Anti-Authoritarian Politics in the Federal Republic

HI136 History of Germany

Authoritarian legacies of the 1950s• Compromises over denazification (1951

Adenauer suspended proceedings & rehabilitated some former National Socialists; Federal cabinets included several former NSDAP members); many ‘sixty-eighters’ engaging in remedial denazification – is this a post-fascist phenomenon?

• Materialism: ‘economic miracle’ supposedly distracted from democratic engagement; Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse warned of late-industrial capitalism creating ‘one-dimensional man’, alienated by consumerism & ‘latent authoritarianism’ of liberal state

• Generation gaps: post-1945 baby boomers suspicious of the parental generation

‘Kanzlerdemokratie’

Herbert Marcuse, philosopher of anti-capitalism

Antinuclear Politics• Rearmament debate from 1950 already

unpopular in opinion polls• Peace politics in 1950s hampered by

communist connotations• Bundeswehr banned from weapons of mass

destruction (ABC weapons)• 1958 atomic artillery to be stationed in

Federal Republic; first small-scale public demonstrations

• 1970s: oil crisis of 1973 prompted greater use of atomic power stations, leading to protests at Wyhl & Brokdorf

• Intermediate Nuclear Forces: early 1980s both Warsaw Pact (SS20s) and NATO (Cruise & Pershing IIs) station medium-range missiles in Germany

• ‘Hot autumn’ of 1983: 400,000 gather in Bonn to protest against INFs

Fight Atomic Death march, 1958

Peace demonstration, Bonn, 1983 against intermediate nuclear missiles

Spiegel Affair, 1962• The affair tested limits of freedom of

the press• News magazine Spiegel had

reported the Bundeswehr’s limited readiness for conflict with Russians

• Spiegel offices were occupied by police, Augstein arrested, as well as the article’s author

• Strauss, Christian Socialist defence minister, lost his job after lying about his involvement in arrests; Adenauer himself only lasted to 1963

• Popular demonstrations began to free Augstein; beginnings of widespread protest culture?

Franz Josef Strauss, defence minister

Rudolf Augstein, editor of Spiegel, being arrested by Federal police

Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO)• Grand Coalition of 1966-69:

absence of a legitimate parliamentary opposition?

• Emergency Laws (1967-68): to cater for national emergency (e.g. Soviet invasion), but interpreted by left as new ‘Enabling Law’ (cf Hitler’s 1933 law)

• Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (APO) set up in Dec. 1966 as umbrella for libertarian left

Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU chancellor) and Willy Brandt (SPD vice-chancellor)

Vietnam• New Left students saw

themselves as a fifth column for the decolonising developing world in the ‘first world’

• West Germany was one of the USA’s main military bases & thus an easy target for demonstrations (against Amerikahaus cultural centres) or the bombing of troop bases

• Bombing of North Vietnam used as justification for early arson attacks

• Internationalism of New Left movement

Political violence I• Political violence becomes political when it is

aimed against the state, or to bring pressure on the state & is not simply criminal violence

• Violence can often escalate from property violence (smashing up cars or shops) to personal violence against human beings

• Property violence: premises of newspapers run by Axel Springer attacked

• Personal violence: Ohnesorg killing by police in 1967 justified counter-violence in many radicals’ minds

• Dutschke assassination attempt: April 1968 a far-right vigilante tried to shoot Dutschke

Benno Ohnsorg succumbs to a police bullet on 2 June 1967 during a demonstration against visit by Shah of Iran

Student politics• Expansion of university sector in mid-

1960s led to • Free University of Berlin radical hotspot

(West Berlin exempt from conscription)• SDS had split from SPD for its leftism

& anti-nuclear stance• Calls for greater student democracy in

running universities (‘Under the gowns the musty smell of a thousand years’)

• Boycotting of ‘Nazified’ teaching personnel

• Extra-campus politics – calls to link up with workers, but problem of GDR

• ‘Long march through the institutions’: Dutschke’s call for a reform of the establishment by infiltration from from within

Socialist German Students’ League: ‘Everyone’s talking about the weather.Not us.’

Rudi Dutschke, leader of Extra-Parliamentary Opposition

Communitarian politics• The personal is political• Wohngemeinschaft (WG), living

community• Berlin & Hamburg offer squatted

accommodation• Kommune I: community suspending

private relations• Fritz Teufel & Rainer Langhans

engage in prankster politics (flour-bombing visiting politicians, releasing mice in court)

• Potential split from ‘politicos’ by hedonistic subculture seeking personal enlightenment

Fritz Teufel & Rainer Langhans, enfants terribles of Kommune I

Kommune I pose for camera

Terrorism• Splinter groups from student

movement (Ensslin)

• Urban guerrilla tactics copied from Latin America (Marighella’s writings)

• Meinhof began as radical journalist & playwright, & dabbled with underground communist party in 1960s

• Aim to unmask latent authoritarianism of state by provoking police overreaction

• Targeted symbols of capitalism, such as bankers, as well as former NSDAP members, but also US military

• Founder generation leaders all in prison by 1972

Ulrike Meinhof, intellectual leader of the RAF

Gudrun Ensslin & Andreas Baader

1977: crisis year• RAF/Palestinian Liberation Organisation joint

hijacking of Lufthansa airliner in Mogadishu foiled by special forces

• Baader & other RAF leaders committed suicide in cells same night

• Schleyer hostage executed in reprisal soon afterwards

• State counter-measures: data protection; national police anti-terrorist centre; job bans (‘Berufsverbote’) in 1972 for radical applying for government jobs (including teachers, postal workers)

Hanns-Martin Schleyer, business leader & hostage

Police RAF wanted poster

Greens• Participatory, single-interest politics• Political scandals of mainstream parties (Flick

sleaze affair)• Ecology (extension of Frankfurt airport; air

pollution killing forestation)• Nuclear powerstations• Stationing of intermediate missiles• Fundamentalists (‘Fundis’) versus Realists

(‘Realos’) over control of parliamentary faction• Greens capable of acting as coalition pivot

instead of Liberal FDP

‘The Greens’ (note absence of word ‘party’

Petra Kelly, prominent leader

Green breakthroughs

• Greens started as regional party (Hamburg, Bremen, Hessen)

• 1983 surmounted 5% hurdle at national level

• 1990 only returned to Bundestag with East German dissident alliance (Buendnis ’90)

• 1998 formed ‘red-green’ coalition with SPD, including Joschka Fischer as foreign minister

• 2005 Greens ousted by CDU-SPD Grand Coalition