THE SOCIAL-LIBERAL ERA IN WEST GERMANY (1969-82)

1969-74: Willy Brandt urges bold reforms in co-determination, women’s rights, and freedom of the press, but his only successes come in foreign policy.

1974-82: The technocrat Helmut Schmidt takes over as Social Democratic chancellor to combat “stagflation”.

1970-77: Terrorist campaign by the “Red Army Faction” (aka the Baader-Meinhof Gang)

1971: Emergence of the “Women’s Liberation Movement” with a campaign to legalize abortion

1982-98: The CDU returns to power under Helmut Kohl

Brandt came to power in 1969 with the FDP’s Walter Scheel as foreign minister

WILLY BRANDT (1913-92) was born Ernst Karl Frahm

in Lübeck, the son of an unmarried cashier

• He became an activist in the SPD Youth in 1929, with a good high school education.

• He fled to Norway in 1933 and served in its army.

• He lived out the war in Sweden, returned to Berlin in Norwegian uniform in 1946, and became a German citizen again in 1948.

• Beloved by SPD members, he served as party chair from 1964 to 1987, but his first and second wives divorced him….

Herbert Wehner (1906-1990):Ex-communist, champion of

the Great Coalition, SPD parliamentary leader after

1969

Egon Bahr (born 1922):Brandt’s chief of staff, 1969-72, & architect of

Ostpolitik

THE CRISIS YEAR OF 1972

Bahr’s Treaty of Moscow was signed on August 12, 1970, and Treaty of Warsaw on December 7, but they were denounced by Kiesinger and Franz Josef Strauss.

Willy Brandt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. On April 27, 1972, the CDU failed by just 2 votes

to replace Brandt with Rainer Barzel. In October 1972 Brandt engineered early

elections and won a dramatic victory with 45.9% of the vote, the SPD’s best result ever. The FDP rose from 5.8 to 8.4%, and The SPD won 75% of the vote among those aged 18-21, and the FDP rose from 5.8 to 8.4%; the SPD won 75% of the vote among those aged 18-21.

Opinion polls showed that 61% of West German voters in 1972 accepted the Oder-Neisse Line as the legitimate border with Poland, vs. only 8% in 1951.

Nobody had ever seen such enthusiasm at SPD rallies….

“A Shipment of Inner-German Détente Ambassadors”

(GDR, late 1972):Victory allowed Brandt and Scheel to press forward with a “Basic Treaty” with the GDR, but with many

provisos

Willy Brandt welcomes Leonid Brezhnev & Andrei Gromyko to Bonn in 1973

Willy Brandt & Helmut Schmidt in 1973

Brandt was forced to resign abruptly in May 1974, when it became known that his close aide Günter

Guillaume was an East German spy

Helmut Schmidt & Erich Honecker at the signingof the Helsinki Accord in August 1975

“The Better Man Must Remain Chancellor:

Helmut Schmidt.Therefore SPD.”

(1976)

His biggest problem was

dealing with the unemployment caused by the “oil shocks” of 1973 and 1979

THE GROWTH IN PUBLIC DEBT FOR THE FRG

YEAR TOTAL PUBLIC DEBT

(billions of DM)

DEBT AS % OF GDP

1965 83.0 13.5

1970 125.9 18.6

1972 156.1 18.9

1974 192.4 19.5

1976 296.7 26.4

1978 370.8 28.7

1980 468.6 31.6

1982 614.6 38.4

The average annual rate of economic growth declined from 7.8% in the 1950s, to 4.8% in the 1960s, and 1.6% in the years 1979-85.

Overfilled lecture halls, ca. 1965: The university student population had ballooned to 275,000,

but new universities were not being built…

“We need enlightenment!” about the Nazi past of high officials (student protest, 1967/68)

An influential experiment by student radicals: “Kommune 1,” Stephanstrasse, West Berlin, 1967

Residents of Kommune 1 (1967)

Protests against the Shah of Iran: Demonstrator removed from entrance to West Berlin’s city hall, June

2/3, 1967

The student Benno Ohnesorg, mortally wounded by the police on June 2, 1967, while demonstrating against the

Shah of Iran

Funeral procession for

Benno Ohnesorg,

June 8, 1967.The cop who

shot him, Karl-Heinz

Kuras,was an East German spy

The SDS was founded by the SPD in 1946 but broke away in 1961; in 1968 it had 2,500 members, 600 of them in

Berlin:Rudi Dutschke debates Ralf Dahrendorf, Freiburg, January

1968

Rudi Dutschke (1940-79) addresses the “Vietnam Congress”

at the Technical University of West Berlin, February 17, 1968

Caricatures of the SDS in the Springer press, 1967/68

“Stop Dutschke now!Otherwise there will be civil war!”

Headline from the Deutsche Nationalzeitung, 22 March 1968, which inspired the young neo-Nazi

Josef Bachmann to travel to Berlin

Kudamm 140, in front of SDS headquarters, April 1968

Dutschke loaded onto an

ambulance, 11 April 1968

Rioting in West Berlin on the night of 11/12 April 1968

Protest against the State of Emergency Laws, May 1968

Ulrike Meinhof (1934-76):

Her father died when she was 5; her mother,

when she was 15.A pious Lutheran anti-war activist, she joined the SDS in 1958 and

became editor of konkret

in Hamburg.

Ulrike Meinhof, “From Protest to Resistance” (May 1968)

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I see to it that things that I don’t like no longer occur. Protest is when I say I will no longer go along with it. Resistance is when I see to it that no one else goes along with it any more either. ….During the protests against the at-tack on Rudi Dutschke during Easter break, the boundary between verbal protest and physical resistance was crossed, for the first time on a massive scale…; for days, not just once; all over, not just in Berlin….

“Those here who, from positions of political power, condemn throwing stones and arson, but not the agitation of the Springer press, nor the bombs falling in Vietnam, nor the terror in Persia, nor torture in South Africa, those who could bring about the expropriation of Springer instead form a Great Coalition…. They want precisely what those of us who took to the streets… do not want: politics as fate, sheep-like masses, a powerless opposition that disturbs nothing and no one, democratic sandbox games, and when things get serious, the state of emergency. [President] Johnson, who declares Martin Luther King to be a national hero, and [Chancellor] Kiesinger, who sends a telegram to express his regret at the attempted assassination of Dutschke, are representatives of the violence against which both King and Dutschke protested.”

ACTIVISTS OR CRIMINALS?

In October 1968 they were sentenced to three years in prison for arson; Meinhof busted them out of jail in May

1970.

Andreas Baader (1943-77):

His soldier father died in 1945, and he dropped out

of high school…

Gudrun Ensslin (1940-77): Daughter of a Lutheran pastor,

student at the Free University…

“Transform your hatred into energy!”

(Che Guevara poster, 1970)

Ulrike Meinhof, “The Idea of the Urban Guerilla:

Draw a Sharp Line Between Us and

the Enemy!”(May 1971)

“Everyone talks about the weather.Not us.”

(SDS poster,1973)

“Committee for the Defense of

Democratic Rights:The Test of Political

Loyalty” (1975):Under the terms of the “Anti-Radical

Decree” of January 1972,

1.4 million people were investigated on suspicion of hostility to the constitutional

order, and 1,100 were banned for life from public sector

employment.

The Baader-Meinhof Trial, June 1975(the group was charged with 34 killings)

“Killers Wage War against the

State,”Der Spiegel,

12 September 1977

“TERROR”(Mogadishu

Airport)Der Spiegel, 17 October 1977