At twenty-four years after the war ended.....we have an unusual 'path' opening up in Germany.....with kids now 'blooming', who grew up after the war, and have no reference to the Nazi period, or the rebuilding effort in the decade after the war. So several events start to occur around the late 1960s in Germany.....which to be remembered occasionally.
In the landscape, Germany is mostly run by gentlemen over the age of sixty, who were part of the 1930s/1940s crowd of Germany. A lot of them had spent time in the Bundeswehr (the Army) and had certain perceptions of 'respect'. These are individual who also didn't see a great need for divisions or demonstrations.
In the late 60's atmosphere, there are sociological developments going on, and a new view of culture. If you were standing there at this junction....you were looking at two groups who were going to clash sooner or later.
Class-struggles are being preached by intellectuals and hyped-upon for the college crowd. Marx was being openly discussed....economic woes were discussed daily in the college setting, and the state authority (judges, the police, and lawmakers) were seen in a highly negative light.
The visit by the Shah to West Berlin in 1967, with the violent riots that occurred out of that episode.....helped to form a fair amount of resentment. The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg? The authorities cleared the policeman who shot Benno, and that only added another layer of distrust. The odd fact decades later that the policeman in question was a East German 'agent'? That's rarely brought up now, but you have to wonder just how much of the social change business was a East German strategy to destabilize West Germany.
The court action in the summer of 1969 to parole four 'bad-boys' and issue an amnesty for 'political prisoners'? This got quickly dragged to the Constitutional Court (the high court of West Germany), and deemed a 'mistake'. Folks can openly laugh about the way this was handled.....but the Court said that the four 'bad-boys' had to return to custody. In simple terms.....it made a bigger mess and simply carried the chaos to a higher level.
Of the four 'bad-boys' in this little episode....only one complied and returned to custody. The other three? They go underground for a number of months....first to France, then to Italy. These three will become the core start-up group of the Red Army Faction. Shocking? Add onto it.....the name of Andreas Baader, who is the kingpin of the RAF 'gang'.
What is forming here? The youth and college crowd are forming bonds to the RAF agenda....who see a fair number of the authorities and leadership....simply as out-of-touch, and pieces of the 1930s/1940s Nazi 'path'. On the other side, the general public sees the college students and RAF group as out-of-touch, and agents of some East German conspiracy.
1969 is this turning point, where the reconstruction period after the war has closed out, and economically.....West Germany looks the best that it's seen in decades. In ranking order, if you use the GDP numbers and per capita.....they rank number one in the world. No one is suffering. If you look at the period between 1950 and 1959.....yearly growth was 8-percent on average.
So it's hard in some aspects to understand the frustration of the youth crowd or anti-authority 'kids'. Every bit of the landscape....from Hamburg to Munich....should have been a van Gogh painting with 36 magnificent colors and a bright future in the making (a house and car for worker, which would have been the 'dream' of any German in the 1920s).
In practical terms....in 1969, there were two landscapes. An outsider, or American here for a 'tour' would have stood there and admired the culture, and then felt unable to grasp the frustration of the counter-culture. I'll end this essay with the quote direct out of 'A Tale of Two Cities': "It was the best of times....it was the worst of times."
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