CHAPTER TWO

Student Protest in the Federal Republic of Germany*

Until recently we were convinced that students do not play a political role in developed industrialized societies. They played a revolutionary role in nineteenth-century Russia, in China in the twenties and thirties, and in Cuba in the fifties. In 1956, the revolts in Budapest and Warsaw were set off by student protests. Students are of great political significance especially in the developing areas of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Governments in Bolivia, Venezuela, Indonesia, and South Vietnam have been overthrown by students. In countries in which revolutionary nationalist groups, usually army officers, have come to power, students exercise a permanent political pressure. In these cases, three conditions for the politicization of student consciousness are generally present:

1. Students can definitely understand themselves as the future elite of the nation, responsible for a large-scale modernization process. Yet their studies are not organized according to well-defined and socially normative models. The adult role anticipated at the university is thus simultaneously politically important and diffuse in content, and is therefore unsuited for supporting a privatized orientation bound to career and advancement. 2. Students are not only preparing for roles that have political significance, the university itself is an agent of social change. It generates both new, technically exploitable knowledge and the consciousness of modernity, with all of its practical consequences. Thus merely belonging to a university provides an impulse toward entering the struggle against the traditionalism of inherited social structures. 3. The structures of the old society, organized according to kinship relations, are the same as those that define the life of the students' families. Thus, there is a singular parallel between the socialization process of the individual student and the overall process of social change. The student, removed from a traditionalist home and initiated into the universalistic roles of a society in the process of modernization, can connect the typical developmental experiences of adolescence with changes in social structure. He can comprehend the epochal process in the framework of his own educational process and conversely link his private destiny with political destiny.

None of these conditions is present in advanced industrial societies. In Europe and the United States the university has narrowly circumscribed functions, namely preparation for qualified career positions, the production of technically exploitable knowledge, and the transmission of a culture which for centuries science and technology have been rooted in rather than uprooting. Moreover, there is no opposition in principle between parental orientations and the norms and values of modern achievement-oriented society that prevail at the university. Sociological considerations of this sort have led to the prediction that students in our countries cannot attain political significance.1 Seymour Martin Lipset still holds to this thesis:

A brief comparative look at the situation of the university and educated youth in the emerging and industrially developed societies suggests that student activism cannot take on major proportions in the latter.2

Nevertheless, for two or three years we have been witnessing student protests at our universities that definitely surpass in scope and method the proportions that have been customary since the end of the war. How are we to explain this? I should like to investigate this question, taking West Germany as an example.

I shall concentrate on events in Berlin, for, as is well known, the Free University is the Berkeley of West Germany. Yet the activism of the students of Berlin is echoed at the other West German universities. This has become clear since June 2 of this year. The outrage over the death of Benno Ohnesorg, a politically rather undistinguished student, who was shot by a plainclothesman at a demonstration against the Shah of Iran at the Berlin opera, touched every university in West Germany. Nowhere, to be sure, did these conflicts attain the extent and constancy of the student protests in Berlin, which have been going on since the spring of 1965 and whose end is not yet in sight.

An active, generally highly qualified minority of students, predominantly in the social sciences and humanities, is leading the struggle against the majority of professors, of which the conservative elements are particularly concentrated in the faculties of law and medicine. Since in Germany the universities are state institutions vested with the power of self-government, there are no independent administrations against which students could organize. The faculty is the born opponent. In the intrauniversity conflicts, three points are at issue. Disregarding specific differences, they correspond to the issues designated here by the phrases "free speech," "knowledge factory," and "student power."3

First the question of free speech. The so-called political mandate of the local student government has been disputed since the late forties. The student governments and their umbrella organization, the Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften (Association of German Student Bodies), are compulsory associations based on the automatic membership of all registered students. Hence, the argument that these organizations cannot take a position in the name of student bodies on current political issues is formally correct. On the other hand, the students have pointed out that university problems cannot be neatly separated from those of society as a whole.4 Given the existing authority structures and the actual division of power at the university, the position of strict legality would be an automatic guarantee of failure. Thus, the political mandate has always been practiced and tacitly accepted. But there remained the legal possibility of restricting the liberties actually taken. In the spring of 1965 the Senate Commissioner of Political Education was censured by the Rector for abuse of office because of an invitation to Karl Jaspers to speak on the twentieth anniversary of the German capitulation and liberation from the Nazi regime. Jaspers declined, and the student parliament invited Erich Kuby, the writer and journalist, to speak in his place. Several years before, Kuby had expressed doubt about the state of freedom at the Free University. The Rector used this as an occasion for prohibiting the speech at the Free University, and it had to be given at the Institute of Technology. This was the beginning of a series of causes célébres. The academic authorities saw themselves called upon to repeatedly restrict the scope of the students' political activity. A few examples: despite his formal apology, an instructor's contract was not renewed because of vague public statements discrediting the Rector. An exhibition about Vietnam was prevented on grounds of violation of housing ordinances. For a while, the use of lecture halls for political events of a not strictly academic character was absolutely denied. Finally, the academic senate attempted to make an "undesirable" political group ineligible for scholarships.

Now to the second point: the knowledge factory. The universities of West Germany have been expanded hesitantly, without structural change, and have since the late fifties, on recommendation of the Government Council on Education and Culture, been externally adapted to the rapidly growing number of students by a linear expansion of the faculty. In institutes and clinics, laboratories and libraries, the mass university affords conditions that discourage many students. The traditionally rigidified courses of study are often unclearly defined and examinations are in many cases burdened with requirements that are antiquated and oriented to the mere reproduction of facts. Only after the recommendations for a reorganization of studies put forth by the Council on Education and Culture in 1966 did the faculties subject the organization of instruction to certain cosmetic operations in order to prevent further interventions. But within a fixed budget and an untouched hierarchical order, these efforts had the immediate effect only of creating more regulation of teaching and study as well as an administratively forced curtailment of attendance at the university. Two of the Berlin faculties hurried to introduce a time limit to immatriculation, that is, to forcibly limit the amount of time that could be spent at the university. There is no doubt that the high dropout rate and the extended duration of study are the result not of bad work attitudes or a poor selection of students, but primarily of catastrophic study conditions and an inadequate organization of university instruction. The students were thus rightly outraged. In the summer of 1966 they demonstratively took action against the restrictive application of the recommendations of the Council. This confrontation resulted in the first major sit-in, in which about three thousand students participated, and led to the establishment of joint commissions on the reform of university study, whose efficacy, nevertheless, remained limited.

This leads us to the third point: student power. Despite an extensive rhetoric of reform, the only comprehensive conceptions for universities in a democratically constituted industrial society have been worked out by students. In the early sixties the Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften, and the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (German Socialist Student Union, SDS) compiled programs for university reform. Both aimed at the...