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.
In April 1967 Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to West Berlin to reassure its citizens that America, despite its preoccupation with the Far East, was still committed to keeping the city free. In light of the cheers that Lyndon Johnson and President Kennedy had garnered earlier, Humphrey expected to be warmly received. But a leftist collective at the Free University called Kommune I had other ideas. The communards decided to greet the visiting vice president with pudding-filled balloons. To prepare for this action they practiced throwing their missiles at trees in the Grunewald. Somehow the Springer Press got wind of these exercises and, in banner headlines, warned of “Planned Bomb Attacks against U.S. Vice President.” The activists were arrested before Humphrey arrived, which spared him the indignity of being covered in Quark. He did not, however, come away unscathed, for at every stop he was booed and heckled. He left the city angry and confused—his disillusionment another sign that the postwar love affair between America and West Berlin was losing some of its luster.
For all their provocative gestures, the protest demonstrations in West Berlin remained essentially nonviolent until June 2, 1967, when the Shah of Iran paid a visit to the city. Reza Shah Pahlavi was seen in Berlin’s leftist circles as the quintessential American lackey, but it was not enough for the students to denounce him as such. In line with their tendency to equate all contemporary evils with the sins of their parents, they labeled him “Another Hitler.” Alerted that there might be trouble during his Berlin visit, the Shah arrived with a large security guard drawn from his dreaded secret police, the Savak. When demonstrators shouted “Shah Murderer” at him during a reception at the Schöneberg Rathaus, the Savak went to work, beating the protesters with clubs. West Berlin police did not intervene. Later that evening, as the Shah and his wife arrived at the Deutsche Oper to attend a gala performance of the Magic Flute, another crowd of demonstrators gathered across the street and threw eggs and stones at the imperial couple. Once again the Savak went on the attack, this time assisted by the local police. When the demonstrators dispersed, the police gave pursuit. One protester, a twenty-six-year-old theology student named Benno Ohnesorg, who was participating in his first demonstration, fell to the pavement under a rain of blows. As he lay on the street a police officer shot him in the head—accidentally according to the officer, on purpose according to some witnesses. An hour later Ohnesorg was pronounced dead at Moabit Hospital. The next day Springer’s Bildzeitung ran a picture of the dead student, declaring that he had been killed by the demonstrators themselves. Günter Grass, on the other hand, called this “the first political murder in the Federal Republic.” Upon leaving town the next day, the shah was asked by West Berlin’s recently elected mayor, Heinrich Albertz, if he had heard about the fatality. Yes, said the shah, but the mayor should not let the incident get him down; that kind of thing happened in Iran every day.
Of course, the death of a political protester was anything but routine in West Berlin, and the Ohnesorg case provoked an extended bout of soul-searching. Mayor Albertz, who resigned his office in the wake of the shah riots, later argued that the authorities’ hard-line reaction to the escalating student demonstrations could best be understood in terms of West Berlin’s geopolitical vulnerability.
In the years after the building of the Berlin Wall we developed an extreme sensitivity to everyone and everything that had contributed to the reality that our city was now walled in. We were fully fixated on the fact that this city, in its current condition, could remain free only through seamless cooperation with the United States. . . . In this situation there suddenly appeared demonstrators with red flags and Ho-Chi-Minh slogans, attacking our guarantor power as a destroyer of humanity and freedom. It was hard to take psychologically.
Albrecht’s explanation overlooked the fact that police forces were reacting harshly to student protests in many other parts of the Western world at this time. Yet it was undoubtedly true that West Berlin’s unique status as a walled city, with its shut-in population of self-dramatizing students and short-fused police, made it a perfect stage for the bitterly confrontational politics of the era.
Benno Ohnesorg’s death convinced some in Berlin’s radical scene that the “system” was so rotten that it could not be reformed through the usual parliamentary methods.
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.