Rudi Dutschke

Lore & Background

Dutschke was born in Schönefeld near Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, the fourth son of a postal clerk, and raised in Communist East Germany. He obtained his high-school diploma in 1958 and apprenticed as an industrial salesman. He joined the regime-directed Free German Youth in 1956, aiming at a sporting career as a decathlete, but also engaged in the youth organisation of the East German Protestant Church. He refused compulsory service in the National People's Army and encouraged others to resist conscription.

On 10 August 1961, three days before the Berlin Wall began closing passage, Dutschke registered as a refugee at the Marienfelde transit camp. On 14 August, he and friends used a rope to try to tear down a section of newly-laid barbed wire and threw leaflets over it into East Berlin. In West Berlin, Dutschke enrolled at the Free University, studying sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history under Richard Löwenthal and Klaus Meschkat.

The Free University and Subversive Action

He was introduced to existentialist theories of Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre, to Lukács's theories of reification and class consciousness, and to the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School. In 1963 he joined the group Subversive Action, conceived as the German branch of the Situationist International, and co-edited their paper Anschlag. In December 1964, he led a demonstration against the state visit of Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, hitting him 'full in the face' with tomatoes—an action Dutschke called the 'beginning of our cultural revolution'. In 1964 his group entered the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), and in 1965 Dutschke was elected to the political council of the West Berlin SDS.

SDS, the strategy of confrontation

He argued for confrontations to force representative democracy to expose its class character and authoritarianism. In April 1965 he traveled with an SDS group to the Soviet Union, where hosts classified him as a Trotskyite. In summer 1965 he took part in protests over the Free University's refusal of speaking rights to writer Erich Kuby, leading to a sit-in in June 1966.

Marriage to Gretchen Klotz and rejection of free-love commune

On 23 March 1966, Dutschke privately married American theology student Gretchen Klotz. They declined invitations to join a residential Kommune, arguing it substituted a 'bourgeois principle of exchange under pseudo-revolutionary auspices'. They had three children. In the 1970s, Dutschke styled himself a patriotic socialist ('Pro Patria Sozi') and called on the left to re-engage the 'national question' and seek a bloc-free path to German reunification. Shortly before his death in 1979 from complications of his 1968 injuries, he was elected as a delegate to the founding congress of the Greens, understood as an 'anti-party party' engaging with parliamentary politics but remaining a grass-roots movement.

Reader's Guide

Rudi Dutschke's significance lies in his role as a leading charismatic figure of the West German student movement and extra-parliamentary opposition until his 1968 assassination attempt. He advocated a socialism inspired by both Christian and Marxist thought, rejecting Leninist party dictatorship and social democratic compromise. He called for alternative institutions structured on direct democracy and hailed Third World national liberation struggles as fronts in socialist world revolution.

His confrontational tactics aimed to force representative democracy to reveal its authoritarian character. Controversially, in the 1970s he styled himself a patriotic socialist and called for a bloc-free path to German reunification. His election as a delegate to the founding congress of the Greens linked the 1960s protest movement to emerging environmental and social-justice politics, engaging with parliamentary democracy while maintaining grassroots roots.