When the Federal Republic created its new army, the Bundeswehr, in the mid-1950s, conscription did not apply to West Berlin because of its continuing status as an Allied protectorate. This meant that thousands of young West Germans moved to West Berlin to dodge the draft. Not surprisingly, they constituted a ready reservoir of protest sentiment in the walled city. West Berlin’s higher educational scene, especially the Free University (FU), also provided a breeding ground for antiestab-lishment politics. Although the founders of the FU had hoped to build a different kind of university, free of old-fashioned hierarchical thinking, the institution soon fell into the same patterns prevailing at other West German schools, with the added disadvantage of extreme overcrowding. The result was a high level of frustration and discontent, fanned by junior faculty who saw little chance for advancement. The FU received considerable financial backing from America, but this created resentment among a new generation of students who regarded the United States as a pernicious influence in world affairs. The fact that America and its wartime allies still functioned as occupation powers in West Berlin added to the sense of grievance, as did the ubiquity of American culture. Initially, U.S. styles had been welcomed as a breath of fresh air, but in the German counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s the American juggernaut was perceived as a corrupting imposition of hypercapitalism, materialism, and kitsch.
The Vietnam War was the crucial factor in bringing these undercurrents of resentment to the surface. From the outset, however, the hostility of West Germany’s youthful antiwar protesters was aimed not only at America but also at older Germans who had left the younger generation with a legacy of guilt and shame. Having been too young to protest against National Socialism, the student radicals of the mid-1960s sought the coveted status of “resisters” by campaigning against Washington and the political establishment of their own country, which they accused of repressing or even repeating the crimes of the Nazis.
Berlin’s first major anti–Vietnam War demonstration occurred on February 5, 1965. About 2,500 protesters, mainly students, marched through the city along a route preapproved by the authorities. A smaller group split off from the main column and headed for the Amerika Haus. Upon reaching the building they lowered the American flag to half-mast (in honor of the North Vietnamese killed in U.S. bombing raids) and pelted the facade with eggs. They tacked up posters accusing the Bonn government of supporting Washington in its policy of “murder through napalm and poison gas.”
The attack on the Amerika Haus horrified local authorities and older Berliners, who continued to see Washington as the free world’s primary bastion against communism. Mayor Willy Brandt publicly apologized to the Americans on behalf of his city. Axel Springer, the conservative press baron, accused the students of working hand-in-glove with the East German Communists to undermine the freedom of West Berlin. In response to Springer’s intervention, the students added his headquarters to their list of targets.
In the following year West Germany experienced its first major change of government since 1949. (The replacement of Adenauer by his CDU colleague Ludwig Erhard in 1963 did not represent a significant new departure.) In December 1966 a Grand Coalition (CDU-SPD) headed by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi Party, took control in Bonn. As mentioned above, the new foreign minister was Willy Brandt, who gave up his position as mayor of West Berlin. By absorbing the SPD into the ruling coalition, the new government removed the traditional left from the ranks of the opposition, leaving that field open to more radical groups. West Berlin, with its Social Democratic former mayor no longer on the scene as a stabilizing influence, became even more favored by the militant left, who saw their major enemy not on the other side of the Wall but in Bonn and Washington.
