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7 | Iconic student leader

Illustration: Yves Haltner

Illustration: Yves Haltner

Iconic student leader. The first major public appearance of sociology student Rudi Dutschke was on June 22, 1966, at a sit-in in the Henry Ford Building. He soon became the face of the German student opposition. Barely two years later he was severely injured in an assassination attempt. This led to major protests throughout West Germany. A footpath on the campus of Freie Universität is named after Rudi Dutschke.


Sources and additional information

Rudi Dutschke, a sociology student at Freie Universität, was a leader in the German student movement in the 1960s. As a member of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), he played a prominent role in planning and implementing protest actions and discourse. Dutschke was a Marxist, an intellectual leader of the APO (German extraparliamentary opposition), a compelling speaker, and an analyst.

On April 11, 1968, Dutschke was severely injured. He was shot three times by Josef Bachmann, a right-wing extremist laborer. Over the Easter holidays that followed the incident, major protests erupted across Germany, the greatest and most serious unrest the German Federal Republic had experienced up to that time. Rudi Dutschke earned his doctorate in 1973. His thesis was entitled “On the Difference between the Asian and Western European Paths to Socialism.” A year later he published a popular scientific version of his dissertation on the Marxist Georg Lukács. In 1979 on Christmas Eve, Dutschke drowned in the bathtub following an epileptic seizure, a result of the brain injury caused by the assassination attempt.