Spiel Appeal: Play,Drug Use and the Culture of 1968 in West Germany

In a 2008 speech given at Boston University, perhaps the single greatest political and cultural star to emerge out of the international uprisings of 1968 called attention to an important gap in current historical understandings of that year’s events and their legacy. ¹ Daniel Cohn-Bendit, formerly Dany le Rouge of the Parisian unrest in May of that tumultuous year, spoke of the importance of 1968, claiming ‘we won culturally, we won socially, but we lost politically.’ ² He was calling attention to a widely maintained truism, namely that sixty-eighters, while failing to create a utopian revolution as had been their ill-defined goal, nonetheless drastically changed the societies in which they lived, making them more livable, more open, more enjoyable. Sixty-eighters often call upon this division between their failed political aspirations and their noble cultural or social contributions as a defense of their revolution against its critics and Cohn-Bendit’s comments fit into this framework. ³ Historians, however, have by and large missed the beat. They continue to focus on 1968 as a political uprising and relegate its cultural or social manifestations to the status of second-tier ramifications. This presentation has not been changed by the outpouring of studies following the year’s thirtieth anniversary in 1998. ⁴ To focus primarily on sixty-eighter political protests and the political legacy of 1968 represents a three-fold oversight. First, it downplays the essential sixty-eighter desire to merge politics with culture, to imbue seemingly ‘apolitical’ acts such as sex or drug use with political weight. Second, it obscures the viewpoint of sixty-eighters themselves, who through their memoirs regularly maintain the primacy of culture over politics in the movement, or at the very least put the two on an equal footing. Finally, it serves to sideline scholarly investigation of 1968’s cultural ramifications.

Here, I would like to offer a cultural reading of one important element of the youth consciousness which underpinned events in West Germany between 1967 and 1969 and which shaped the legacy of those years: drug consumption. ⁵ Though sixty-eighters themselves often point out the presence and importance of drugs within their movement, this development has been less remarked upon in the historical literature. ⁶ The recent edited volume by Belinda Davis et al., illustrates this point: amidst 13 essays from a variety of scholars dealing with ‘political protest and collective identity’ in West Germany and the United States of America in the 1960s and 1970s, none address drug issues, nor is drugs an indexed topic. ⁷ Drugs are also missing from Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth’s introduction to 1968, either as an essay topic or an index entry. ⁸ These absences are telling: Davis’ and Klimke’s works represent some of the most important recent contributions to discussions of the student left in West Germany. In his well-regarded memoir, Rebellion und Wahn, Peter Schneider performs similar alchemy with sixty-eighter history, writing that ‘we felt called by history itself to build a society according to new rules. It was a rush without drugs …. ’ ⁹ While this may have been true for Schneider, thousands of sixty-eighters sought a rush quite precisely with drugs and to omit them from the history of the movement dampens historical understanding.

Drugs were part and parcel of a new vision of leftism, primarily among the nation’s young adults, that helped enable West Germany’s 68. This ‘ludic leftism’ sought nothing less than the utter transformation of West German society and politics. Students and fellow-travelers aimed to create a community which was simultaneously autonomous, spontaneous, and communitarian: they wanted a more playful world. ¹⁰ They sought, to paraphrase the great Dutch historian and theorist of play Johan Huizinga, to escape into or forge a ‘temporary world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart,’ something sixty-eighters might call granting ‘all power to the imagination.’ ¹¹ Ludic leftism refers to a loose, egalitarian ethos focused on a lived life of joy, rather than the politics of outrage which so often anchor historical understanding of that year. Playful acts were defined by their focus on mixing and blending, blurring of boundaries and impulsiveness. Among the most important of young leftist methods for achieving a playful community was the deployment of hashish and LSD. Sixty-eighters did not use recreational drugs as a simple form of juvenile protest or as a pure escape, as authorities immediately and enduringly maintained, nor was drug use a regrettable excess, as some rueful sixty-eighters later argued. Pot and LSD were important pieces of a broader rejection of perceived Adenauer era conformity by some of the nation’s youth. In the individual life stories of sixty-eighters, as reflected in both autobiographies and novels, the drugs’ primary roles were as facilitators of community and ‘awakening’. They were essential elements of the playful leftist counter-culture which youth and leftists invented concretely throughout Germany at the onset of the 1970s in the form of urban sub-cultures and alternative ‘scenes’, the invention of which constitutes one of the most important social legacies of 68.

The status of drugs in the West German counter-culture was not appreciably different than in the other New Lefts of the 1960s, especially the United States of America. In both cases, hashish and LSD use existed as politically freighted activities among a significant subset of protesters, drop-outs, and students. In his recent, thorough study of the political overlaps between American and West Germany student groups, especially the parallel SDS’s, Martin Klimke identifies a ‘shared counter-culture’ as the most important connection between the two groups. ¹² Though Klimke does not discuss this shared culture in great depth, since his focus is political, drugs certainly existed as part of the revolutionary repertoire of the late 1960s in both countries. America’s Diggers and the early Weathermen, as well as West Germany’s Subversive Action and Hash Rebels, sought to wed drug consumption to protest in similar ways, often using Situationist tactics, in order to engender revolutionary consciousness or challenge the status quo, as Jeremy Varon points out in his work on the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction. ¹³

The West German case differs less in the importance ascribed to drug use, though here drug use sometimes played a role in coping with the recent – often familial – National Socialist past which was simply not present in other western countries. What makes the German case stand out is the very central role pro-drug groups, especially Kommune I, came to play within the counter-culture. For a time, Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier acted as something of a first couple within the drop-out left and their brand of ludic leftism was synonymous with hashish and LSD consumption. Kommune I stood as a central meeting house for numerous leftist luminaries, from Rudi Dutschke – who had helped formulate the original idea for the commune though he remained less than won over by it in practice – to Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader. This is by no means meant to downplay the very controversial position that Kommune I occupied within the counter-cultural left, where its denizens produced a dizzying array of polarized reactions. The commune’s influence, however, outstripped that of equivalent groups in the United States of America, such as the Merry Pranksters or even Abbie Hoffman’s yippies. It also spawned copy-cat groups around the country, aimed at merging drug consumption and political engagement to craft autonomous lives. This is just one example of the ways in which West Germany’s ludic leftists lived in closer proximity to their political counterparts, and were often taken more seriously, than in other New Lefts.

The ludic left’s playfulness manifested itself with particular strength in three areas: sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. All three helped enable young leftists to fashion ludic selves. Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll were all closely associated with youth and perceived as new and hip. Young leftists vehemently took them up as key portions of their identities and their struggle. While all three were embattled in the late 1960s, only drugs have failed to achieve general mass acceptance since those heady days. Sexual freedom has generally become enshrined in western societies, as has rock music, but even the lightest of sixty-eighter drugs – hashish – has not been legalized or even decriminalized in most countries. For sixty-eighters, however, hashish and LSD were very important. They helped link political engagement with lived life, aiding in the desired infusion of playfulness into politics and vice versa. For example, when the main character and narrator of Jörg Fauser’s pseudo-autobiographical novel Rohstoff moves from Turkey to Berlin and settles in at Kommune I in 1968, he is at first put off by their obsession with revolution as something which required constant engagement, ‘even while washing dishes or shitting.’ Even their obsession with sex, represented by their desire to sell illegal copies of Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of Orgasm, puts him off as formal and almost prudish. But, the narrator observes, ‘Then they started talking about drugs and I knew that I held the key even to their psyches. It was called: the new consciousness. I only needed to turn the key.’ ¹⁴ Despite their failure to maintain the status they achieved in those years, drugs, especially hashish and LSD, were at least as important as sex and rock in the leftist search for ludic life. ‘The drug helped us to find a new self-image,’ observed Matthias Horx. ¹⁵ Drugs helped thousands of young leftists ‘turn the key’, to borrow Fauser’s term.

Sixty-eighters deployed hashish and LSD for two compatible reasons: first, they wanted to open innovative pathways, to bring ‘all power to the imagination’; second, drugs helped foster communitarian impulses under the rubric of the ever-present call for solidarity. An article from West Berlin alternative paper Love defended hash smoking in precisely these terms. ‘The hashish-hunter maintains that hashish seduces one to flee from “reality”, Love wrote. ‘The Springer Press stipulates what reality is in combination with the criminal police. This repressive fiction of “reality” produces its realness primarily in relation to the power with which it is enforced.’ Here, Love gave hashish smoking a political edge, indicating ways in which the playful and political messages of 1968 mixed together. Few venues embodied this mixing as clearly and emphatically as drug use. ‘The “reality” from which hashers flee,’ Love continued, ‘is made up of coercive bourgeois fictions, out of the straightforward rationalism of the nineteenth century, out of the used-up daily experience of achievement and consumption.’ ¹⁶ Love sought to counter this nineteenth-century productivist worldview through vehement, personal revolution, of which hashish was an essential part. The drug achieved a dual political function – opening the eyes to West German ‘realities’ while opening the mind to other, new possibilities. The loose, relaxed atmosphere that hashish engendered added not only to the drug’s appeal but also to the appeal of counter-cultural, ludic leftism in general, which owed not a little bit of its considerable popularity to this hippie sensibility.

Some sixty-eighters recognized hashish’s bridge role. An illustration published in the Swiss alternative paper Hotcha and widely distributed in flyer form all over German universities clearly elucidated this role (Figure 1). ¹⁷ Here, sixty-eighters played linguistically (in English, not German, and also, ‘joint’ instead of ‘join’) in addition to making a playful historical reference by replacing God and Moses – as per Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling – with two protesters passing a joint. The poster also clearly implies that smoking pot constitutes an entry ticket into the counter-culture, into the underground. Pamphlets which included this illustration also included a diagram of how to roll a joint, thereby passing on the forbidden knowledge necessary to enter the counter-culture. In addition to its playful political meaning, the poster clearly conveys this image of the subculture as both a shared secret passed from person to person but also a communitarian project. As Robert Stephens, examining the same images, affirms, ‘the drug scene was created through peer networks that shared insider knowledge.’ ¹⁸ The revolution is passed from person to person via the joint just as the joint would pass around a room while being smoked. Protesters thus embarked upon not only a shared psychological trip, but a common revolutionary one as well – as they entered into a shared counter-cultural community where the dream of anti-authoritarian solidarity was as widely shared as the ubiquitous joints. Hashish, in other words, could act as a gateway drug to ludic leftism.

LSD lacked the bridge function of hashish, but the two drugs occupied broadly similar political roles in the counter-culture. The word ‘trip’, so often associated today purely with acid or other psychedelic substances, was often used in the late 1960s to refer to either pot or LSD, especially by the mainstream press, who regularly confused the two. The linguistic confusion existed despite the two drugs’ radically different psychological effects. Acid lacked much of the communitarian impulse behind hashish. LSD’s role in the counter-culture was mostly an individual one – it expanded consciousness, preparing users for revolutionary action by broadening their psychic horizons. The effects of acid were, however, much more unpredictable than hashish. As such, some leftist publications knew that they needed to prepare their readers for an acid trip in a way that they did not for a session of pot smoking. Consciousness expansion constituted practically mandatory intellectual and spiritual labor for young leftists, after all. When German anthropologist Gisela Bonn took time off from her vacation in the United States of America to observe that country’s hippie culture in San Francisco, the young men and women she met spoke directly to LSD’s necessity. ‘Anyone who has never taken drugs,’ one of them told Bonn, ‘can’t even take part in the conversation.’ ¹⁹ For such essential journeys, the alternative press – booming in these years – offered itself as a guide.

The alternative press and student flyers constituted essential core elements of the broader leftist scene that emerged out of 1968. They were the circulatory system which enabled the New Left body politic to function. The plethora of alternative press which emerged in West Germany typified themselves by their playfulness, as a short review of their titles alone suggests. Carlo Sponti (Heidelberg), Dr. Med. Mabuse (Frankfurt), Charlie Kaputt (West Berlin), Der Metzger (Duisburg), and Traumstadt (West Berlin), just to name a few of the papers founded, sometimes only briefly, between 1967 and 1977, used their often-whimsical names to convey a flexible program focused on spontaneous living, in addition to spontaneous politics. ²⁰ For the sake of brevity, I will take only one example, Love, a respected alternative paper that flared briefly across the firmament of West Berlin’s late 1960s counter-culture. The paper’s founder and principal editor, Frank Schickler, hoped Love might become a voice for hippie culture in West Berlin. Five issues were printed between 1969 and 1970. As with most alternative press, exact distribution numbers are hard to come by, but the runs were doubtless small. The paper presented a fairly common mix of topics seen across a wide swathe of New Left and New Left-inspired alternative press and therefore deserves a longer look.

From the very beginning of its first issue, Love vigorously pushed the borders by mixing political and playful leftism. Its opening editorial statement read: ‘It is our obligation to break the antiquarian social and economic system … we are all cripples – many bodily, others psychologically, and still others spiritually. That’s why we have to force ourselves, collectively, to build a new world.’ ²¹ This very typical sixty-eighter political statement was titled, however, ‘Call to a Party’ and reached the conclusion that the best way to prevent the world’s gradual decay was simply to join like-minded people and enjoy life. The best counter to political stagnation, in other words, was to build an alternative scene and lifestyle, as so many young leftists would do throughout the 1970s. To many sixty-eighters, this was the best way to ‘be high’ and ‘be free,’ to parrot a common phrase from those years. The rest of the issue centered on a detailed examination of communal living and a lengthy interview with Timothy Leary, America’s famous acid prophet. The next issue of Love continued the drug-using focus with another Leary interview and a discussion of the need for consciousness-expanding drugs like LSD and hashish (though the authors were decidedly less sure about opium). The remaining issues of Love before it faded into obscurity, as so many alternative projects did after only a few issues, maintained this same mix – here an article about politically-motivated violence, there an illustration entitled ‘Fuck for Peace’, with tellingly appropriate visual, here an article on Charles Manson, there a review of a Led Zeppelin album, here an article about the impending Third World War, there an illustration of the Earth with a ring around it reading ‘We are all one.’ These articles do not just appear to melt into one another when recapitulated in quick succession; they shared editorial space across the entire range of New Left papers. Even some of the milieu’s more mainstream publications like the leftist mass publication konkret reflected this impulse. Klaus Rainer Röhl, the paper’s editor and co-founder, intentionally combined political, violent and sexual images on his covers to achieve maximum sales. ²²

Desire for a playful life was not enough to ensure effective drug use on the part of young leftists, however. They needed guides to introduce them to the then-exotic substances, hashish and LSD. Between 1966 and 1970 several books appeared, published by small, leftist presses like the März Verlag, aimed at helping young trippers. The most popular of them, Ronald Steckel’s Bewusstseinserweiternde Drogen, maintained a proper edifice of scientific and philosophical curiosity, much like the pornography of the early 1960s, but was in fact often purchased as a sort of druggie guidebook. After all, this was a generation who had grown up with little or no explanation of drugs’ varied effects. They were hungry for information. Steckel’s work was already in its third printing by 1970. Books like Bewusstseinserweiternde Drogen helped to fill the informational void, but it was the alternative press that really took upon itself the role of drug teacher, long before most German cities or states would find such positions necessary. West Berlin’s Charlie Kaputt, Nuremberg’s Päng, Heidelberg’s Der grüne Zweig, Frankfurt’s Underground, and Gelsenkirchen’s On the Road all published trip guides until the early 1970s. Der grüne Zweig, in particular, published a number of such articles, which is not surprising since it was founded by ‘Highdelberg’ dealer and later publisher Werner Pieper. In contrast to the common how-to illustrations about rolling joints, these articles on LSD eschewed the practical side of drug-taking in favor of the spiritual or mental implications. A 1970 Love article entitled ‘Tips for Trips,’ for example, provided the following consciousness expansion narrative:

Linger around the center of a big city. Observe environmental oscillations, the traffic flow, the cars, traffic lights and the people standing in front of them. Go into a film, for example, Godard’s Weekend, afterwards, when you’re back in the street, the film goes on.

Visit the zoo and the aquarium and feel the developmental history of humanity. A technique is being developed for underwater research that would allow human beings to breathe air through a liquid and to move through 1000 meter depths like a fish. Think about whether you’re in an aquarium. ²³

This passage carried a simple lesson. West German youth were living in an aquarium themselves, a modern city designed not to let them be free but to contain them, to move them along specific, capitalist pathways of consumption. LSD became an essential ingredient in the process of identifying and escaping from this German middle-class society, much as Jay Stevens has argued for the USA’s beat generation. ²⁴

Even as alternative and student papers encouraged their fellow young West Germans to first question and then change their daily experience, city and national authorities struggled to understand their critique. German officials could not understand what was so unpleasant about daily life in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). One can imagine their shock as the youth in which they had put so much stock suddenly turned on them, going against the self-same economic prosperity that, to their parents, seemed a veritable godsend. ²⁵ Frankfurt city authorities, reporting in 1970 with great pride on the moderate success of the first city-organized drug help center, concluded that drug users ‘seem somehow … unable to reach satisfaction with life.’ ²⁶ This was a more or less correct assessment of West German drug users – they indeed could not quite reconcile themselves with lived life in the FRG. For their part, youth protested that there was nothing wrong with them; rather, something was wrong with West German life itself. LSD and hashish were readily available tools for its improvement. Hessen’s state crime office was emphatically correct, if a bit belated, when it observed in 1971 that ‘Whoever wants to be “in” must free themselves from the present through drugs. That is the solution that is everywhere available to the youth.’ ²⁷ It was precisely in this calculus that the playful substances LSD and hashish achieved a vital political function in 1968.

City and state authorities all over West Germany – and the world – desperately wanted one question answered: who was smoking all this pot and dropping so much acid all of a sudden? When Frankfurt’s central city-organized drug help center prepared a report of its activities in 1971, its first full year of operation, it presented a fairly clear sample of the city’s still-growing drug using population. Of the 300 users who had called in or personally visited the help center, 80 per cent were men aged 16 to 24. ²⁸ The overwhelming majority of these, nearly 98 per cent, had smoked hashish at some point in their lives or still smoked hashish on a regular basis. Even more striking, almost 82 per cent admitted to having taken LSD, a percentage that would never again come close to being that high. It is not a coincidence that more young Germans reached for acid during the late 1960s and early 1970s than at any time before or since – its revolutionary import was ideally geared to the student movement’s desire for flexible action. ²⁹ The playful role of these substances was also substantiated by users. When asked why they continued to smoke pot or take LSD, nearly half (48 per cent) answered ‘Conviviality, Enjoyment.’ ³⁰ While these are doubtless among the top reasons people use any drug at any time – to have fun and get high – that sort of generalization does not take us very far in understanding why specific drugs are used for that purpose in specific times. That hashish and LSD found avid users in the years 1966–71 was not a coincidence or a result of the law of supply and demand. Rather, their psychological and physiological effects were well suited to the young leftist imaginary of the late 1960s and early 1970s. ³¹

Though pot and LSD may have been ideally suited to the emerging leftist counter-culture of the late 1960s, their impact was still sudden and unexpected to those outside the movement. Hashish use exploded in West Germany between 1966 and 1971. Frankfurt authorities captured 134 kilograms of the substance in 1966, a sum which had risen to 381 kilograms by 1968 and would continue to grow into the 1970s. ³² West German police as a whole seized over four metric tons of cannabis products in 1970, and six tons a year later. ³³ In addition, in 1968 city police confiscated an incredible 45,498 LSD trips, although strikingly little opium (only 209 grams). The number of smugglers who went before court in Frankfurt rose with equal sharpness, from 161, of which 63 were German, in 1964 to 1224, among them 856 Germans, in 1968. In all, 814 cases against the Opium Law, as West Germany’s anti-drug legislation was still called, went before court in 1970, 919 in 1971. This increased caseload was not the result of improved police measures, for the police had frankly no idea how to respond to this new problem, but rather a sheer reflection of the massive increase in drug imports. ³⁴

The official reaction to the problem of youth drug use bears out its impact. Frankfurt, a city of over half a million people, did not even have a drug office associated with its police force before 1968. When the office, the Rauschgiftdezernat or drug department, opened it had only two employees. Ten years later, the drug office was still expanding, including by then over 28 workers. There were already 13 by 1970, a 600 per cent expansion in official response within only two years. The drug problem caught other state institutions off guard as well. When it celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1968, the organization which had hitherto been most responsible for countering substance abuse in Hessen, the Hessische Landesstelle gegen die Suchtgefahren, published a two page, single-spaced list of conferences they had held over their decade of service. None of them dealt with drugs other than tobacco or alcohol. Of their publications, only a very select few dealt with the drugs which would so soon come to dominate public consciousness, LSD, hashish or heroin. Their most popular pamphlet, with 20,000 copies printed by the presses of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, was ‘Against the Nimbus of the Youth Cigarette.’ ³⁵ By 1971, such concerns would have seemed positively quaint. The state of German law in 1970 is itself an indication of how new illicit drug consumption was – the opium law had last been revised in the 1930s. The legal system, much like the non-existent therapeutic network, was utterly unprepared for the number of drug cases which confronted them. In addition to being redubbed the Betäubungsmittelgesetz (narcotics law or BtmG), anti-drug laws would be revised three times over the next 12 years, once in 1971, again in 1978 and once more in 1981.

Certainly, then, new drugs were there to be smoked and swallowed, but precisely how many people actually did so is hard to discern. Much the same argument can be made for drugs that Dagmar Herzog has made about sexual attitudes. In both cases ‘the influence of the New Left extended far beyond its own constituency.’ ³⁶ In the case of hashish and LSD, the cultural expansion of use occurred even faster than had the liberalization of sexual mores. ‘The sexual behavior of German youth’ may have ‘changed as never before in this century’ between 1966 and 1971, as Herzog asserts, but youth drug consumption not only changed, it was practically invented as a German phenomenon in the first place. ³⁷ In 1965, hashish smoking was confined to a very limited, underprivileged urban lower class in only a few cities, namely Munich, Hamburg, and West Berlin. It was extremely rare in the rest of West Germany. By 1971, hashish use had spread to every sizeable West German city and was downright common among counter-cultural youth. The problem was large enough that the Association of German Cities and Towns initiated a Germany-wide study to better understand drug consumption and the central government in Bonn inaugurated the first of many grand ‘plans for combating drug use.’ ³⁸ Following this new plan, every German state launched a massive survey of their school systems, where they rightly identified the most endangered of their youth. A 1970 report of the Frankfurt youth office quoted the city’s high school teachers as guessing that around 10 per cent of their students had drug experience, a guesstimate that proved to be far too low. ³⁹ When Hessen launched a state study in 1971, 40 per cent of the state’s surveyed students admitted to smoking or having smoked pot. ⁴⁰ Drug use spread very rapidly, then, from the university to the high school. Contemporary social psychologist and widely-published observer of the drug problem in Germany, Werner Heckmann, described the introduction of hashish into high school student circles in the late 1960s as ‘advanced high schoolers and university students discovered a new plaything.’ ⁴¹ The choice of terms is telling. If high schoolers found a new toy in these years, it was campus ludic leftists, through their actions and their publications, who had taught them how to play with it. In a few short years, hashish and acid had left college campuses and become generational markers, separating sixty-eighters in general not only from their parents, but even from their older siblings who missed out on those centrifugal years.

To say that the periodic press reacted to these numbers rashly would be an understatement. The panic-prone Frankfurter Neue Presse (FNP) went as far as to claim that there were 50,000 registered drug users in the country, a massive exaggeration. ⁴² Another article even went a step further, arguing that West Germany might have as many as 60,000 ‘drug invalids’ – a strange and terrifying designation, to say the least – by 1980 if youth consumption continued at its current pace. ⁴³ For their parts, the youth who appeared in that newspaper’s ‘What do you think?’ section uniformly claimed, when asked how well informed they were about the effects of drug use, that they had never used hashish ‘or similar stuff.’ Every one of the five youths whose responses were printed, however, admitted, more or less, that ‘hashish has already been enthusiastically spoken about’ among their friends. ⁴⁴

Frankfurt city authorities, though generally incapable of formulating solutions to their city’s booming drug problem in the early 1970s, nonetheless identified numerous aspects of the problem correctly, among them the communitarian role played by pot in student and youth counter-cultures. Youth, Frankfurt’s influential social minister Jost argued, ‘emigrate in groups for whom drugs are often the only thing cementing their protest orientation and community.’ ⁴⁵ Another report, this one from the state of Hessen, spoke in a similar tone. ‘The clique through their hash ritual, for example, experience passing contact and redemption from their own unsatisfied I’s,’ the report read. ⁴⁶ The drug was much more than ‘only’ a crutch for otherwise failed communities; rather pot smoking gave counter-cultural circles an air of familiarity which enabled them to tap into other common generational experiences and overcome ‘bourgeois’ inhibitions. Many sixty-eighters experienced a strong communal bond sitting on a Wohngemeinschaft (WG ⁴⁷ ) floor, waiting for a joint to be passed their way. The young radicals of Kommune I in West Berlin may have been one of the first groups to popularize this type of leftist community, but they were far from the only ones (Figure 2). What Uschi Obermaier observed in reference to her Munich apartment, the ‘high fish’ commune, may well have been true for many of the WGs founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely, that ‘the name was also the program.’ ⁴⁸

This view is supported by Karl-Heinz Reuband in his contribution to the 1981 Bonn Drug Exhibition Rausch und Realität. Seeking the reason for German youth’s sudden desire for hashish in the late 1960s, Reuband locates ‘the appearance of the drug phenomenon as a mass phenomenon … in connection with the development of other subcultural movements within the 1960s (such as the student protest movement and hippies).’ ⁴⁹ These movements, Reuband argues, through their focus on the need for consciousness expansion in order to elicit deep societal change, legitimized drug use and made it attractive. Similar observations were commonplace in leftist therapy movements of the 1970s, who argued that leftists needed to help the numerous heroin addicts who, so went the argument, would not exist were it not for leftism’s popularization of drug use in the first place. Leftist politics, in other words, was a gateway drug. Such arguments touch on an important theme, the interrelation between hashish and LSD on the one hand and the student protest movement on the other. However, they get the connection at least partially backwards. For a loose group that prized playfulness, drug use’s conflation with leftism also granted sixty-eighters some of their allure. ‘The left and the drug wanted the same thing,’ Peter Mosler writes, transcribing the thoughts of a Frankfurt beatnik, ‘The transformation of the thing through its opposite.’ ⁵⁰ The gateway between drugs and leftism opened both ways.

Sixty-eighters aimed to transform life in all its aspects into a mash-up of styles, attitudes and voices. Drugs were essential to this process, as the ubiquity of illustrated marijuana leaves in late 1960s and early 1970s alternative papers shows. Robert Stephens observes this as well in his Germans on Drugs, writing that ‘this kind of mixing of the politically revolutionary and the self-transformational was widespread in Germany.’ ⁵¹ The uprooting of established order and replacement of apparently-oppressive bourgeois values was one of the primary threads linking ludic leftism with its purely political counterpart. The self-transformational aspects of LSD were also central for Bernward Vesper, who described his acid use in his novel essay Die Reise along the same lines as Mosler’s beatnik: ‘The drug rips the veil away from reality, wakes us up, makes us alive and makes us aware of our situation for the first time.’ ⁵² Drugs helped young ludic leftists develop a new self-image, one which reconfigured their place in the world just as the 1960s economic boom had recentered their buying power. For some, like Vesper, this translated into a literal self-portrait, like the one he scribbled into the margin of his book (Figure 3). ⁵³ Here we see in radical form the heightened self-confidence and altered self-image that drug use could help engender. The illustration not only portrays a typical masculinist, sixty-eighter obsession with sexual pleasure through the grotesquely enlarged penis, the figure also blends into and mixes with the background. Vesper’s indistinct features merge together just as the playful and political elements of 1968 were supposed to meld together, creating a mobile, yet inviting counter-cultural image (Vesper is waving, after all).

Drug use not only held the potential to alter self-perception, however, but also the perception of the German past and present. In this regard, drugs were part of the broader social critical project of 1968, which aimed to critique daily life and work-a-day politics in West Germany, something Ulrike Meinhof referred to as the ‘German circumstances’. ⁵⁴ For Vesper, the situation that drug use revealed was the oppressive mixture of modern capitalism and the Nazi past in West Germany which, combined with Germans’ lack of desire to confront the past and their general passivity (vegetables, Vesper calls them), created a stifling atmosphere. Drugs not only made this predicament clear, they also helped ‘to rescue at least a piece of our life time … now it is all about beginning freedom here, in particular, developing the I. That is everything.’ ⁵⁵ If the very idea of drug-induced consciousness expansion as a method for perceiving society’s flaws seems clichéd, that is partially because of the generational experiences of sixty-eighters. ⁵⁶ As sixty-eighter Hedda Kuschel observed, ‘The consciousness-expanding function ascribed to LSD is often laughed at or questioned, but I have … very powerfully experienced it. With LSD it was possible to dive into totally new spheres and dimensions …. ’ ⁵⁷ Thousands of fellow sixty-eighters shared Kuschel and Vesper’s experiences with LSD and found that it significantly altered their view of the German present and societal change. It was one emphatic way to counteract the German circumstances that was open to sixty-eighters and that often went hand-in-hand with political engagement and revolutionary activity.

Peter Mosler, in the voice of his beatnik subject, furthers this point, writing that ‘Literature, SDS, Easter March, drugs – that was all one great unity.’ ⁵⁸ Fellow sixty-eighter Karin Adrian remembers that there

were the most different types of people in the scene back then, the artists, the really hard political people, the thirty year-olds, who for us younger ones were already a whole different generation, the hash-smokers, the LSD-eaters, the needle people, the vagabond hash rebels and the first terror people. Everything was one scene and we didn’t differentiate. ⁵⁹

The seemingly pithy observation in Love, ‘We are all One,’ was anything but – sixty-eighters wanted desperately to be ‘all one’, to merge into a greater, ludic revolutionary community of change. ⁶⁰ The feeling of everything being connected helps explain the ludic leftist propensity for eastern mysticism with its focus on circles not lines of development – an obsession which is also clear in Vesper’s self-portrait – but it also helps make clear, again, the immense joy that these years engendered. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a playing man par excellence, described the goal of ‘anti-authoritarian’ identity as a ‘rejection of all norms and an attempt to integrate joy (die Lust) into daily life and also – as far as possible – in politics.’ ⁶¹ For three years, everything really did feel as if it were melting into one, an effect only exacerbated by the shared, global nature of 1968’s uprisings. If everything was inextricably linked, it then followed that small changes might elicit big ones, that the personal could influence the political and vice versa, grand change was possible. History, in the words of the time, ‘can be remade’. Martin Klimke has recently picked up this thread, though not in reference to drugs, writing that 1968’s protests were undergirded by ‘a collective protest identity that consisted of shared cultural and political reference points … strengthened by a global medial discourse.’ ⁶² The communitarian revolutionary zeal manifested itself in an emphatic presentism, a visceral desire to fix the now. As a young woman student observes in conversation with the narrator in Fauser’s Rohstoff, ‘Later is abolished. There is only now.’ ⁶³ Drug use played a role in fostering this world view.

Despite their ready deployment and seeming effectiveness in fomenting a revelatory community of change, drug use’s place in the ludic leftist pantheon alongside rock music and sex was not secure. In fact, by 1972, hard core political leftists increasingly rejected drug use altogether. This was part and parcel of a post-1968 re-thinking of the sixty-eighter revolutionary vision, a revision which came not from the right, but from within the left, from the radical political fringe. To put it simply, sometime in the early 1970s Marxist-Leninists and Maoists in particular stopped playing. Hand-wringing over youth drug use was, alongside terrorism, one of the first manifestations of resistance to 1968. The pinnacle of this political leftist rejection of drug use was the Anti-Drug Conference, coordinated by the leftist paper konkret in 1972. At this conference, a wide array of political leftist groups recanted their previous commitment to LSD and hashish as political tools. This had been a mistake, these groups now claimed. The delegates gathered in Hamburg dismissed consciousness expansion via drug use as a political act. Instead, they reiterated the arguments of their counterparts in both the nascent leftist and mainstream therapeutic communities, positing that drugs distract from political engagement and encourage flight from reality. In his survey of German drug therapy, Martin Schmid aptly summarized the shift in the extra-parliamentary left’s opinion of drug use. ‘Discipline was now needed,’ he wrote ‘and whoever consumed drugs was immediately under suspicion of escapism.’ ⁶⁴ Hashish and LSD really were, so the radical theoretical left after 1972, simple facilitators of apolitical escape and therefore not productive elements of the struggle after all. They not only had no place in the revolutionary avant-garde, they were indeed counter-revolutionary. A contributor to the Heidelberg alternative paper Der grüne Zweig put a slightly ecological spin on this leftist anti-drug turn, writing that drugs ‘seems to me like artificial fertilizers, bringing things to bloom even on barren ground until the ecosystem collapses. Healthy soil doesn’t need any artificial fertilizer.’ ⁶⁵

Heroin represents one reason for the New Left’s sudden disenchantment with exotic intoxicants. The powerful opium derivative, which started to flood the European market in the late 1960s and early 1970s, held the potential to undercut one of the New Left’s primary goals. Heroin threatened dependence and that was anathema for a series of movements centered, however loosely, on notions of autonomy. Eckhard Joite, a worker at Berlin’s branch of the leftist therapy franchise Release (originally out of London), accused heroin users of ‘numbing themselves’ and therefore playing into the hands of the selfsame ‘Establishment’ which they claimed to detest. ⁶⁶ Students and drop-outs riding the slippery slope down from occasional hashish use to serial heroin consumption, and its attendant, mostly negative, bodily and social effects, are common enough in 1970s history to have become something of a trope. One such character even figured in the 1971 vignette in Günter Grass’ recent attempt to chart a literary journey through twentieth century German history, Mein Jahrhundert. ⁶⁷ Leftists began to fear that their utopian striving came with a cost that they might be unwilling to pay. However, the move against drugs also stemmed from political developments within the New Left around questions of political organization, violence, and confrontation with the state. It would certainly have been possible, following Herbert Marcuse’s minority theory, to conceive of junkies as an oppressed and potentially revolutionary class. Some publications, such as Frankfurt’s Pflasterstrand, as well as emergent junkie advocacy groups, would do just that in the later 1970s and 1980s. ⁶⁸ But early in the decade, elements within the New Left instead choose to turn away from drug consumption as part of larger political rejection of cultural forms of protest.

The reaction against drug use and against ludic leftism in general was part of a more general contemplative moment in the New Left from 1970–2. Bommi Baumann, talking about his small anarchist group’s desire to dub itself the Central Office of the Vagabond Hash Rebels, described the entire mood of the early 1970s student movement when he wrote ‘then we started to give this whole cluster a name.’ ⁶⁹ In naming themselves, the revolutionaries splintered into doctrinaire groups, struggling to define the goals of their activism. The revolution was over, as Dieter Süverkrüp sarcastically sang on his 1970 track. The former revolutionaries used the early 1970s to get their bearings. Another radical leftist author, Peter Paul Zahl (himself twice imprisoned after exchanging fire with police officers), described 1970 as the ‘time of the great slackening.’ ⁷⁰ It was a moment of reflective pause, a time to begin the ‘long march through the institutions’ – an emphatically unplayful undertaking. These were years of politicization in the small sense, of splintering into increasingly radical subgroups. It was those increasingly politicized and radicalized sects, in particular the assorted K-Groups, who saw 1968 as a failed political revolution and, in seeking to steel themselves for the next round, to name themselves, in Baumann’s terms, sought to purify their political message and purge it of playful elements. The coming apart at the seams of the New Left was an international phenomenon, of course. The American and German New Lefts divided themselves over similar issues: such as attitudes toward violence, as Jeremy Varon has shown, or revolutionary tactics, as Martin Klimke has recently illustrated. Drug use represented another of these fault lines.

Politics suddenly become something very serious indeed – the loose, ludic leftism which had granted 1968 so much of its mass appeal fell out of favor with the revolutionary elite. One contemporary observer in Frankfurt, Hayatullah née Paul Gehard Hübsch, succinctly described his beloved ludic leftist scene as ‘slowly dissolving’ in the early 1970s. ⁷¹ Politicized subcultures gradually took over the Club Voltaire, which Hübsch managed as a mingled counter-cultural space. Hübsch had been active in Frankfurt’s political and drug scenes since the late 1960s and sought consistently to wed the two. During his time as programming director of the well-known Club Voltaire, he ‘strained himself to melt together politics and literature and drugs.’ ⁷² He was quite successful, for a time. As the post-1968 political backlash against ludic leftism grew, however, and the scene at Club Voltaire broke apart, Hübsch decided to create a new ludic space.

He founded the Heidi-Loves-You shop, named after his long-term girlfriend, in a basement apartment in 1969. It was, he maintained, Europe’s ‘first head shop.’ Hübsch saw it as a conversational space where the ‘hair splitting’ which already defined the political scene could be avoided in favor of a ‘real’ connection between ‘hippie youth’ and the ‘politically conscious student body.’ ⁷³ The chance for communication was real enough. The Heidi-Loves-You shop was located precisely between the drug users in their public scene downtown and their student compatriots at the university. Hübsch described the headshop’s atmosphere in his short autobiography with no lack of prideful nostalgia. ‘Everybody could sit around,’ he remembered,

along the walls, wherever the bathtub and book shelves left space, there were benches where the entire shop-clique sat and listened to the stereo … Late in the evening, the entire SDS-team would come, sit around and get drunk and Krahl would sit on an old couch and read Jan Cremer. ⁷⁴

Hübsch’s dream of a unified space for ‘acid heads and politicos,’ as Bernward Vesper would have put it, would not come to pass, however. ⁷⁵ Frankfurt police closed Heidi-Loves-You in 1970 on the pretext, which was correct enough, that the shop encouraged youth drug use. Numerous leftist luminaries protested the action, among them Lothar Baier, Joseph Melzer, Klaus Wagenbach, and Bernward Vesper. ⁷⁶ The outcry was striking, given the soon-to-be decreased status of drug use among political leftists leading up to 1972’s Anti-Drug Conference. It wasn’t enough to keep the hang-out open, however, and Hübsch soon left Germany altogether, frustrated at the splintering of his movement.

Leftist poet and writer Peter Paul Zahl blamed rigid, dogmatic Marxism for his beloved movement’s dying vigor. ‘Marx isn’t well-suited to singing,’ he wrote. ⁷⁷ Zahl further described the results of political dogma in his novel Die Glücklichen, through the example of fictional political activist sixty-eighter Zimmermann:

Zimmermann had been a totally normal person for all these years. Studied German. Fourth semester. A funny guy. Loved to smoke pot. Had a superb head around which silky hair curled, deep black and frizzy, a cute nose, a mouth that could laugh … nothing failed him. Then Marxism-Leninism came over him. Help, the plague! One day, totally unexpected. Without any forewarning. Zimmermann cut his hair … he went to the factory. The proletariat on his lips … there was main front and secondary front, primary and secondary contradiction and the Red Book … His brain dissolves itself without a trace, jokes and humor and esprit were given away at the coat check. ⁷⁸

In short, rigid Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups ended the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition’s party; they instituted a ‘Schluss mit lustig’ moment.

As the 1970s dawned, the mixed-bag approach to revolution that so typified the sixty-eighter ethos drew increasingly scathing criticism from the politically-focused extreme left, especially Maoists and assorted K-Groups (mostly student Marxist-Leninist groups), who considered cultural hangers-on to be little more than day trippers. A lengthy rant from the short-lived Frankfurt paper Roter Mohn – written in mocking tone from the perspective of a stereotypical modish leftist – deserves a full citation in this context:

Then we’re sitting in school, the teacher stands up front and explains something, we don’t listen because it doesn’t interest us for shit. Afternoons we watch BAFF or Beatclub and feel in, as rebels, as outsiders. Yeah, we’re soooo terribly enlightened. We know that the capitalists are taking advantage of us, that our parents are oppressing us, we know that the teacher’s full of crap … we are so totally left.

The great Mao and the great Che are hanging on our wall, in our album collections we’ve got the Beatles and Frank Zappa plus Dylan, the collected essays of Sigmund Freud stands on our book shelves, we are soooo awfully left, lefter’s not possible.

We feel ourselves to be the avant-garde of the revolution, because we smoke hash. We love to be anti-authoritarian and don’t need any organization. We redeem the world through fucking, hash-smoking and through the Rolling Stones … 

You all think that you’re already left, when you wear long hair, read konkret and drop LSD …. 

HaH!! Organize yourselves! The truth is: you’re chic modish leftists!! So long as you are how you are, that’s how long you stabilize the system.” ⁷⁹

By 1972, groups like Roter Mohn’s anarchists had almost fully dissociated themselves from 1968’s playful well-springs. In the process, they fatally weakened radical political leftism’s mass appeal and engendered an abiding dislike among the majority of leftists. The Frankfurt student paper Fuzzy, a publication with a distinctly ludic editorial tone, only voiced the hopes of numerous leftists when they dreamed of a time when ‘The K-Groups are from the beginning not there, therefore no one has the feeling that the usual back-and-forth will ensue again.’ ⁸⁰ As this 1976 article implies, the wall that K-Groups sought to place between politics and playfulness remained permeable for the majority of leftists, no matter however vigorously those on the political side of the divide sought to maintain it. Some of the most successful political young leftist groups of the 1970s remained emphatically playful in their attitudes and outlook, among them the early Greens and the Spontis – who were particularly strong in Frankfurt, led by veteran instigator Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Ludic leftism survived the political purge of the early 1970s outside Marxist-Leninist and Maoist circles and lived on within the wider alternative and drug scenes. Despite the reaction of the early 1970s, both the nascent alternative and drug scenes continued to seek playful communities focused on mixing identities, experiences, and consciousnesses.

Ludic leftism was not a mere appendage of a political main body, it was essential to the impact of sixty-eight. To smoke pot, to listen to the Stones, to have long hair, wear a parka and think of oneself as a leftist grew popular in the late 1960s and 1970s and this had everything to do with playfulness. Play acted as a gateway to political engagement. Bommi Baumann is but one among many who has argued that the politically-engaged mass of leftist youth who drove sixty-eight had, only a few years earlier, not really been political at all. ‘One did not yet feel oneself as a leftist,’ he wrote, ‘but everything that was against was good … it only became political for lots of people later.’ ⁸¹ Roter Mohn took part in a broader trend when they loudly regretted the way in which their cause had been watered down by popularity, their lifestyle the stuff of Bravo (the German equivalent of Tiger Beat), but this actually represents one of the most striking cultural changes in recent German history – the transformation of German youth, and especially students, from a bankable, conservative force into an enduringly leftist group and an important motor behind West Germany’s liberalization in the 1970s. The left’s playful ethos was important in this process. Leftism’s broad appeal was not a product of a watering-down of the counter-culture in the 1970s. Rather, the generational focus on spontaneity and playfulness were an enabling factor behind leftism’s rise to widespread youth popularity in the first place. As Nuremberg’s Päng proclaimed, in a marijuana-leaf bedecked 1971 edition, ‘when we’re happy, that’s already revolutionary!’ ⁸² For the thousands of West German youths who wanted to be both political and happy, ludic leftism was the answer.