The Young Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Der Spiegel is often accused of being anti-clerical. The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Germany has given anti-clericals a vast amount of material to work with. But Der Spiegel is also willing to tell the truth about corruption in the liberal icons of society, in this case the revolutionaries of 1968 and their sexual abuse of children — of course abuse motivated by the purest ideological motives.

The 68ers wanted to get rid of all inhibition and repression, including the repression of sexual contact between adults and children. Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man’s aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.

To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age.

All bourgeois repression and prejudice had to be overcome:

“At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear,” Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

A lack of respect for boundaries is putting it mildly. One could also say that the boundaries were violently torn open.

In 1970 a kindergarten put leftist sexual enlightenment into practice.

The educators’ notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

According to the records, a “sex exercise” was conducted on Dec. 11 and a “fucking hour” on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: “In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us.”

Nor was this a fringe institution, but was sponsored and staffed by a university:

On April 7, 1970, the Berlin state parliament discussed the Rote Freiheit after-school center. As it turned out, the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin was behind the center. In fact, the institute had established the facility and provided the educators who worked there.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a teacher during this time and described his sexual experiences with children.

In his 1975 autobiographical book “Der grosse Basar” (“The Great Bazaar”), Green Party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit describes his experiences as a teacher in a Frankfurt Kinderladen. When the children entrusted to his care opened his fly and began stroking his penis, he writes, “I was usually quite taken aback. My reactions varied, depending on the circumstances.”

Danny the Red liked both little boys and little girls. He wrote:

«Mon flirt permanent avec tous les gosses prenait vite des formes d’érotisme. Je sentais vraiment que les petites filles, à 5 ans, avaient déjà appris comment m’emmener en bateau, me draguer [the lttle 5-year-old girls had already learned how to hit on me]. C’est incroyable. La plupart du temps, j’étais désarmé.» (L’Express)

In 1982 he continued enthusing about adult-child eroticism:

“At nine in the morning, I join my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and 2 years. I wash their butts, I tickle them, they tickle me and we cuddle. … You know, a child’s sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn’t the same as it is with the four-to-six-year-olds. When a little, five-year-old girl starts undressing, it’s great, because it’s a game. It’s an incredibly erotic game.”

The Leftists say it was all for the good of the children, unlike the nasty sexual activity that went on in the Catholic Church:

Does what happened in a number of the Kinderladen qualify as abuse? According to the criteria to which Catholic priests have been subjected, it clearly does, says Alexander Schuller, the sociologist. “Objectively speaking, it was abuse, but subjectively it wasn’t,” says author Dannenberg. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherents to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.

That of course is what pedophiles and pederasts say: it is for the good of the children.

Adult-child sex became part of the platform of the Green Party

At its convention in Lüdenscheid in 1985, the Greens’ state organization in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, without any age restrictions. “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalized,” the “Children and Youth” task force of the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper at about the same time.

Leftist newspapers celebrated pedophilia liberation.

During this time, no other newspaper offered pedophiles quite as much a forum as the alternative, left-leaning Tageszeitung, which shows how socially acceptable this violation of taboos had become in the leftist community. In several series, including one titled “I Love Boys,” and in lengthy interviews, men were given the opportunity to describe how beautiful and liberating sex with preadolescent boys supposedly was. “There was a great deal of uncertainty as to how far people could go,” says Gitti Hentschel, the co-founder and, from 1979 to 1985, editor of Tageszeitung. Those who, like Hentschel, were openly opposed to promoting pedophilia were described as “prudish” — as opposed to freedom of expression. “There is no such thing as censorship in the Tageszeitung,” was the response.

Now the Leftists claim that anyone who brings this part of their history up is an anti-Leftist tool of the reactionaries (sounds familiar?).

“Such accusations are also part of an attempt to denounce social progress,” sexologist and 1968 veteran Gunter Schmidt wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau. “On the whole, the social changes that are associated with the number 1968 were more likely to have led to the prevention of abuse.”

This is a very mild way of recalling the past. It is certainly not shared by everyone who was part of the leftist educational experiments of the day.

There were, as in the Catholic Church, a few brave, honest incorrupt people on the Left who were horrified by this sexualization of children.

One of the few leaders of the left who staunchly opposed the pedophile movement early on was social scientist Günter Amendt. “There is no equitable sexuality between children and adults,” Amendt said, expressing his outrage over the movement. Alice Schwarzer, the founder of the political women’s magazine Emma, also spoke out against the downplaying of sex with children and defined it as what it really was: outright abuse.

Amendt recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles. “There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time,” he says. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that this horrific episode came to an end. In 1994, the Pedos appeared in Tageszeitung for the last time, and even that publication recognized that intercourse with little boys was no different than with little girls, who, thanks to the women’s movement, have long been deemed worthy of protection.

They were, like Tom Doyle in the Catholic Church, ostracized.

Although Der Spiegel has given extensive coverage to clerical failings, it also keeps raising the uncomfortable question: Why is it so bad if priests have sex with minors and OK if Roman Polanski and Daniel Cohn-Bendit have sex with minors? Is the fuss about child molestation in the Church simply a cover for anti-clericalism or anti-Christianity? Shouldn’t sauce for the clerical goose also be sauce for the artistic and political ganders?

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