Alfred Willi Rudolf Dutschke (; 7 March 1940 – 24 December 1979) was a German sociologist and political activist who, until severely injured by an assassin in 1968, was a leading charismatic figure within both the (Socialist Students Union) in West Germany and that country's broader ("extra-parliamentary opposition").
Dutschke claimed both Christian and Marxist inspiration for a socialism that rejected both the Leninist model of party dictatorship that he had experienced as a youth in Communist East Germany, and the compromises of West German social democracy. He advocated the creation of alternative or parallel social, economic and political institutions structured on the principles of direct democracy. At the same time, he joined Moscow- and Beijing-oriented communists in hailing Third World national liberation struggles as fronts in a socialist world revolution.
Controversially for many of those who had protested with him in the 1960s, Dutschke in the 1970s 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 arising from his injuries in 1968, Dutschke was elected as a delegate to the founding congress of the environmentalist and social-justice Greens. It was a project then understood as the creation of an "anti-party party", engaging with parliamentary politics but remaining a grass-roots movement.
Christian youth in East Germany Dutschke was born in (an of present-day Nuthe-Urstromtal) near Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, the fourth son of a postal clerk. He was raised and educated in Communist East Germany (the - DDR, or German Democratic Republic — GDR), obtaining his high-school diploma (Gymnasium Abitur) in 1958, and apprenticed as an industrial salesman.Chaussy (2018)
He joined the regime-directed Free German Youth in 1956, aiming at a sporting career as a decathlete. However, he also engaged in the barely tolerated youth organisation of the East German Protestant Church. Dutschke allowed that religion played an "important role" in his life: that he "incorporated" its "fantastical explanation of the nature of man and his possibilities" into his later political work.For me, the decisive question, from a real historical point of view, was always: What was Jesus actually doing there? How did he want to change his society and what means did he use? That has always been the crucial question for me. For me, the question of transcendence is also a question of real history, how is the existing society to be transcended, a new design for a future society, that is perhaps materialistic transcendence.In Easter 1963, he wrote: Jesus is risen. The decisive revolution in world history has happened – a revolution of all-conquering love. If people would fully receive this revealed love into their own existence, into the reality of the 'now', then the logic of insanity could no longer continue..It was in this religious milieu outside of approved party and state structures, that Dutschke developed the courage (at the cost of any prospect of further education) to refuse compulsory service in the National People's Army and to encourage others to likewise resist conscription. Dutschke also cited the impact of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Its mobilisation in workers' councils suggested to him a democratic socialism beyond the official line of the GDR's governing Socialist Unity Party (but consistent with his reading of the Polish and German revolutionary and theorist, Rosa Luxemburg).
Refused his chosen course of study in sports journalism, in October 1960 Dutschke began regularly crossing into West Berlin to attend the school in Berlin-Tempelhof. With his new Abitur, he secured a job (working for nine months) with the Axel Springer tabloid, Bild Zeitung.Chaussy (2018), p. 38
On 10 August 1961, just three days before the restrictions of Barbed Wire Sunday were introduced to close passage from East Berlin to the West, Dutschke registered as a refugee at the Marienfelde transit camp. On 14 August, Dutschke and some friends used a rope to try to tear down a section of the newly-laid barbed wire that was eventually to become the Berlin Wall, and threw leaflets over it into East Berlin. It was his first political action.Ulrich Chaussy (1999), Die drei Leben des Rudi Dutschke. Eine Biographie [The Three Lives of Rudi Dutschke. A Biography]. Pendo, Zürich, ., pp. 33–35
Student political activist, 1960s The Free University and Subversive Action Dutschke enrolled at the Free University in West Berlin. Formed in 1948 by students abandoning the Communist Party-controlled Humboldt University in East Berlin, the constitution of the new school incorporated a degree of student representation unknown elsewhere in Germany. But the "democratic" faculty and city officials appeared to Dutschke and his classmates to have broken faith with the model of student co-determination. At senate meetings they confronted student delegates with common positions decided in advance.
Dutschke's scepticism with regard to the democratic credentials of the new institutions in the West were reinforced by his study of sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history under Richard Löwenthal and . He was introduced to the existentialist theories of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre, to György Lukács's theories of reification and class consciousness, and to the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School. Together these sources provided links with the Left and encouraged alternative, libertarian interpretations of Marx and of labour history. While increasingly engaged in consciously Marxist polemics, bolstered by his reading of the socialist theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, Dutschke retained an emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of action.
Dutschke believed he had found the means of transforming these critical perspectives into "praxis" in the dissonant, consciousness-raising provocations of the Situationists (in the propositions of Guy Debord, Rauul Vaneigem, Ivan Chtcheglov and others). In 1963 Dutschke joined the group Subversive Action (Subversive Aktion), conceived as the German branch of the Situationist International. He co-edited their paper Anschlag, to which he contributed articles on the revolutionary potential of developments in the Third World.
In December 1964, Dutschke's group joined a demonstration against the state visit of the Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe. Dutschke spontaneously led the protesters toward Schöneberg Town Hall, seat of the West Berlin House of Representatives, where Tshombe is said to have been hit “full in the face” with tomatoes. Dutschke described this action as the “beginning of our cultural revolution”.Norbert Frei (2008): 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. dtv, Munich, p.102.
SDS, the strategy of confrontation In 1964, Dutschke's group entered the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (German Socialist Students Union), the former collegiate wing of the Social Democrats (SPD). The SDS had been expelled from the moderate SPD for its 'unreconstructed leftism', although this had amounted to little more than organising lectures on Marxism.
Dutschke, elected in 1965 to the political council of the West Berlin SDS in the face of some considerable resistance, argued for confrontations in the university and on the streets. The theory as expounded by Dutschke in relation to protests against the Vietnam War, which soon dominated the agenda, was that "systematic, limited and controlled confrontations with the power structure" would "force the representative 'democracy' to show openly its class character, its authoritarianism, ... to expose itself as a 'dictatorship of force'". The awareness produced by such provocations would free people to rethink democratic theory and practice.Merritt (1969), p. 521
Dutschke and his faction had an important ally in Michael Vester, SDS vice-president and international secretary. Vester, who had studied in the US in 1961–62, and worked extensively with the American SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), introduced the theories of the American New Left and supported the call for “direct action” and civil disobedience.
In April 1965 Dutschke traveled with an SDS group to the Soviet Union. His hosts, who would have been aware of his critical, in their view anti-Soviet, commentary in Anschlag, classified him as a Trotskyite.Chaussy (2018), pp. 107–126. On his return in May 1965, his group's target was the United States, driven in particular by outrage over its invasion of the Dominican Republic.Chaussy (2018), pp. 126–136, 143–148.
In the summer of 1965 Dutschke took part in student protests over the Free University's refusal of speaking rights to the writer Erich Kuby. This was a prelude to a sit-in at the university in June the following year. Just as in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement two years earlier, West Berlin students were making a connection between the imperiousness of the university authorities and the broader absence of democratic practice.
Marriage to Gretchen Klotz and rejection of free-love commune On 23 March 1966, Dutschke privately married the American theology student Gretchen Klotz. She credits herself with making her husband aware of the misogyny in their revolutionary ranks: “What shocked me was, when the women talked in meetings, the men laughed. I said to Rudi ‘this is impossible’ but I don't think he was aware of it up to that point, he couldn't see it before then".
The couple declined invitations to join a newly founded residential Kommune in West Berlin, suggesting that in opposing permanent couple relationships the group were merely substituting a “bourgeois principle of exchange under pseudo-revolutionary auspices”. They had three children together.Chaussy (2018), pp. 175–180
Shortly after the birth of their first child, a son they named Hosea-Che, Dutschke and Klotz were forced to leave their apartment after the appearance of threatening graffiti (“Gas Dutschke!”) and attacks using smoke bombs and excrement.Chaussy (2018), pp. 181–213 The CSU member of the Bundestag, Franz Xaver Unertl, described Dutschke as an "unwashed, lousy and filthy creature".Birgit Schulz, Martin Block (2010), Die Anwälte: Ströbele, Mahler, Schily: eine deutsche Geschichte. Fackelträger, , p. 88
Revolutionary "voluntarist"