Hans-Jürgen Krahl

Hans-Jürgen Krahl (17 January 1943 – 13 February 1970) was a West German philosophy student and political activist who came to wider prominence as a participant in the '68 Student Protest movement of which, in the eyes of admirers, he was a leading ideologue.

He was a leading member of the fractious Socialist German Students' League. During the mid-1960s, Krahl became a star student and doctoral pupil of the polymath-philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Early in 1969, after four years during which Krahl treated Adorno as an academic mentor, there was a falling out between the two men, however. This arose in the context of a student occupation of the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in which Krahl was involved. Adorno, as director of the institute, summoned the police to evict the "trespassing" students on 7 January 1969. Adorno died suddenly later that same year, eleven days after the end of the trial process that followed on from the events at the institute.

Krahl himself was only 27 when he was killed, a front-seat passenger in a motor accident on an icy road north of Marburg, barely six months after the death of Adorno. His reputation as the great theoretician of Europe's '68 movement, able and willing to grapple with both the ideological and the economic mechanisms of mature capitalism, persists among scholars of the political left. Much of Krahl's written work, which included large amounts of material delivered orally – albeit in perfectly formed prose structures – and recorded at the time, to be transcribed onto paper only much later, was published posthumously.

Life Provenance and early years Hans-Jürgen Krahl came from a lower-middle class ("kleinbürgerlich" / "petit bourgeois") background in what he later termed "the darkest recesses of Lower Saxony" (aus "den finstersten Teilen Niedersachsens"). By contrast, the CDU (political party), the centre-right party of Konrad Adenauer, of which Krahl became a member in 1961, was widely perceived as the heart of the political mainstream, particularly in the conservatively inclined small town German towns in which Krahl grew up. Nevertheless, as his political journey across the political spectrum continued through the 1960s, Krahl would come to view the CDU, with which he had engaged as an activist member between 1961 and 1963, with much the same level of contempt and distaste that he would epply to the "crypto-nazi" "Ludendorffbund". Meanwhile, he was still living in Alsfeld with his family when he became a "passionate founding member" of an Alsfeld branch of the "Junge Union", the youth wing of the CDU. (Krahl would later describe his two years as an activist member of the CDU as "an enormous step towards enlightenment" ("...) ein enormer Schritt an Aufklärung"). It enabled him to embark on "a sort of odyssey through the organisational structures of the ruling classes ("... gewissermaßen eine Odyssee durch die Organisationsformen der herrschenden Klasse hindurch"), and "I would like personally to commend myself for having taken part continuously for two years, with an enormous degree of mental consistency, in the CDU meetings of small town worthies in this dark province" ("... und es gehört, das möchte ich mir ganz persönlich zugute halten, ein enormes Ausmaß auch an psychischer Konsistenz dazu, in dieser finsteren Provinz zwei Jahre kontinuierlich an CDU-Versammlungen von Kleinstadt-Honoratioren teilzunehmen ..."). At the same time he joined the Coburger Convent Verdensia student fraternity.

By 1964 Krahl had left the CDU Alsfeld party branch. According to Krahl himself,

Death Late at night on 13 February 1970 Hans-Jürgen Krahl was a passenger in the front seat of a car travelling from Paderborn towards Marburg the B252 (main road). Conditions were icy and the car was involved in a collision with an oncoming truck near Wrexen (Diemelstadt). Krahl was killed instantly. Franz-Josef Bevermeier from Paderborn who had been driving the car at the time of the collision was taken to a hospital where he died three hours later. Three other passengers in the car were badly injured.

Philosophical development As the star doctoral student of the much admired Theodor Adorno, Krahl took as his point of departure Adorno's "Frankfurt School Critical theory" social critique, and built on ideas inferred from it in his doctoral dissertation and subsequent written work.

With these analyses, Krahl pursues a line of reasoning already resonating at the Frankfurt School, while foreshadowing analyses which, in the years ahead, would lead many militants and thinkers of the left to dismiss the revolutionary role of the factory worker class as being of diminished relevance.

The so-called Prague Spring and the ensuing Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 represented a series of events on which Krahl expressed himself with robust clarity. Like Dutschke, he was powerfully positive about attempts by the Dubček government to re-normalise Socialism outside the authoritarian constraints of Stalinism's enduring legacy. On the other hand, he was openly disappointed by the Prague reformers' vision of and alternative socialist model which was, he asserted, less than radical. After the Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague, Krahl shared his opinion that the "Soviet counter-revolution [had] prematurely and violently closed down the possibility – not without its own contradictions – of pursuing the revolutionary liberation struggle on the home turf of European socialism".

Legacy The year following his death a volume was compiled and published comprising the collected writings of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. It had been re-published a number of times. The 2005 (fourth German-language) re-issue runs to 440 pages. SDS membership had peaked at around 2,500 in 1968. Immediately after Krahl's death the organisation seemed to lose not merely its voice, but its entire sense of direction and purpose. It fell into a rapid succession of crises culminating, formally on 21 March 1970, in its dissolution. Tellingly, many of the currently available sources for the life of Hans-Jürgen Krahl are published not in German but in Italian.

Celebration In August 2005, shortly after Krahl's grave had been leveled because there were no longer any living relatives willing and able to pay for its maintenance, Hannover's Mayor Schmalstieg intervened to secure the grave plot, contributing to the costs. A group of friends teamed up to collect money for grave maintenance and, on 27 June 2007, oversaw the placing of a modernist replacement gravestone, designed by Uwe Spiekermann, on Krahl's flattened grave plot. The main speaker at the inauguration the new memorial stone was Adorno's biographer Detlev Claussen, and the man who 37 years earlier had already delivered the funeral oration at Krahl's funeral.