Cohn-Bendit Is A Holocaust Survivor

Cohn-Bendit was born in France to German-Jewish parents in 1945. They had fled Nazism in 1933. He spent his childhood in Montauban. He moved to Germany in 1958, where his father had been a lawyer since the end of the war. He attended the Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim near Frankfurt, a secondary school for children of the upper middle class.

Being officially stateless at birth, when he reached the age of 18 he was entitled to German and French citizenship, but he renounced the latter in order to avoid conscription. 8

Cohn-Bendit Slithers Into France

He returned to France in 1966 to study sociology at the University of Nanterre, under the supervision of the network society's theorist Manuel Castells. He soon joined the anarchist federation, Fédération Anarchiste.
 

Goes Between The French And German Communist Parties

Although residing in Paris, he was frequently able to travel back to Germany, where he was notably influenced by the death of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967, and the assault on Rudi Dutschke in April 1968. In this tense context, he invited Karl Dietrich Wolff, leader of the Socialist German Student Union, for a lecture in Paris, which would prove influential to later May events.

An Anarchist's Dream Of Co-Eds, Drugs, And Demonstrations

In Nanterre, Cohn-Bendit was a leader in claims for more sexual freedom, with actions such as participating in the occupation of the girls' premises, and the girls' dormitory. The March 22nd Movement was a group characterized by a mixture of Marxist, sexual, and anarchist semantics.

In the autumn of 1967, rumours of his upcoming expulsion from the university led to a local students' strike, and his expulsion was cancelled. On March 22, 1968, students occupied the administrative offices, and the closing of the university on May 2 helped move the protests to downtown Paris.

 

The French Riots Of 1968

From May 3, 1968 onwards, massive Communist student riots erupted in Paris against Charles de Gaulle's government, led mainly by non-Communist left-wing youth. Cohn-Bendit quickly emerged as a public face of the student protests, along with Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar and Alain Krivine.

Gentile French students often referred to him as the 'Foreign Juide'. His fellow Communists took up the chant, "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands" ("We are all German Jews").
 

The 1968 Riots

The French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais described Cohn-Bendit as the "German anarchist Cohn-Bendit" and denounced student protesters as "sons of the upper bourgeoisie"... "who will quickly forget their revolutionary flame in order to manage daddy's firm and exploit workers there". Continued police violence, however, prompted trade unions (and eventually the Communist Party) to support the students, and from May 13 onwards, France was struck by a general strike.

Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France on May 22 as a "seditious alien". On May 27 the Communist-led workers signed the Grenelle agreements with the government; on May 30 supporters of the president organized a successful demonstration; new elections were called and at the end of June 1968 the Gaullists were back in power, now occupying three-quarters of the French National Assembly.


On the whole, Cohn-Bendit had participated little in the May 1968 Paris events, which continued without him, but he had become a legend, which was to be used later in the 1990s upon his return to France.

An Aging Hippie Recluse

Back in Frankfurt in the family house, Cohn-Bendit became one of co-founders of the autonomist group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle) in Rüsselsheim. From this point his fate was linked with Joschka Fischer, another leader in the group. Both were later to become leaders of the Realo wing of the German Green Party, alongside many former Communist.
 

Hans-Joachim Klein Is An Associate

Cohn-Bendit was now involved with other Jewish terrorists. He shared an apartment with Hans-Joachim Klein, who is related to the Entebbe hijacking, and terror attacks on French Jews.  Frankfurt prosecutors to the European Parliament, requested they waive the immunity of MEP Cohn-Bendit, in the context of a criminal investigation against the terrorist, but the request was rejected by the assembly.

Cohn-Bendit admitted having helped Klein on several instances, notably when Klein surrendered to the police. 7
 

Allegations of Pedophilia At A Kindergarten

Cohn-Bendit worked in the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung bookshop and ran a kindergarten. Later in 2001 he was accused of pedophilia.  "It happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and started to stroke me. I reacted differently according to circumstances, but their desire posed a problem for me. I asked them: 'Why don't you play together? Why have you chosen me, and not the other kids?' But if they insisted, I caressed them still."

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