Guilt about the Past by Bernhard Schlink

Author:Bernhard Schlink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2010-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Prudence and Corruption

1970 was a year that divided two different political climates. In the sixties, foreign affairs were full of conflict and tension, but there was much hope in domestic affairs. The sixties saw the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. At the same time, they saw Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society in the US, liberal, social democratic and socialist governments replaced conservative administrations across Europe, and on both sides of the Atlantic students protested against rigid institutions and for peace and the power of love. In the seventies the situation was reversed; the years brought the end to the Vietnam War, détente between East and West, and an easing of tension in the Near East, but domestically conflicts intensified; peaceful student protests descended into violent demonstrations and were met with an increase of government repression, each feeding off the other.

Of course, the major shift between the sixties and seventies did not happen all in one year. In 1970, however, there were events that symbolically presaged it: the National Guard was sent in against demonstrators at Kent State University, Ulrike Meinhof helped Andreas Baader escape from prison, starting the terrorist Baader-Meinhof group, Willy Brandt kneeled at the Memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Just as pressure built up by gradual tectonic movement is suddenly released in earthquakes, the change in political climate erupted in a storm of demonstrations.

In 1970, young people took to the streets all over the world, as if a better world could be found there. In Germany, they demonstrated against the American engagement in Vietnam and Cambodia, for the students shot down at Kent State University, against Apartheid in South Africa, against the construction of the Cabora-Bassa Dam in Mozambique, for the workers shot in Gdansk, out of joy over Lenin’s one-hundredth birthday and Allende’s election victory, out of sadness for the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, for reform in the universities and education system, for cheaper public transportation, against the strengthening National Democratic Party, in Frankfurt for a better police, in Dortmund for the mini-skirt. They demonstrated with serious purpose or as a joke, militantly or playfully, often with absurd overestimation of their significance and sometimes even with ironic distance to themselves.

On 19 June 1970 there was an international conference on development policy strategies in my hometown Heidelberg and the President of the World Bank, Robert S McNamara, participated. The students of the SDS, the Socialist Union of German Students, were outraged; in their eyes development policy strategies were capitalistic and imperialistic, and the presence of the one-time American Secretary of Defense was a provocation. They organised a demonstration that was supposed to ‘break up’ the conference, and the police prepared themselves for a violent confrontation. As some of the demonstrators tried to storm the Hotel Europäischer Hof where the conference was being held and were driven back by the police, a street battle ensued during which demonstrators pelted

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