to search for radical alternatives.
The second rupture in students’ Third World activism took place within the SDS around strategies of antiwar activism in 1966. Were provocative protest techniques necessary to break through what Dutschke called the “managed consciousness” of First World populations? Or could one continue to appeal to liberal-capitalist governments in the language of human rights tactically in the interest of building an oppositional bloc? The disagreement pivoted on an analysis of the international situation in the mid-1960s. As chapter 2 demonstrated, West Berlin SDS leaders had been sensitized to Third World revolutionary tactics through reading Guevara and Fanon, following world events, and collaborating with foreign students. Referred to as the “antiauthoritarians,” they felt that the immediate revolt of radical students and marginal social groups could widen the cracks opened in the system of international capitalism by Third World liberation struggles. They called on West Germans to identify with the resisting Vietnamese and advocated illegal direct action to spark moribund segments of the population into action.
The Marburg and Frankfurt sections of the SDS, also known as the “traditionalists,” opposed the West Berlin SDS’s stance as “sectarianism” and “verbal radicalism.”2 Although they shared a keen interest in the Third World, they doubted both the transferability of Guevara’s foco strategy into the industrialized countries and the extent to which Third World liberation struggles had already undermined the structures of Western capitalism. Although they were certain that the crisis was coming, they felt that it had not yet arrived and that the West Berliners misidentified the potential for revolution in the economically stable conditions of West Germany. The Marburg and Frankfurt factions insisted instead that the SDS avoid self-defeating putschist rhetoric and continue to build a coalition on the left both inside and outside socialist circles. Broad support at the grassroots level would prepare them to capitalize on a future crisis in the capitalist economies of the West. The conflict between the “traditionalist” and “antiauthoritarian” positions came to a head around the “Vietnam—Analysis of an Example” Congress organized by the SDS and held in Frankfurt in May 1966. Although they possessed a sophisticated analysis of U.S. imperialism that the West Berliners lacked, the Marburg and Frankfurt position had lost out in the SDS to the West Berlin antiauthoritarians by early 1967. Able to capitalize on a sense of urgency among leftist students, the West Berlin faction successfully offered an alternative to the tedious process of domestic coalition building with a new form of organization inspired by Third World political idioms. Focused on the international rather than the national frame, and the psychological-existential rather than the practical aspects of politics, the West Berlin position resonated with young leftists eager to break with the mentality of the older generation.
Opposition to the Vietnam War, as movement historians have argued, “played the decisive role in the mobilization and politicization of students.”3 It also permanently transformed the terms of West German leftist engagement with the Third World. While personal connections to Third World intellectuals characterized the campaigns of the decade’s early years, an abstract relationship to guerrilla fighters grew to dominate alongside the escalation of the Vietnam War, presenting new challenges and potential pitfalls to the goal of relating political struggles between the First World and the Third World. The starkness and apparent ethical clarity of the confrontation between U.S. oppressor and Third World victims in Vietnam would provide the deep structure of activism in the years that followed.
The Vietnam War was a new kind of Third World issue for West German students for several reasons. First, the war was unique in its scale. With close to 200,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam by the beginning of 1966, it was the first major war in the adult lives of West German students. The violence was also particularly brutal. Reports of carpet bombing of civilian areas, napalm designed to remove human skin if wiped off, and fragmentation bombs built to explode in midair and send out shards of shrapnel into human flesh suggested not only that Vietnam was being used as a “testing ground for new weapons,” as the SDS concluded, but also something approaching a connoisseur’s taste for pain on the part of the U.S. military.4 The political songwriter Dieter Süverkrüp expressed his feeling of helplessness at the asymmetry of the conflict in 1966 in a verse that contrasted empathy with an imaginary Vietnamese victim with revulsion for his U.S. Marine killers:
His name was Da-Min-Shu
Was as young as you
A farmer’s son, South Vietnamese
Never had enough to eat
Yesterday he was forgotten
And two leathernecks grin themselves rotten
Staring at you in the morning dailies.5
Images of the war, both in the print media and on television, were also central in amplifying the presence of the conflict in West German students’ consciousness. By fall 1965, one could see images from the front nightly on the television news.6 A year later, news reports included closeup footage of combat and bird’s-eye views of bombs falling.7
Many students were disturbed by the fact that the emissary of pluralism and democracy in postwar Western Europe had become the perpetrator of a horrific war. Even in leftist circles, most students had seen the United States as a positive international force in the early 1960s. The former activist Klaus Vack has compared opposition to the war to an act of patricide.8 He had read the Declaration of Independence aloud “and believed in it” in 1955, he recalls, and the war came as a shock. When a “big, rich strong country went in and massacred a small, poor people,” Vack wrote, “something collapsed.”9 Peter Gäng, a member of the West Berlin SDS, remembers the effect of the war on the worldview of the younger generation: “When Kennedy died, the dismay of the left here [in West Germany] was perhaps stronger than anyone else’s. Against that stood the reality of American society. Vietnam was a land that had earned all of its support, and the Americans went there and crushed everything to death with an enormous hammer.”10
Before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy had enjoyed widespread sympathy from West German students, especially in West Berlin, where he became an honorary member of the FU during his visit in June 1963.11 Twenty thousand students took to the streets in West Berlin in an unplanned mourning march after his death in November 1963.12 Even the relentlessly critical political observer Ulrike Meinhof eulogized Kennedy in Konkret, writing, “The sorrow ebbs, the void remains. The man who the people of the world believed would make peace is dead. . . . He was discomfiting to conservatives, compliant to leftists. But the powerful had to work with him, and the powerless placed their hope in him. Three shots in Texas brought it to an end.”13 Kennedy’s aura outlasted his death. When the cabaret impresario Wolfgang Neuss published a provocative leaflet in December 1965 denouncing West German support for the war (which led to his ejection from the Social Democratic Party [SPD]), he included the line, “America’s leadership is conducting an anti-Kennedy policy in Vietnam.”14
The young president’s charisma may have helped divert critical attention from the realities of his aggressive policies of anticommunist containment in the Third World, which were no secret in West Germany.15 The left-liberal newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported on what it called the “secret U.S. war” in South Vietnam from spring 1962 onward. The magazine conveyed graphic details, such as the response of the White House military adviser General Maxwell D. Taylor after hearing the number of communist partisans operating in South Vietnam: “Why don’t you kill them instead of counting them?”16 Der Spiegel followed the escalation of military personnel in South Vietnam as it rose from 800 when Kennedy took office to 11,000 in 1962.17 Despite these reports, the SDS remained focused on issues of European colonialism and personal solidarity campaigns with Angolans, Algerians, and South Africans until 1964.
Beginning in 1964, the vocal support of West German political parties across the spectrum for the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam helped catalyze leftist opposition. Under Ludwig Erhard, chancellor from October 1963 to November 1966, the West German administration voiced its approval for U.S. policy in Southeast Asia several times.18 In April 1965, Willy Brandt, the leader of the SPD and the mayor of West Berlin, followed the British Socialist Party by publicly endorsing the U.S. war.19 In response to an antiwar demonstration in West Berlin in February 1966, Brandt reiterated his support, writing a letter to U.S. Major John F. Franklin Jr. apologizing for the criticism by students and saying he was “certain that the extensive obligations and limited goals of American policy in Southeast Asia served the prosperous coexistence of the peoples.”20
As Alexander Troche has shown, verbal statements of support by West German politicians were, in part, attempts to appease the U.S. government, which began to suggest the deployment of West German troops to Vietnam in spring 1964.21 In March of that year, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara first introduced the notion that “the defense of Berlin starts at the Mekong.”22 In the following years, U.S. officials repeatedly used the formula to pressure the Federal Republic for increased financial contributions to U.S. overseas commitments.23 Both Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD leaders accepted McNamara’s characterization of the conflict, publicly repeating it after the beginning of carpet-bombing campaigns in spring 1965.24 Erhard linked the two sites explicitly in June 1965, saying, “The U.S. commitment in Vietnam is confirmation for the German people that they can depend on the loyalty of the U.S. within our alliance.”25
West German politicians were able to avert the demand for troops by augmenting their verbal support with generous donations of economic and medical aid.26 By December 1965, West Germany had contributed $100 million in non-military aid to the South Vietnamese government, making it the second-largest donor after the United States.27 In late 1965, Erhard was also negotiating to send West German civilian construction and medical teams to South Vietnam, using West German support for the war effort to angle for partial control of the Western nuclear arsenal.28 Although the nuclear negotiations dissolved, West Germany deployed a hospital ship called the Helgoland, with a staff of seven doctors, to South Vietnam in September 1966.29
The uncritical support by the West German political parties exacerbated the anger of antiwar activists, who felt that the war in Vietnam threatened rather than ensured the security of Western Europe. As Wilfried Mausbach has shown, the pacifist Ostermarschbewegung (Easter March Movement) and its parent organization, the Kampagne für Abrüstung (Campaign for Disarmament; KFA) first took up the Vietnam issue in spring 1965 out of fear about a potential expansion of the conflict.30 The KFA argued that “the war in Vietnam has to end before it buries us all.”31 After 1965, the pacifist organization became what Günther Wernicke calls the “organizational carrier” of protest against the war and clearly mobilized the largest number of people. In 1965 and 1966, more than 100,000 demonstrators participated in the fourteen peace marches organized by the KFA throughout West Germany.32
The scope and quantity of protests greatly expanded from mid-1964 to early 1966, as the SDS took its place within a broad coalition of West German antiwar groups. While demonstrations had been limited to Munich and West Berlin in 1964, student activists held events on the theme of Vietnam in fifteen West German university cities and towns in the summer semester of 1965.33 In late 1965 and early 1966, the SDS organized a teach-in, protest, press conference, or film screening related to Vietnam on the FU campus every couple of weeks, and the issue dominated its activity by the end of 1965.34
In December 1965, members of the SDS-affiliated West Berlin Argument Club created a position statement for the antiwar movement that focused on humanitarian concerns and the call for the enforcement of liberal norms. Antiwar activists constructed the widest base of opposition to date with the “Declaration against the War in Vietnam” drawn up by the Argument Club, securing the signatures of 150 prominent writers, academics, and intellectuals, including the philosopher Ernst Bloch, the theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, and the authors Heinrich Böll and Erich Kästner.35 Signed by 1,300 students at the FU in the first three weeks of December 1965, the declaration linked the on-campus opposition to wider circles of civil society.36 It also linked the on-campus opposition to the antiwar movement in the United States. The declaration concluded by declaring solidarity with the “5,000 American professors who demand an immediate end to the war and the neutralization of Vietnam” and with the “U.S. Civil Rights Movement, whose spokesman, Martin Luther King, has called for demonstrations for peace in Vietnam.”37
By 1965, the U.S. antiwar movement was already rapidly expanding. Twenty-five thousand people attended a demonstration against the war organized by the Students for a Democratic Society in April 1965, and activists held teach-ins on university campuses across the nation that spring.38 In December 1965, the American folk singer Hedy West brought the more radicalized position of the U.S. opposition to a performance in West Berlin organized by the FU Student Union, singing, “Before I were fenced in—I’d vote for Ho Chi Minh.”39 In the same way that personal connections with Third World students helped catalyze activism in the first years of the decade, transatlantic networks helped catalyze and give shape to the antiwar effort. Martin Klimke has shown how the firsthand experience of many West German SDS leaders in the United States, including Michael Vester, K. D. Wolff, and Günter Amendt, created conduits for the exchange of protest tactics and information, as well as a vision of the “other America,” which could act as a leftist ally.40 In an issue of Konkret published in June 1966, Ulrike Meinhof argued that the strengthening of domestic opposition to the war had made the U.S. state more dependent on the tacit consent of Western Europe “as an argument against the opposition in its own country.”41 Not only was visibly protesting the war in West Germany internationally relevant, but it could also buttress the efforts of the opposition within the United States.
The protest network spread internationally within Western Europe. In late 1965, SDS members met Italian and French students in Florence to discuss future cooperation.42 At a meeting in Frankfurt in February 1966, the SDS formed the Western European Student Committee for Peace in Vietnam (WESCPV) with student groups from Austria, France, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Italy.43 By May 1966, the WESCPV included members from all Western European nations except Spain and Portugal.44 The WESCPV’s demands illustrated the increased stridency of students’ demands in comparison with 1964. They called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Vietnam, the immediate meeting of all powers both directly and indirectly involved, and the right to self-determination for the Vietnamese people in domestic and foreign affairs, including free elections according to the Geneva Agreements.45
Although a small number of South Vietnamese studied at West German universities and a Vietnamese student became vice-president of the Afro-Asian Student Union Federation in 1963, they did not take leading roles as other Third World students had.46 Some may have been supporters of the administration of Ngo Dinh Diem, while others may have feared repercussions from their government. Such a fear was substantiated in 1972 when a Vietnamese student group in Aachen distributed a flyer giving a different valence to the Allies’ comparison of Berlin to Vietnam. They wrote, “As high school students, we were appalled by films of night bombing raids in Europe and the bombs dropped in Hiroshima. We were affected when we saw films about the Second World War because our parents had raised us in the spirit of humanity and brotherhood. Now these films are being made reality in Vietnam.”47 The leaflet commented cuttingly on both the origins of mechanized violence in the West and the role of images in transmitting the awareness of war. The Vietnamese Embassy responded by blocking money transfers to the students and publicly denouncing them as venal traitors.48
Other Asian and African students were active in antiwar protest from early on. In February 1965, the Tübingen SDS planned a protest with the Iranische Studenten-Vereinigung (Iranian Students Association) in the wake of the North Vietnam bombing campaign.49 The same month in Munich, the Afrikanischer Studentenverband (African Students Association) cooperated with the SDS to organize a one-hundred-person demonstration in front of the U.S. Consulate in Munich and helped draft a resolution calling for an “immediate end to combat operations” in Vietnam.50 In Darmstadt in 1965, the SDS reported that “it was above all foreign students that defended the position of the SDS” on Vietnam on the university campus.51
The most active organization of student opposition to the Vietnam War was the West Berlin section of the SDS . A few factors help explain why the FU students were the quickest to respond to U.S. overseas intervention. The city of West Berlin was itself a front in the Cold War. As a militarized island in the middle of the GDR, it faced daily reminders of ongoing geopolitical tension in the high numbers of resident U.S. military personnel, the Berlin Wall (erected in August 1961), and the towers of the U.S. military listening station on top of the city’s largest hill near the FU. The FU itself was founded in 1948 as part of what Völker Berghahn has called the “intellectual Cold Wars in Europe” to counter the party-line Humboldt University in East Berlin.52 Funding for its initial creation and subsequent institutes came from the U.S. occupying administration with large contributions by the Ford Foundation.53 Ford funded the university’s Osteuropa Institut (Eastern Europe Institute) as a research center for anticommunist area studies.
The U.S. influence was clearly visible at the FU and its environs. The campus lay a short distance from Clay-Allee (Clay Boulevard), named for the first military governor of U.S.-occupied Germany, as well as from the U.S. Embassy and the residential area for U.S. military personnel and their families. One of the central buildings on campus was the Henry Ford Building, which became a center of activism in the 1960s. A less visible presence on campus was U.S. intelligence. There was a minor scandal in 1965 when, as mentioned in chapter 2, a Peruvian student reported that U.S. intelligence agents had threatened him with deportation unless he informed on radical German and foreign students.54 The allegations emerged again in early 1967 when an American and former FU graduate student reported that the CIA had regularly recruited foreign students as informants in the early 1960s.55 The U.S. presence in West Berlin and at the FU was broad enough that when an anonymous person wrote, “AMI [Yankee] GO HOME! KILLER GO HOME!” in white paint across the entrance of the Henry Ford Building in February 1966, the target could have been the U.S. military in West Berlin or in South Vietnam or the American influence at the FU.56
The FU was also unique in its commitment to students’ self-government according to the “Berlin Model,” which included student representatives on the university’s decision-making bodies. The relatively empowered student government was stolidly anticommunist throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, but student support shifted leftward beginning in 1965 in response to overcrowding in the classroom and issues surrounding free speech, on which left-wing candidates took the lead.57 A new generation of students without the vivid experience of war or blockade felt freer to begin calling the United States to account on the principles they saw being violated in Vietnam. News and personal experience of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the African American Civil Rights Movement provided the prospect that American-style democracy could also mean dissent. Students could look to proximate evidence after 1967, when U.S. citizens in West Berlin formed a “U.S. Campaign to End the War in Vietnam” and began biweekly antiwar demonstrations.58 Martin Klimke has shown that the American authorities themselves were surprisingly flexible in their reception of West German dissent, frequently seeking to create opportunities for active discussion about geopolitical issues.59
Indeed, the pro-American stance of the West Berlin population and tabloid press was more violent than that of the U.S. authorities, a discovery that some antiwar demonstrators made as they moved from academic argument and rule-abiding protest to direct action. The first moment of large-scale direct action came when 1,500 antiwar protesters marched through downtown West Berlin on February 5, 1966, ending (for reasons that are unclear) with a sit-down strike in front of the French cultural center, the Maison Française.60 About 500 demonstrators, including members of the SDS, along with the East German–affiliated FDJ–West Berlin and SED–West Berlin, continued to the America House, where they took down the U.S. flag and a few protesters pelted the building with nine eggs.61 The local tabloids reported the protest in scandalized tones. The headline in the Bild-Zeitung read, “Shameful! Unthinkable! Short-Sighted!,” and the B.Z. announced, “A Disgrace for Berlin!”62 Three days later, members of the CDU and its student associations, the Junge Union and Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten, staged a counter-demonstration. According to Der Spiegel, right-wing demonstrators grabbed leftist hecklers “by the hair, dragged them to the nearby train station, and pounded them through the turnstiles.”63
The public and press response to the minor act of egging the America House shocked many students. To some, it served as startling evidence of the narrow parameters of political discourse in West Germany, and especially in the “front city” of West Berlin. Susanne Schunter-Kleeman, a group leader within the West Berlin SDS, recalls feeling alienated from the urban population that showed indifference to reports of torture and sadism in Vietnam but displayed a “massive counter-reaction” against the symbolic protest action of egging the America House. “But they all saw the atrocities and crimes happening in Vietnam,” she wrote. “One could only think in the end: ‘They’re the ones that are crazy, not us!’”64 Early encounters with a West Berlin population that continued to see the United States as its protector and savior helped to radicalize leftist students at the FU.
Opposition to the war bore consequences for some students. Members of the Humanist Student Union (HSU), the Liberal Student Union (LSD), and the Social Democratic University Union (SHB) faced sanctions from their affiliated organizations for their antiwar activism. The Third World activism of the HSU, which started with antiapartheid protests in 1963, began in earnest with opposition to the Vietnam War.65 Their parent organization, the Humanist Union (HU), condemned the cooperation of the HSU in antiwar protests in February 1966, stressing its institutional independence from the on-campus group and writing in a press release,
The HU stresses that it does not have the slightest to do with the demonstrations [against the Vietnam War in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Munich]. It is an organization concerned with cultural and legal issues and seeks to realize the principles of the Basic Law in these areas in the Federal Republic. A position concerning foreign and geopolitical incidents is outside of its area of activity and its competence. It has taken no position on the war in Vietnam until now and will not do so in the future. . . .The HU regrets that the Humanist Student Union has not for its part restricted its activity to the cultural and legal-political problems of our country.66
In early 1966, the HU placed clear national borders on its humanism.67 The attention of university students to human rights beyond West Germany and beyond the West threatened to complicate the scope of its activity, which had been concerned until that point primarily with questions of religion, secularism, and civic freedom. By 1968, events in the Third World had radicalized opinion within the HU itself as, “prompted by the Vietnam War,” members began to discuss how their organization could acknowledge the fact that “one cannot understand human rights as nationally limited,” but the student group led the way.68
The SPD blocked its subsidiary student organization, the SHB, which had been signing antiwar statements at the FU since July 1965, from participating in a congress against the Vietnam War organized by the SDS in May 1966 because it was anxious about adversely affecting public opinion ahead of an upcoming election.69 The SHB chapter in Frankfurt complained that the parent organization was unfairly denying it the right to protest by controlling its operating funds, but to no avail.70 The Free Democratic Party also publicly severed ties to the West Berlin section of the LSD after the protests in February “for following a political direction that no longer had anything liberal about it.”71
Relatively tame demands for the enforcement of international legal norms by antiwar activists in 1965 and 1966 brought strong reactions from the organizations with which student groups were affiliated. It seemed that the call for the application of human rights to populations beyond Western Europe was radical and unacceptable when it implicated West Germany’s principal ally, the United States. The vehemence of the reaction exasperated antiwar students who felt they were calling on the very principles of democracy and self-determination that the United States claimed to defend. Some concluded that the war conclusively proved the bankruptcy of liberal capitalism. As Ulf Kadritzke, a former member of the West Berlin SDS, put it, “If the postwar messenger of a new democratic ideal, the U.S. superpower, was fighting for the defense of Western freedom with carpet bombing and receiving the public blessing of all democratically legitimized organs of the Federal Republic for it, then it was not only our moral feelings that were injured. . . . The entire existing framework for understanding the world was put into question.”72 Antiwar activists were left with a dilemma about the language of organization. As the demand for human rights seemed ineffectual in persuading the very proponents of those values, some activists began to look for alternative political idioms that could express their anger about the brutality of the ongoing war.
From the beginning, tension existed in SDS antiwar activism between external and internal discussions of the Vietnam conflict. In public, the SDS soft-pedaled socialist language and the critique of the United States to build a coalition with other, less radical student groups.73 In 1964, the SDS’s demands remained quite moderate, stopping short of the call by North Vietnam (and by France’s Charles de Gaulle) for free elections and the neutralization of South Vietnam.74 At the same time, SDS members began to refer internally to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam as an act of “neocolonialism” in September 1964.75 How could socialist activists use the very terms of liberalism (including human rights) that they believed served as such effective ideological cover for the U.S. state? The answer lay in the dominant SDS strategy of the time, which was still set by the Frankfurt and Marburg faction rather than the West Berliners. The traditionalists in these factions saw the path to socialism in exploiting the possibilities of liberal democracy paired with systematically constructing a grassroots opposition. Their theories of imperialism were a baseline within socialist student circles against which the antiauthoritarians around Dutschke and Rabehl began to react in 1966. The division between the two factions structured Third World activism in the second half of the 1960s.
Descriptions of the United States as “imperialist,” rarely heard in SDS circles in the early 1960s, became commonplace after 1965. The most important theorists of imperialism came from the Marburg circle of political science and sociology students working under the mentorship of professors Wolfgang Abendroth and Heinz Maus.76 The Marburgers were influenced by Abendroth’s contention that the egalitarian aspects of the West German Constitution or Basic Law could be used for what Jürgen Habermas described as a “legal transition to socialism.”77 Abendroth felt that socialists should work on building alliances among leftist groups to make demands on the promises of social equity codified in the constitution.78 Unlike Marcuse, he believed in the potential recuperation of the working class as a force for leftist politics in “late capitalist” societies.
Frank Deppe, Hans-Dieter Boris, Kurt Steinhaus, and Rüdiger Griepenburg, members of the Marburg SDS, followed their mentor’s faith in the working class and the need to construct broad-based coalitions in preparation for moments of crisis. Deppe and Steinhaus wrote in 1966, “We [the SDS] must attempt to build political potential that will be able to contribute to the mobilization of exploited and oppressed classes in historically open situations. . . . As there are a great number of possibilities for the left in the Federal Republic yet to be exhausted, this demands a planned, coordinated, and optimal use of all obtainable political resources within and outside of existing oppositional organizations.”79 According to the Marburg analysis of the global situation, the crisis was not yet at hand. In an article in Das Argument in February 1966, Boris warned against the “unmodified transfer” of insights from “classic” Marxist theories of imperialism to the present day.80 At the same time, he suggested the viability of a “new, differentiated theory of imperialism” that took into account the enormous differences between the global situations before the First World War and after the Second World War. As one of the first attempts by West German socialist students to create a global political-economic framework for their engagement, it is worth exploring at some length.
Boris began by pointing out that, whereas private capitalist interests in industrialized regions had relied on overseas colonial markets to fix “surplus capital” in the period before the First World War, the postwar global situation was different. First, the willingness of the capitalist countries to work together rather than in competition had led to a “decrease of significance of the developing countries.”81 Having commonly chosen the Keynesian mechanisms of “full employment policies and increasing stimulation to invest,” Western capitalist states had themselves “taken over the entrepreneur function of increasing effective demand, using all of [their] means against the structural crises of under-consumption,” which had made the export of surplus capital to the colonies necessary in the past.82 In addition, most economic exchange between industrialized and developing countries in the postwar period were public transactions in the form of development aid, military aid, and the grants of financial and credit institutions, a reversal of the dominance of private capital in the period of imperialism before the First World War.83
Although capitalists in industrialized nations did not rely on the developing regions in the same way that they had in the past, Marburg theorists insisted that they were still vulnerable to overseas tendencies in the long term. While the quantity of private investment may have declined relative to the earlier period, Boris pointed out, the profit rates had grown dramatically. In the example he used, profit rates for private investment in Asia, the Near East, and the Middle East were between 39 percent and 60 percent, compared with 5.8 percent for Canada.84 Overseas private investment continued to boom in the extractive industries, particularly oil and mining. If one bracketed Latin America, he noted, two-thirds of U.S. direct investment went into oil alone.85 The seven major American oil companies, in particular, reaped enormous profits, benefiting from monopoly control of prices and low royalties returning to the primary nations of extraction: Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.86
The new regime of foreign aid served two important and arguably indispensable functions for capitalist states. First, Boris argued, “the expansion of the world market stimulates export industries and secures new export markets” through providing public credits for private investment. Under the guise of humanitarianism, the structure of foreign aid in the late 1950s and the early 1960s “provided returns to private individuals through foreign aid funds drawn from the taxes of the entire population.”87 More important, U.S. foreign aid policy dovetailed with global strategic concerns. According to Boris, one-third of U.S. capital transfers overseas “were for military purposes.” Funding its military bases in allied countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and South Vietnam with “foreign aid” funds both relieved pressure on the domestic budget and “mobilized affordable troops for U.S. geopolitical goals.”88
In an article in February 1966, Griepenburg and Steinhaus put even greater emphasis on the central role of the military in the management of the U.S. business cycle. They observed that the United States had solved crises of overproduction by raising the production of goods that “increase the effective demand rather than creating additional supply on the market.”89 The most reliable sector for producing new products and new needs had been the armaments industry, which was constantly developing new forms of weaponry and vehicles, especially following the precipitous rise in the military budget since the beginning of the 1960s.90 Avoiding crises of overproduction through public investment in the armaments industry had the grotesque outcome that “military engagement itself was an instrument of economic stabilization or business cycle policy.”91 “The notion,” they wrote, “that a limited armament, as has been a consequence of Vietnam, is the best thing that could happen to the American national economy is spoken of in astonishingly open terms.”92 In support, they quoted a New York Times editorial from 1965 by M. J. Rossant, a former senior editor of Business Week, saying that “the decision to escalate . . . had nothing to do with the state of the economy . . . but was timed perfectly. It permitted the administration to apply the necessary stimulation without confessing its fallibility.”93
Griepenburg and Steinhaus argued that U.S. imperialism was sustained and driven forward by military Keynesianism, or what two authors from the West Berlin SDS in 1966 called the “shift from the welfare economy to the warfare economy.”94 This fact, the Marburg theorists suggested, explained both why the United States was fighting in Vietnam and why it could not afford to stop. At a basic level, U.S. capitalist interests feared the loss of access to resources and the large profits from overseas investment that might follow a socialist revolution in South Vietnam. But this fear alone could not motivate the scale of the military undertaking. As Griepenburg and Steinhaus pointed out, the Vietnam War was “not only illegal and inhumane—contravening the human rights norms of the UN Charter, the General Declaration of Human Rights, and the Hague Conventions”—it was also “extremely expensive.”95 The enormous campaign in Vietnam made sense only if one saw that a Vietcong victory would pose a fundamental challenge to the U.S. system of organizing the world.
Afraid that a successful revolution in Vietnam would encourage other Third World liberation movements, the United States chose to make Vietnam an example. Brutal suppression of socialist challenges in South Vietnam would send a disciplinary message to would-be revolutionaries worldwide. As Griepenburg and Steinhaus phrased it: “The struggle of the Vietnamese people anticipates, almost in miniature, the emancipation of entire continents, the significance of which for the self-reproduction of the international capitalist system, especially for the United States, can hardly be overestimated. Through the ongoing change in the terms of trade, through the running profits from over a century of overseas capital investments, the ‘Third World’—emancipated in the formal sense, at best—is a source of enrichment for the capitalist industrial countries that is not to be underestimated.”96 Although the wealth of the United States meant that it could sustain its engagement in South Vietnam indefinitely, Griepenburg and Steinhaus conclude by asking, “What would happen if Vietnam was only one case among many, when, for example, the many partisan movements in Latin America currently unfolding reach a comparable strength?”97
Working from the analysis of U.S. imperialism outlined here, the Marburg SDS felt that the role of socialists in West Germany was to continue to wait and build the domestic forces of opposition in the hope that the successful challenge of Third World liberation movements would shake the structures of U.S. imperialism. They should be prepared to “exploit moments of crisis to create breakthroughs toward socialism in terms of consciousness and practical politics” but did not have a direct role in bringing about the crisis.98 Although they advocated armed partisan warfare in the Third World as a means of revolt, the only hope in the First World was a long process of strengthening socialist opposition, drawing in new groups, and seeking to reanimate the working class.99 In an article in 1966 on “political education and praxis in the SDS,” Steinhaus and Deppe used a passage from Mao Zedong that captures the traditionalist position on political organization. Distinguishing the conditions of political action between the industrialized world and China, Mao wrote: “The forms of organization [in the industrialized nations] are legal, the forms of struggle bloodless. But in China there is no parliament that one can exploit, the workers have no legally established right to organize or carry out strikes. . . . So the problems in China can only be solved through armed struggle.”100 The position of the Marburg SDS, shared by the Frankfurt and Hamburg members of the SDS Bundesvorstand (Federal Committee) in early 1966, followed this insight. These traditionalists prescribed a policy of moderate and inclusive political language in statements such as the “Declaration against the War in Vietnam” as a way to expand the oppositional movement within West Germany. Deppe and Steinhaus called it a policy of “here and later” rather than “here and now.”101
In early 1966, the West Berlin faction of the SDS announced its break with the long-term strategies of the Marburg and Frankfurt factions in two spectacular actions unauthorized by the SDS leadership. Taken in combination, the actions shattered the consensus on decorous protest and the language of human rights. The first was an illegal “poster action” in which a group of about forty activists, mostly members of West Berlin SDS and including Dutschke, Jürgen Horlemann, and Eike Hemmer, put up 60–100 posters throughout the city.102 The police arrested five activists for putting up the poster, which read, “Erhard and the parties in Bonn support MURDER. . . . East and West [meaning the two Cold War blocs] are increasingly coming to an arrangement with one another at the cost of the economically underdeveloped countries. Now, all that remains for the oppressed is to reach for arms. For them, future means: REVOLUTION.”103 The second act of provocation came three months later, at the Vietnam congress in May 1966, when West Berlin SDS members circulated a leaflet without authorization from the SDS Federal Committee. The leaflet’s authors condemned the “solidarity with underdogs whimpered by the lame student movement until now” and called for the students to “become powerful in solidarity with the victors, more powerful with every American plane shot down, every draft card burned.”104 In the flyer, the West Berlin SDS proposed, “We have to achieve what we have failed to do until now, not simply chant our laments for [the Vietnamese] but finally recognize ourselves in the condemned who successfully defend themselves.”105 The West Berlin faction suggested that the Vietnam War could act not as depressing confirmation of patterns of increasing state authoritarianism but as an inspiration for rebellion in the First World. The crisis, which the West Berlin faction saw as having already arrived, could become an opportunity. The solution was a leap of identification with the fighting Vietnamese.
The West Berlin position reflected the culmination of experiences in the previous years of mobilization, as well as successful advocacy of an actionist line intolerant of compromise by a small number of student leaders. As described in chapter 2, Dutschke and Rabehl had entered the West Berlin SDS in early 1965 explicitly intending to redirect the student organization toward the program they had developed with their colleagues in Subversive Aktion. In April 1965, Dutschke wrote to Subversive Aktion members that he had “no illusions about the character of the SDS” but that it could be used “to maintain the possibility of international connections.”106 Along with an international orientation, Dutschke and Rabehl brought with them belief in the need for provocation and conflict with authority to deepen the commitment of activists.107 The Tshombe demonstration had proved that transgressing the rules could produce results and could draw the attention of the media, which could have an amplifying effect on the demands of protesters.
The unique relationship of the media to the SDS in West Berlin doubtlessly helped to validate spectacular protests. West Berlin was the only place in West Germany where student demonstrations were automatically domestic, and even international, news stories because of the city’s high geopolitical profile. Dieter Kunzelmann of Subversive Aktion has illustrated this point by comparing the response of the media to the Tshombe demonstrations in West Berlin and Munich: “In Munich, we made the foyer of the . . . hotel where Tshombe was staying into a no-go zone with stink bombs without producing a noticeable public reaction. In Berlin, by contrast, the demonstration against Tshombe and the successful rupture of a police cordon into the area around Schöneberg City Hall led to huge headlines.”108 Subversive Aktion focused its efforts on West Berlin, Kunzelmann wrote, because “the media resonance was excellent. The slightest leftist activity prompted heated journalistic red-baiting from the Springer Press.”109
The exaggerated response of tabloids owned by Springer to the egging of the America House in February 1966 supported Kunzelmann’s description of West Berlin as a “provocateur’s paradise.”110 The experiences of the West Berlin SDS nurtured the notion that the most direct route to public consciousness was not through small-scale coalitions but through media attention attracted by spectacular protests. Such experiences help explain the frustration of the West Berlin faction with the relatively slow organization promoted by the Marburg and Frankfurt SDS sections.
The provocations of the West Berlin SDS brought outraged responses from SDS leaders. After the poster action, President Helmut Schauer and Vice-President Hartmut Dabrowski of the SDS traveled to West Berlin and demanded that the perpetrators of the action be expelled from the organization.111 Although the rogue members were not expelled, a meeting was held to discuss the consequences of the action for the SDS’s position. At the meeting, the West Berliners’ primary target was the “Declaration against the War in Vietnam,” which SDS leaders had made the basis for the Vietnam congress held in May 1966.112 When West Berlin SDS members challenged what they saw as the anodyne nature of the declaration, Schauer defended it, saying that the goal was “to enable the participation of all radical opponents of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and they are not all socialists.”113
The West Berlin faction rejected the appeal to liberal norms and goal of coalition building that underlay the Vietnam congress and the widely circulated petition. They expressed their dissatisfaction in a letter to the national leadership in the run-up to the congress, writing: “We do not believe that an immanent critique of the contravention of bourgeois norms in Vietnam can unify the opposition. Themes, for example, like ‘political and legal problems of the Vietnam War’ can only serve to camouflage the actual process at work.”114 To the West Berlin faction, the lack of response to international protest proved the futility of trying to pressure the United States with its own language of liberal norms. In a leaflet distributed in West Berlin without the approval of the SDS Federal Committee, the West Berlin faction began with a list of U.S. crimes that deliberately invoked the Second World War: “Everyone knows today what the ‘cordon sanitaire’ produced by carpet bombing looks like, the effects of tear gas . . . what kind of poverty the ‘non-toxic material’ used to eradicate the harvest brings to the civilian population. Everyone knows that ‘resettlement’ only hides expulsion, that concentration camps are being presented as ‘villages for new living,’ that the CIA’s ‘pacification’ is intended to create the coercive state (Zwangsstaat) that will finally guarantee ‘population control.’”115
The authors of the leaflet wondered why knowledge of these facts had not shaken the faith of antiwar activists in appeals to the morality of the superpower that “speaks loudly of freedom but means carpet bombing.” “They presuppose,” they wrote, “a government in Washington that sees Vietnam as a mistake, as a scandal exposed, and deny the unrelenting consistency that has led to the construction of this slaughterhouse.”116 Jürgen Horlemann, leader of the West Berlin SDS, argued that mobilizing under liberal demands actually did damage by preserving the semblance of a tolerant civil society, further thickening “the democratic veil . . . through the whole democratic performance of the splintering of protests, their partial placation, diversion, etc.”117
Schauer, who had defended the appeal to liberal norms in the declaration, conceded the inconsistency himself in private discussion with the SDS but argued that it was a matter of tactics. As he put it, “Of course, appealing to the Johnson administration to end the intervention and the war is incorrect and obscures the actual circumstances. . . . But we are not formulating our political goals for Johnson, but for those we want to win for our cause and draw into our movement.” Beginning in the run-up to the Vietnam congress, the West Berlin SDS rejected Schauer’s model of organization based on compromise, coalition building, and appeals to rational self-interest in favor of a model of vanguardism based on leaps of psychological and emotional identification with Third World revolutionaries.
At the Vietnam congress, the West Berlin SDS found an unplanned ally for its call to break with appeals to bourgeois norms in the keynote speaker, Herbert Marcuse. Ahead of Marcuse’s arrival from California, the SDS leader Walmot Falkenberg had written privately to ask that he use his remarks to discipline the West Berlin faction, whom he described as exhibiting the “infantile disorder of communism,” using Lenin’s label for the anti-union and anti-parliament communist factions of Great Britain and Germany in 1920.118 Falkenberg foreshadowed Dabrowski’s discussion of the solidarity of “rationally grounded interests” by asking Marcuse to emphasize “which concrete solidarity of interests, not of sentiments, connects us with the liberation movements of the Third World.”119 In his keynote speech, Marcuse responded to Falkenberg’s request for a call to order by rejecting it. Instead, he praised the “instinctive, spontaneous solidarity of sentiment” with the Third World, which, he said, “goes deeper than organized solidarity, without which it cannot become effective.”120 He put emphasis on the first jump of empathy—what he called “the power of negation that initiates the upheaval”—giving the seal of approval to the mode of existential voluntarism advocated by the West Berlin faction.121
Before the congress, the conflict between the SDS Federal Committee and the West Berlin faction had come to a head in an exchange between Schauer and Dutschke, the most vocal representative of the West Berlin group, on the question of “total negation.”122 While Schauer argued that “there were starting points for developing a society based on solidarity within capitalism” and defended the viability of the Western working class as a revolutionary subject, Dutschke contended that the coming revolution would not be “a proletarian but a popular revolution (Volksrevolution),” the subject of which “would constitute itself first in the course of revolutionary struggle.”123 He held that the key starting point for contemporary struggle was the identification by the First World intellectuals with Third World revolutionaries and the “total negation” of existing terms of political engagement. He referred to the internationalist coalition as the “identification of the thinking with the suffering,” adapting Marx’s description of the cross-class opposition to the Prussian absolutist state.124 In response, Schauer reasserted the problem of class difference, pointing out that only a small sector of West German society “was in the position to comprehend what was happening in Vietnam and to make the abstract identification called for by Dutschke.”125
Schauer’s position reflected a continuing faith in the progressive role of labor that the West Berlin SDS did not share. In early 1966, the SDS Federal Committee was still dominated by students who maintained close working relationships with labor, including Frank Deppe of the Marburg SDS. With Schauer as president, the SDS leadership had worked with IG Metall, the metalworkers’ trade union, since early 1965 to oppose the Emergency Laws being proposed by the CDU government. In 1966, Schauer became an employee of IG Metall as the secretary of the Notstand der Demokratie (Crisis of Democracy) organizing committee devoted to opposing the Emergency Laws, actively cultivated connections between socialist students and labor institutions and helping to organize a conference that drew 20,000 attendees in October of that year.126 To Schauer, Third World issues were distractions from domestic issues. In early 1965, he had already expressed concern that attention to the Third World could be a dangerous “escape to the distant (Fernflucht).”127 Unlike Schauer’s position and that of the Marburg SDS, the West Berlin position, as articulated by its main spokesperson, Dutschke, allowed no progressive role for the working class in Western countries. Marcuse took the same stance, pointing out in his keynote address that the working class in the United States had been entirely “integrated” into support of the status quo and the Vietnam War and that the “crucial counterforce” was “the opposition in developing countries.”128
The resonance between Marcuse and the West Berlin faction was not surprising. As discussed in chapter 2, the West Berlin group had developed its focus on the psychological aspects of revolution and its dismissal of the Western working class in engagement with Marcuse’s writings. It had also arrived at its conclusions based on its members’ political experiences of the preceding years. In the isolated “front city” of West Berlin, the closest collaborators of the SDS had not been labor organizations but its Third World colleagues at the FU. The experience of collaboration influenced the group’s understanding of what forces would and could lead political change.
Schauer and Dabrowski declared their official intention to step down as SDS leaders in the wake of the Vietnam congress, saying that the West Berlin faction threatened “the destruction of the SDS in the form it has taken until now.”129 Although they withdrew their resignations and finished their terms, they were correct in their prognosis. In September 1966, two representatives of the West Berlin line, Reimut Reiche (of Frankfurt) and Peter Gäng, replaced Schauer and Dabrowski as SDS leaders.130 Until the SDS’s dissolution, antiauthoritarians dominated its leadership, rejecting the prospects of collaboration with the working class for an orientation toward Third World revolutionary socialism.131 The value of identification with the Vietnamese victor became the party line in the leading West German socialist student organization.
Socialist students recognized the risks of leaving coalition building, academic analysis, and the “solidarity of interests” for the project of sparking empathy and what Marcuse called the “solidarity of sentiment” with Third World revolutionaries. Even after signing the leaflet calling for identification with the “Vietnamese victors,” Horlemann worried in May 1966 about the false sense of “immediacy” that this identification might create.132 He recognized that, if felt too completely and “when it cannot be put into practice,” empathy could be dangerous and misleading, welcoming irrationality into the core of political organization. Both the power and the hazards of identifying with the Third World revolutionary would become obvious as the movement continued to expand.
The widespread adoption of theories of imperialism in socialist student circles had similarly long-reaching consequences. In their pioneering analyses at mid-decade, Steinhaus, Boris, and Helga Deppe-Wolfinger, among others, were specific about condemning the project of international development in the particular form practiced by the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s.133 Yet their conclusions, and those of the less intellectually rigorous students who followed them, tended toward an allor-nothing prescription for the Third World, which branded everything short of popular revolution an indefensible variant of “neocolonialism.”
The influence of Vietnam in socialist student circles helped displace the alternative visions of development built around liberal and critical freedoms proposed by foreign students in West Germany for the panacea of partisan revolution. It was not until the high point of mobilization had passed in 1969 that some students returned to critiques of development policy that saw a space for maneuver between subjugation to U.S. imperialism and outright escape from it.134 Accepting the impossibility of total escape from the capitalist world system would first require a deflation of expectations and, for many, personal and physical confrontation with the police force of their own apparently intransigent state.