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. His admirers included Rudi Dutschke.
He was a leading member of the fractious Socialist German Students' League. During the middle 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 ending of 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"). He was born in January 1943 at a time when suspicions were stirring among the German people that the Second World War might not end in the promised German victory. Rudolf Krahl, his father, and his mother, born Erna Schulze, were both employed in private sector business. Rudolf Krahl was no fan of the National Socialists during the Hitler years, but nor is there any indication that he engaged actively in political resistance. Where it came to upbringing, Krahl's parents appear to have provided their child with an upbringing marginally more liberal than would have been deemed conventional at the time. Hans-Jürgen was still very small when, probably early in 1944, he lost his right eye during the course of an aerial bomb attack. For the rest of his life he wore an artificial eye. By the time the European war ended in May 1945 the little family had moved to Stettin, but early in 1945 they had joined the flood of refugees desperate to escape from the advancing Soviet army, and ended up back in Sarstedt, the little town a short distance up-river of Hannover. It was in Sarstedt that he spent most of hus childhood. When he was 15 the family relocated to Alsfeld, some 100 kilometers further to the south. After he grew up he would look back on both the towns in which he spent his childhood as archetypal examples of conservative "small-town Germany".
According to his own later reports, as a boy Krahl became involved with the "Ludendorffbund", a right-wing extremist political organisation under the leadership (at least till it was outlawed in 1961) of Mathilde Ludendorff, widow of the infamous General Ludendorff 1865-1937. The "Ludendorffbund" was a populist movement dedicated to ethniocationalism and racism and other mystical extremist notions which had fallen out of fashion in western Europe in the aftermath of the twelve year Hitler nightmare, and was in its day regarded as somewhat "niche". 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.