Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Fritz Teufel, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Fritz Teufel, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum

Dancing and Hiding. 1968 in the Federal Republic and the GDR

08.02.2023 Clemens Tangerding

1968 was very different in the West than in the East. This can be seen in the photos and other documents from those years. Students gathered in West German cities to protest and provoke. In the GDR, protests against the invasion of the ČSSR by Soviet troops had to take place from behind the scenes. The abundance of pictures from the Federal Republic of Germany and the lack of photos from the GDR shape our image from 1968 to the present day.

For photographers in a West German university town, the year 1968 was completely different from that of their colleagues in the GDR. In West Germany, journalists were informed by press release about upcoming court hearings. They could stand at the side of the road and photograph student demonstrations or follow the actors like Rudi Dutschke and Fritz Teufel with their cameras. In the GDR, rallies or protests against this were kept secret, and court hearings in criminal cases were usually held in camera. When photographers took pictures of demonstrations, they were not only putting themselves in danger, but also the people in the pictures.
Since there was freedom of the press in the West, the right to demonstrate existed and photographers could generally move freely, there are countless photographs of the events of 1968. In the GDR, demonstrations against state authorities and political organisations were prohibited and prosecuted, so hardly any photos recall the protests beyond the Iron Curtain. Photographs from the epoch year 1968 reflect the dance with the system in the West and the hiding from the system in the East. They illustrate the different ways of dealing with protest and counterculture in a democracy and in a dictatorship.  

Music and Megaphone

In the photo by Jürgen Henschel, taken in August 1967 on Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin, a young woman in a wrap dress dances, her legs painted with flowers and geometric figures. Her hair is held together by ribbons. Those around form a circle and applaud. One young man wears a discarded hat, another a broad, patterned tie. The megaphone in his hand suggests that the group is protesting for or against something.

The spontaneous dance performance is for the student Fritz Teufel. He was a member of Kommune I, the residential community that propagated an alternative way of life to the bourgeois family and dissolved in 1969, not even two years after its founding, because of conflicts.
Teufel had come to West Berlin from Baden-Württemberg in 1963 to study at the Free University. In Berlin, for example, he took part in the protests against the state visit of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah to West Berlin on 2 June 1967. The Shah from Iran had attracted the dislike of left-wing students because he massively rearmed his military under pressure from the United States of America - and because the Springer press reported very favourably on him and his wife. Fritz Teufel stood in front of the Deutsche Oper on that famous 2 June 1967, where the Iranian ruling couple wanted to see "The Magic Flute" with the Federal President Heinrich Lübke and Berlin's Governing Mayor Heinrich Albertz. When the couple arrived, the protesters behind the barrier were shouting their rage from the soul, knowing full well that their protest was covered by the Basic Law. Nevertheless, the police arrested 45 students that evening, including Fritz Teufel. A student was killed: Benno Ohnesorg, an avowed pacifist, had taken part in a demonstration for the first time in his life and stayed out of all fisticuffs. Nevertheless, the West Berlin police officer and Stasi informant  Karl-Heinz Kurras shot him in the back as he fled. Of the students arrested, most were released the next day, but Teufel had to wait in pre-trial detention for almost six months for his trial. The judicial system obviously played its trump cards.

During his time in prison, his fellow students drew attention to the case with spontaneously convened Fritz Teufel celebrations. But they did it differently than protests have done so far. On Kurfürstendamm, a group spontaneously formed a circle around a dancing woman. In between, one of the students called through his megaphone for the release of Fritz Teufel: "Cast out the devil from Moabit!" And: "The devil is loose in Berlin!" The prison where Teufel was held in custody was in Berlin-Moabit. The historian Wolfgang Kraushaar has described these actions of Commune I as deliberate irritations: "At second glance, they mostly appeared to be something other than they had pretended to be at first glance."

 

Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Horst Mahler, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Horst Mahler, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum

In flip-flops to court

The court cases were also part of the actions of the communards and their allies in the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) -Socialist German Student League . Courts were dance floors for the protesting students, as the many recordings make clear. The nature of the dispute was very different from the usual court proceedings. The students did not want to win the trials with legal expertise, skilfully placed motions or by appealing to rulings that were favourable to them. Their aim was to expose the justice system (Chaussy 2018; Scharloth 1968; Kraushaar 1968). They challenged the legitimacy of the Court by all means. Fritz Teufel appeared in bathing slippers at the trial for his alleged serious breach of the peace on 2 June 1967.

Again Jürgen Henschel was there with his camera. Teufel pretended to misunderstand the questions addressed to him and used his answers to make political statements. He even remained seated when the judge entered the courtroom after the lunch break. Only after repeated requests did he rise with the words: "If it serves to establish the truth." Of course, standing up did not serve the purpose of finding the truth. By a single sentence, Teufel had degraded deference to the office of judge to a ritual devoid of content.

It is striking that neither the name nor the likeness of Benno Ohnesorg can be seen on the recordings of protest actions of the time. In view of his assassination on the evening of 2 June 1967, the question arises why the communards and SDSers did not refer to this, still calling themselves "fun guerrillas" and also acting as such. Why did Fritz Teufel put a Christmas wreath on his head when he was acquitted of charges of breach of the peace in December? The communards could have used Ohnesorg's death in the fight against the "unjust state of the Federal Republic", but they did not. The historian Eckard Michels provides the answer: according to him, Ohnesorg's death was only retrospectively declared to be the founding moment of the 1968 movement. A martyr was needed to legitimise their own radicalisation. The terrorist "2nd June Movement", from which some members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) were recruited, also referred to Ohnesorg's death only later. Incidentally, "1968" as a term was only introduced afterwards as a cipher for the worldwide protests of the years between 1965 and about 1970.

Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Krumme Str. 66-67, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Krumme Str. 66-67, 1967, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum
Willy Pragher: Freiburg: Studentenkundgebung mit Diskussion zwischen Dutschke und Dahrendorf, von oben, 29. Januar 1968, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (Namensnennung 3.0 Deutschland)
Willy Pragher: Freiburg: Studentenkundgebung mit Diskussion zwischen Dutschke und Dahrendorf, von oben, 29. Januar 1968, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg

Revolutionaries with side parting

In West Berlin, the "frontline city" of the Cold War, the 1968 movement was more militant, louder and bolder than in the rest of the Federal Republic. The photos of demonstrations and large-scale events of the left student body in other cities show students who were interested in ideas of social upheaval but could not escape their bourgeois habitus. The iconic series by photographer Willy Pragher from 19 January 1968 in Freiburg shows a crowd of students eagerly following Ralf Dahrendorf's discussion with Rudi Dutschke. The student leader Rudi Dutschke, who fled from the GDR to West Berlin shortly before the Berlin Wall was built, was able to captivate the masses. Even though most of them certainly could not follow his theory-heavy argumentation in detail , they listened to him attentively.

 

Pragher's recording, however, also shows that the male students had combed their hair properly and the ladies had done their hair before the event. However, the many photos of demonstrations, court cases and spontaneous actions should not obscure the fact that "1968" was never a mass phenomenon. Only a small minority of students actually campaigned for social upheaval.

GERMIN: Man feiert ausgelassen Fasching, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
GERMIN: Man feiert ausgelassen Fasching, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek

Blown-Up History

In the GDR it was much more difficult to protest against state measures. This is already shown by the cautious protests against the church demolitions carried out in 1968: In May 1968, the Leipzig city council decided, on the orders of the Politburo, to blow up the University Church of St. Pauli. The university was to be given a new face, a functional purpose building to replace the Pauline Church. This was not only to create more space for teaching and research - it was a brutal attempt to reinterpret the place: The sacred space was to be replaced by a stronghold of science in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. The young physicist Stefan Welzk, who had studied at the university himself, did not want to accept the destruction of this Leipzig landmark. Unlike Rudi Dutschke in West Berlin, however, Welzk could not openly articulate his ideas in the GDR. The resistance had to take place in secret.
Welzk got together with some like-minded people and put up a banner in the Leipzig Congress Hall three weeks after the blast. It was there that the III. Leipzig Bach Competition took place. With the help of a converted alarm clock, they managed to determine the time at which the fabric web should unroll on stage. After a speech, her placard with the words "We demand reconstruction" unfurled in front of the invited audience, including Western media. The audience applauded loudly.

 

Heyde, Walter Gerhard: Universitätskirche St. Pauli, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Heyde, Walter Gerhard: Universitätskirche St. Pauli, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek

Unlike the SDS, which drew attention to itself with loud actions, it was crucial for the oppositionists in the GDR to act in secret. Although the action was also well prepared in this respect and Stefan Welzk and one of his comrades-in-arms managed to escape to the West shortly afterwards, another person involved was arrested in 1970. He was in prison for years. Two completely uninvolved persons also had to serve longer prison sentences. The trials that served as a stage for the accused students in the West had the sole aim of convicting suspects and intimidating the public in the GDR. Exposing the judges, as the communards had begun to do and later perfected by RAF members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, was denied to the resisters in the GDR.
The protests against the demolition of the Paulinerkirche in Leipzig and the Garnisonkirche in Potsdam were not captured by independent photographers and sold to newspapers as they were in West Germany. As a rule, only two groups of people photographed the counter-protests of this period in the GDR: the protesters themselves and the State Security Service. Both parties used the photos for documentation purposes, not for publication. There are hardly any recordings of the court cases. The commemoration lacks the pictures.

Prague as a place of longing

This phenomenon can be observed even more clearly in relation to the protest of GDR citizens against the military suppression of the "Prague Spring" on 21 August 1968. Since January 1968, the attention of GDR citizens had been focused on their neighbouring country, Czechoslovakia. There, the new First Secretary of the Communist Party, Alexander Dubček, had initiated reforms in the sense of a "socialism with a human face". Among other things, this meant that the planned economy and thus state influence was to be dismantled in favour of greater autonomy for enterprises. The Czechoslovak parliament as an executive body was to be strengthened, and the directives from Moscow were to be pushed back.

Bad Schandau. Elbtal mit Bad Schandau, Ansichtskarte, 1969, Deutsche Fotothek OLB Görlitz (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Bad Schandau. Elbtal mit Bad Schandau, Ansichtskarte, 1969, Deutsche Fotothek OLB Görlitz

For the people of the country, however, it was less important what was newly created than what was left out: Dubček declared the censorship of the press to be over. This measure led to an eruption of debates, Czechoslovakia became a country of open exchange. As a result, the reforms also came to the attention of GDR citizens: In the first half of 1968, they travelled in droves to the neighbouring country in the East. In June alone, 244,000 people visited the ČSSR.

The trains returning to the GDR from Prague were checked particularly thoroughly when they crossed the border in Bad Schandau and Zinnwald. But there are no recordings of this either. Bad Schandau was to remain a recreational resort in Saxon Switzerland for the GDR population and not turn into a gateway for revolutionary ideas. The Central Committee of the SED with Walter Ulbricht at its head wanted to prevent the reform efforts from spreading to its own country.

Nevertheless, there were expressions of solidarity for the "Prague Spring": spontaneous rallies, leaflets, banners, slogans on house walls. The organisers and participants always had to try to cover their tracks. This was often successful: by March 1969, 80 per cent of 2100 protests could not be cleared up by the (secret) police. Nevertheless, 1189 GDR citizens were sentenced for expressing sympathy for the "Prague Spring" (Kowalczuk 2022; Wolle 2001). Despite the large number of cases against opposition members, they hardly play a role in the social memory of 1968. As a rule, they were not public and did not find expression in the state press. In contrast, the few court cases against left-wing students in the Federal Republic of Germany are very present.

Hermann, Manfred: Niederschlagung des Prager Frühlings: Bilddokumentation (Kleinbild-Diaserie) über den Einmarsch der Truppen des Warschauer Paktes auf dem Wenzelsplatz und in der näheren Umgebung, 1968, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Hermann, Manfred: Niederschlagung des Prager Frühlings: Bilddokumentation (Kleinbild-Diaserie) über den Einmarsch der Truppen des Warschauer Paktes auf dem Wenzelsplatz und in der näheren Umgebung, 1968, SLUB / Deutsche Fotothek

Lost Utopias

The West German public knew not just Rudi Dutschke's ideas, but what he looked like as well. His face was familiar to newspaper readers. People who had protested in the GDR against the suppression of the "Prague Spring", in contrast, remained faceless, even though they risked so much. The vast majority of those detained were young people from all walks of life (Kowalczuk 2022; Wolle 2001). This is a big difference to the events on the other side of the inner-German border: Students were in the minority at the protests.

 

Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Internationaler Vietnamkongress, 1968, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum (Rechte vorbehalten - Freier Zugang)
Jürgen Henschel: Kleinbildnegativ: Internationaler Vietnamkongress, 1968, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum

While the big goal of the students in the Federal Republic was to network the actions in the individual cities to become an unstoppable movement, the groups in the GDR were left to their own devices. The GDR civil rights activist Ehrhart Neubert sums up that the resistance actions "despite all the intensity and the astonishing quantity, nevertheless remained isolated individual actions" (Neubert 1998).
If one compares the rallies and demonstrations in the cities of the Federal Republic with those in the GDR, another phenomenon stands out: The protests in the West knew no national borders. Fritz Teufel wrote a leaflet on his typewriter during his remand in Moabit in 1967 with the headline "Nazis out of the justice system, Yanks out of Vietnam! After the Vietnam Conference in 1968, Rudi Dutschke called on the US soldiers stationed in West Berlin to desert. For the SDS there was no need at all to limit its political demands to the territory of the Federal Republic.

 

The situation was quite different in the GDR. It is true that people also learned about events in the Federal Republic, France and the United States, because they were taken up and reinterpreted in the "Neues Deutschland", the central organ of the SED, in the sense of anti-imperialist propaganda. But the wishes of the GDR oppositionists concerned their own living conditions to a far greater extent. The awakening in Czechoslovakia was tangible for the GDR citizens themselves. A relaxation of travel restrictions and a free press would have been concretely implementable in their own country. This is also why the disappointment after the suppression of the "Prague Spring" was so great. It was clear that nothing would change in his own life.
While the protesting students in the West had to say goodbye to the utopia of a different society after 1968, but were still able to use their individual freedom, the GDR citizens' own living space was further restricted. They had to wait another 20 years before they could develop freely.

 

Sources

Ulrich Chaussy, Rudi Dutschke. Die Biographie, München 2018 (German)

Sandra Kraft: „Wenn’s der Wahrheitsfindung dient“. Antiautoritärer Protest vor Gericht um 1968, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (65), H. 2, 2017, S. 163-190 (German)

Michael Sontheimer, Peter Wensierki: „Wenn's der Wahrheitsfindung dient“. Vor Gericht in Moabit, in: SPIEGEL ONLINE, 22.03.2018 (https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/berlin-1967-fritz-teufel-und-karl-heinz-kurras-vor-gericht-in-moabit-a-1198959.html) (German)

„Ich war am anfälligsten für die Liebe", in: Der Tagesspiegel, 07.07.2010 (https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/fritz-teufels-letztes-interview-ich-war-am-anfaelligsten-fuer-die-liebe/1670424.html) (German)

Stefan Wolle, Die versäumte Revolte, in APuZ (22/23) 2001, S. 37-46 (German)

Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die blinden Flecken der RAF, Stuttgart 2017 (German)

Ehrhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949-1989, Berlin 1998Der Prager Frühling 1968 und die DDR (German)

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Der Prager Frühling und die DDR, in: Lernen aus der Geschichte (http://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-Lehren/content/13943) (German)

Marco Carini, Fritz Teufel. Wenn's der Wahrheitsfindung dient, Hamburg 2003 (German)

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