Who's Rudi Dutschke?

I got a nice T-Shirt for my birthday that the German daily newspaper taz prints. It is just the street sign "Rudi-Dutschke-Straße" (link in German). Rudi Dutschke was a German student activist in the 60s who was shot and wounded in 1968, shortly after another student, Benno Ohnsorg, was shot dead. The Springer press was seen as responsible for stirring up the anti-student sentiment.

It has just recently been determined that the police officer who shot Benno Ohnsorg was actually a Stasi spy for Eastern Germany. This is causing the entire 68-movement to be reassessed in the columns of the newspapers.

The taz even got a piece of the Kochstr. that runs by their building renamed in Rudi-Dutschke-Straße in 2008 in remembrance of the shooting. The street crosses the Axel-Springer-Str, the street to which the Springer press relocated their main entrance so they didn't have to have the mailing address that would cause them such pain.

So anyway, I had this T-Shirt on in the lab today. "Is there something important on that street?" someone asked. Umhum. "But who is Rudi Dutschke?" Google him!

They did, but I still don't think they understood. This was some old guy, shot before they were born. Has nothing to do with the student protests that are bubbling up this week in Germany. I don't hope they turn violent, but we surely need a swift kick in the backside in Germany's educational system.