As Alan Brinkley has noted, most of the protests and conflagrations of the 1960s had their roots in a desire to preserve or create communities. The ostensible issue that launched the takeover of Columbia University in 1968 was the encroachment of the campus into the black community. The administration's appeasement of Black Nationalists was done in the name of welcoming blacks to the Cornell community, and the Black Nationalists took up arms because they felt that assimilation into the Cornell community, or the white community generally, amounted to a negation of their own community — that is, "cultural genocide."
The Berkeley uprising was sparked in large part by the school's expansion into a tiny park that, at the end of the day, was just a place for hippies to hang out and feel comfortable in their own little community. Hippies may call themselves nonconformists, but as anyone who's spent time with them understands, they prize conformity above most things. The clothes and hair are ways of fitting in, of expressing shared values. Peace signs may symbolize something very different from the swastika, but both are a kind of insignia instantly recognizable to friend and foe alike. Regardless, the Berkeley protesters felt that their world, their folk community, was being destroyed by a cold, impersonal institution in the form of the university and, perhaps, modernity itself. "You've pushed us to the end of your civilization here, against the sea in Berkeley," shouted one of the leaders of the People's Park uprising. "Then you pushed us into a square-block area called People's Park. It was the last thing we had to defend, this square block of sanity amid all your madness...We are now homeless in your civilized world. We have become the great American gypsies, with only our mythology for a culture."34 This is precisely the sort of diatribe one might have heard from a bohemian Berliner in the 1920s.
There is no disputing that Nazism was an evil ideology from the first spark of its inception. But that does not mean that every adherent of Nazism was motivated by evil intent. Germans did not collectively decide to be Hollywood villains for all eternity. For millions of Germans the Nazis seemed to offer hope for community and meaning and authenticity, too. As Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary shortly after the Cornell uprising:
Most of the basic beliefs and even the outward fashions of the present world-youth movements can be traced back to the period in Europe just before and after the First World War. The German Neue Schar of 1919 were the original hippies: long-haired, sandaled, unwashed, they castigated urban civilization, read Hermann Hesse and Indian philosophy, practiced free-love, and distributed in their meetings thousands of asters and chrysanthemums. They danced, sang to the music of the guitar, and attended lectures on the "Revolution of the Soul." The modern happening was born in 1910 in Trieste, Parma, Milan, and other Italian cities where the Futurists arranged public meetings to recite their poems, read their manifestos, and exhibit their ultra-modern paintings. No one over thirty, they demanded, should in future be active in politics...
For the historian of ideas, the back issues of the periodicals of the youth movements, turned yellow with age, make fascinating reading...It is indeed uncanny how despite all the historical differences, the German movement preempted so many of the issues agitating the American movement of today, as well as its literary fashions.35
Let us return to the example of Horst Wessel, the most famous "youth leader" of the early Nazi movement, "martyred" in his battle against the "Red Front and reactionaries" as immortalized in the Nazi "Horst Wessel Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"). Wessel fit the 1960s ideal of a youth leader "from the streets" fighting for social justice. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing by dropping out of law school at twenty-one and enlisting in the Nazi storm troopers. He moved into a shady working-class part of town and, with his comrades, joined in bloody street battles against the communists. But Wessel also earned a reputation as an idealistic and sensitive proselytizer for the "revolution from below," which would usher in a united racial community transcending class differences. He walked the walk, living among criminals and the struggling proletariat:
Whoever is convinced that the Germany of today is not worthy of guarding the gates of true German culture must leave the theatre...the salons...the studies...their parents' houses...literature...the concert halls. He must take to the streets, he must really go to the people...in their tenements of desperation and woe, of criminality...where the SA is protecting German culture...Every beer hall brawl is a step forward for German culture, the head of every SA man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people, for the Reich, for the house of German culture.36
An amateur poet, Wessel wrote a small tribute to the cause, "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise High the Flag"), which promised, "The day breaks for freedom and for bread" and "Slavery will last only a short time longer." Around the same time, he fell in love with Erna Jaenicke, a prostitute whom he first met when she was being beaten up by pimps at a neighborhood bar. The two soon moved into a rundown boardinghouse together, over the protests of his mother. There's some evidence that Wessel grew increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis, realizing that the communists shared many of the same aspirations. He certainly became less active in the ranks of the Brownshirts. But whether he would have broken with them is unknowable because he died at the hands of the communists in 1930.
And that was all that really mattered to Joseph Goebbels, who translated Wessel's death into a propaganda coup. Overnight, Wessel was transfigured into a martyr to the Nazi cause, a Sorelian religious myth aimed at the idealistic and perplexed youth of the interwar years. Goebbels described him as a "Socialist Christ" and unleashed a relentless torrent of hagiography about Wessel's work with the poor. By the beginning of World War II, the places of his life and death in Berlin had been made into stations of the cross, and shrines had been erected at his birthplace in Vienna as well as his various homes in Berlin. His little poem was set to music and became the official Nazi anthem.
In the German feature film Hans Westmar: One of Many, the young protagonist, based on Wessel, peers from his fraternity window and declares to his privileged comrades: "The real battle is out there, not here with us. The enemy is on the march...I tell you, all of Germany will be won down there, on the street. And that's where we must be — with our people. We can no longer live in our ivory towers. We must join our hands in battle with the workers. There can't be classes anymore. We are workers too, workers of the mind, and our place now is next to those who work with their hands."37
Even if the propagandized Wessel were a complete fabrication — though it was not — the mythologized version illustrates the more interesting, and important, truth. Germany was filled with millions of young men who were receptive to the shining ideal that Wessel represented. Of course, the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis makes it difficult to see (and impossible to forgive), but the dream of a unified, classless Germany was deeply heartfelt by many Nazi joiners; and if reduced to that alone, it was not an evil dream at all.
But just as the line between "good" totalitarianism and bad is easily crossed, dreams can quickly become nightmares. Indeed, some dreams, given their nature, must eventually become nightmares. And for the Horst Wessels of the American New Left, whatever admirable idealism they might have had quickly and unavoidably degenerated into fascist thuggery.