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My main problem on the afternoon of June 2, 1967 was how to get rid of Maurice Stegman. Maurice, as I have already mentioned, was the American cultural attache in Berlin and also the resident CIA spook. I had met him briefly at various cultural functions since our first luncheon, forced on me by the German cultural agency, and it was difficult to avoid him altogether in the compact cultural world of Berlin. As I have noted, Maurice was far from being a total pill, and he was genuinely interested in the new lifestyle being evolved by the young at home and abroad. I had suggested books and essays for him to read and records for him to listen to—I had hinted to him that a whole new concept of life was coming into existence, which he would miss out on altogether if he didn't make a bit of effort. Maurice had undoubtedly also been reading the articles I had begun to write about Berlin for IT, and as good as my contacts with the student left were, he no doubt imagined they were even better. Whenever I ran into him, he would try to steer the conversation around to student politics, and I would unobtrusively begin to talk about something else.

I had however made the mistake of promising him, for the sake of his education, that I would take him on a tour of the dance joints, artist cafés, and bars of Berlin, a demi-monde I had lost no time in exploring soon after I arrived, and Maurice happily agreed. This seemed innocent enough and might even broaden Maurice's cultural horizons, but soon I began to have my doubts. I had made the appointment for this tour twice and then postponed it at the last moment. And so I decided that afternoon that I really couldn't put it off any longer. Besides, Ilene was in London, leaving me alone, and the evening might just turn out to be amusing. And so on the evening of June 2, 1967, I met Maurice Stegman, as I am calling him, at the Café Zuntz on the Kudamm to set out on our Berlin-By-Night Lowlife Tour. I repeat the date, as anyone familiar with Germany at this time will know that I am leading up to a story. Maurice and I were to have a very interesting evening indeed, though in ways neither of us could have predicted.

My antennae were quite well attuned to the Berlin frequency, but I had received no signal indicating that a full-scale alarm was about to be sounded. But if I was caught off-guard that night, so was all of Germany and the rest of the world. Only two people in all of Berlin could have had any inkling of what was about to happen: the mayor and the police chief, and they weren't talking. I had delivered some copies of American underground papers to the Republikanischer Klub earlier in the week and had asked around about upcoming events. My friends had told me something about a big demonstration at the Opera to protest the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin. I had wished them good luck with it and put the matter out of my mind.

It seemed to me that the energies of the German left, like those of the movements in other countries, were often being frittered away in causes of no immediate service to the society involved. Thus, I felt that the Germans would have done far better to direct their energy into problems closer to home, such as the incredibly elitist process of university admissions, where a class system had run rampant. Or the conditions of the so-called Gastarbeiter, (or "Guest Workers") in Germany, who were treated little better than indentured servants and denied most civil rights. Yet these Italians, Greeks, and other Mediterraneans were doing most of the necessary drudgery in Germany. I did not doubt that Iran had numerous problems, nor that its leader ruled as a tyrant, but I wondered if this should be the first concern of German leftists. Radicals everywhere seem to have a talent for focusing on grievances elsewhere on the planet as opposed to those closer at hand, which they might actually be able to do something about. No doubt I will be criticized by any remaining strict constructionist pro-Moscow liners [reminder: written in 1973] for this notion and for my failure to understand "the international nature of the socialist struggle," but I still hold to my position.

I am sure Maurice had even less of a clue that something unusual was in store for us when we met that evening on the Kudamm. His sources of information were far less reliable than mine, which was no doubt one of the reasons he wanted to meet with me. In any case, neither of us could ever have predicted the full repercussions that one act by a trigger-happy cop were about to have for Germany and the European left.

By way of outlining the ground rules for the evening, I told Maurice  where I would be taking him in an effort to help him understand the cultural side of the youth scene. I could see his face sink when I failed to mention any of the hangouts of the student left.

"Well, Alex, I was sort of hoping you'd take me to the Republikanischer Klub," Maurice volunteered rather sheepishly. I explained that I didn't think that would be altogether appropriate for him, without saying precisely why. He countered that I had taken Peter Nestler and his mistress there one evening for a drink, and the implication was that I could take him as well. I patiently replied that Peter Nestler was a German, that his job directly dealt with students of all sorts, and that he was consequently more presentable at the club than Maurice would be. I didn't bother adding that Peter was both young and relatively hip in demeanor which Maurice was not.

"Come on, Alex that's no explanation," Maurice badgered. "Why won't you take me to the Republikanischer Klub?"

"It's simple, Maurice. Because you're a CIA agent."

My reply came out before I could help myself. Maurice's mouth gaped, and I quickly extricated myself by telling him he was the sort of person the students might think was a CIA man, even if this were not the case. And so I led a saddened but somewhat mollified spook out on our tour of the fleshpots of Berlin. Maurice was quite attentive to the music and dancing at the several cheap danceries off the Kudamm and to the figures of the scantily dressed German girls. After about an hour of loud beat music in the discos we returned to the Kudamm and started to walk.

It was a magnificent evening, everyone was wearing summery clothes, the thousands of lights on the Kudamm reflected and refracted brilliantly into each other providing a glittering impression of what was at that time undoubtedly one of the handsomest streets in the world, especially by night. We crossed the Kudamm at Fasanenstrasse and stood on the corner by a café as we debated where to go next.

Suddenly sirens began to screech. We heard loud rasping shouts—a band of about thirty demonstrators appeared almost out of nowhere and ran by at full speed, shouting slogans against the police. They went right by us, almost knocking us down. Then another group went running on the other side of the Kudamm and also passed by. There was an edge to their shouting that I had not heard before, and their motions were jagged and uncontrolled.

Maurice immediately turned to me, as though I ought to know what it was all about. One of the group had carried a battered poster reading Massenmord in Iran (Mass Murder in Iran), and I suddenly realized this must be the night my friends had planned to demonstrate against the Shah's visit. I had just communicated this to Maurice when we heard loud sirens again, and the first group of demonstrators ran back towards us. Apparently they were caught between two contingents of police. Just then a large police van came screeching to a halt right on our corner, just as the students reached it from the other direction.

What followed was some of the most uncontrolled mayhem I have ever had occasion to watch or participate in. The police went after the students with a ferocity I have never seen equaled, with truncheons, the stocks of weapons, their bare hands. We were caught right in the middle and immediately retreated to the sidewalk café, where we sat down. Two of the students did the same at an adjoining table. Cries of Schweinehünde rent the air, as these policemen performed the best imitation of Gestapo officers I hope I will ever see. The demonstrators resisted, but they did absolutely nothing to provoke the violence unleashed on them, at least nothing Maurice or I could see.

Everything happened with incredible speed. We had not so much ringside seats as seats inside the ring itself. Two or three students fell to the ground, but the beating and kicking continued. The fallen students were thrown roughly into the waiting van. Others ran off and escaped the police. All at once the head waiter from our café‚ grabbed a truncheon he kept behind the door and attacked the students sitting next to us, forcing them from the table and calling them various names he had read in the Springer press. He then turned to us and was about to treat us the same way, when he took in Maurice's dour middle-aged mien and withdrew. The police sped off in pursuit of the students who got away.

Maurice and I looked at each other

"Well," I said, "I told you I'd show you a side of Berlin you hadn't seen before." Marice was almost speechless, genuinely shocked by what he had just observed. He finally gained control of his voice.

"I would say that someone in the police department has gotten out of control," he commented thoughtfully. We then had a long argument about police methods and brutality and the etiquette of demonstrating. Soon we got up and left to continue our tour of Berlin's dives and gin mills. We were both in a bad mood after what we had seen, and we started drinking more than we should at each place we visited. Sirens were to be heard constantly wherever we went, sometimes near, sometimes afar, more frequent and insistent than I had ever heard them.

We were sitting in our last bar of the night, Die Dicke Wirtin in the Carmerstrasse, at one time supposedly frequented by artists and poets, when a student walked in and announced to everyone present "Die Bullen haben zwei Studenten getötet. Verprügelt." (The fuzz killed two students. Beat them.")

I immediately asked him for further details. He admitted it might be a rumor, but he heard they had been taken to a specific hospital, which I could call up if I wanted to know more.

I told Maurice that I thought we had had enough of an evening and that in any case, if this story proved true, then I had a job to do in covering it for IT. With that we parted company, and I headed home. And thus it happened that the CIA's Berlin chief and the underground's east-european agent spent their time shuffling from bar to bar together on the worst night in German history since the days of the Third Reich. A coincidence that might seem corny and unbelievable in fiction became a simple, everyday part of real life, which as usual delights in mocking writers, futurologists, and intelligence agents.

I had been drinking too much and dozed off for about an hour as soon as I got home. When I awoke, I was unable to get back to sleep. Suddenly, I remembered the name of the hospital. I called them up, told them I was working for the foreign press and asked if they could verify the report of two students being killed in the rioting. The girl at the other end sounded defensive. She could give out no information but suggested I call one of the local newspapers. I finally reached another defensive voice at the Berliner Tagesspiegel at 3:30 in the morning.

"It's a lie," she said, "They only got one." Once again I was told that the student had been beaten to death, in "self-defence," the voice explained.

There was little more I could do that night. I was extremely disturbed and already somewhat hung over. I didn't get to sleep until seven in the morning and then was awakened by Peter Nestler knocking at my door at eleven-thirty the same day. I had forgotten that I had invited him to lunch, as Ilene was still in London and his mistress was also out of town. I told him of my experiences last night, and he had pity on my woebegone appearance and invited me out to lunch with him, as I was in no condition to prepare anything. We drove to a restaurant near the further end of the Kudamm, and over Bier and Schnitzel my spirits began to revive.

Peter told me he had already heard about the student's death, and he hoped reports of it in the foreign press would not damage Germany's reputation too greatly. I was tempted to reply that no news of any further deaths from Germany could possibly darken the country's reputation any further than it already was, but I forbore. Peter said he had heard that the death had occurred as a matter of self-defense and was purely accidental. I asked him how you beat someone to death in self-defense, and he confessed he was not sure of all the details.

After lunch I left Peter and tried to buy a newspaper, but the stands were all sold out because of the previous night's disturbances. I walked down the Kudamm a block or two to a small advertising office of the Berliner Tagesspiegel, where they always kept the latest edition posted in full in the windows. I read the article on the killing several times, but a number of details simply did not make any sense. All I could determine for certain was that the student's name was Benno Ohnesorg, and that the incident had taken place on a side-street near the opera house, about a mile from where Maurice and I had seen the rioting on the Kudamm. I was now only a few blocks from the Republikanischer Klub, so I decided to drop by and see if anyone there could give me more information.

The elevator at the club wasn't working, so I started to walk up the four flights of stairs. When I was halfway up, someone passed me going down.

"Don't bother going up there." he said, "Everybody's leaving." This didn't make sense to me, and I kept climbing. Close to the top I ran into a theatre friend who, like myself, was deeply interested in student affairs. He was also headed downstairs.

"Alex!" he said, "You're just the right person. Come down with me to the University. I'm driving right now. We're all going."

"Ja, aber was ist gescheh'n mit dem Student, den die geprügelt hab'n?" I asked. (Yeah, but what happened to the student that they beat?")

"Erschossen!" he answered in a single word, correcting both me and the false account given by the authorities. Erschossen. Shot to death.

While driving down to Dahlem, we became aware that we were part of a mammoth cavalcade of cars converging on the university from all directions. A few were already flying from their antennae the black streamers of cloth that were to become such a common sight in the days ahead. When we arrived at the university, the campus was already jammed.

More students and student-types and professors, more friends and well-wishers were arriving every moment. A major meeting was scheduled in the Audi Max, but it was so crowded that no one could get in, so we all just stood around and listened to the proceedings on loudspeakers. I walked around the campus during part of these proceedings, and everywhere I went, outdoors on the grass and indoors in the hallways of class buildings, I found more and more students standing and listening.

At first a number of speakers succeeded one another with brief statements abhorring the tragedy or reading messages of condolence and solidarity from other universities and student groups. Knut Nevermann, the head of the student council, then made a speech which became the master plan of everything that was done in the next few days. Nevermann pointed out the seriousness of this murder in the light of German history during the Nazi period, and his view were soon seconded by the rector of the university. Together they saw the incident as a crucial one to establish democracy in Germany.

Already the Mayor of Berlin had made remarks defending his police force, and later that day he was to make a televised speech blaming the students instead of the police. And this mayor was a social democrat, supposedly to the left of the Christian Democrats who had ruled Germany for so long. The press was also playing the role of supporting the police and the government and so far had been a prime supporter of the cover-up. The police were quite simply lying about the cause of death, and only an examination by doctors sent by the university had determined the truth. A clumsy attempt had been made to sew up the gunshot wound. Neither Nevermann nor the rector were radicals in any sense of the word—rather, they both subscribed to the moderate doctrines of Willi Brandt's nominally socialist party. But the actions of the police, the mayor, and the press had the effect of pushing the entire student body to the left, of "radicalizing" them, as the phrase went.

I have in some ways made light of the high seriousness of these German students in their approach to life and in their almost mystical faith in democracy. But on that day it may have been those very traits which held the students together and kept Berlin from falling apart. Emotion, be it mourning, frustration, or a lust for revenge, was visible and almost tangible on all sides of me, just as the anger of the ordinary Germans who read and believed their Springer newspapers also became quite evident to me. But what was proposed that day not only served to channel most of this emotion into a constructive direction but might have served as a model for America in our own treatment of Kent State three years later. But our own national tragedy, when it came, was to be handled quite differently.

A week's recess from all classes was declared. All students were asked to don black armbands, to put black streamers on their car antennae, and to descend in groups to the Kudamm and other central points of the city—there, carrying poles flying black streamers, they were to engage the citizenry of Berlin in a prolonged public discussion of what had happened. They were to discuss the matter with whoever came along and wanted to talk, and they were to keep discussing—yes, diskutieren, the very verb I have mocked elsewhere in this book—until no one was left to discuss with any longer. They were to avoid being provoked by their fellow citizens and they were to restrain themselves from any further radical action until the results of this plan could be gauged.

To say that the next two or three weeks in Berlin were one of the most exciting periods I have lived through is necessarily an understatement. A variety of political dangers was unleashed by the events of June 2, and it was impossible not to feel that the Pandora's box of past German politics had been opened as well. The forces of the extreme left and the extreme right were both very much in evidence. The entire German nation was forced to take a close look at the demons of its past, which were all too visibly still alive in the present. I believe the vast majority of Germans were repelled by what they saw during those weeks and took a first, halting—almost lurching—step away from the past and towards a slightly more liberal future.

This is of course precisely the opposite of what happened when America was to encounter its own demons at Kent State three years later. Until June 2, I somehow had, the feeling that what I was watching in Germany could only be a pale carbon copy of what was going on in America. But after that date, I was to gain increasingly the uncanny sensation that what I was watching in Berlin just might be the original, while what was to happen in America, France, England, and elsewhere took on the feeling of rough carbon copies. Herman Kahn and others have observed that student, protest movements abroad were largely an imitation of our Viet Nam demonstrations. I believe this view is fundamentally mistaken—the Europeans had their own grievances and their own profound historical and psychological grounds for demonstrating, even in those few cases when the subject was Viet Nam.

The Kudamm, West Berlin's glittering main thoroughfare, was an unforgettable sight during the week immediately following the murder. The students of Berlin were massed along this street at any time from early morning till after, midnight, not in a crowd, but in innumerable smaller groups, spreading out over a dozen blocks on each side of the street. And with them, engaged in earnest Diskussion, were the citizens of Berlin. In the midst of each group was a broomstick flying a tattered black pennant. And each and every one of the students wore a black armband, just as their cars flew similar black ensigns.

Sometimes these discussions became quite heated. In a few cases violence broke out. But it soon dissipated. The overall atmosphere of seriousness following this event was too real to permit anything as insignificant as petty violence. The Berlin police patrolled the Kudamm in pairs. In theory no demonstrations were permitted at all, including these gatherings. But the police did little to stop the discussions. They were hopelessly outnumbered by the combined forces of students and curious citizens. In a few cases, the police took part in the discussions. Some students took advantage of their presence to bait them before the public and ask them provocative questions. A few policemen volunteered that they were as shocked and baffled by what had happened as the students.

At any point during this week, further violence could have erupted. Tempers were enflamed on both sides. In the past, ordinary citizens had been known to attack students with far less provocation than was now available, while policemen simply looked the other way. But the choice of mourning tactics and the ubiquitous black flags and armbands seemed to have a quieting effect on the populace.

Yet there was good reason to be shocked and baffled. Not only had the mayor and the police chief pursued a hard line following the incident, but the whole Berlin press had leapt to align themselves with them, defending the police and blaming the students.

This came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Berlin press at that time. A few months earlier, people around the world had picked up their newspapers to discover that German student radicals had made an attempt on the life of then Vice-President Hubert Humphrey during a trip to Berlin. Apparently a bomb had been thrown.

Yet the very next day these same readers learned there had been no assassination attempt at all—a group of students and artists had indeed been involved, but the bomb had contained nothing but vanilla pudding. The Berlin press had simply jumped to a conclusion without bothering to check the facts. And the story had been passed along to the rest of the world. In the affair of June 2, these same reporters were to take even longer to get to the truth.

In fact, they only began to admit that they might have been guilty of some misreporting a few days after the incident. Even then, it remained hard to find out what was happening. Numerous students were still in custody after the demonstration at the Opera, and it was not known whether they had been formally charged or were being held in what, the Germans picturesquely call an Untersuchungsgefängnis or "Investigation Prison." The names of those students injured in the rioting (and even those of wounded police) were also slow in being released. As for the cause of death, several stories had now been offered by the police and picked to pieces. The first of course was that the student Ohnesorg had died as the result of a single accidental blow.

It was then explained that he had to be forcibly subdued because he had pulled a gun on a policeman. Since the victim, as so often happens in these misfortunes, was in fact a mild-mannered philosophy student who was attending his first demonstration out of curiosity, this explanation was also quickly ruled out. It was like pulling teeth to make first the press and then the citizenry concede that Ohnesorg had been shot, and that an attempt had been made to sew up the wound. The final version, which took some weeks to be publicized to the German people, was that the policeman had been surrounded by a gang of students and drew his gun in fear for his own life. Needless to say, the available facts were such as to render this version equally dubious.

The East Germans were quick to denounce the entire affair and immediately offered freedom of passage to a procession of students bearing Ohnesorg's body from Berlin to his home town in West Germany. This intrusion of cold war politics further inflamed an already inflammatory situation, and the Springer press was quick to use this as further fuel. Universities throughout Germany proclaimed periods of mourning and Diskussion in solidarity with Berlin, and mutterings were heard in Bonn of imposing emergency measures throughout Germany. The proposed laws which would have permitted this had long been under fierce attack from the students and other liberal sources, as they embodied nothing more or less than the potential restoration of a completely authoritarian government in Germany, as opposed to the paternalistic version of democracy in existence since the war. All that would be needed was for a government to declare an "emergency," and the existing democratic system could be virtually abandoned.

Although the laws permitting this had not yet been passed, for a period of three weeks it remained an open question as to whether martial law might not be proclaimed in any case. To have done so might well have provoked armed rebellion from the students and other liberals, as the situation was so tense that no one would have believed that such measures were merely temporary. Any armed disturbance in Berlin at that time opened the city to possible intervention by the East Germans, the Russians, the western powers, or any imaginable combination of these. If this assessment seems fantastic in retrospect, it was nevertheless the everyday feel of Berlin at that time, the conventional wisdom of politics, as it is called. Everyone believed it, and hence everyone felt that anything was possible.

Three or four days,after the killing, when the hysteria in Berlin was at its height, I received a strange phone call from Maurice Stegman. He told me he was calling from an outside phone because as far as he was concerned this was strictly an unofficial call. He also said he didn't know if my phone was being tapped or not, but that he really didn't, care. He said he wanted to tell me he really appreciated what he had seen that night on the corner of the Kudamm. He told me he was trying to pass along to others what he had seen, so they would understand too, but it was hard to do because everyone was so "trigger-happy."

I asked him what he was talking about, and he replied that he thought the Berlin police had made a great mistake in the way they handled things. I agreed with him whole-heartedly and pointed out that their main problem was their lack of a sense of humor. We had talked about this that evening also, and we had both agreed that the German police often managed to provoke incidents with the students by the way they themselves responded to any minor provocation. Let a dozen students sit in the middle of the Kudamm, and immediately the whole intersection would be swarming with police, water cannon, paddy wagons, and a pompous captain with a loudspeaker proclaiming "Achtung, Achtung, Hier spricht die Polizei" and ordering the miscreants to disband at once. I felt, and Maurice tended to agree, that if they proceeded in a slightly lighter manner or perhaps did nothing at all, the students would probably just get bored and disband of their own accord. This might have the effect of raising the standards of demonstrations for students and police alike, I told Maurice. I thought the police had still not learned this lesson, and their apparent inability to learn was potentially dangerous in the current atmosphere.

There could be no doubt that Berlin was probing new frontiers of uptightness during those days, and the police were in no mood to learn anything. As the newspapers slowly reversed themselves and the Kudamm discussions began to have their impact, the police felt themselves more challenged than ever, or perhaps it was the first time they had ever really been challenged. On the day after the riot they placarded Berlin with notices calling for the support of the citizens against demonstrations they regarded as simply "criminal" and strict non-interference by the government in "decisions and measures of police tactics." American radicals who insist that our country is a police state really have no applicable frame of reference for stating this, as in Germany the role of the police went unchallenged for centuries, along with the whole apparatus of "Obrigkeit," which can be roughly translated as "authority." And this would have been true even if many of the police had not been, as they were, veterans of the Gestapo or the S.S.

A day or so later, I was handed an unsigned student leaflet which I found quite frightening. It called upon students to gather the very next day at the police station and jail in Tegel, where some of the demonstrators were still being held, and join in a public denunciation of the police. In England or America such an action would have seemed to me quite harmless and even a good way to get some publicity for a cause. But here in Berlin at this particular time and political nexus it struck me as foolhardy.

I went to the Republikanischer Klub and tried to find out from my contacts who was responsible for the leaflet and why a demonstration was being called so suddenly for the very next day. No one was able to supply precise information, but it was assumed that someone at the German SDS was responsible. I found this too vague, as the demonstration seemed all too likely to produce fresh incidents in the escalating climate of emotion. I pointed out that it would be to no one's benefit if more students were killed or injured. My friends agreed with me, but there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about it.

That evening I went out to a pay phone and called up Maurice Stegman at home. I told him about the planned demonstration the next day and what I thought about it and said I felt this was definitely an instance where the German police ought to try a lighter touch, as it looked to me quite possible that someone might be counting on them to overreact as usual. Maurice was aghast at the news, as he had heard nothing of the demonstration and was if anything more alarmed by it than I was.

I had an appointment with my publisher the next afternoon, so I was unable to attend the demonstration, and I am limited to reporting what I heard of it secondhand and through the press. Evidently the police amazed everyone by responding, for the first time in the history of Berlin, with a light touch. Instead of the usual threats on the loudspeaker, a jovial captain took over and offered to serenade the students with records of waltz music so as to calm their nerves for their studies.

The demonstration broke up without incident.

A week later in the Tagesspiegel I was to read a tantalizing complaint by one of the editors that the western occupying powers had been unfairly restraining the strong, stern hand of the Berlin police from dealing with the student riffraff as they so richly deserved. I have never been able to put two and two together as to precisely what happened behind the scenes, but I could not help drawing my own conclusions from this piece.

Although there were numerous demonstrations after that and I was to participate in many of them, none had anywhere near the potential for disaster this one had had. This was partly because the political situation was slowly changing in favor of the students, who were increasingly seen as the innocent victims of a corrupt press, partly because on June 7 the Six Day War had began in the Middle East. Although the first effect of this was to increase tension, the doctrinaire position of the orthodox left-wingers in supporting the Arabs brought great criticism from the majority of the students, who tended to favor Israel. Ideological lines soon became blurred not only concerning the Near East crisis but the one in Berlin as well.

What is in retrospect perhaps most important about this period in Berlin is that ultimately it led to a mild relaxation and liberalization in German politics and society. No radical alterations occurred, but a significant change of mood did take place. The killer of Benno Ohnesorg was never adequately punished (though he was finally placed on trial), but many changes did occur in the larger political arena subsequent to these events.

Prior to the riots of June 2, Germany had been ruled for two decades almost exclusively by a single political party of conservative leanings, yet only months afterwards an opening to the left did take place, and the social democrats under Willi Brandt took over in Bonn. As Brandt's own sons had been among the most rebellious of the students, this could never have taken place without a change in the national mood.

As for the mayor and police chief of Berlin at that time, their days were numbered, and neither has any high political expectations in Germany today because of the roles they played on June 2. Even the Berlin police were deprived of their slick storm-trooperish uniforms and made to wear, against their will, as part of a change of "image," turn-of-the-century police hats and cloaks that made them look like fugitives from an operetta.

But all of this developed only over a period of time, and none of us had any reason to suppose it could happen during that June. It seemed to me that this whole scenario proved that there is a case for planned, responsible radical action in politics, as well as for passive, and on occasion, even active and provocative resistance. At least this is what the German model proved to me. I suspect the American model was considerably less successful, at least in narrowly defined political terms, but I will leave a discussion of this matter until I deal with matters closer to home.

One important consequence June 2 had for me personally is that it threw me even more deeply into the embrace of the international movement. I sent copies of my article about these events not only to IT in London but to the East Village Other in New York and to the newly emerging Liberation News Service, which was trying to coordinate underground news out of Washington. I tried to analyze what had happened so the information would be of use elsewhere, and perhaps it was.

The result was that the piece ran in a number of papers, and I began to correspond with Ray Mungo, who was then running Liberation News Service. Soon my name was appearing on the EVO masthead next to that of my friend Miles for London, Jean-Jacques Lebel for Paris, and Simon Vikenoog for Amsterdam. And Ray asked me to serve as eastern european correspondent for LNS, which of course meant mainly Berlin. Although Ray later urged me to obtain a Polish visa and travel to Warsaw to report on student demonstrations then erupting there, the request for a visa was of course, as I had warned him, turned down.

Up until this time, I had been mainly dependent on my trips to London to obtain such copies of the American underground press as happened to be lying around the IT office. These I brought back and quickly passed out to greedy German students. But on my London trip that autumn, I set up an arrangement through the editors of IT by which I had copies of all the main underground papers from America sent directly to my Berlin address.

Thus, starting in October of 1967, and throughout 1968, I was regularly receiving (and reading) copies of underground papers from at least fifteen different American cities. Because of this, I expect I was better informed about what was going on in America than many people then living there. I did this not just out of political zeal or a need for reading material, but largely, I suppose, because Ilene and I were growing ever more homesick, restless, and almost unbelieving about the many changes which seemed to be taking place back home. By reading these papers, we were able to convince ourselves that the unthinkable was indeed happening. America was actually changing, perhaps even growing up.