This was the world in which I grew up, until I left my Bavarian home in the South of Germany in 1964 and went to West Berlin to study sociology at the Free University of Berlin. My first demonstration was for my father, a left wing writer and journalist. The president of the university had banned him to speak in the auditorium maximum of the Free University of Berlin, because he had advocated the recognition of Eastern Germany as a separate state. Before I knew it, I was elected into the left student representative organ and took part in the demonstration against the Shah of Persia on the 2nd of June in 1967, where the student Benno Ohnesorg was killed with a shot in the head by an alleged policeman of West Berlin, Karl-Heinz Kurras, who claimed to have acted in self-defence. This was the match that had been put to the dry wood of a drifting student generation, who had grown up under the heavy yoke of the guilt of the holocaust. The parent generation had been largely silent on their role during the Nazi regime and put all their energy into rebuilding the ruins of German towns and their own material existence on the upward wave of the German “economic miracle”. Some thirty years later it became known that Kurras was a hitman of the STASI, the secret service of East Germany, who was never held responsible for the murder. It also turned out that the activists of the student-upheaval regularly crossed over the wall to East Berlin to receive instructions and money for the strategic subversion of Western academia.
One could only enter West Berlin through a corridor passing through East Germany, being heavily controlled by soldiers of the Volksarmee, the Peoples Army. West Berlin was enclosed in a high wall with barbed wire, behind it a band of raked earth, the so called “Stripe of Death” with watch towers to shoot down any person who tried to flee from the socialist paradise of the anti-fascist, anticapitalistic People’s Republic.
Somehow the Western student generation was displeased with the state of affairs. For reasons that need depth psychology to be explained, they were not displeased with the obvious suppression of the people, the gloomy and joyless atmosphere and the very poor economic standard in the Eastern part of Germany – no freedom, no coffee, no bananas, dim light bulbs; they adopted the communist interpretation of history, that capitalism had produced the holocaust and communism was the salvation – despite the fact that wherever communism ruled, mass murder by the millions through force of state was the rule. This ideological interpretation of history has gone through metamorphosis, but is still in force and is passed on to the young generation. Students began to become enthused by socialist theory, study groups of Marx and Engels and the plethora of theorists of the communist revolution were formed, and students who could master the vocabulary of dialectic-materialism had a bonus for leadership. The Frankfurt School of philosophers and sociologists had a major impact on the 1968 movement. Realising that in an increasingly affluent society the proletariat was no longer the revolutionary subject, they created a new synthesis of Marxism and Freudian depth psychology, so called Psycho-Marxism, with the old aim to bring down the bourgeois society.
The 400 page work of Simone de Beauvoir, The Other Sex, infused my generation with the idea, that now the historical moment had come to throw off the patriarchal yoke which had supressed women for thousands of years, ever since matriarchy had disappeared a few thousand years ago from the stage of history. Simone de Beauvoir said the famous sentence: “One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman!” – which can be seen as the nucleus of gender-ideology. She also said: “Flee the slavery of motherhood!” – which is the nucleus of the demographic crisis of our time. Fleeing the slavery of motherhood, meant to flee from the “prison of matrimony” into free sex, made possible by the availability of the pill since the beginning of the 1960ies. Beauvoir fought for the legalization of abortion by having them performed in her Paris saloon. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre presented themselves to the world as the model for “free love”. Accounts of the cost in the coinage of severe depression and psychological disorders can be found in her novels.
In the increasingly agitated atmosphere of the mid 1960ies, the tables of the student canteen were constantly covered with flyers, which in the pre-electronic age had to be produced laboriously with primitive printing machinery. There was constant ideological input, increasingly on sexual issues. Wilhelm Reich, an apostate of Sigmund Freud, was rediscovered, who had founded the “sex-pol movement” in the Weimar Republic putting his book The Sexual Revolution into practise. As most cultural revolutionists, he temporarily was a member of the Communist Party and wanted to bring down the bourgeois society.
Reich understood that sexualisation of the masses, especially the youth, was the means of choice to achieve his aim. Reich wanted to abolish the “sex-negating atmosphere and structure of the family” by using sexualisation to release children and youth from their family ties: “[R]evolutionary youth is hostile and destructive to the family.” Reich promotes masturbation as a “way out of the harm of abstinence” and sexual intercourse starting at puberty, because, “[S]uppression [of youth sexuality] is essential for maintaining compulsory marriage and family as well as for producing submissive citizens.” Reich was well aware that sexualisation of youth blocks the relationship to God. “We do not discuss the existence or non-existence of God—we merely eliminate the sexual repressions and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents.”1
What Reich says is true: Indeed sexualisation of children is “hostile and destructive” to marriage and the family, it is hostile and destructive to faith and creates rebellious individuals.
The astounding fact is, that the predominantly Christian society somehow lacked an immune system that would recognize and reject the infiltration with poisonous ideological viruses: communist theory, radical feminism and the destruction of the moral regulation of sexuality. These three always come in a package. All cultural revolutionists of our time have their intellectual roots in some derivate of communist ideology that believes in creating justice by stateinduced egalitarianism; they promote radical feminism that wages war against the man, the mother and the child. And they are adepts of the theory of Herbert Marcuse, that the so called “liberation of sexuality” will bring about a paradise without power and suppression.
What a temptation! To control the sexual drive and integrate sexuality as an expression of love into the whole person, which is a unity of mind, soul and body, has always been a challenge since the expulsion from paradise. It was the most obvious differentiating factor of the early Christians from their pagan environment.
Countless generations before us aligned themselves to that challenge and built up the magnificent, unparalleled European culture by their sacrifices. And here comes Marcuse and his colleagues of the Frankfurt School and seduces a generation by presenting sexual satisfaction, devoid of any moral limitation, as the path to peace and happiness for all.
Fifty ears later we live in the social and psychological ruins that a demoralized sexuality creates with no paradise at the horizon, but a new totalitarianism creeping into our society and undermining our democratic polity. It cannot be otherwise: As Alexis de Tocqueville discovered when rendering an account for the working of Democracy in America in 1835: Christianity is the foundation of democracy, because it teaches people to strive for goodness – a task that the state can never perform.
The cultural revolutionists in the wake of 1968 are radical atheists, that hate the Catholic Church, unless they put on a cloak of modernist, liberalistic theology to undermine the Church from within.
The blunt attack on Christian sexual morality by the followers of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse took a sophisticated turn in the 1990ies by the creation of gender theory. Gender theory takes the sexual revolution to the very foundation of human existence by proclaiming that we can choose and change our sex voluntarily. It denies the fact that we a born either as man or