Hitler’s Children: A Selection from Tony Judt’s Postwar (2005)
“If ever there was a generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their parents represented—everything: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace, stability, law and democracy—it was ‘Hitler’s children’, the West German radicals of the Sixties. In their eyes the Federal Republic exuded self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. . . .
With the growth of opposition to the Vietnam War this conflation between past and present extended to West Germany’s military mentor. America, always ‘fascist’ in the rhetoric of a minority of radicals, now became the enemy for a far broader constituency. . . . If America was no better than the Hitler regime—if, in a slogan of the time, US=SS—then it was but a short step to treating Germany itself as Vietnam: both countries were divided by foreign occupiers, both were helplessly caught up in other people’s conflicts. This way of talking allowed West German radicals to despise the Bonn Republic both for its present imperialist-capitalist associations and for its past fascist ones. More ominously, it authorized the radical Left to recycle the claim that it was Germans themselves who were the true victims—an assertion hitherto identified with the far Right. . . .
Young Germans of the Sixties were not really much concerned with the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, like their parents, they were uncomfortable with the ‘Jewish Question’. . . . students were the new ‘Jews’; and Nazi concentration camps were just a serviceable metaphor for the crimes of imperialism. In the words of a slogan graffitied across the walls of Dachau in 1966 by a group of radicals: ‘Vietnam is the Auschwitz of America’. . . .
One distinctively German variant of Sixties cultural confusion saw sex and politics more closely entangled than elsewhere. Following Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and other twentieth-century German theorists of sexual and political repression, radical circles in Germany (and Austria, or at least Vienna) sung the praises of nudity, free love and anti-authoritarian childrearing. Hitler’s much advertised sexual neuroses were freely adduced to account for Nazism. And once again, a bizarre, chilling analogy was drawn in certain quarters between Hitler’s Jewish victims and the youth of the 1960s, martyrs to the sexually repressive regime of their parents.
‘Kommune 1’, a Maoist micro-sect that aggressively promoted sexual promiscuity-as-liberation, circulated a self-portrait in 1966: seven nude young men and women splayed against a wall—‘Naked Maoists Before a Naked Wall’ as the caption read when the photo ran in Der Spiegel in June 1967. The emphasis on nudity was explicitly designed to recall pictures of helpless, naked concentration camp bodies. Look, it said: first came Hitler’s victims, now the rebelliously unclothed bodies of Maoist revolutionaries. If Germans can look at the truth about our bodies, they will be able to face other truths as well.
The ‘message’—that adolescent promiscuity would force the older generation to be open about sex, and thence about Hitler and everything else—provoked SDS leader Rudi Dutschke (in such matters a conventional Left moralist of the older sort) to condemn the ‘Kommunards’ as ‘neurotics’. As no doubt they were. But their aggressively anachronistic narcissism, casually conflating mass murder and sexual exhibitionism in order to titillate and shock the bourgeoisie, was not without consequences: one member of ‘Kommune 1’, who proudly declared his orgasm to be of greater revolutionary consequence than Vietnam, would resurface in the 1970s in a guerrilla training camp in the Middle East. The path from self-indulgence to violence was even shorter in Germany than elsewhere.
In June 1967, at a Berlin demonstration against the Shah of Iran, police shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg, a student. Dutschke declared Ohnesorg’s death a ‘political murder’ and called for a mass response; within days, 100,000 students demonstrated across West Germany. Jürgen Habermas, hitherto a prominent critic of the Bonn authorities, warned Dutschke and his friends a few days later of the risk of playing with fire. ‘Left Fascism’, he reminded the SDS leader, is as lethal as the right-wing kind. Those who talked loosely of the ‘hidden violence’ and ‘repressive tolerance’ of the peaceful Bonn regime—and who set out deliberately to provoke the authorities into repression by voluntaristic acts of real violence—did not know what they were doing. . . . Emphasis upon the crimes of Communism was just a diversion from the crimes of capitalism. Communists, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit had expressed it in Paris, might be ‘Stalinist scoundrels’; but liberal democrats were no better.
Thus the German Left turned a deaf ear to rumblings of discontent in Warsaw or Prague. The face of the Sixties in West Germany, as in Western Europe at large, was turned resolutely inwards. The cultural revolution of the era was remarkably parochial: if Western youth looked beyond their borders at all, it was to exotic lands whose image floated free of the irritating constraints of familiarity or information. Of alien cultures closer to home, the Western Sixties knew little. When Rudi Dutschke paid a fraternal visit to Prague, at the height of the Czech reform movement in the spring of 1968, local students were taken aback at his insistence that pluralist democracy was the real enemy. For them, it was the goal. . . .
The thought that what binds Nazism and capitalist democracy is more important than their differences, and that it was Germans who had fallen victim to both, helps account for the German radical Left’s distinctive insensitivity on the subject of Jews.
On September 5th 1972, the Palestinian organization Black September attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics and killed eleven athletes, as well as one German policeman. Almost certainly, the killers had local assistance from the radical Left (though it is a curiosity of German extremist politics of the time that the far Right would have been no less pleased to offer its services). The link between Palestinian organizations and European terrorist groups was already well-established—Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof all ‘trained’ at one time with Palestinian guerillas, along with Basques, Italians, Irish Republicans and others. But only Germans went the extra mile: when four gunmen (two Germans, two Arabs) hi-jacked an Air France plane in June 1976 and flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda, it was the Germans who undertook to identify and separate the Jewish passengers from the rest.
If this action, so unmistakably reminiscent of selections of Jews by Germans in another time and place, did not definitively discredit the Baader-Meinhof gang in the eyes of its sympathizers it was because its arguments, if not its methods, attracted quite broad consent: Germans, not Jews, were now the victims; and American capitalism, not German National Socialism, was the perpetrator. ‘War crimes’ were now things that Americans did to—e.g., Vietnamese. There was a ‘new patriotism’ abroad in West Germany, and it is more than a little ironic that Baader, Meinhof and their friends, whose violent revolt was initially directed against the Germany-first self-satisfaction of their parents’ generation, should find themselves co-opted by the reverberations of that same nationalist heritage. It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.”—Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)
“Naked Maoists Before a Naked Wall”