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32 This so-called “K1-Ost,” as it was dubbed by its founders, was the work of a small and relatively privileged group of children of leading cultural and political luminaries, prominent among them two sons and one daughter of the dissident scientist Robert Havemann. 33 Members of this circle took part in the spontaneous wave of protests that greeted the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and suffered jail terms and loss of educational privileges as a result. 35 It had a particularly important practical function, for, unlike West Berlin, with its left-wing bars and hangouts, East Berlin lacked semiprivate venues for oppositional sociability.

24 For the average citizen of West Berlin, especially anyone old enough to have had direct experience of the tactics employed by Soviet security forces in Berlin in the early postwar period (dragging hapless victims into waiting sedans never to be seen again), the situation was much less complicated. Outrage over the murders at the Wall of fellow Germans trying to escape from East Berlin was only the barest part of the picture. 26 Popular anti-Communism was amplified in the daily newspapers of the Springer Press, which reproduced, in sensationalist form, the Manichean worldview of the Cold War.

What was unusual was that Tshombe’s visit provided the occasion for the presentation of an alternative scheme in which the dictator appeared not as a friend but as an enemy. This alternative was posed by student protesters who openly challenged the status quo in the streets. 3 What was new in the Tshombe protest was the appearance of a self-consciously radical avant-garde that sought to use the protest as a means to larger, more thoroughgoing ends. Among the organizers, in addition to the SDS and other student groups, including the African Student League, was a small radical group calling itself Subversive Aktion.