A Case of Kulturkronkheit

In April, leftist students threatened to "assassinate" Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey with pudding, flour and paint. A few weeks later, youthful demonstrators cursed the country's President to his face. This month, students exploded smoke bombs in the path of the Shah of Iran. The scenario sounded like a rerun from Berkeley, but the setting was a long way from California --or any other hotbed of U.S. student agitation. It was West Germany.

Even German high schools are getting into the act, and barely a week goes by without a student outburst. The rallying cry may be Viet Nam, dictatorship in Athens or price hikes at the campus cafeteria. Whatever it is, the excuse for the clamor is of secondary importance. West Germany's students seem determined to mobilize behind any cause that suggests they are carrying the torch of democracy.

Spiritual Measles. Their elders' surprise is understandable. Only a few years ago, German students were determined bookworms, so politically passive that many intellectuals wondered if there was much hope for democracy in a country that must look to such detached youths for its future leaders. The intellectuals are wondering no more. Instead, some are busily trying to dampen the unrest, which they regard as evidence of a West German Kulturkrankheit, a cultural sickness that amounts to a kind of spiritual measles. Vice Chancellor Willy Brandt and other Social Democratic Party chiefs are equally alarmed. Two weeks ago, they met in Bonn for more than six hours with student leaders, but the talk did not narrow the widening gulf between older Germans and the new activists.

The immediate cause of the Bonn confrontation was the fatal shooting of Student Benno Ohnesorg, 26, during the anti-Shah rioting. His death by a police bullet has elevated him to martyrdom; the New Left now talks of him the way angry West Germans talked of Peter Fechter, who was killed by East German border guards at the Berlin Wall five years ago. West Berlin's police chief (since furloughed) hardly helped matters when he called the anti-Shah crowd "a liverwurst . . . You press it in the middle to squeeze it out at the end." To the distress of the student leaders, Brandt refused to condemn the club-swinging Berlin cops.

Ideological capital of the rebel students is West Berlin's sprawling Free University (enrollment: 15,000), founded in 1948 with American support. In contrast to most tradition-bound German campuses, it has been a model of relaxed student-faculty relations and loose campus rules. Among the many student organizations, the most articulate political voice belongs to the Socialist German Student League. There is also a clutch of small, far-out radical cliques, such as the Maoist "Kommune I," in which men and women share worldly goods and sexual favors.

Declaration of War. The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine reflected the attitude of many older Germans when it called the student protests "a declaration of war against society." Other observers, however, applaud the youthful activities. They see it all as a fitting reaction to the authoritarianism that is still prevalent on German campuses. They blame student attitudes on the scant attention paid to the nation's overcrowded educational facilities while the rest of the country has prospered, and on the stifling of political debate since Brandt's opposition Social Democrats joined the ruling Christian Democrats in the Grand Coalition in Bonn.

The unrest shows no sign of abating. Last week 180 Free University students staged a 45-hour hunger strike and talkin at a West Berlin Protestant Student Center to demand the release of a jailed anti-Shah demonstrator. Whether they achieved their goal seemed almost beside the point; the act of protest itself was the crucial issue.

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