49 Facts About Rudi Dutschke

Rudi Dutschke advocated the creation of alternative or parallel social, economic and political institutions structured on the principles of direct democracy.

Shortly before his death in 1979 from complications arising from his injuries in 1968, Rudi Dutschke was elected as a delegate to the founding congress of the environmentalist and social-justice Greens.

Rudi Dutschke was born in Schonefeld near Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, the fourth son of a postal clerk.

Rudi Dutschke was raised and educated in East Germany, obtaining his high-school diploma in 1958, and apprenticed as an industrial salesman.

Rudi Dutschke had joined the regime-directed Free German Youth in 1956, aiming at a sporting career as a decathlete.

Rudi Dutschke cited the impact of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

On 10 August 1961, just three days before the restrictions of Barbed Wire Sunday were introduced to close passage to the west, Rudi Dutschke registered as a refugee at the Marienfelde transit camp.

Rudi Dutschke believed he had found the means of transforming these critical perspectives into "praxis" in the dissonant, consciousness-raising provocations of the Situationists.

In 1963 Rudi Dutschke joined the group Subversive Action, conceived as the German branch of the Situationist International.

Rudi Dutschke co-edited their paper Anschlag, to which he contributed articles on the revolutionary potential of developments in the Third World.

In December 1964, Rudi Dutschke's group joined a demonstration against the state visit of the Congolese Prime Minister Moise Tschombe.

In 1964, Rudi Dutschke's group entered the German Socialist Students Union, the former collegiate wing of the Social Democrats.

Rudi 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.

On 23 March 1966, Rudi Dutschke privately married the American theology student Gretchen Klotz.

Rudi Dutschke called for the expropriation of his former employer, the conservative Axel Springer Press, which at that time controlled around 67 percent of the leading media in West Berlin.

Rudi Dutschke argued that Dutschke's notion of calculated disturbance to unmask the veiled force of the state was mistaken.

Rudi Dutschke, he said, was putting the lives of other students at risk.

On 21 October 1967 Rudi Dutschke joined about 10,000 people on the streets of West Berlin, while 250,000 anti-war protesters besieged the Pentagon in Washington.

Rudi Dutschke was prevented from speaking from the pulpit by a bloody blow to the head.

Rudi Dutschke called on the students to "leave here quietly and spread out in small groups across the city to distribute your pamphlets".

Rudi Dutschke advised Mandel that Dutschke was able to maintain his position in the SDS only by virtue of his political flexibility.

Such a system does not represent "the real interests of our people", which Rudi Dutschke described to Gaus as "the right to reunification, safeguarding jobs, safeguarding state finances, the reordering of the economy".

Rudi Dutschke did not share the reformist euphoria surrounding Willy Brandt, the former anti-Nazi resister and West Berlin mayor who, as junior partner to the ruling Christian Democrats, led the Social Democrats for the first time into federal government in December 1966.

Rudi Dutschke joined calls for an extra-parliamentary opposition.

Gaus's first question to Rudi Dutschke was why he wished to upend the republic's social order.

The difference was that German neutrality for Rudi Dutschke was a condition not only for national unity but for social transformation.

In June 1967, Rudi Dutschke proposed that West Berlin, then still under Western Allied sovereignty, declare itself a council republic.

On his return from Prague, Rudi Dutschke wanted to live with his wife for one to two years in the US and to study Latin American liberation movements.

Rudi Dutschke had prepared the move and in the interim had accepted an invitation to a 1 May demonstration in Paris when, on 11 April 1968 he was shot.

Rudi Dutschke had waited for Dutschke outside the SDS office on Kurfurstendamm.

Rudi Dutschke appealed to all those who felt responsible for the maintenance of democracy to show vigilance and calm.

Rudi Dutschke survived, but the attack left him with aphasia, brain damage, memory loss, epileptic seizures and several other health problems.

Rudi Dutschke seemed to welcome the fact that many left groups wanted to go their own way and, if only on the basis of his health, ruled out a further strategizing role for himself.

Rudi Dutschke sought talks with trade unionists and social democrats, including former president Gustav Heinemann, whose vision of a non-aligned, demilitarized Germany as a whole he shared.

Rudi Dutschke later made contact with Robert Havemann and Rudolf Bahro and East-Bloc dissidents such as Milan Horacek and Adam Michnik, among others.

Increasingly, Rudi Dutschke was associated with concerns for civil and political rights.

In October 1979, sensing that Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was impatient with questioning at a press conference with Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Hua Guofeng, Rudi Dutschke, representing the left-wing daily taz, reminded the Chancellor that he was in presence of a free press, not the hierarchical Bundeswehr nor the totalitarian regimes of Beijing, Moscow or East Berlin.

The direct actions and provocations that Rudi Dutschke defended as a means of "unmasking the authoritarian structures" of capitalist society, did not in principle exclude armed violence.

In July 1967, in discussions following a lecture by Marcuse on "The End of Utopia", Rudi Dutschke dismissed "pacifism on principle" as counterrevolutionary.

At the SDS delegate conference in Frankfurt in September 1967, Rudi Dutschke proposed the creation of urban "sabotage and refusnik guerrilla" groups.

In December 1978, reflecting on the turmoil of the preceding decade, Rudi Dutschke was more emphatic:.

Rudi Dutschke returned, it seemed increasingly, to the theme of German re-unification.

From 1976 Rudi Dutschke was a member of the "Socialist Bureau", created after the final dissolution of the SDS.

Rudi Dutschke was an advocate for a new "eco-socialist" constellation that would embrace activists in the anti-nuclear, anti-war, feminist and environmentalist movements but, in contrast to the APO of the sixties, would necessarily exclude Leninists and others not in sympathy to the spirit and practice of citizen initiatives and of grass-roots democracy.

Rudi Dutschke established his credentials with the new generation of activists by participating in the attempted occupation of a nuclear power construction site, just over the border from Denmark, at Brokdorf, Schleswig-Hollstein.

Rudi Dutschke advocated the right of nations to self-determination and thus a right of resistance to the military blocs in West and East.

Rudi Dutschke had continued to struggle with health problems due to brain injuries sustained in the assassination attempt against him.

Rudi Dutschke wanted to abolish subservience as a personality trait of German identity.

Those, like Ralf Dahrendorf, satisfied that Rudi Dutschke was "a decent, honest and trustworthy man," can nonetheless take a dismissive view of his contributions.