The Student Protest Movement in West Berlin

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In the late afternoon of Maundy Thursday, 1968, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Bachmann stood expectantly on the Kiirfurstendamm, West Berlin's busiest and most brightly-lit thoroughfare. Just that morning he had arrived by train from his home in West Germany; he hoped to return home by plane on the morrow, Good Friday, after completing the important task still before him. The door to a partially bombed-out apartment building opened. Out stepped Rudi Dutschke, a young man with a wild shock of straight black hair and penetrating eyes, a brilliant orator of Marxist persuasion who had become the very symbol of West Berlin's student protest movement. He had gone only a few feet before Bachmann lunged at him. In trying to ward off his assailant with his bicycle, Dutschke lost his footing. Bachmann fired a revolver three times at his stumbling target, and .38 caliber slugs ripped into Rudi Dutschke's head, neck, and chest. Within five minutes an ambulance arrived to carry Dutschke to the hospital-miraculously alive. There the doctors, acting quickly, were able to save his life-and that of Bachmann, who had subsequently been cut down in a duel with the police.l But even before Dutschke had won his fight for life on the operating table, demonstrations of sympathy had broken out in West Berlin. These demonstrations continued almost unbroken until the following Monday, a hundred hours later. At one point, on Easter Sunday, as many as 12,000 demonstrators filled the streets to battle the police. Losses were heavy: the demonstrators overturned cars and set them afire; they blocked deliveries of the newspapers from Axel Springer's publishing house, causing an estimated $65,000 damage to the Springer concern. In West Berlin alone, the police arrested 388 persons. Over 200 demonstrators and innocent bystanders alike suffered injuries, as did 54 police officers. Meanwhile, in West Germany, spontaneous and planned demonstrations broke out in every major city and every university town, leading to thousands of arrests and injuries and two deaths. A spasm of reaction-or was it revolution?-had seized Germany, immobilizing the entire country for a long, bloody weekend. It was a weekend that few would soon forget. Viewed from another perspective, however, the