Education: Battle of Berlin

Professor Jurgen Zerche was lecturing on political science one day this spring when a band of some 70 young leftists barged into his classroom at the Free University of Berlin and began shouting curses at him. His offense: he had criticized the appointment of a Trotskyite professor. The students warned him that unless he recanted they would hold him prisoner until he starved to death. Zerche escaped by jumping out of a window.

Historian Alexander Schwan nearly met the same fate. His crime was that he had complained that student ideas of justice were similar to those of the Nazis. Another band of youths invaded his classroom, denounced him as "Professor Schwein [pig]" and tried to throw him out of the window. Schwan's own students formed a phalanx around him, however, and led him to safety.

Many West German universities have had student protests in recent years, but no demonstrations have been so continuously disruptive as those at the Free University. Its militant students and teaching assistants repeatedly come storming out of their favorite Kneipen (taverns) to break up classes. "They don't want learning," complains Political Scientist Richard Lowenthal, himself a onetime leftist youth leader. "They want to conquer the Free University and turn it into an institute for party training."

Nonpolitical departments like science still operate fairly normally, but the turmoil has produced a shambles in the fields of economics, sociology, philosophy and political science. Said a Cologne newspaper: "There is not a university in the country that seems so near the brink of disaster."

Fading Ideals. The conflict is particularly ironic because the Free University was originally organized with U.S. backing in 1948 as a democratic counterpart to the once great Humboldt University, which had fallen under Communist domination when Berlin was divided after World War II. Massively supported by the Ford Foundation, the Free University was to be a "community of teachers and learners." Its standards were high, its equipment excellent, its faculty idealistic. It also broke with German tradition by allowing a student council to take part in its administration.

As postwar idealism faded, however, so did good intentions. Senior professors gradually took control, and lectures often amounted to little more than the standard German classroom scene: a snowy-haired professor reading from his next book and refusing to answer student questions. At the same time, militant students from West Germany flocked to the campus, partly because Berlin was exciting, but also because the move to Berlin exempted them from the military draft. Built for only 10,000 students, the Free University eventually grew to more than 20,000.