Four years after the taz, a newspaper with not so clandestine leftist leanings, had first broached the idea of honoring Rudi Dutschke the Berlin Administrative Court of Appeals has disallowed a claim intended to prohibit part of Kochstrasse to be renamed Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. Neighbors along the street had seen an infringement of their constitutional rights, stating that changing the street name would “alter their social status�, condone crimes committed in the same street four decades ago and compel them to inform authorities and other entities of the change in address, an intolerable state interference in their private sphere.The court ruled that the naming of streets is a public interest issue and that private issues have no sphere of influence in the matter.

Rudi Dutschke was conservative Germany’s worst nightmare. Born in Schönefeld in 1940 he grew up under the SED regime installed in East Germany in the late 1940s. He received a “religious-socialist� upbringing and, wanting to become a sports journalist, joined the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend) in 1956, the same year as the uprising in Hungary. His beginning political awareness culminated in his refusal to join the National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee) and convincing several friends to do the same. The whole course of German post-war history could have been different had Rudi not decided to cross over to Western Germany on August 12, 1961 – the day before the Wall was built. Instead, he joined the Socialist Student Association (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) while studying social science, ethnology, philosophy and history, later specializing in existentialism, Marxism and the history of the labor movement.


He was a brilliant speaker, taking a stand against the Grand Coalition government in Bonn and seeing himself and his supporters as part of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition, an opposition to the government outside the parliament, and its political conscience. He led protests against Vietnam and the Emergency Laws that encroached on civil liberties in the 1960s. When Benno Ohnsorg was shot during an anti-Shah protest in 1967, Dutschke staged sit-ins to pressure the authorities into a thorough investigation of the circumstances and also as a protest against the aggressive, pro-Shah tendencies of the Bild-Zeitung, printed by the mighty Axel Springer publishing house. However, he never resorted to violence and always stated that the only way to change the establishment was to infiltrate it from within, the so-called “long march through the institutions�.

In April 1968, forty years ago, he was attacked and shot three times resulting in permanent brain damage. Josef Bachmann, the attacker, is said to have had ultra-rightist tendencies; rumor has it that he was strongly influenced by the Bild-Zeitung and its appeal to capture the rebel-rousing leaders of the protesting masses. This resulted in massive riots around the Axel Springer publishing building in Berlin. After recovering as far as possible, Dutschke continued his political work, representing socialist platforms and supporting the opposition in the Eastern Block. He had moved to Denmark, stating that he could not live in Germany (possibly due to its narrow views on recreational hemp consumption?) towards the end of his life. Christmas Eve 1979 he had an epileptic fit in his bathtub and drowned.

You have to hand it to the taz that having a street intersecting Axel-Springer-Strasse dedicated to the guy’s worst enemy is a stroke of genius. Dutschke would have enjoyed the neighbors’ discomfort regarding their social status and yes, I think he would have been pleased with the changes to the establishment in the past forty years, and he would have graciously accepted the late honor of having his very own street.