Rudi Dutschke

Dutschke was born in Schönefeld (present-day Nuthe-Urstromtal) near Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, the son of a postal clerk. Raised in East Germany (GDR), he attended school and graduated from the Gymnasium there. Interested in the ideas of religious socialism, he was engaged in the youth organisation of the East German Evangelical Church. In 1956 he joined the socialist Free German Youth aiming at a sporting career as a decathlete.

In the same year, however, he witnessed the Hungarian Uprising and began to advocate the ideals of a democratic socialism beyond the official line of the Socialist Unity Party. He obtained his Abitur degree in 1958 and completed an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk. As he refused to join the East Germany National People's Army and convinced many of his fellow students to refuse as well, he was prevented from attending university in the GDR. In August 1961, Dutschke finally fled to the Marienfelde transit camp in West Berlin, just one day before the Berlin Wall was built.

He began to study sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin under Richard Löwenthal and Klaus Meschkat where he became acquainted with the existentialist theories of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and soon after also with alternative views of Marxism and the history of the labour movement. Dutschke joined the German SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (which was not the same as the SDS in the USA, but quite similar in goals) in 1965 and from that time on the SDS became the center of the student movement, growing very rapidly and organizing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.

He married the American Gretchen Klotz (de) in 1966. They had three children. Dutschke's third child, 1980-born Rudi-Marek Dutschke (often known as just Marek Dutschke) was born after his father's death. He is a politician of the German Green Party as well as Dean's Office staffer of the Hertie School of Governance today. His older siblings are Hosea-Che Dutschke (named after the Old Testament minor prophet Hosea and Che Guevara) and their sister Polly-Nicole, both born in 1968.

Influenced by critical theory, Rosa Luxemburg, and critical Marxists and informed through his collaboration with fellow students from Africa and Latin America, Dutschke developed a theory and code of practice of social change via the practice of developing democracy in the process of revolutionizing society, collaborating with foreign students.

Dutschke also advocated that the transformation of Western societies should go hand in hand with Third World liberation movements and with democratization in communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He was from a pious Lutheran family and his socialism had strongly Christian roots; he called Jesus Christ the "greatest revolutionary", and in Easter 1963, he wrote that "Jesus is risen. The decisive revolution in world history has happened — a revolution of all-conquering love. If people would fully receive this revealed love into their own existence, into the reality of the 'now', then the logic of insanity could no longer continue."

Benno Ohnesorg's death in 1967 at the hands of German police pushed some in the student movement toward increasingly extremist violence and the formation of the Red Army Faction. The violence against Dutschke further radicalised parts of the student movement into committing several bombings and murders. Dutschke rejected this direction and feared that it would harm or cause the dissolution of the student movement. Instead he advocated a 'long march through the institutions' of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery. The meaning of Dutschke's idea of a 'long march through the institutions' is in fact highly contested: most historians of '68 in West Germany understand it to mean advocating setting up an alternative society and recreating the institutions which were seen by Dutschke as beyond reform in their current state. It is highly unlikely Dutschke would have promoted change from within the parliamentary and judicial system, which were populated by former Nazis and political conservatives. This is made clear in the SDS reaction to the Kiesinger-led CDU-SPD grand coalition and the authoritarian Emergency Laws they passed.

Memorial plate for Rudi Dutschke at Kurfürstendamm and Joachim-Friedrich Straße in Berlin, Germany

On April 11, 1968, Dutschke was shot in the head by a young anti-communist, Josef Bachmann. Dutschke survived the assassination attempt, and he and his family went to the United Kingdom in the hope that he could recuperate there. Dutschke and Bachmann would share correspondence over the next year, until Bachmann's suicide in 1970. Dutschke was accepted at Clare Hall, a graduate college at the University of Cambridge, to finish his degree in 1969, but in 1971 the Conservative government under Edward Heath expelled him and his family as an "undesirable alien" who had engaged in "subversive activity", causing a political storm in London. They then moved to Århus, Denmark, after professor Johannes Sløk had offered him a job at the University of Aarhus which made it possible for Dutschke to gain a Danish residence permit.

Dutschke reentered the German political scene after protests against the building of nuclear power plants activated a new movement in the mid-1970s. He also began working with dissidents opposing the Communist governments in East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, including Robert Havemann, Wolf Biermann, Mihailo Petkovic, Milan Horáček, Adam Michnik, Ota Šik and more.

Because of brain damage sustained in the assassination attempt, Dutschke continued to suffer health problems. He died on 24 December 1979 in Århus, Denmark. He had an epileptic seizure while in the bathtub and drowned.

The song "Rot" by Markus Henrik features a mention of Dutschke, who can also be seen in the music video of the same. The song uses Dutschke as a reminder of political activism in Germany in the 60s and 70s.

There's also a Finnish song about Rudi Dutschke, by Eero Ojanen. It is based on the lyrics of the song Drei Kugeln auf Rudi Dutschke by Wolf Biermann.

Dutschke appears as Prussian nobleman-turned anarchist Count Rudolf von Dutschke in the novel Warlord of the Air, the first part of Michael Moorcock's alternate history/steampunk trilogy A Nomad of the Time Streams. Revolutionary socialist Count von Dutschke is close friends with a very aged Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (whom he fondly relates to as "Uncle Vladimir") in Moorcock's alternate 1973 where World War I and the October Revolution never took place. In Harry Mulisch's novel The Discovery of Heaven Dutschke makes a cameo appearance at a "political and musical happening" in a chapter titled "The Demons."

Dutschke was portrayed by Sebastian Blomberg in the 2008 film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

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