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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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[Euro…] pean countries, that would determine the
future of Europe. There was at last a good chance for Brandt's Social Democrats
to take over in the near future and adopt a foreign policy different from the
Christian Democrats'. To me, a bet on that game was much safer than a bet on
the one surging through the streets of Paris.
On May 29, half a dozen
youths and I occupied the OFA building. From the windows we hung three big
banners: Franco-German Alliance for Youth Occupied – No Emergency Laws
for Germany – Solidarity between French and German Students and
Workers.
Robert Clément, the director of the French wing of
the OFA, made no objection. General de Gaulle had left Paris, and
Clément was not sure whether the government would fall. Those
twenty-four hours of peaceful occupation were punctuated by the appearance of
numerous youth organization leaders appealing for financial support from the
OFA or wanting to hold structured dialogues on the OFA's future and necessary
changes in its procedures. My former co-workers were shocked to see me blithely
leading the attack on the offices where only a few months earlier I had been
pounding a typewriter. They expected me to be arrested, but I wasn't.
During the summer of 1968, I applied myself to publicizing facts
about German politics in a series of articles for Combat. On September
2, I wrote:
The key to European security and peace and
to the liberalization of Eastern Europe is the reunification of Germany into a
truly socialistic, democratic, and pacifistic nation. So long as the German
people refuse frankly to acknowledge their responsibility for the tragedy that
made Europe what it is today, so long as they will not expel from government
positions the survivors and the putrescent odors of the Third Reich, and so
long as a healthy national attitude continues to be confused with pan-Germanic
expansion and the lust for power, so long as the monopolies that rule its
economic and intellectual life are not reduced in authority, the status quo in
Europe will remain an intangible reality. All this is happening in a world in
which disasters far more bloody than Prague's seem barely to rouse the
conscience of the good-for-nothings in the capitalist and the communist blocs.
These have rigidly assumed an insufferable attitude of defiance toward each
other, even though they have duties to perform far more edifying than recourse
to arms, as well as responsibilities toward the Third World proportional to its
problems. In order to shatter that confrontation, in order to avoid letting
Europe relapse into a total cold war as
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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