Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust By Hans Kundnani (Hurst and Company, £16.99)
A traveller on the London tube, glancing up from his or her book, may read a series of short aphorisms or poems, supposedly sponsored by Transport for London and the office of the (Conservative) London mayor. At the moment one of these is a quotation from Friedrich Engels, in life a frequent visitor to the city and, in death, the co-occupier with Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Mao or Fidel, of a million revolutionary banners and posters. It reads, “an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
The book that I looked up from was Hans Kundnani’s lucid and fascinating exposition of the intellectual history of the 1968 generation of the German left, a book that shows, contrary to Engels’ assertion, that ideas can have primacy, and that—in certain circumstances—an ounce of theory can move a ton of action. ?
On 2nd June 1967 in West Berlin, a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead by a panicking policeman during a demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran. (Later, though unconnectedly, the policeman proved to be a Stasi agent) A week later, in Ohnesorg’s home town of Hanover, the radical students’ organisation, SDS, held a big conference to discuss state violence and the response to it. Seven thousand people attended at one time or another, and one of the speakers they heard was the radical Frankfurt philosopher, Jürgen Habermas.?Habermas, though sympathetic, wanted to warn against the idea, fostered by Marcuse among others, that direct action on the part of students could provoke a reaction that might help bring about a social revolution; a revolution for which there was little appetite in West Germany. Habermas was heard, but the fiery unofficial leader of the student radicals, Rudi Dutschke, was much more to the gathering’s taste. Habermas, he said, was too much the theorist and too little the activist. Now, in advanced capitalism, a vanguard movement could, by its actions, create a revolution.
Dutschke and Habermas left but, as Kundnani relates, so worried was the philosopher about the implications of Red Rudi’s speech that he turned his car around, and drove back to Hanover. In the post-midnight hall, in front of a few hundred people, Habermas warned that Dutschke’s position held the danger of degenerating into “left-wing fascism.” He was booed and jeered and then rebuked, not least by a young lawyer, Horst Mahler. It was, said Mahler, a question of resistance. The students’ parents—the “Auschwitz generation” had not resisted. His generation should not make the same mistake. On the same day, a couple of thousand miles away, the six day war ended in total Israeli victory.
Habermas was a member of the famous Frankfurt school, but the origins of the prevailing radical wisdom lay in the words of other members of that school. His colleague, Max Horkheimer, had coined the epithet that, “he who does not wish to speak about capitalism should not speak about fascism.” The idea that fascism was an outgrowth of capitalism permitted the students to cast their own postwar republic, not as an occasionally flawed democracy, but as a fascist state in embryo. After Ohnesorg, as an SDS statement had it, “the post-fascist state in the Federal Republic of Germany has become a pre-fascist state.”
In terms of the Holocaust, such a characterisation had an interesting effect, as Kundnani argues. It relativised the Holocaust as something that was the product of “fascism” rather than of German Nazism; it placed students and other “victims” of this emerging system on the level of wartime Jews. And in so doing it diminished the specific nature of the elimination of a race. Kundnani marks Dutschke’s own surprising lack of interest in the Holocaust. “My sense of Christian guilt is so great,” Dutschke once said, “I decline to read further evidence.” As Kundnani puts it, “the more the student activists became interested in the structural similarities between Nazism and the FRG, the less interested they became in the Nazi era itself.”
At the same time, the ideas of Fanon and Marcuse located the new oppressed—the new revolutionary classes—in the third world. According to Fanon the victory of third world liberation movements would cut off the material benefits of imperialism and impel the western proletariat to revolt. Young men and women such as Dutschke, Mahler, Joschka Fischer and Ulrike Meinhof, became convinced that the student movement was in some kind of alliance with these movements, and might even in some ways emulate them.
A simple formulation produced the equation that on one side was the FRG, their puppet-masters the Americans and, now, the Israelis, and on the other were the students, the Vietnamese, the wretched of the earth and the Palestinians. This logic produced the horrible irony of a bomb attack on a German synagogue on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, organised by German leftists, the endorsement by Meinhof of the Black September murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the participation by the Red Army Faction in the Entebbe hijacking, when Jewish passengers were held hostage and gentiles were released. ?
By the time of the German autumn of 1977 Habermas’s warning had been borne out. The radicals had turned into the thing they professed to loathe, and their erstwhile sympathisers were left to find another political direction. Kundnani charts how Joschka Fischer, a street fighter, became a green politician and then German foreign minister determined that the lesson of Auschwitz was that Germany should play its part in acting against genocide. But he also charts that tendency in the greens and elsewhere to seek a German special way, outside the alliance of democracies, a tendency that had its most extreme expression in the journey of Horst Mahler from radical through RAF member to the antisemitic far right.
Of course, much of the need here was psychological, as Kundnani demonstrates. In a way the worse the Israelis or the Americans could be said to be, the less guilt, in a strange way, attached to Germany, which itself became more of a victim. When questions such as Germany’s contribution to the Nato effort in Afghanistan are debated, the distant echoes of how the left understood Auschwitz are still to be heard.
