Any Narrative of “1968” in Germany has to include a number of individuals who gained notoriety through their words and actions. Some of them died young, becoming martyrs for the cause. Others carried on and became “voices” of their generation. These familiar “faces” help historians, writers, and the media to tell the story, no matter whether they depict “1968” in its entirety or represent just a small aspect. Much has been written about them, and, in some cases, they have written or are still writing about “1968” themselves. In the following, we will meet some of these “marked individuals,” and begin to understand how the construction of “1968” works.

Benno Ohnesorg

Benno Ohnesorg was a most unlikely figure to feature as martyr and catalyst of the hot phase of the German student movement. Ohnesorg was a quiet, introspective mature student, who was attending a demonstration against the state visit of the Shah of Persia on the evening of June 2, 1967 when he was shot in the head by plain-clothes policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras. While the police and West Berlin's press initially claimed that a policeman had been hurt, and that the students had only themselves to blame, the students painstakingly assembled the facts. However, in the subsequent trial, Kurras was acquitted while Fritz Teufel, a member of Kommune I, was remanded in custody for his alleged role as ringleader during the demonstration. This obvious miscarriage of justice was one of the reasons that politicized, energized, and radicalized students who until that moment had not become engaged in the demonstrations and Extraparliamentary Opposition. The Socialist German Student League quickly put itself at the front of the emerging protest Movement. On the morning of June 3, 1967, with a curfew outlawing demonstrations anywhere in West Berlin, SDS leader Rudi Dutschke and his comrades organized protests at the Dahlem campus of the Freie Universität Berlin, brandishing banners with slogans like “Heute Ohnesorg, morgen wir” (Today it's Ohnesorg, tomorrow it's all of us). suggesting that the killing had been politically motivated, that students had now become the target for the authorities and could be hunted down at will.