uni'alumni 2013_ENG

Some of the things Freiburg students protested against in the years around 1968 were the German Emergency Acts, the Vietnam War, the Springer Publishing House, and price hikes for streetcar and bus tickets. Photo: Müller/Stadtarchiv Freiburg, M 75/1 Jörg Bertsch Photo: 1971 The Drip Candle and the Revolution “Ankle-deep! I swear: The piles of ﬂyers from communist student groups we waded through each day in the cafeteria were ankle-deep. SDS, SHB, KBW, KPD, KPD/ML! Leninists, Stalin- ists, Maoists, Trotskyists! The thing with the revolution was really compli- cated. They spent more time struggling against each other than against the class enemy. The most crushing insult of all was to call someone a ‘revision- ist.’ There weren’t any Greens yet, but there were plenty of people without a sense of humor. Once the ﬂyer was ﬁnished, everyone sat around for a while smoking Gauloises before blow- ing out the drip candle and cuddling up with someone – true to the real revolu- tionary message of those days: ‘Where there’s a pill, there’s a way!’” Dr. Christoph Friedrichs Photo: 1970 The Students Are Demonstrating “It was fall and already dark. I stood among a large group of citizens at a left-wing rally involving the occupation of the America House. I didn’t under- stand much about the politics of this act, and the citizens around me watch- ing the spectacle understood them even less. A small older man – he might have been a Black Forest farmer – in a green wool coat with a green wool hat on his head and a striking Emperor Franz Joseph beard stood there, his arms leaning on his bicycle. He shook his head and said, as if to himself but still loud enough for the people around him to hear, in the familiar Baden dialect: “So, we have to work and the students are demonstrating. Ha, there is something wrong with this!” I had to laugh – and concede to myself that the likeable farmer was right.” Prof. Dr. Manfred Löwisch Photo: 1970s The Lecturers Strike Back “By the time I came to Freiburg, the conflict was already past its peak. The legendary meeting on the new university constitution, available for viewing on video in the Uniseum, had already happened. The movement was slowly dying off, but there were aftershocks. Students still had it out for a couple of unpopular professors. We countered the next strike against one of our colleague’s courses with a two week lecturing strike of our own – with approval from the then Minister of Education Wilhelm Hahn. Nothing of the sort has happened again since. In hindsight, the things that happened back then seem somewhat banal, but they did destroy a lot of the trust between teachers and students. It took a long time to build that trust back up.” Jörg Bertsch Photo: 1971 Prof. Dr. Manfred Löwisch Photo: 1970s The Lecturers Strike Back “By the time I came to Freiburg, the conflict was already past its peak. The legendary meeting on the new Prof. Dr. Manfred Löwisch uni'alumni 2013 Alumni Network 19

uni'alumni 2013_ENG

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