¡Viva Rudi!
Rudi Dutschke, Germany’s Che, is another one of these sad 68er martyr figures that wanted to change the world and, well, actually did. But then the stragglers come along, no longer in power/never really were in power (Greens, Linkspartei.PDS) and need a medienwirksame (media-effective) provocation to get a little coverage and a couple of votes (Hey brother, have you got a dime?) and exploit his myth by choosing to name a street after him. Not just any street, of course. It too has to have a symbolic value, and does.
Berlin’s Kochstr. is were the powerful Axel Springer publishing house resides, one of Rudi’s favorite Feindbilder (enemy icons). Axel Springer is still synonymous with evil here (if you are left or middle-to-left), you see. And not just because it publishes crappy newspapers, you must understand. It is because it publishes the Bild, an almost holy Feindbild, the quintessence of evil. There’s a whole anti-Bild industry out there. I don’t quite understand why, but this animosity is real.
I find the Bild very entertaining and quite revealing when it comes to native culture and harmless and, if anything, apolitical and they even print pictures of naked women in there for crying out loud so what’s the big deal? But that is neither here nor there. It’s on Kochstr., oops, I mean Rudi-Dutschke-Boulevard.
Die Bild lesen? Ich bin doch nicht blöd!
Deutsche Kommentare? Logisch.
