1968 as a paradox: a memory of the journalist Klaus Hartung

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It was in Leipzig in the spring of 1990. No more German-German wall.

The closed GDR, previously

terra incognita

, was suddenly an easily accessible neighboring area.

Time for west-east exploration.

By chance I met Klaus Hartung on the street, we knew each other.

The big issues at the time: the CDU victory in the Volkskammer election in March, which surprised many people.

The question of unification, which could no longer be rejected.

So the question is whether affiliation with the Federal Republic or a new constitution.

Klaus was talking about something else.

About what the GDR did to its citizens, what it did to them.

He did this at length, told details.

He had spoken to citizens of Leipzig on the street and at meetings.

They told him a lot about the meanness of the regime, about the sadness, the omnipresent Stasi.

But one thing was particularly newsworthy to him: the structural lack of almost everything and, connected with it, the never-ending struggle for elementary goods.

As a western citizen, he said, one could not even imagine what it means to have to be on the road again and again for every seal, every bicycle tube, every telephone, repeatedly calling in unsuccessfully, repeatedly being put off or harshly rejected.

A GDR citizen of 50 years could not look back on anything other than a wasted life.

Gentle person, without arg

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Klaus Hartung had got used to looking carefully and distrusting the first impression and smooth words.

He was an affectionate, gentle person, without suspicion. He spoke in a rather low voice, looking for the right word, sometimes hesitantly.

There is usually a hint of a rather incredulous smile around the lips.

The certain reluctance he displayed may be a result of the experience of happiness and loss of happiness that he had in the years around 1968.

With his light, very light Saxon sound he sometimes spoke as if over the heads of those present, as if to an imaginary counterpart.

I think Klaus was an optimistic melancholic.

And a late citizen.

He was born in 1940 in Olbernhau in the Ore Mountains, which lies on the border with today's Czech Republic, in what was later to become the GDR.

When his parents moved to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, he became a federal citizen - the time in the GDR, which he left at the age of 15, was formative for him.

Life in Trieste

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In the 1960s he studied at the Free University of Berlin, mainly German.

He was one of those “68ers” who tried to spark the wind of change even before 1968.

Member of the SDS, he belonged to the more radical group.

Teach-ins, occupation of the institute, anti-Vietnam demonstrations, the looming question of violence.

The latter worried him, but in the end he refused.

Although he belonged to the "Red Aid", he did not - like many of its members - follow the path of the RAF.

But neither did he join the Marxist-Leninist party founders.

Instead, it was not well regarded at the time, but went its own way.

A detour.

For a few years he lived in Trieste.

There he worked with the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who was working towards the closure of the Italian "madhouses", in which catastrophic conditions prevailed and which were basically nothing but prisons.

Basaglia pleaded for the inmates of the psychiatric clinics to be released as far as possible into everyday, yet cared for life.

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Basaglia was successful; on his initiative, the state reform of psychiatry took place in 1978, which until now had not focused on therapy but on custody.

The dream that the “normal lunatic” could henceforth be able to determine his own life was not fulfilled, of course.

Klaus Hartung has described and analyzed this experience of half winning and half failure in a book.

The title: “The new clothes in psychiatry”.

Very attached to "68"

The activist had become an observer, a fine observer, who for ten years after 1980 made the “taz” the organ of his social and self-exploration.

The activist sets the tone, the observer “only” observes.

In general, there is a hierarchy between the two, at the bottom of which is the writer.

It was different with Klaus.

It was the experience of success and failure of “68” that prompted him to strengthen his powers of observation, analysis and participatory description from now on.

He stuck to "68" all his life, but neither glorified nor damned it.

In a beautiful and sometimes poignant article (you can read it on his homepage) he researched the soaring and hubris of “68”.

It says there: "Without enjoying the paradox, serious engagement with '68' is hardly conceivable."

Because this “movement” has undoubtedly contributed to the democratization of the republic, but only “because it failed in its goals”.

It challenged the state and in the end forced it to shed its traditional authoritarianism and even to accommodate the “68ers”.

The mistake, according to Hartung, was that "we never touched the outstretched hand to test".

The success of “68” was an unwilling success, and those who can't at least smile about it are living in a lost past.

Hartung also named the sore points in this article: the - half scared, half pleasurable - game with the thought of violence, the inability to self-reflection.

"68", he stated without regret, had not fed any significant new thoughts into the German discourse machine.

Thinking about Berlin

But that did not change anything in his own fundamental experience of 1967 and 1968 for himself. This time, wrote Hartung, gave something “that childhood refused, namely self-respect.

(...) The lack of understanding with oneself since childhood created the feeling of happiness of 67. ”The formative experience, he wrote, was“ the eccentric happiness in which the possibility of a better world flashed, a possibility that unexpectedly in ours In our hands was what overwhelmed us and prevented a critical distance from ourselves. ”As soon as the happiness was felt, it was gambled away.

The strange ending of “68” and the untapped possibilities of 1989 have, I suspect, made Klaus Hartung cautious over the decades.

But not resigned, but curious.

Long before 1989, he roamed those meetings and conferences where rumors of the near end of the Soviet empire were rumored and where anti-communism was not a dirty word.

He felt the cracks - in the German democracy as well as in the structure of the Cold War.

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He never let go, not even when he became editor of “Die Zeit” at the beginning of the 90s, which was so unwise as to make the universally interested Berlin and world connoisseur only a “Berlin correspondent”.

He accepted the assignment and conscientiously reported on the political and cultural innards of the new capital.

Provincial grossness

And at the same time, always reaching further.

Thinking in circles about Berlin and how the city could finally make more of itself became almost something of his trademark.

He did not give up, warned the Berlin civil society, which must do justice to the role of the city.

Outraged, he stated: “The city is broken, in the precise sense as a city, as a community, as a place of civic identity, as an object of civil responsibility.” Since after 1989 there would have been so many possibilities.

Political and cultural Berlin, in its provincial stupidity, did not live up to Hartung's claims and hopes.

And that is why he sometimes abandoned the role of the observer in this area and tried, as an author, to spur the city with its “young old contradictions”.

In the last decade of his life Klaus painted, there were exhibitions with his pictures (some can be seen on his homepage).

Unfortunately, as far as I know, he has not described the difficult experience of getting older for a “67”.

In August of that year he fell badly.

Klaus had an operation on his head, from which he has not recovered.

He died on December 27th in Berlin, six weeks after his 80th birthday.