Battle of Berlin

Professor Jurgen Zerche was lecturing on political science one day this spring when a band of some 70 young leftists barged into his classroom at the Free University of Berlin and began shouting curses at him. His offense: he had criticized the appointment of a Trotskyite professor. The students warned him that unless he recanted they would hold him prisoner until he starved to death. Zerche escaped by jumping out of a window.

Historian Alexander Schwan nearly met the same fate. His crime was that he had complained that student ideas of justice were similar to those of the Nazis. Another band of youths invaded his classroom, denounced him as "Professor Schwein [pig]" and tried to throw him out of the window. Schwan's own students formed a phalanx around him, however, and led him to safety.

Many West German universities have had student protests in recent years, but no demonstrations have been so continuously disruptive as those at the Free University. Its militant students and teaching assistants repeatedly come storming out of their favorite Kneipen (taverns) to break up classes. "They don't want learning," complains Political Scientist Richard Lowenthal, himself a onetime leftist youth leader. "They want to conquer the Free University and turn it into an institute for party training."

Nonpolitical departments like science still operate fairly normally, but the turmoil has produced a shambles in the fields of economics, sociology, philosophy and political science. Said a Cologne newspaper: "There is not a university in the country that seems so near the brink of disaster."

Fading Ideals. The conflict is particularly ironic because the Free University was originally organized with U.S. backing in 1948 as a democratic counterpart to the once great Humboldt University, which had fallen under Communist domination when Berlin was divided after World War II. Massively supported by the Ford Foundation, the Free University was to be a "community of teachers and learners." Its standards were high, its equipment excellent, its faculty idealistic. It also broke with German tradition by allowing a student council to take part in its administration.

As postwar idealism faded, however, so did good intentions. Senior professors gradually took control, and lectures often amounted to little more than the standard German classroom scene: a snowy-haired professor reading from his next book and refusing to answer student questions. At the same time, militant students from West Germany flocked to the campus, partly because Berlin was exciting, but also because the move to Berlin exempted them from the military draft. Built for only 10,000 students, the Free University eventually grew to more than 20,000.

Inflamed by bitter anti-American feeling over the Viet Nam War, the campus exploded several times in the late 1960s, and student radicals demanded a larger say in the control of the university. The West Berlin Parliament responded with a series of reforms. Among other things, the rector --the administrative head chosen by the faculty--was replaced by a powerful president elected for seven years by a council of professors, teaching assistants, students and employees. That change enabled leftist students and assistants to elect one of their own as president in 1970: Rolf Kreibich, then 31, a Social Democratic sociologist who was not a full professor and had not even completed his doctorate.

Once in office, Kreibich satisfied almost no one. He was already distrusted by the senior faculty as an upstart ("He is not well endowed educationally," said Classics Professor Georg N. Knauer), and he quickly lost the support of the most radical students when he threatened to call in the police to protect persons and university property. For the rest, he has just drifted.

Now scholars complain that academic standards have slipped badly and that serious research is impossible. At the school of political science, the Otto Suhr Institute, Marxists hold about 60% of the junior faculty appointments, and they demonstrate "solidarity" with students by letting them write papers and take exams "collectively"--one student does the work and two or three others get the same grade. As a result, many German employers consider the institute's degrees meaningless. (The stodgy East German Communists take an equally dim view of the Berlin rebels.) But the students continue to demand their "revolutionary rights." Says Abraham Ashkenasi, an American who teaches political science at the institute: "There is a wild, anarchistic streak in them that forces even the older students and the Marxist instructors to adopt more extreme positions as a means of maintaining their influence."

This spring the struggle at the Free University intensified when President Kreibich attempted to appoint Ernest Mandel, a German-born Trotskyite who lives in Brussels and who was once barred from the U.S., as a full professor of economics. West Berlin's government vetoed the appointment because it feared his presence would attract still more leftist students to West Berlin. Angry students protested by striking the departments of economics, sociology and philosophy, and Kreibich has promised to appeal the Mandel decision in the courts.

No Police. After two years of anarchy, the moderate members of the faculty are trying to reorganize their forces. On the one hand, they have rejected the city's offer of off-campus classrooms guarded by police, because, as Asian Scholar Juergen Domes put it, "We thought the arrangement would create two classes of professors: those the students would allow to teach on campus and those they wouldn't." On the other hand, the moderates have drawn up a reform plan for the Berlin government to approve this fall, including provisions for the installation of an experienced president and the return of authority to the faculty.

So far, some 30 dissatisfied professors have left the Free University but most have stayed. Says Classicist Knauer: "We don't want our sons and daughters to have to ask 'Why didn't you stand up?' That is what we asked our own parents in 1945."

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