West Berlin in the mid-1960s
West Berlin in 1967 was an unusual place to be a student. It was a city surrounded by East German territory, supported by the Western Allies, and full of young people, including many who had moved there partly because residents were exempt from West German military service. The Free University, founded after the war in the western sector, had a tradition of student participation, and by the middle of the decade a section of its students had moved to the left.
Several grievances overlapped. Many young Germans resented the silence about the Nazi past in their parents’ generation and in public institutions. In December 1966 the two main parties formed a “grand coalition” government in West Germany, which left little parliamentary opposition and seemed to some students to confirm that real dissent had to take place outside parliament. Plans for emergency legislation caused further alarm. Opposition to the Vietnam War added a further theme, and the Socialist German Students’ League, known as the SDS, provided an organisation through which it was expressed. The German SDS had separated from the Social Democratic Party in the early 1960s and was distinct from the American group with a similar name.
Rudi Dutschke, a student leader associated with the SDS, became the best-known figure of the movement. Student ideas about democracy within the university were combined with experiments in lifestyle, such as Kommune I, a Berlin commune that attracted press attention in 1967 for its provocative stunts.
The conservative newspapers of the publisher Axel Springer, which dominated the press in West Berlin, were hostile to the students and published sharply worded attacks on them. The students, in turn, campaigned against what they saw as the concentration of media power.
The Shah’s visit
On 2 June 1967 the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, visited West Berlin as part of a state visit to West Germany. Iranian students living in Germany and German students opposed his rule, which they described as a repressive monarchy, and they planned demonstrations. West Berlin’s authorities and the police were determined to avoid embarrassment to the guest.
In the afternoon, supporters of the Shah, who were reported to include people bussed in to cheer him, attacked demonstrators outside the town hall in Schöneberg with sticks. The police were criticised for not intervening effectively and then for moving against the protesters. Later that evening, while the Shah and his wife attended a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper, a larger crowd gathered outside. Police used heavy force to disperse it, and fighting spread to the side streets.
The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg
Benno Ohnesorg, a 26-year-old student, was among those in the crowd. He was reported to have been attending his first demonstration. In a courtyard off Krumme Strasse, during the chaos after the police charge, he was shot in the head by a plain-clothes police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras. Ohnesorg died in hospital. His wife was expecting a child.
Police first presented the event as the result of violence by demonstrators, a version that was soon contested by eyewitnesses and the press. Kurras stated that he had acted in self-defence. He was acquitted at his trial, and the verdict was not overturned, which many contemporaries saw as a sign of an unwilling justice system. The Berlin interior authorities faced criticism, and Mayor Heinrich Albertz resigned in the autumn, along with the police chief and other officials, though the full chain of responsibility is a matter on which accounts differ.
In 2009 researchers working with the East German Stasi archives established that Kurras had been a long-term informant of the Stasi and a member of East Germany’s ruling party. This was a shock, but historians found no evidence that the Stasi had ordered the shooting, and the circumstances of the shot itself remain disputed. The discovery altered the way some people interpreted the story without changing the basic fact that an unarmed student was killed by a police officer.
Radicalisation
Ohnesorg’s death turned a student protest into a mass movement. Many students who had been indifferent to politics took part in memorial demonstrations and in a conference on university and democracy held in Hanover shortly after his funeral. The student left began to speak of a “fascist” tendency in the state, a claim that has been criticised as exaggerated but which captured the anger of the moment. Press attacks by the Springer papers became a target of protest, and in the following year the conflict with the publisher escalated; Dutschke was shot and seriously wounded by a young man in April 1968, an act that set off riots outside Springer buildings.
The movement divided between those who pursued reform through the universities and parties and those who moved toward more extreme positions. Within a few years a small number of people from this milieu turned to violence. The Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, emerged around 1970, and a different group in the early 1970s took the name “2 June Movement” in reference to the date of the shooting. These groups were minor in size compared with the broad movement, and many former activists strongly rejected them.
Context
The Berlin events were part of a wider student movement that was spreading through several countries, and they interacted with the Vietnam protests then spreading from the United States and the opposition to the Greek junta, whose April 1967 coup was also a cause for German demonstrators. The unrest in West Germany came before the May 1968 strikes in France, which drew in far more people. A large international Vietnam congress was held in West Berlin in February 1968. The shooting of 2 June 1967 is still treated in Germany as a turning point in postwar political culture.