Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz
Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz ( ), b. Klotz (born March 3, 1942 in Oak Park , Illinois ) is an American author and former student activist. She was the wife of the activist of the German 1968 movement, Rudi Dutschke, who died in 1979 .
Life
Gretchen Klotz is the daughter of a pharmacist and a housewife. She began studying theology at Wheaton College , Illinois. As a passenger on a cargo ship , she came to Antwerp and started a course at the Goethe Institute in Munich . During a visit to West Berlin in the summer of 1964 she met Rudi Dutschke. After her temporary return to the USA, she wrote to offer him a free partnership, as she wanted to support him in his political work and not restrict it. In March 1965 Dutschke agreed, whereupon Klotz moved to Germany and began studying theology in Hamburg .
But soon the couple wanted to live together, which was rejected in Dutschke's circle of friends:
“Fixed ties, even marriages, were frowned upon among Rudi's friends. Women were seen as accessories that could be put away at will. "
Nevertheless, they moved into a joint apartment in Berlin in December 1965 and also planned to get married:
“That ended the need to explain to our parents. And that brought in money, because at that time the Senate paid every couple who married in West Berlin 3,000 marks. "
At the Free University of Berlin , Klotz continued her theology studies with Helmut Gollwitzer , which, after interruptions, she completed in 1971 with a master's degree. The subject of her thesis was “revolutionary movements in the time of Christ”. Gollwitzer and his wife soon became part of their closer circle of friends; He let the Dutschke family live temporarily in his villa in Berlin-Dahlem and later took care of Rudi Dutschke's funeral after his death.
Gretchen Klotz tried to implement equality between men and women in their partnership . She married Dutschke on March 23, 1966 and had three children with him during their marriage (Hosea-Che, Polly-Nicole and Rudi-Marek, who was only born after his father's death). She was one of the first partners of left student leaders in what was then the Socialist German Student Union , who campaigned for the interests of women. The idea of Commune I as a collective, non-alienated working and living community originally went back to her initiative.
As a mother, Dutschke-Klotz also took an active part in the political activities of the West Berlin student movement . After the assassination attempt on her husband, she helped him develop his language center again and learn to speak again in months of intensive care. After Dutschke's death in 1979, she moved back to the United States in 1985, where she lived in Waltham , Massachusetts ; since 2010 she has been living in Berlin again.
Dutschke biography
Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz is the author of the most detailed biography of Rudi Dutschke to date , which presents his origins and private circumstances as well as his political development in detail and personally, but also critically. It contains a lot of information that was hardly or not at all known until then, such as Dutschke's positive relationship to German unity or his utopia of a Berlin Soviet republic analogous to the Paris Commune .
She also published Dutschke's diaries in 2003, which he kept from 1963 until his death in 1979. In the afterword, she deals with various interpretations of her husband's politics today. In particular, its nationalistic appropriation by former comrades-in-arms like Bernd Rabehl finds its energetic contradiction.
Based on, among other things, Dutschke's diaries and the books of Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, the combined documentary and feature film Dutschke was created in 2009 , in which she also appeared or was portrayed by Emily Cox .
2018 - 50 years after the 1968 movement - Gretchen Dutschke looks back in a new book 1968. What we can be proud of on her life and the successes of the movement.
Fonts
- Rudi Dutschke. We had a barbaric, beautiful life. A biography. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1996, ISBN 978-3-462-02573-6 .
- as editor: Rudi Dutschke: Everyone has to live their whole life. The diaries 1963–1979. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2003, ISBN 978-3-442-73202-9 .
- 1968. What we can be proud of . Kursbuch Kulturstiftung gGmbH, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-961-96006-4 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz in the catalog of the German National Library
Footnotes
- ↑ Biography, p. 81.
- ↑ Biography, p. 81.
- ↑ Gretchen Dutschke A revolutionary degree . In: Free University of Berlin, ed. from the Press and Information Office of the Free University of Berlin, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87584-719-9 , page 87.
- ↑ Gerhard Bauß: The student movement of the sixties. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1977, p. 183.
- ↑ 1968 - The new book by Gretchen Dutschke | Official website. Accessed February 14, 2018 (English).
- ↑ sueddeutsche.de: Review
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dutschke-Klotz, Gretchen |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Klotz, Gretchen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American student activist, wife of Rudi Dutschke |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 3, 1942 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Oak Park , Illinois , United States |