3-16-1969 Dutschke Assailant gets 7 Years (Stars and Stripes)
Stars and Stripes published a short follow up to the stories the past year detailing the attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke. His assailaint, Josef Bachmann, was sentenced to seven years for the attack.
April 11, 1968 West Berlin
A young house painter, Joseph Bachmann, waits patiently in the street outside the home of Rudi Dutschke. Dutschke is the firebrand leader of the APO — a leftist movement. In Bachmann’s coat pocket is a gun. Bachmann shoots Dutschke three times, knocking him clean out of his shoes. Dutschke survives his shooting. Immediately following the [read all]
9-27-1967 Student Radicals Rise in Germany (Stars and Stripes)
This is a perfect slice-of-the-times syndicated opinion piece by John Chamberlain that ran in Stars and Stripes in late 1967. Chamberlain notes with interest that both America and Germany have student organizations that are called the SDS, though he notes that they are completely unrelated. At times the article is almost comically conservative; but Chamberlain [read all]
SDS
Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund or German Socialist Student Union Though unconnected to its American counterpart that shared its acronym (Students for a Democratic Society), the German SDS shared a similar place in German society. It was the leading left-wing student organization throughout the sixties (the APO — Extraparliamentary Opposition — was more of a movement than an organization). Originally [read all]
“Everybody Talks about the Weather… We don’t.”
Everybody Talks about the Weather… We don’t. All reden vom Wetter… Wir nicht “Everybody talks about the Weather… We Don’t” is a phrased derived from a German national rail service (Deutsche Bahn) poster of the mid 1960s, that was later co-opted for a poster by the German student organization, the SDS. The original poster shows [read all]
Gudrun Ensslin
Contrary to what many people think, Gudrun Ensslin, not Ulrike Meinhof, was the real female leader of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Gudrun was a politically active student in the 1960s. She participated in the seminal 2 June 1967 Berlin protest where a young pacifist named Benno Ohnesorg was killed. After the protest she went to the [read all]
Podcast 6: Historian Martin Klimke Interview
Author Martin Klimke talks about the German and American student movements of the 60s. [display_podcast]