HAPPENINGS
531
audience left the hall, pointing out that a semester had been lost. But the
students themselves stayed by the thousands, listening with peaceful
resignation to incorrigible bores, who finally threw them into apathy
or indifference. This is why talk finally cannot be justified - instead of
leading to rebellion, involuntarily, it bogs action down in filibusters.
Ironically, it's precisely in this kind of speculative resignation, this ten–
dency to justify, this critical and autocratic passion, at times openly
tiresome, that the weakness - and the fascinating power - of the
German student movement rests.
It is impossible to render these contradictions in conventional poli–
tical language. Nevertheless, we've witnessed the learned elaborations
of a most distinguished professor from Frankfurt, who, after having
been considered a "doctrinarian" of the movement, tastes once again
the academic pleasure of giving Marxist lessons on the inevitable limits
of protest, and the Oxford historian rediscovering in the passions of
these last months the recurrance of an ancestral Teutonic fury. After
having deplored for so many years the obedience to authority, the con–
formism and the apoliticism of German youth, after having taught us
that democracy means an apprenticeship even in disobedience, when
their propositions are taken seriously the professors are shocked.
For suddenly here are these students, generously stipended, who
can't face society's constraining rituals, who are disrupting the five-day
political week, upsetting the weekend intellectual, and all the reassuring
murmurs of conferences on social and literary humanism, and who have
plunked us suddenly right in the middle of a paradox. What the stu–
dents were doing might have been a challenge to the existing order, but
it was also an attack on the rules of the game of revolutionary tactics,
in so far as that game, classically played, requires canniness, violence
and dictatorship. In fact, the action of the students amounted to
bringing derision - the horse-laugh - into the street, or to making
Utopia the source of rules of conduct: it was a case of Art for Art's
Sake in revolution. And all this in spite of the talk about political order.
The paradox, however, is that Art for Art's sake, brought down into
the street, ceases to be gratuitous. The students' actions may have consti–
tuted esthetic spectacle in its purest form, but it was precisely this
gratuitous quality which so enraged the bourgeoisie. The shopkeepers in
Bonn simply could not understand how two thousand students from
Berlin could make such a long trek for the sole purpose of attending a
meeting one rainy afternoon, a meeting which, no matter how you looked
at it, led nowhere. The bourgeois takes being insulted and attacked
quite well, but he draws the line at having his intelligence challenged.
