In Europe

to ‘live alongside the workers’. No one wanted anything more to do with the bourgeoisie.
    In hindsight, the statistics show where the real rebellion took place: in 1965, more than half of all Dutch people felt that children should not call their parents by their first name, and more than eighty per cent felt that mothers should not work outside the home. In less than five years, these percentages had been halved. The real revolution of the 1960s took place indoors, at hundreds of thousands of kitchen tables.

Chapter FIFTY-THREE
Berlin
    THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN FLOWER POWER AND THE SOBERING 1970s lay somewhere around 1968. With increasing frequency, the troubadours interspersed their cheerful songs with grim, bitter lyrics. The Rolling Stones sang the praises of the ‘Street Fighting Man’, Jefferson Airplane openly summoned ‘Volunteers’ to join the revolution: ‘One generation got old,/One generation got soul,/This generation got no destination to hold,/Pick up the cry!’ Both songs were banned by numerous radio stations.
    The cultural movements may have been international, but the concrete and often inevitable conflicts that resulted from them were – with the exception of the opposition to the war in Vietnam – largely national by nature. Provo was typically Dutch, Mary Quant was English, Rudi Dutschke was German to a tee, and May 1968 was eminently French.
    The British, who had not been occupied by a hostile army and had experienced less of a crisis and fewer jolts to their prosperity than other Europeans, were those least affected by the generation gap. Young people particularly had a bone to pick with the ‘British’ way of life, which had ground to a halt somewhere in the 1920s: the fashion, the music, the censorship and the laws governing morality.
    In Poland – for there too a small student rebellion was underway in 1968 – the major issue was freedom: when the staging of a nineteenth-century drama at Warsaw's national theatre was banned, a group of angry students marched into the censor's office. Fifty of them were arrested, and their leaders, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlaifer, were expelled from university. In the disturbances which followed, some 50,000 students took part. A number of sympathisers on the faculty were sacked, including Zygmunt Bauman, who was later to achieve fame across Europe. Theofficial reason for his dismissal was that he had been ‘influenced by American sociology’.
    In France, the oppression exercised by the old bourgeois society was felt most keenly in regard to the educational system and police violence. ‘We are fighting because we do not want to make a career as scientists whose research work will serve only a profit-based economy,’ read a student brochure handed out at Nanterre. ‘We decline the examinations and the honorary titles used to reward those [few] who are willing to accept the system.’
    In Italy the focus was on corruption and public scandals, as well as education and police violence. Between 1960–8 the Italian student population had doubled, while the universities had seen little in the way of change since the nineteenth century. ‘Never have I met an Italian student who felt he had received a good education,’ George Armstrong wrote in the
New Statesman
in 1968. ‘The universities are the rigid feudal domain of the older professors. They are the haven of the sons and daughters of the middle classes, who usually have no intention of working in the field for which they have been trained.’ In Rome, 300 professors were charged with teaching more than 60,000 students.
    In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the revolution of the 1960s was a largely playful one. The student movement was a serious affair, but Provo and its adherents never stopped playing: with public opinion, with the medium of television, with the ‘public image’. It was an artistic form of protest linked to anti-monarchist and anti-German sentiments (made manifest during the wedding of Crown Princess Beatrix and Claus von Amsberg in March 1966), anti-bourgeois ideals (expressed in the happenings around the
Lieverdje
and elsewhere) and a kind of anti-fascism-in-hindsight (with the storming of the daily newspaper
De Telegraaf
in June 1966).
    In Germany, that playfulness was nowhere to be found. There things revolved, in essence, around the legacy of the Second World War.
    In 1968, the American philosopher Joseph Berke visited Commune 1 at Stephanstrasse 60 in Berlin.