West Germany

Martin Klimke

pp. 97-110

in: Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth (eds), 1968 in Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

On June 2, 1967, West German police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras killed twenty-six-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg with a shot to the head during a demonstration in West Berlin against the Shah of Persia. A photograph of the dying Ohnesorg lying on the street, with his head bleeding and a helpless woman in an elegant fur coat leaning over him, was to become one of the most iconic images of the German student movement and the 1960s in West Germany. The events of June 2, 1967, marked the transformation of the West German New Left into a nationwide student revolt; until then, it had largely been centered in Berlin and Frankfurt. After that day, the largest student organization on the Left, the Socialist German Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS), experienced a rapid increase in sympathy and support, jumpstarting a broad movement whose participants would go down in West German history as the "68ers."