Sigrid Damm-Rüger

Sigrid Damm-Rüger (born Sigrid Rüger: 1939 - 1995) was a German feminist activist who initially came to prominence in September 1968 through a tomato throwing incident at the 23rd congress of the German Socialist Students' Union, and subsequently became an author specialising in professional education and training.

Several commentators believe that the tomato throwing incident was the event that launched the second wave of the German women's movement.

Life University admission and politicisation Sigrid Rüger was born in Berlin. By 1961 she was working for her Abitur in Frankfurt. Often seen as a school final exam, the Abitur opens the way in Germany to university-level education. Rüger was working for the exam not as a secondary school pupil, but at the newly opened "Hessenkolleg", using the recently introduced alternative education route "Zweiter Bildungsweg", which was designed to open up a route to university admission for older candidates. In or around 1962, after passing her Abitur, Rüger enrolled at the US-backed Free University (FU) in Berlin as a student of Theatre studies. She quickly switched to Politics and Sociology even though, as at least one commentator has pointed out, student radicals identified as the "generation of '68" were scathingly scornful of conventional views of Sociology at this time. She became a member of the German Socialist Student Union ("Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund" / SDS) within which she belonged to the "Universities' Political Working Group" ("Hochschulpolitische Arbeitskreis"). The focus of her student life became university politics at the Free University of Berlin. Here she was elected, in 1964, as a student spokeswoman for the Philosophy Faculty. In 1965 she became a student spokeswoman in the university senate. During the sit-in of 22 June 1966 it was Rüger who several times was sent by the gathering of several thousand protesting students to deliver their demands to the university senate. The ways in which she reported back to the massed ranks of protestors on the progress of negotiations within the senate were widely seen to have violated hitherto customary principals of confidentiality.

First impressions of the German Socialist Student Union ("Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund" / SDS) "I was drawn to the SDS because it discussed topics which otherwise were not discussed at the FU, but which were nevertheless precisely the things that interested me; things like international politics, political structures and inter-relationships, fascism, authoritarian personality structures and university democracy. ... I also joined the student parliament. I was keen to find out what the students could bring to the table, what could be changed .... That was all discussed in the SDS. For me that was all incredibly helpful. So much so that in the beginning I did not once notice the [uneven] power balance [between men and women in the SDS]. I was simply spellbound by the matters discussed. Another aspect was certainly in play, which meant that I did not so readily spot that power imbalance: my friend Susanne [Schunter-Kleemann] was the one who got me into the SDS. She was already in it - she had arrived at Berlin before I did. She took me along to the SDS ... which meant I was already part of a group of women friends, and I rather identified with their feminine solidarity. It frequently happened that the women in the SDS joined because their husbands were members, but I was introduced by another woman who already had women friends there, and they became my women friends too." "Der SDS hat mich angezogen, weil er Themen diskutiert hat, die sonst nicht an der Uni diskutiert wurden, die aber genau das trafen, wofür ich mich interessierte, also Internationale Politik, Zusammenhänge, Faschismus, autoritäre Persönlichkeitsstrukturen, Demokratie an der Hochschule. Das war zu der gleichen Zeit, zu der ich in den Konvent, also das Studentenparlament, gegangen bin. Ich interessierte mich dafür, was man als Student einbringen konnte, was zu ändern war … Das alles wurde im SDS diskutiert. Das war für mich unheimlich hilfreich. Insofern habe ich die Machtverhältnisse [zwischen Männern und Frauen innerhalb des SDS] zunächst einmal gar nicht wahrgenommen. Ich war thematisch gebannt. Ein anderer Aspekt hat sicherlich dazu beigetragen, daß ich die Machtverhältnisse nicht so stark wahrgenommen habe, nämlich daß meine Freundin Susanne [Schunter-Kleemann] mich in den SDS geholt hat. Sie war nämlich schon drin, … sie war vor mir in Berlin. Sie hat mich zum SDS mitgenommen … Da war ich also schon in eine Frauenfreundschaft, in eine Frauensolidarität eingebunden und habe mich eher danach ausgerichtet. Häufig war es so, daß Frauen mit ihren Männern in den SDS gegangen sind, ich bin hingegen mit einer Frau dort erschienen, die dort bereits Freundinnen hatte, die wiederum meine Freundinnen wurden." It later turned out that she had been aiming not at Krahl, who was gay and the complete opposite of a misogynist, but at the face of Helmut Schauer the SDS president at the time. "That evening Krahl sat in the bath and cried", recalled a mutual friend, Tilman Fichter; "Then Sigrid came round to comfort him. That's how she was."

An immediate practical result of the tomato throwing was that it prevented the men who were running the conference from letting a powerful speech from Helke Sander, in which Sander appealed for the SDS to support the women's political agenda, to be followed by the next agenda item without any discussion. Of the two publications Stern during the 1960s was frequently more ready to publish criticism of the conservative elements in the West German political establishment than Spiegel: it was Stern that now devoted its own lengthy article to the "Protest of the SDS Women". ("Ich habe die Tomaten geworfen, um den Mädchen Mut zu emotinaler und aggressiver Artikulierung ihrer Probleme zu machen." Within the student movement and across the universities sector, the tomato throwing incident galvanised awareness of the demands of the Action Council among both backers and opponents.)