Rudi Dutschke

He was born on 7 March 1940 in Schönefeld near Luckenwalde, the youngest of four sons of a post-office official. Growing up in East Germany, he took his "religious socialist" grounding from the Protestant youth congregation in Luckenwalde, and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 turned him to a democratic socialism that kept its distance from both the United States and the Soviet Union and rejected the SED as well. When he refused, as a pacifist, to serve in the newly founded National People's Army, his school-leaving grade was lowered in 1958 and he could not go straight to university. On 10 August 1961 he moved to West Berlin, and when the Wall went up three days later he registered as a political refugee.

From that autumn he studied sociology, ethnology, philosophy and history at the Free University, moving from existentialism to the early Marx, Lukács and Bloch, and the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. In autumn 1963 he and Bernd Rabehl joined Subversive Aktion, which combined social and cultural criticism with protest actions, and co-edited its journal Anschlag; after the Berlin SDS took in the group in January 1965 he was elected to its political advisory board that June, and he opened the SDS to anti-authoritarian forms of action.

He saw the Grand Coalition formed in November 1966 as a threat to democracy born of the SPD's hunger for power, and called for an extra-parliamentary opposition (APO). After a policeman shot the student Benno Ohnesorg on 2 June 1967 he demanded the expropriation of Axel Springer's press group, and in February 1968 he was a principal organiser of the International Vietnam Congress at the Technical University of Berlin, where at the closing march he called for "smashing NATO" and for mass desertion by American soldiers.

Dutschke held that Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism still applied, but that his forecast of a growing proletarian class consciousness had failed in the countries with higher living standards. The "Organisation Report" that he and Krahl gave to the SDS conference in September 1967 followed Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man in arguing that a gigantic system of manipulation blunted social contradictions and left the masses unable to rebel of their own accord. Revolutionary groups therefore had to make the abstract violence of the system a tangible certainty through visibly irregular actions, and the "propaganda of the shot" of Che Guevara's guerrillas in the Third World had to be completed by the "propaganda of the deed" in the metropoles. The report won broad support and carried the anti-authoritarian line through the whole SDS.

He regarded parliamentarism as an expression of what Marcuse called "repressive tolerance", beyond reform; its structures had to be overturned in a long, internationally differentiated revolutionary process that he called the "long march through the institutions". In a Kursbuch conversation of October 1967 he sketched a "council republic in West Berlin" on the model of the Paris Commune, in which collectives of at most three thousand people, based on self-managed enterprises, would run their own affairs.

Of actually existing socialism he wrote that "there is not yet any socialism on earth". Like Rosa Luxemburg he criticised the bans on discussion and factions among the Bolsheviks, and on the SDS visit to Moscow in 1965 he asked about the Kronstadt rising. In Prague in March–April 1968 he encouraged Czech students to combine socialism with civil rights, and after the Warsaw Pact invasion that August he ruled out any SDS co-operation with the DKP and the SED.

On 11 April 1968 the young labourer Josef Bachmann fired three shots at him in front of the SDS office on the Kurfürstendamm, shouting "You dirty communist pig!"; two struck his head, and Dutschke barely survived after an operation lasting several hours. Many students held the Springer press, which had campaigned against him for months, jointly responsible. He relearned speech and memory through months of daily therapy and, after stays in Switzerland and Italy, was given a residence permit in Britain on condition that he refrain from political activity.

He took his doctorate at the Free University in 1973, and the thesis appeared the following year as Versuch, Lenin auf die Füße zu stellen ("An attempt to put Lenin on his feet"). Following Karl August Wittfogel, it argued that the preconditions for a socialist revolution had never existed in Russia: what prevailed there was neither feudalism nor capitalism but an "Asiatic" mode of production, from which an "Asiatic despotism" had developed in unbroken continuity from Genghis Khan to Stalin's forced collectivisation and industrialisation. What the Eastern bloc needed, accordingly, was a "second revolution" away from bureaucratic state capitalism.

In the later 1970s he joined the anti-nuclear movement, befriended the East German dissidents Wolf Biermann and Rudolf Bahro, and in November 1978 organised the Bahro solidarity congress. From 1976 he worked for a party uniting green-alternative and left initiatives without the K-groups; in 1979 he joined the Bremen Green List and was elected a delegate to the Greens' founding congress planned for January 1980. On 24 December 1979, in Aarhus, he suffered an epileptic seizure, a late effect of the shooting and the brain surgery, and drowned in his bath.