Ignoble Emulation

Violence flared in Europe last week. An assassin picked as his target Rudi Dutschke, 28, a self-avowed revolutionary, leader of Germany's student unrest and author of fierce tirades against "repressive" European society. As Dutschke wheeled his bicycle away from the headquarters of his Socialist Student League on West Berlin's Kurfuerstendamm, a young man who had been lying in wait fired three shots at him from a pistol. The bullets hit "Red Rudi" at close range in the chest and head.

After a sharp firefight, police wounded the assailant and dragged him from a nearby cellar. He was identified as a 23-year-old Munich house painter named Josef Bachmann, who had traveled to Berlin expressly to kill Dutschke. "I read about Martin Luther King and thought, 'You too must do something like this,' " he explained to police. Even as Dutschke underwent a successful five-hour operation for the removal of a bullet from his skull, and seemed to be on the way to recovery, the news of the attempted assassination caused Germany's most widespread civil disturbances since the early 1930s.

Ominous Threat. Chanting their war cry, "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!", students, many of whom wore protective helmets and carried heavy clubs, went on rampages in virtually every major German city. Almost everywhere they went, they blockaded and sometimes stoned the local printing plants of conservative Publisher Axel Springer, whose newspapers, notably the mass-circulation Bild-Zeitung, have denounced their restive leftist tendencies. The students also broke store windows, erected barricades across streets and fought bitter pitched battles with police. The violence was worst of all in West Berlin, where a mob of 3,000 young revolutionaries broke almost every lower-floor window in Springer's shiny skyscraper near The Wall and set fire to some 20 delivery trucks. Then, crying "Berlin equals Memphis!", the students marched on West Berlin's city hall, setting fire to a police motorcycle along the way. All told, 150 persons so far were injured in the riots throughout Germany, several hundred jailed.

Alarmed by the violence, Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger broke off his Easter vacation in southern Germany and went back to Bonn, where he warned the students to calm down or face the consequences. Meanwhile, in a display of the intertwining relationships between the young European radicals, students staged riots of varying degrees of violence in Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. At week's end, taking advantage of West Germany's troubles, the East German Communist regime issued an ominous warning that it was now barring all senior Bonn officials from traveling to and from West Berlin through its territory. It was a clear threat to West Berlin's most precious asset--its free access to West Germany--and as such, posed a potentially greater peril to the city than even the hotheaded students.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.