One who thought this way was Rudi Dutschke, or “Red Rudi,” as he came to be known. Like many who came to play key roles in West Berlin’s student movement, Dutschke hailed from the East, having grown up in the small town of Luckenwalde about fifty kilometers southeast of the capital. Independent-minded from the beginning, he had ruined his chances to study at Leipzig University by refusing do “volunteer” service in the new East German army. Since the GDR would not let him study, he moved to West Berlin in 1961 to matriculate at the Free University. No sooner had he gotten there than the Wall went up, marooning him in the West. In order to obtain government funds for the continuation of his studies he registered as a political refugee and renounced his East German citizenship. He earned additional money by working briefly as a sports journalist for the Springer Press (an aspect of his biography that he was later careful to conceal). When not working or studying he often sat in West Berlin cafés frequented by other recent refugees from the East who shared his sense of alienation from the (in their eyes) hypercompetitive, get-rich-quick environment of the West. He began to read Marx, something that he had resisted in the GDR when it was part of the official curriculum. Another influence was Rosa Luxemburg, whose democratically based, humanistic socialism he found preferable to the party-dominated, state socialism of the GDR. In 1963 he drifted into a group calling itself “Subversive Action,” which launched Dada-like “happenings” to mock the career-and-consume society of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). But with time Dada did not seem an adequate weapon against the seductive powers of the modern capitalist order, which, according to the neo-Marxist guru, Herbert Marcuse, employed the opiate of consumerism to sedate the people. In 1965 Dutschke joined the Berlin branch of SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), a student group dedicated to changing the political order through direct action in the streets. The creation of the Grand Coalition convinced him that the SDS, too, was not an adequate tool of revolutionary change, and in 1967 he established the APO (Ausserparlementarische Opposition), which aimed to replace Bonn’s parliamentary system with a “people’s democracy” of popular councils elected directly by the masses.
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As he established himself as a leading figure in West Berlin’s radical leftist scene, Red Rudi became a favored target of local conservatives, including his old employers, the Springer Press. The
Bachmann, who was quickly arrested, turned out to be a casual laborer whose life had consisted of one failure after another. Upon attending some meetings of the radical rightist NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, National-Democratic Party of Germany), he had become convinced that communism was the enemy of honest workers. After his arrest, however, he began to regret his attack on Dutschke, who wrote him letters from prison saying that he, Bachmann, should be directing his anger not at the people who were trying to liberate him but at the “ruling clique” that was oppressing him. Bachmann replied that while he no longer considered Dutschke his enemy, he was puzzled why student radicals demanded a revolution when workers in Germany had never had it so good. This exchange was a telling commentary on the failure of West Germany’s university-based left to make headway with the country’s working classes.
