Exhibition 'The 68ers': photos of a movement, then and now
Ludwig Binder's photos covered the events that led to the 1968 student revolts in Germany, from the Shah's visit to the Rudi Dutschke attack. Jim Rakete revisits the central figures of the movement, 50 years later.
Demonstration against the Shah's visit
The German student protest movement of 1968 actually took off a year earlier. Demonstrations were organized against the official visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin in 1967. Police and Iranian agents attacked the protesting students; an unarmed student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead by a policeman. The police brutality fueled the movement. Press photographer Ludwig Binder documented the events.
Assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke
Binder also showed up with his camera right after Rudi Dutschke, the unofficial leader of the student movement, was shot by a far-right man, Josef Bachmann. The photographer listened to the police radio, said Jim Rakete, who was an intern working with him at the time. Here's a shot of the site of the crime on April 11, 1968. Dutschke died a decade later of the after-effects of the injury.
Police state
The student protests were systematically crushed by the authorities. Many activists were arrested. Former Nazis were part of the police force — and they didn't hesitate to beat up demonstrators. Filmmaker Roman Brodmann entitled his film on the Shah's visit "The Police State Visit."
Traces of violence
The assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke officially marked the beginning of the student unrest. The events in West Berlin launched a country-wide movement, with demonstrations held at West German universities and in front of the buildings of publisher Axel Springer, whose tabloid press demonized the students. Binder took this photo after the clashes known as the "Schlacht am Tegeler Weg."
Revisiting the witnesses
Along with Binder's photos of the historic events, the exhibition shows recent portraits of the people involved in the 1968 protests taken by photographer Jim Rakete. Friederike Hausmann accidentally became a central figure of the June 2, 1967 demonstration, as she tried to help Benno Ohnesorg after he was shot. A photo of both of them became a world famous icon of the student movement.
The communard
He became renowned as the "guru of free love." Rainer Langhans was part of West Berlin's Kommune 1, the first politically motivated commune in Germany. The group of young people experimented with alternative lifestyles. Communards Fritz Teufel, Dieter Kunzelmann and Rainer Langhans promoted the motto: "If you sleep with someone twice, you're already part of the establishment."
The feminist
In 1968, politically active women complained that they didn't have equal rights even within the leftist movement. Filmmaker Helke Sander fought to obtain support for the women's political agenda within the German Socialist Organization (SDS). When her demands were ignored by the SDS male leaders at a delegate convention, a tomato was hurled at them — sparking the second wave of German feminism.
The exhibition
"The 68ers" is the name of the exhibition held through October 7, 2018 at Berlin's Kulturbrauerei. It shows how the activists of the time followed different paths afterwards. Some of them, such as Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer, chose to work within the system, becoming major politicians in Germany, while others pursued their revolutionary convictions within alternative structures.