ONE WHO MADE A REVOLUTION
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Daniel Cohn-Bendit One who made a Revolution BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS He represents all the youthful optimism of the international political generation of the 1960s: Daniel...
...on French television, Danny called the head of the French Communist trade unions a "Stalinist creep...
...COHN-BENDIT: Things did change, but the lives of the people hardly changed...
...But in the Greens, we ask more questions...
...And this is complicated because: Why did the West have to act the way it did toward Nicaragua...
...COHN-BENDIT: Well, yes and no...
...The visionary ideas will all vanish into a big, big nothing...
...So SDS was destroyed...
...If you're still a radical when you're forty, but you have changed, then you're normal...
...There were a lot of people within SDS who disagreed with PL and the Weathermen, but they were not a force...
...This was the group and this was their structure...
...The Weathermen succeeded in destroying SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], which had really been a massive student-based Left organization...
...As it is, we forced them to become authoritarian and then we say, "Look, they are authoritarian...
...Ten years later, it's a very big moment...
...They say, "We want to be free, we have a need of freedom, and so we will try to act as if we were free...
...After that, we made a magazine...
...But unlike textbook revolutionaries, the French protesters demanded more than economic relief...
...It's like parents who beat a child and then say, "Look, he's violent...
...COHN-BENDIT: I'm here making a series for Dutch television about the 1960s...
...By the '80s, we became involved with the Greens...
...What happened in the '60s is that we felt something new...
...Who can blame them...
...COHN-BENDIT: That was a mistake...
...All of France shut down—just as in the movies and textbooks...
...I can't speak for them...
...But you need a big majority in society to change it...
...But I was there when one-and-a-half million people were out in the streets for the right to vote...
...There are contradictions—and they are big problems...
...In this decade he has emerged as one of the most articulate leaders of the parliamentary faction of Germany's Green Party...
...For the first time, we saw that people were changing—and that this was really something new...
...He doesn't read...
...It can provoke society...
...Eighteen years ago, when risings against authority rumbled around the world, Danny the Red brought France to a halt with an amazing student-worker street revolt...
...Except that the French Left has done a good job for the French Right because they are changing a lot of the economic structure of France...
...This was why their faction could come and have so much power...
...For four years, I was on staff in a daycare center...
...Mercifully, this was ended by later social movements, the newer ones, the women's movement, the ecological movement...
...In the United States, one reads much about the Social Democratic Party moving to the Left...
...And that's what happened to the Mitterrand socialists...
...To live in this way, more collectively, is meant as a continued provocation to society...
...They wanted an end to the war in Vietnam, educational reform, the abolition of bourgeois sexual mores, a newer, more communal way of life...
...COHN-BENDIT: I have an optimistic feeling about them...
...Within weeks of the uprising, the French government had deported Daniel Cohn-Bendit to Germany...
...Q: What on earth are you doing in New York, Danny Cohn-Bendit...
...The film is about all the people I read about and knew in the '60s—and I'm tremendously curious about what they now think and what they are doing...
...This was amazing...
...They are trying to be more rational, but they don't reach it—and because they are living in a situation of crisis, unemployment, the Bomb, they try to tranquilize themselves with signs of stability...
...So the Weathermen said, "We are tough guys and the blacks are tough guys and we're doing something...
...But they speak on problems, or they do not speak...
...Q: Can we flash back to Paris '68...
...I say, "High tech is an issue in modern society and you can't forget it...
...It was Danny who set the tone of the rebellion with such slogans as The More I Make Revolution, the More I Make Love...
...Q: In the last U.S...
...But working-class problems weren't really our problems...
...I'm not the vanguard of the working class...
...It's happened so far nowhere else, you know...
...No one thought much about what the generation does when it's thirty and forty—when its members have jobs and children...
...A lot of things are going to be easier with computers and lots of jobs that are very bad can be changed with robotics...
...I think you have to give this younger generation time to make its own statement...
...At American colleges and universities, students were protesting war and racism and depersonalized education...
...These people with their strategy to overthrow the government were completely out of reality...
...I'm looking at what they're doing with it and I'm waiting...
...In the '60s, we said we were against the war, for better human relationships, against just living for consuming things...
...Q: The political group you've been working with all these years in Frankfurt has moved somewhat into the mainstream of German politics...
...This was a big improvement...
...Remember the slogan Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty...
...The people in Poland are a changed people...
...COHN-BENDIT: I would say that if you're not a radical when you're twenty, you're crazy...
...Think of it this way: We started something in the '60s, then came a gap in the 1970s, and in the 1980s we're renewing the traditions of the late '60s...
...I don't see a point to people working in factories under bad conditions...
...Q: In other words, "Who is this French big shot whom the media always photograph...
...When I say "fight," I mean publish articles against them, argue with them, say, "We have an argument against the State and against the terrorists and this is our political position...
...It would have been a better thing if someone else had gotten the power, because then the problems of modern French society would have been the main point of discussion from the beginning...
...As in 1968, it will happen everywhere in the industrial world...
...So from the beginning, from the early '70s, when people began doing terrorist things, I thought, "This is really for the people who are doing it, rather than for changing things...
...We were the generation of politics...
...Q: As the symbol of 1960s youth rebellion, how do you rate the current youth generation...
...It is not true that younger people have little feeling about the world around them...
...Q: There has to be big disappointment within the French electorate that socialism has brought so little social change...
...What does forty-year-old Danny Cohn-Bendit say...
...COHN-BENDIT: I would say it will come at the latest at the end of this decade in a big questioning about which way society will go...
...Everyone else was paralyzed by this argument because of their bad consciences, so they remained mute...
...Few of us were...
...And it ends by asking what the political generation of the '60s has to say about democracy today...
...The films start by interviewing some of the activists from 1968—leaders from France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Poland...
...he held German citizenship papers on a technicality...
...And if you're still a socialist when you're forty, you're crazy...
...This generation opened the highway for the new movements—women, ecological, peace...
...So only if the Greens really challenge them, and only if the Social Democrats see that the only way to get back power is to make social change with the Greens, then they'll have to move...
...We are risking our lives in the fight against imperialism...
...It is a mistake for people our age to look at them as hopeless and say, "Oh, they are not political...
...And now, in the 1980s, for the first time since the 1960s, we feel that people are changing, are questioning the structure...
...We shouldn't make the same mistake that our parents made when they said, "Oh, those hippies—they don't wash, they walk barefoot, and this and that...
...And I'll tell you: It will be a hell of a mess on the campus if Reagan invades Nicaragua...
...You know, "To the factories— the workers will take power," et cetera...
...Every generation has to go through its own self-definition...
...The problem was that at a certain point the Weathermen had a theory and the Progressive Labor Maoists had a theory and no one else had a position within SDS...
...One can't help but think of Francois Mitterrand as a French Jimmy Carter...
...first with the German Left—that they weren't crazy to accept you...
...So the new generation wants first to get through, to have a chance at life...
...When I first had to move to Germany, I was active in a group that sought to make connections with the workers at the General Motors-Opel factory...
...It seemed as if the young were betraying their natural idealism...
...Collectively, everyone was trying to find out, "Who am I? Where am I going...
...What happened was important...
...I try not to be only a politician: I work with children...
...Q: So you are sympathetic to Mitterrand's ideology of high-tech socialism...
...It is horrible what they do...
...We thought that it would crumble as it did in the books...
...In France, the crowds chanted: "We are all German-Jews...
...In France, this was a moment that the people were really questioning their lives and what they wanted to do...
...Like one of those aliens from the science-fiction movies he's so fond of, he has a message for us: that consistency is possible, that commitment is a lifetime matter, that imagination is still needed in politics, that one can grow to middle-age with ideals intact...
...it hadn't happened before...
...It was an emotional reaction...
...I've always felt our generation had to form its own political culture—and that we could only do it in a new political party...
...And then in 1974 came our big confrontation with the Red Army faction and its violent politics...
...If the West would have supported them, Nicaragua today would be a social-democratic country...
...My politics and the life are mixed: I live in a commune in Frankfurt with ten adults and children...
...It was a moment when the people were really questioning their lives and what they wanted to do...
...Q: What do you think of French President Francois Mitterrand...
...From the miasma of the Reaganoid 1980s, it's almost impossible to recall what that time felt like...
...Right now, I am active in the Green Party...
...I think this will happen because there will be an economic crisis, people trying to get through that crisis, but you will also have a new form of life based on the new technology...
...The Greens are the party of imagination...
...SDS felt impotent in the face of the violent ones...
...Paris '68 is a compass mark for anyone of a certain age...
...COHN-BENDIT: No, your assertion is wrong...
...The problem is, if you say everything will change and it doesn't because you're not a magician, you have problems...
...Also, I work on an underground magazine with ten or fifteen other people, Pflasterstrand...
...Danny Cohn-Bendit now lives in a commune in Frankfurt, West Germany...
...No generation can do that...
...So that in years to come, things will really go better because of the policies of the socialists...
...A sense of collectivity existed in the '60s and people remember...
...But films like Desperately Seeking Susan show that many younger people are not so conventional...
...Q: Any insights on why this could happen...
...In Paris, students took to the streets in anger against hierarchy and a tradition-bound education system and, astoundingly, their uprising soon became a workers' general strike...
...All along I've been able to live in a certain way that I consider provocative of society...
...It's a myth...
...Because you're in your family, you're in your work, but you feel alone...
...COHN-BENDIT: Right...
...Q: Are you saying that one of our failures in the '60s was not to free ourselves of the radical language of the past...
...For a few days, it seemed as if the old order would actually fall—like in movies and novels about Nineteenth Century revolution...
...It wasn't so great because I was a product of the French New Left and I was an anarchist...
...COHN-BENDIT: Yes...
...But leaderless and defeated, the French New Left drifted into factionalism and impotence...
...Still, I wouldn't say high tech is bad...
...COHN-BENDIT: Because too many people had a bad conscience...
...COHN-BENDIT: Well, yes...
...You have to imagine it as a huge ship that is slow to move...
...Nowadays, we understand this better...
...For the first time, the problem wasn't to take over the government...
...To say that is to challenge the institutions...
...And what we are—having made this critique—is a reference point...
...It was Danny who showed that this was, indeed a New Left...
...But only because the majority would not organize themselves...
...The protests against South Africa are a beginning...
...They also asked, "And what will he impose on us...
...Q: Do you believe that those of us who came of age politically in the 1960s are a special generation...
...Because there you were, living in the house of imperialism...
...We were the first who had all this and who questioned the quality of life...
...But I think they have to go through this because of the insecurity of the times...
...There was a movement there for elections...
...COHN-BENDIT: I'm not saying it's positive or not—this is their world...
...The interesting thing about the Greens is that we've forced the Social Democratic Party to change...
...COHN-BENDIT: Well, it's complicated...
...COHN-BENDIT: No, never...
...COHN-BENDIT: He is an old-fashioned politician very much within the traditional form of republican socialism, and that is why he's failed...
...We strongly opposed that...
...It must have seemed that way to you, too...
...In a way, this is a cinematic autobiography...
...Q: There's a cliche about politics that explains the ever-present American disillusionment with ideology: "If you're not a socialist when you're twenty, you're crazy...
...Nobody else does...
...Where you were destroyed was where we didn't fight them as a political organization...
...Even now...
...Presidential election, the younger the voter was, the more likely he or she was to cast a ballot for Ronald Reagan...
...Q: Well, let me ask you what you've been asking everyone you've been interviewing: "What have you been doing with yourself since the '60s...
...We thought the old order was crumbling in the Nineteenth-Century way...
...Q: About the only thing the violence managed to bring down in the United States was the New Left...
...When he doesn't work in a day-care center, he helps edit the political magazine Pflasterstrand...
...We explained social change in outdated terms...
...When people change, then the system can change...
...He is playing all day with his computer...
...The New Left was destroyed before the Weathermen...
...To be young, by definition, is a certain time in your life...
...There are things beginning to happen now...
...COHN-BENDIT: At the beginning, I liked the Sandinista Revolution because of one thing—they didn't kill anyone after July of 1979...
...Quite Marxist...
...Q: As you look around the world in 1986, are there any revolutionary movements you're attracted to...
...COHN-BENDIT: In the beginning of the '60s, the young French voted for DeGaulle...
...Q: In the '60s, we believed that generational affiliation was as important a radicalizing factor as social class...
...He got to power by chance, by accident...
...People asked that...
...What happened here to SDS—the Weathermen didn't destroy it...
...Q: Could you ever see yourself becoming a Social Democrat...
...They are really modernizing French industry...
...And I think this really had an impact...
...one-third is moving toward an ecological social-democracy position...
...The mistake was to say, as many did, "This will be the generation that will change society...
...And they felt very strong...
...And the German Left was very theoretical...
...And all the people who said that the youth were a new revolutionary subject—this was wrong...
...I was always asking, "How can the working class take power...
...We played with other things and we read...
...COHN-BENDIT: We are special in one way: We are the first generation born after World War II, who had not lived the war, and who had grown up with the modern consumer society...
...And now, you find people of this generation on different crossroads on this battle...
...COHN-BENDIT: Because I always hated violence...
...The '60s were a break and a lot of people felt, "something happened," but then they had to go back to the normal rhythm, and so they put this away...
...From there, we moved to ecological issues...
...Now they are problematic...
...A twelve-year-old now—the world is different for him...
...It is a fast-moving ship, and it takes that big ship and moves it, pushes it...
...So now, in the 1980s, we're getting to reformulate what we started in the '60s...
...In Poland, one of the only places where the intellectuals of the New Left made successful connection with the workers, this is exactly what Solidarity was doing...
...The magazine is a collective and we share whatever monies we earn...
...If you're a Social Democrat when you're forty, you're crazy...
...Because it was the only language we had...
...I call this a revolution...
...Q: We heard you had lots of trouble at Claudia Dreifus's last interview for The Progressive was with former CIA Director Stansfield Turner...
...The most important change in the last twenty years and nobody talks about it...
...Q: Why didn't you become a terrorist, as so many on the German Left did...
...COHN-BENDIT: Well, they do just believe in it a little too much...
...The hero of the moment was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, then twenty-three, French by birth, the child of German-Jewish war refugees...
...one-third is in the center...
...I'm sure that violence sometimes exists in social change, but it's not a political strategy...
...THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Daniel Cohn-Bendit One who made a Revolution BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS He represents all the youthful optimism of the international political generation of the 1960s: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known everywhere then as Danny the Red, the anarchistic organizer/theoretician/ media genius who made the rebellion of Paris '68...
...We felt that the government wouldn't fall apart, but that the civil society would...
...The first German Left affinity group I joined after I arrived got involved in supporting workers at the General Motors-Opel factory...
...There's one revolution that I find great: Brazil...
...If not, they will destroy the so-called "ecological Left" within their party...
...The third that's in the center really wants to keep power...
...And this inappropriate use of radical language got worse in the beginning of the 1970s, when all this traditional Marxist-Leninist rhetoric was employed...
...Q: Where and when do you see the next Paris '68 occurring...
...We ask, "How can you have a high-tech modern perspective and also an ecological perspective...
...On a visit to New York City several months ago, drinking coffee in my kitchen, he seemed still boyish—a red-haired, blue-eyed emissary from the 1960s...
...Q: Excuse this ancient value judgment, but what's good about not reading...
...The militants had so much power because the media needed them and because the New Left really didn't exist...
...We didn't have the words for it then, so we used the radical rhetoric of the 1930s, and even of the Nineteenth Century...
...This new generation, they need time to understand their technological world, and when they have that, Fm sure, they will come forward with completely new ideas...
...If we should go into the Social Democratic Party—or, here, into the Democratic Party—all that's happened since the '60s will be lost, will disappear...
...It doesn't mean that the working class is unimportant...
...I wasn't working class...
...COHN-BENDIT: Some aspects of the German Left, which I am connected to, turned out to be more interesting than the French, and I have been able to live a highly political life—a consistent one there...
...One-third of the Social Democrats is traditional, conservative...
...When you look at the political documents of the '60s, you see everyone always talking about "the working class...
...They revive marriage and try to have stable relations and things like that...
...they are the generation of the computer...
...They will be able to criticize the computer world in the same way we criticized the political world...
...And these kids, they have special problems we didn't have: unemployment, they all think about it...
...And I think for this, they've done a good job...
...In the 1960s, we believed that we had to live in ways that were consistent with our political beliefs, and I do try to do that...
...And the same thing could happen to the French Right when they take power...
...You know, whenever I travel and meet people in my age group, they make a special thing of telling me what they were doing in the '60s...
...There was no killing, so nobody's impressed...
...All of a sudden, I was in their midst and it was a personal and political problem: Nobody knew at what level of the structure I would integrate myself...
...And this is new...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
