On 14 March 1969 German student leader Karl Dietrich Wolff (K.D. to his friends), travelling through the United States and Canada on a lecture tour, appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, which questioned him about the cooperation between the West German and US protest movements. All of a sudden, this Senate hearing turned the spotlights on one of the most remarkable features of the close relationship that had emerged between the US and the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II: the intimate ties among protesters across the Atlantic that supplemented the official transatlantic alliance. Wolff himself added to the effect by immediately turning the event into a public happening, accusing the committee of conspiring against the worldwide liberation movements of which he was a representative.
About this “other” transatlantic alliance, German historian Martin Klimke, Fellow of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and the German American Institute in Heidelberg, has now published a fine and exemplary book, based on the dissertation he finished five years ago with Detlef Junker of Heidelberg University and Akira Iriye of Harvard University. Klimke has already earned something of a reputation for his research into the 1960s as a global era of protest and transformation, with his impressive organizational skills which, over the last eight years, have resulted in scores of international networks – such as the IFK Protest, the Interdisziplinäres Forschungskolloquium Protestbewegungen (Interdisciplinary Research Forum on Protest Movements, Activism, and Social Dissent) – conferences, and publications. For his latest book he has studied a great variety of historical sources, read almost all the literature, and spoken to many of the protagonists of his story, including K.D. Wolff.
Klimke convincingly demonstrates that Wolff was only one representative of a larger network of American and German activists who inspired one another and worked together, as they imagined themselves to be parts of a global revolutionary movement. He retraces this network back to the early 1960s when the German and American radical student organizations, coincidently both named SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund and Students for a Democratic Society), came into contact with one another because a German exchange student, Michael Vester, became interested in the political activities of his American co-students. Both sides immediately began to influence each other to a considerable degree, starting with Vester contributing some ideas to the 1962 Port Huron Statement, with which the American SDS announced its political programme. The Germans especially picked up much from the American New Left, not only intellectual ideas but also all kinds of protest techniques, such as sit-ins and teach-ins.
The reception given to the American protest techniques of “direct action” were important, Klimke shows, for the “anti-authoritarian” wing of Germany's SDS, led by Rudi Dutschke, and its gaining control of the organization and putting it on a collision course with the establishment. The amalgam of German and American ideas about capitalism and world order created a global revolutionary theory that several German and American student activists tried to implement from about 1968 by creating anti-imperialist, second fronts in the urban centres of the Western world as a complement to the Vietcong and other Third-World liberation movements.
One particular dimension of this development of a revolutionary movement was the reception of the civil rights movement and Black Power ideology by German activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Klimke's chapter on this is the most rewarding in the book. He claims, rightly, that he “can show for the first time how solidarity and identification with Black Power fostered an increasing radicalization and greater militancy in the West German student movement”. This began with support for the non-violent struggle for equal rights, but many radical Germans welcomed the turn by the Black Panthers and other Afro-American organizations to more general criticism of the capitalist system, which was seen to be the driving force of segregation, and to violent protest.
Klimke gives detailed accounts of German support networks, such as the Black Panther Solidarity Committee (founded on 23 November 1969 by K.D. Wolff), which helped American GIs based in West Germany to desert the army and flee to neutral Sweden, and the Angela Davis Solidarity Committee (founded in 1971). The Davis case especially demonstrates how the personal and the political were intertwined in those years (and still often are); part of the intensity of the German campaign for the release of this highly intellectual Black Power activist can be explained by the fact that Davis had studied in Frankfurt in 1965–1967 with the famous critical sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, and had at that time also been active in the Frankfurt chapter of the SDS.
For the few German radicals who took up arms around 1970 and began an “armed struggle” with the state under the banner of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and a few other organizations, the Black Panthers were a model (as were the Tupamaros of Uruguay). The fact that they, a minority, had embarked on a struggle against their oppressor without waiting for the masses to rise, thus along the lines of Che Guevara's foco theory, made such a deep impression on members of the RAF that they used the same leaping black panther to illustrate their first manifesto that their Afro-American comrades always used. Even as late as 1985, a RAF cell that bombed an American military compound on German soil called itself “Kommando George Jackson”, after a Black Panther leader shot in prison in August 1971.
The involvement of those German students with the Afro-American struggle was based on the idea that West Germany, being the US's main European ally, was complicit in the repression of coloured people there, just as it shared responsibility for America's war in Vietnam. Unlike their parents’ generation, which had collaborated with the Nazi regime or had ignored its excesses, they planned to act upon the outrage they witnessed. In noting this, Klimke reveals a side effect of the postwar Americanization of West Germany: young Germans taking the new democratic ideals to heart to such an extent that they became extremely disillusioned with democracy at work in America and at home. American officials took note of this unexpected side effect and launched official inquiries into the radical student movement in Europe in general and in West Germany and West Berlin in particular. Klimke ends his book with two chapters on this American reaction to the “other alliance”, but this conclusion to his extremely insightful book is slightly unfortunate. Although he has interesting information and analyses to offer, and reveals once more his great skill in handling archival sources, the integration of these final chapters into the total narrative of the book is unsatisfactory. This by no means disqualifies the book in any way. It merely reflects an outstanding characteristic of this energetic historian: his reluctance to leave anything out.
