Leaflet-Posters As Discursive Spaces of
Trans-European and Transatlantic Student
Protests During the 1960s[1]
By Thomas Pegelow Kaplan
Activists in the European student and youth revolts of the 1960s
made extensive use of leaflets and posters as tools to voice
their criticism and increase their support. Cheaply and quickly
produced, these communication tools played an unmatched role in
creating a counter-public sphere that challenged mainstream
political discourses and practices. Today, some of these protest
documents have assumed the status of media icons that decisively
shape collective memories of the past revolts. From the start,
scholarship on the 1960s protests has widely relied on these
sources.[2]
Scholarly works continue to benefit from the large collections
of flyers and posters that movement activists and staff members
of university, city, and state archives across Europe have
assembled.[3]
Since the 1990s, scholars, including, finally, a growing number
of historians, have re-examined these revolts in European-wide
and global contexts.[4]
More recently, studies have drawn on transnational approaches to
grasp the impact of knowledge transfers and communication
processes between activists across national borders on the
course of their protests.[5]
Even if this recent wave of scholarship has not ignored the
wealth of leaflets and posters,[6]
it has yet to offer a substantial analysis of these sources that
situates them at a decisive juncture of trans-European and
transatlantic protest communication and as crucial discursive
spaces in which activists renegotiated new protest languages and
practices.
This essay takes a first step in the direction of developing a
more systematic analysis of leaflets and posters as
transnational protest media by offering a rereading of the
centerpiece of the February 1966 “placard protest” (Plakataktion)
in West Berlin and Munich. In so doing, it also introduces a new
conceptualization of this often-mentioned source of the 1960s
German student revolts and modifies protest poster and leaflet
typologies. Drawing on rarely used documents on the emergence of
the 1966 placard’s text, this contribution moves beyond
conventional analyses of the poster as mere propaganda and means
of provocation and explores the intricate ways in which it
expressed communicative memories of the protesters and
intervened in broader societal memory cultures.[7]
In a nighttime operation on February 3–4, 1966, small groups of
leftist activists put up hundreds of posters at prominent
locations all over West Berlin and Munich. The placard protest
confronted onlookers with the accusation that “Erhard and the
parties in Bonn support[ed] murder.”[8]
A few days earlier, the American government had resumed its
bombing campaigns in North Vietnam and the West German political
establishment stood by its main ally. The poster identified an
“International Liberation Front” (Internationale
Befreiungsfront) as the group behind this protest and its
call on the Americans to leave Vietnam. Small Situationist-leaning
circles in West Berlin and Munich had chosen this designation to
underscore the poster’s call to action and their solidarity with
anti-imperialist liberation movements in the “Third World.” In
the Munich circle, Dieter Kunzelmann, once active in Paris,
played an important role; in West Berlin, the GDR-born students
Bernd Rabehl and Rudi Dutschke spearheaded the placard protest.
A younger cohort from the Berlin section of the German Socialist
Student Union (SDS), which Dutschke and others had joined in an
effort to recruit activists for their allegedly revolutionary
politics, participated in the illegal operation. Before the end
of the night, the police had removed most of the posters and
arrested several activists. Still, the placard protest helped to
swell the ranks of the participants in the city’s February 5
anti-Vietnam War demonstration to some 2,500. Organized by a
broad coalition of leftist groups, including the SDS, this
demonstration continued the protests of the “Vietnam Semester”
1965–66. At the end of the march, a minority—in line with the
placard protest’s provocations—escalated their discursive
attacks by lowering the American flag and throwing eggs at the
US Information Agency’s “America House” (Amerika-Haus).[9]
These developments and the protest poster are well known. The
circumstance that the text evolved in a lively, almost
month-long letter exchange between activists in West Berlin and
Munich and went through more than half a dozen drafts, however,
is only rarely discussed. In his important study of the SDS,
Siegward Lönnendonker, for instance, simply ignored these
debates. The Kunzelmann circle, the former West Berlin SDSler
stated, acted on its own authority when its members radically
modified the Berlin group’s draft and sent it directly to the
printer.[10]
Yet, these exchanges are particularly revealing about the poster
text’s emergence, transfer of linguistic trans-European and
transatlantic protest practices, and even its very
classification.
In his first placard protest-related letter of January 9, 1966,
Rudi Dutschke sketched his vision for 1,000 Din A2-sized,
two-color placards for each city, promised a text, and demanded
“theoretical-political” (theoretisch-politisch)
reasons for any modification of his forthcoming draft.[11]
The much-pondered text, finally, amounted to 29 lines on a sheet
devoid of any images. It, thus, begins to escape the clear-cut
classifications and distinctions between posters and leaflets
that many scholars of the 1960s protests rely on when dealing
with the movements’ media. According to their standard
definitions, protest posters are larger paper or cardboard
sheets produced for outdoor public display. Activists usually
glue or paste them to walls, fences, and billboards. The
posters’ letter font is large enough for passersby to catch most
of their message. Political posters also most often include
pictorial elements and color. 1960s protest posters were
deliberately crude in their layout and production. The emerging
“anti-placard effect” served as a deliberate critique of
bourgeois aesthetics and the professionalism of the posters used
by political parties. The activists’ posters spoke to
time-and-place specific issues, aimed primarily at forming a
distinctive opinion and sought to prompt political action. In
contrast to political posters, 1960s protest leaflets were
smaller in size. Activists directly distributed them to
audiences on university campuses, at busy urban intersections or
during protest events. Protest movements enlisted them as
communication tools in their daily political struggles and,
during specific campaigns, frequently circulated more than one
flyer per day. As a result, they were only distributed once and
not used again at a later date. Leaflets general encompassed one
to two and, if folded, up to four pages of text. They advanced a
more accessible language than the jargon-filled theoretical
explications in movement journals and often directly addressed
and involved their readers. Protest leaflets, finally, were the
outcome of collective processes and assumed a key function in
activists’ much-celebrated political practices.[12]
In light of its wording and exclusive reliance on lengthy text,
the “poster” of the Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann groups actually
shares more similarities with a political leaflet than a more
stylized “text poster” (Schriftplakat)
and, therefore, constitutes what this essay describes as a
“leaflet-poster.” As a hybrid of the leaflet and poster genres,
leaflet-posters could easily be displayed as posters when
printed on larger paper or handed out as leaflets when produced
on smaller sheets. More than two dozen copies of the analyzed
February 1966 placard even resurfaced in the form of a banner at
the February 5 anti-Vietnam War rally in West Berlin.[13]
On a basic level, the overlaps between the two genres are rooted
in their long, shared history. Scholars such as Frank Kämpfer
have pointed out that posters and placards developed from fliers
of the Reformation and Peasants’ War periods whose protagonists
refined leaflets in the political battles and made ample use of
them. The very term “placard” (Plakat)
entered northern and central European language use in the
sixteenth century, when participants in the Dutch revolts glued
their leaflets against Habsburg-Spanish rule on walls in public
spaces and started referring to the mounted pamphlets as
Plakatten. The revival and emergence of leaflets and
posters in their modern form took place in the French political
cultures of the 1780s and 1860s respectively and interacted with
the rise of these genres in other European societies. Both the
employment of new printing techniques, especially
nineteenth-century lithography, and the demands for
advertisement in the quickly expanding consumer cultures aided
these developments. By that the late nineteenth century,
leaflets and posters had taken on noticeably different
characteristics along the lines of size, dissemination, and
function. Like their predecessors, however, flyers, placards,
and the leaflet-posters of the 1960s West German protest
movements discussed in this essay belonged to broader discursive
spaces of trans-European and transatlantic protest cultures
which shaped them and which these posters, in turn, helped to
remake.[14]
In the Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann leaflet-poster, these
trans-European dimensions are readily apparent in its mode of
emplotment and language use. The plot structure pins the
American and West German governments as the murderous villains
against the exploited populations of “economically
underdeveloped countries” (wirtschaftlich
unterentwickelten Länder) who emerge as the revolutionary
heroes of anti-imperialist liberation struggles. Drawing further
on a Romantic mode of emplotment, the leaflet-poster’s authors
inserted themselves and the readers who joined them as the
text’s secondary heroes. Their act, the leaflet-poster implies,
is already a decisive measure to disallow the rulers “to murder
in our name” (daß
in unserem Namen gemordet wird). To join the revolution
would be the all-important next step. The
Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann groups, however, did not only target
the “West.” They also explicitly took aim at the “East” and
accused both centers of the bi-polar postwar world of brutal
arrangements at the cost of the oppressed.[15]
The groups’ position reflected trans-European knowledge
transfers between leftist movements, especially in Western
Europe, in search of a “third way” beyond capitalism and Soviet
Communism. Beginning in the late 1950s, leading theorists of the
Situationist International (SI) such as Guy Debord had blatantly
criticized Communist systems and accused them of still
construing human beings as commodities. By the spring of 1966,
Kunzelmann no longer belonged to the German section of the SI
that he had first encountered in Paris in the late 1950s. He and
other members of the Munich and West Berlin circles had even
left the revolutionary Subversive Action that they had
co-founded in 1963 and that Rudi Dutschke had joined in West
Berlin.[16]
Several scholars have examined the impact of these
trans-European Situationist circles on West German activists.
Wolfgang Kraushaar has argued that these circles’ ideas and
failures resembled and prefigured beliefs and shortcomings of
the participants in the late 1960s revolts.[17]
Kunzelmann himself reaffirmed in a 1991 interview that they
continued to engage and remake key approaches and the lingo of
the European-wide avant-garde Situationist movement. The
leaflet-poster’s text was a clear expression of the practices
Kunzelmann and comrades had cultivated in exchanges with
activists in Amsterdam, Paris, and Göteborg.
These transfer processes extended to the very concepts that
underpin the Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann leaflet-poster,
pointedly expressing its trans-European intertextuality.
Situationist theorists like the Belgian activist Raoul Vaneigem
had popularized strategies of “diversion” (détournement)
that aimed at placing signs and words out of their established
contexts to create new meanings that rendered older ones
insignificant. “All elements of the cultural past,” he wrote,
“had to be reinserted or disappear.” By turning this established
language against their perceived enemies who had coined it, SI
protesters hoped to subvert the hegemonic societal order. The
authors of the 1966 poster applied this practice most
prominently in their employment of the term “murder” (Mord).
With its large lettering, it dominated the leaflet-poster’s
upper section and reappeared more often than any other concept.
Dutschke and his fellow activists cited a term that the German
criminal code defined as the cruel killing of a human being
based on murderous lust or other base motives and tied to an
individual murderer. By widening the term’s meaning as a
collective practice of a state and ascribing it to the German
lawgivers’ American allies, they ultimately turned it against
these lawgivers who appeared as party to US mass crimes.[18]
Much more so than the rather subtle early SI theorists,
Kunzelmann and Dutschke unashamedly used these subversive
citations as part of their revolutionary approaches. As Dutschke
later summarized, “conscientiously staggered” (bewußtseinsmäßig
gestaffelte) and “intense” (intensiv)
texts and flyers had to prepare the “radicalization at larger
rallies” (Radikalisierung
bei größeren Demonstrationen) in ways that aided some
participants’ “‘leap’ to us” (Sprung
zu uns). By adding the phrase “murder by poison gas” (Mord
durch
Giftgas)” that was already part of the Berlin group’s first
draft of January 12, they intensified their subversive
practices. The phrase evoked memories of the Germans’
extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War and,
thus, provocatively placed both the CDU-led Bonn government and
the Johnson administration in continuity with Nazism. As
scholars such as Götz Aly and Hans Kundnani have shown, these
blatant constructions of parallelisms and continuities between
the Nazi, West German, and American political establishments had
already been evoked by activists prior to 1966 and only gained
in prominence in the course of the protest movement’s ongoing
radicalization. In their response to Dutschke on January 13, the
Munich group stressed the need for this “coarsening of language”
(vergröbernde
Sprache). To rely on the “reigning jargon” (herrschenden
Jargon) was not sufficient and had no connection to the
activists’ reality. Instead, they had to remake language and
“precisely name this reality” (diese
Realität genau[zu]
bezeichne[n]).
[19]
Still, an analysis of the February 1966 leaflet-poster should
not reduce these practices to mere propaganda. Indeed, they
simultaneously expressed and strengthened the activists’
communicative memories that returned time and again to the
fascist period and shaped, as Norbert Frei has recently
reiterated, their actions.[20]
Dutschke’s diary entries, for example, strikingly capture these
dynamics. During his travels to the Soviet Union a few months
prior to the placard protest, he noted “too many memories of the
participation of the fathers in the conquering of Poland.”[21]
In remembering their country’s recent mass crimes, West German
activists were joined by their counterparts in other European
societies who were haunted and motivated by images of their own.
Transcultural exchanges between protesters only intensified
these processes as exemplified by French student activists who
evoked memories of Vichy and fascism in France in support of
Daniel Cohn-Bendit two years later. The leaflet-poster’s “murder
by poison gas” reference, meanwhile, was more complex and
multi-directional. It also reached mainstream onlookers by
conjuring up a different set of transnational imagery. In the
larger trans-European memory communities, “poison gas” also
evoked images of gas warfare in the trenches of the “Great War”
and the postwar cults of the dead.[22]
Truly, the leaflet-poster depicted a devastating imagery of a
century of mass murder and destruction that was yet to continue
in Vietnam and elsewhere.
In the discursive space of the February 1966 leaflet-poster, the
authors’ subversive citing and evoking of trans-European
memories did not stop at mere “murder” rhetoric. Hardly
mentioned in the scholarly literature, the activists further
radicalized their lingo to outright genocide charges. “We are
supposed to assist the rulers,” the poster’s last substantial
text paragraph began, “in perpetrating genocide.”[23]
In the course of the discussion, activists in Munich, as the
leaflet-poster draft that accompanies this essay indicates, had
even supported a more prominent placement of “genocide in
Vietnam” (Völkermord
in Vietnam) accusations at the beginning of the text’s
first paragraph. As the Munich group explicated in a letter of
January 15, the genocide accusation increased the text’s
seriousness and, in combination with the signing by an
“International Liberation Front,” achieved a “distinct fomenting
effect” (bestimmte
agitatorische Wirkung) that critically underscored the
narrative. Two days earlier, they had already sharply criticized
the Dutschke-Rabehl group’s initial draft that was devoid of any
genocide vocabulary. Instead, the Berlin circle’s version listed
modes of killing from “destroyed” (zerstört)
to “lacerated” (zerfleischt).
This “mincemeat episode” (Hackfleichepisode),
the Munich circle quipped, was “redundant” (überflüssig).
The Berliners’ subsequent employment of the “self-determination
formula” (Selbtbestimmungsformel)
came too close to “bourgeois United Nations demands” (bürgerlichen
UN-Forderungen). A subversive citing of UN lingo, the
Munich comrades’ criticism implied, would be promising.[24]
The 1948 UN Genocide Convention had elevated the term to
international law and committed the convention’s signatories to
prevent these crimes and prosecute their perpetrators. Since the
Federal Republic had acceded to the convention in 1954, the very
act of naming a crime genocide had become a distinctly political
practice.[25]
The Munich group was particularly eager to remake and
incorporate the genocide term into the final draft of the
leaflet-poster, expanding its meaning to include napalm bombing
campaigns. This step was hardly original. In the context of
increasingly radicalized anti-war protests during the Free
University of Berlin’s Vietnam Semester, for example, activists
had already started to draw on this lingo. In November 1965, FU
lecturers such as Wolfgang F. Haug, the publisher of the
influential leftist journal
Das Argument, issued a declaration on the conflict that
accused the US of being on the verge of “genocide” (Völkermord)
in Vietnam and “wrong[ly] naming” (falsche
Benennung) this war. At the end, the authors pointed to an
initiative by young academics in the United States that had
inspired this declaration.[26]
As in the case of the Haug text, the Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann
groups’ use of genocide vocabulary can only be fully explained
by the growing significance of supra-European and transatlantic
transfers and communication networks that decisively shaped
these leftist activists’ very language.
While taking aim at the US government and military apparatus
that spearheaded the Western Cold War alliance and was virtually
present in West Berlin and Bavaria, the
Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann groups drew distinctly on practices
and concepts of civil rights and leftist American activists from
the other side of the Atlantic. Less than two years prior to the
placard protest, organizers of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, for example, had fought a proposed
mandatory sterilization bill in the Mississippi State House by
quoting the UN Genocide Convention’s definition and naming the
measure “a program of officially. . . sanctioned genocide.”
Members of the American SDS swiftly drew on genocide discourses
as they intensified the campaigns against their country’s war in
Vietnam. A SDS pamphlet for conscientious objectors from the
fall of 1965, for instance, spoke of an “immoral, illegal and
genocidal war against the Vietnamese people.” German SDSlers
like Günter Amendt had been at Berkeley, when students returned
from the 1964 Freedom Rides in Mississippi. Dutschke, who had
learned about these practices through SDS channels, also stepped
up his connections to American activists. Gretchen Klotz, for
instance, helped him to establish contact with members of the
Black Power movement. The February 1966 leaflet-poster and its
language, thus, belonged to and shaped a broader discursive
space of trans-European as well as transatlantic protest
activism and memory.[27]
Finally, any reading of protest publications, including
leaflet-posters, has to take the hegemonic socio-political
narratives into consideration to which these protest discourses
remained inherently linked. In the power relations of Cold War
Western Europe, the responses by state institutions and
mainstream media outlets played a crucial role, forcefully
affecting the reception and reach of leaflet-posters and even
redirecting the protest practices that underpinned them. Since
West Berlin’s police had removed the Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann
leaflet-posters within a few hours, the placard protest would
have had a much-reduced impact, if it had not been for West
Berlin newspapers. The city’s press turned this protest into a
news story for mass consumption. In the Cold War hysteria of the
“front-line city,” the local newspapers, dominated by the
conservative Springer publishing house, swiftly attacked the
protesters. Most papers identified them as misguided elements
that aided East Berlin’s cause or simply as hardened “supporters
of the Communist Party.” The
Berliner Morgenpostcondemned the “defamation” of leaders of
the Western world as “murderers.” And yet, the
non-Springer-owned
Tagesspiegel published the text of the leaflet-poster and
granted it a significant afterlife. The responses to the placard
protest were not limited to the city and had distinctly
transatlantic dimensions best captured by the activities of the
US Mission in Berlin whose staff members ardently screened the
city’s press. Immediately following the placard protest, a US
official reported to the State Department in Washington, D.C.,
that the poster contained “classic Communist” claims and lingo.
US diplomats swiftly construed the “International Liberation
Front” as a minority of little influence whose members were “disavowe[d]”
by the city’s main student groups. In a striking contrast to
later years when they perceived serious challenges by
transatlantic protest alliances, these diplomats did not detect
any threat. By minimizing the leaflet-poster, they helped with
the virtual drowning out of the poster protest in the mainstream
media and public—for the time being.[28]
In closing, while television fully assumed the status of the key
medium in Western European societies during the 1960s, student
and youth protest movements revived and refashioned political
leaflets and posters as an alternative means of communication.
As much as this protest media responded to national and even
local politics, it was also significantly shaped by the
increasing transnational communication and knowledge transfers
between protesters in various parts of the transatlantic Cold
War world and, in turn, contributed to a remaking of the
discursive and visual spaces of these activists’ broader protest
cultures. The February 1966 “Erhard and the parties in Bonn
support murder” leaflet-poster of Situationist-oriented groups
in West Berlin and Munich reflected and intervened in these
processes. In its analysis of this protest document, this essay
proposes an altered typology by conceptualizing it as a
leaflet-poster. Leaflet-posters as a hybrid form that could be
used as flyers, posters, or even banners were a key component of
the innovative and experimental alternative media tools of the
trans-European and transatlantic protest cultures of the 1960s.
Other types included image posters and mixed image-text posters
that political activists and artists diligently developed in
response to and for the expanding transnational protests. The
1968 text-image poster that depicts the dead Benno Ohnesorg and
identifies the uniformed police commander Hans-Ulrich Werner as
“SS-Werner” in charge of a genocidal campaign in 1942 Russia is
but one example. At the rally following the Vietnam Congress at
the Technical University, leftist Spanish students and Franco
opponents carried several copies of this poster through downtown
West Berlin.[29]
These leaflet- and other posters, meanwhile, were not simply
tools of agitation. They also expressed and formed communicative
memories of protesters and sympathizers alike that often
challenged hegemonic societal memory cultures. Still, in the
anti-Communist hysteria of Cold War West Berlin, the
Dutschke-Rabehl-Kunzelmann groups’ 1966 imagery of mass
slaughter in Vietnam and German genocidal crimes of the
century’s previous conflict was drowned out by competing images
and memories evoked by the city’s mass media and government
officials. The grammar of these still hegemonic memories gave
prominence to Communist brutalities that dated back to 1953 East
Germany and even 1945 Berlin. In the course of the widening
global revolts at the end of the decade, these trans-European
and transatlantic protest imageries and memories were
increasingly heard, further remade, and began to alter dominant
memory cultures. In these processes, transnational leaflet- and
text-image posters played a key role that scholars of the 1960s
still need to fully acknowledge and adequately incorporate into
their studies of this crucial period of postwar European and
transatlantic history.
[1] Essay relates to source: Internationale Sozialisten
Deutschlands (ISD), Leaflet-Poster Draft.
[2] See, for example, Fichter, Tilman; Lönnendonker,
Siegward, Kleine Geschichte des SDS. Der Sozialistische Deutsche
Studentenbund von 1946 bis zur Selbstauflösung, Berlin 1977;
Thomas, Nick, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany. A Social
History of Dissent and Democracy, Oxford 2003.Research for this
essay was made possible by research fellowships from the
Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the German Historical
Institute in Washington, D.C.
[3] For entire collections of these sources cf. Miermeister,
Jürgen; Staadt, Jochen (eds.), Provokationen. Die Studenten- und
Jugendrevolte in ihren Flugblättern 1965–1971, Darmstadt 1980;
HKS 13 (ed.), vorwärts bis zum nieder mit - 30 Jahre Plakate
unkontrollierter Bewegungen, Hamburg 2001.
[4] Cf., for instance, De Groot, Gerard J. (ed.), Student
Protest: The Sixties and After, London 1998; Kraushaar,
Wolfgang, 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur, Hamburg 2000;
Kurlansky, Mark, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, New York
2004 and Frei, Norbert, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler
Protest, Munich 2008.
[5] Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, Der Transfer zwischen den
Studentenbewegungen von 1968 und die Entstehung einer
transnationalen Gegenöffentlichkeit, in: Kaelble, Hartmut;
Kirsch, Martin; Schmidt-Gernig, Alexander (eds.), Transnationale
Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt
am Main 2002, p. 303–326; Klimke, Martin; Scharloth, Joachim
(eds.), 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism,
1956–1977, New York 2008; AHR Forum. The International 1968,
Part I, in: American Historical Review 114 (2009), p. 42–135.
[6] See, among others, Reichardt, Sven; Siegfried, Detlef
(eds.), Das Alternative Milieu. Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und
linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa
1968–1983, Göttingen 2010, p. 441, p. 453.
[7] On communicative memories cf. Assmann, Jan, Das
kulturelle Gedächtnis, Munich 1992, p. 48–56.
[8] The German original reads: “Erhard und die Bonner
Parteien unterstützen Mord.” See Miermeister, Provokationen, p.
82.
[9] Lönnendonker, Siegward; Staadt, Jochen; Rabehl, Bernd,
Die antiautoritäre Revolte. Der Sozialistische Deutsche
Studentenbund nach der Trennung von der SPD, Vol. 1: 1960–1967,
Wiesbaden 2002, p. 226–238; Klimke, Martin, The Other Alliance:
Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the
Global Sixties, Princeton 2010, p. 49–51.
[10] Lönnendonker, Antiautoritäre Revolte, p. 227. Some more
recent works, by contrast, have mentioned the exchange. See
Reimann, Aribert, Dieter Kunzelmann. Avantgardist, Protestler,
Radikaler, Göttingen 2009, p. 115.
[11] Dutschke, Rudi to Munich group, January 9, 1966,
Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS), RUD 151,06.
[12] Artinger, Kai, Das politische Plakat – Einige
Bemerkungen zur Funktion und Geschichte, in: idem (ed.), Die
Grundrechte im Spiegel des Plakats, 1919 bis 1999, Berlin 2000,
p. 16–17; Seidman, Steven A., Posters, Propaganda, and
Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through
History, New York 2008, p. 5; Hagelweide, Gert, Flugblatt und
Flugschrift, in: Dovifat, Emil (ed.), Handbuch der Publizistik,
vol. 3, Berlin 1969, p. 41, p. 46; Loenartz, Marianne; Trumpp,
Thomas, Plakate in Archiven – Funktionswandel, Erschliessung und
Benutzung einer publizistischen Quelle, in: Der Archivar 26
(1973), p. 629–632, 638–639.
[13] Lönnendonker, Siegward; Fichter, Tilman, Hochschule im
Umbruch, vol. 4, Die Krise (1964–1967), Berlin 1975, p. 67.
[14] Cf. also Kämpfer, Frank, “Der Rote Keil.” Das
politische Plakat. Theorie und Geschichte, Berlin 1985, p. 13;
Hagelweide, Flugblatt, p. 40–41; Loenartz and Trumpp, Plakate in
Archiven, p. 630 and Miermeister, Provokationen, p. 8. Image
posters of the 1960s protest also showed pronounced non-European
influences and knowledge transfers. Especially the large wall
posters of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in the
China of Mao Zedong had a lasting impact on the development of
the genre by Maoist and other leftist activists in the
trans-European revolts. See Landsberger, Stefan, Chinese
Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization, Armonk,
N.Y., 1995 and Evans, Harriet; Donald, Stephanie (eds.),
Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of
the Cultural Revolution. Lanham 1999.
[15] Early drafts included even harsher criticism of
Communist regimes. Cf. Dutschke, Rudi to Munich group, January
12, 1966, HIS, RUD 151,06. On modes of emplotment see White,
Hayden, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism,
Baltimore 1978, p. 70.
[16] Diederichsen, Diedrich, Persecuation and
Self-Persecution: The SPUR Group and Its Texts, in: Grey Room 26
(2007), p. 64–65 and Situationistische Internationale 1958–1969.
Gesammelte Ausgabe des Organs der Situationistischen
Internationale, vol. 1, Hamburg 1976, p. 26.
[17] Kraushaar, Wolfgang, Die Bombe im Jüdischen
Gemeindehaus, Hamburg 2005, p. 8; idem, “Kinder einer
abenteuerlichen Dialektik,” in: Böckelmann, Frank; Nagel,
Herbert (eds.), Subversive Aktion. Der Sinn der Organisation ist
ihr Scheitern, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 7–32 and Juchler,
Ingo, Die Avantgardegruppe “Subversive Aktion” im Kontext der
sich entwickelnden Studentenbewegung der sechziger Jahre, in:
Weimarer Beiträge 40 (1994), p. 72–88. See also Dreßen,
Wolfgang; Kunzelmann, Dieter; Siepmann, Eckhard (eds.), Nilpferd
des höllischen Urwalds. Situationisten, Gruppe Spur, Kommune I,
Berlin 1991, p. 160.
[18] Vaneigem, Raoul, Détournement, in: Dreßen, Nilpferd, p.
79; Lee, Mia, Umherschweifen und Spektakel. Die
situationistische Tradition, in: Klimke, Martin; Scharloth,
Joachim (eds.), 1968. Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte
der Studentenbewegung, Bonn 2008, p. 103; Brunotte, Barbara,
Rebellion im Wort. Eine zeitgeschichtliche Dokumentation.
Flugblatt und Flugschrift als Ausdruck jüngster Studentenunruhen,
Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 78.
[19] Munich group to Berlin group, January 13, 1966, HIS,
RUD 151,06; Dutschke, Rudi, Genehmigte Demonstrationen müssen in
die Illegalität überführt werden, in: Dreßen, Nilpferd, p. 168.
See also Kundnani, Hans, Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968
Generation and the Holocaust, New York 2009, p. 31 and the often
polemical Aly, Götz, Unser Kampf. 1968 – Ein irritierter Blick
zurück, Bonn 2008, p. 148–149, 156–157.
[20] Frei, 1968, p. 78–88.
[21] The German original reads: “Zu viele Erinnerungen an
die Beteiligung der Väter bei der Eroberung Polens. . .”
Dutschke, Rudi, Jeder hat sein Leben ganz zu leben. Die
Tagebücher 1963–1979, Munich 2005, p. 27.
[22] Kalter, Christoph, Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt.
Dekolonisierung und neue radikale Linke in Frankreich, Frankfurt
am Main 2011; Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory,
New York 2009, p. 267; Müller, Jan-Werner, On ‘European Memory.’
Some Conceptual and Normative Remarks, in: Pakier, Malgorzata;
Stråth, Bo (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and
Politics of Remembrance, New York 2010, p. 28–29.
[23] “Wir sollen den Herrschenden beim Völkermord helfen.”
See Miermeister, Provokationen, p. 82.
[24] Internationale Sozialisten Deutschlands, poster draft,
n. d., HIS, RUD 240,07; Munich group to Berlin group, January
13, 1966; Munich group to Berlin group, January 15, 1966, HIS,
RUD 151,06.
[25] Minow, Martha, Naming Horror: Legal and Political Words
for Maß Atrocities, in: Genocide Studies and Prevention 2
(2007), p. 38–39 and Jescheck, Hans-Heinrich, Die internationale
Genocidium-Konvention vom 9. Dezember 1948 und die Lehre vom
Völkerstrafrecht, in: Zeitschrift für die gesamte
Strafrechtswissenschaft 66 (1954), p. 193–197.
[26] Erklärung über den Krieg in Vietnam, in: Das Argument 8
(1966), p. 67–68.
[27] SNCC (ed.), Genocide in Mississippi, Atlanta 1964, p.
2, 4; SDS, „Guide to Conscientious Objection,“ 1965, p. 5, 11,
NA, RG 46.15, Box 273, „Students for a Democratic Society 1967
(1 of 2)“; Böckelmann and Nagel, Subversive Aktion, p. 340 and
Höhn, Maria; Klimke, Martin, A Breath of Freedom, The Civil
Rights Struggle, African American GIs and Germany, New York
2010, p. 108, 111.For broader studies of the influences and
collaborations between American and West German protest
movements cf., for example, Klimke, Other Alliance; Kraushaar,
1968 als Mythos, p. 53–80 and Juchler, Ingo, Die
Studentenbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten und der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre, Berlin 1996.
[28] Lönnendonker, Hochschule im Umbruch, p. 264; Klimke,
Other Alliance, p. 194–195; USBER to State Department, February
5, 1966, NA, RG 59, Box 2197, Folder “Pol 23. Internal Security
Counterinsurgency. GER B” and Berliner Morgenpost and
Tagesspiegel, 05.06.1966, qtd. in ibid.
[29] On image-text posters see, for example, Kämpfer, “Der
Rote Keil,” 48–49.
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