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In April 1967 Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to West Berlin to reassure its citizens that America, despite its preoccupation with the Far East, was still committed to keeping the city free. In light of the cheers that Lyndon Johnson and President Kennedy had garnered earlier, Humphrey expected to be warmly received. But a leftist collective at the Free University called Kommune I had other ideas. The communards decided to greet the visiting vice president with pudding-filled balloons. To prepare for this action they practiced throwing their missiles at trees in the Grunewald. Somehow the Springer Press got wind of these exercises and, in banner headlines, warned of “Planned Bomb Attacks against U.S. Vice President.” The activists were arrested before Humphrey arrived, which spared him the indignity of being covered in Quark. He did not, however, come away unscathed, for at every stop he was booed and heckled. He left the city angry and confused—his disillusionment another sign that the postwar love affair between America and West Berlin was losing some of its luster.

For all their provocative gestures, the protest demonstrations in West Berlin remained essentially nonviolent until June 2, 1967, when the Shah of Iran paid a visit to the city. Reza Shah Pahlavi was seen in Berlin’s leftist circles as the quintessential American lackey, but it was not enough for the students to denounce him as such. In line with their tendency to equate all contemporary evils with the sins of their parents, they labeled him “Another Hitler.” Alerted that there might be trouble during his Berlin visit, the Shah arrived with a large security guard drawn from his dreaded secret police, the Savak. When demonstrators shouted “Shah Murderer” at him during a reception at the Schöneberg Rathaus, the Savak went to work, beating the protesters with clubs. West Berlin police did not intervene. Later that evening, as the Shah and his wife arrived at the Deutsche Oper to attend a gala performance of the Magic Flute, another crowd of demonstrators gathered across the street and threw eggs and stones at the imperial couple. Once again the Savak went on the attack, this time assisted by the local police. When the demonstrators dispersed, the police gave pursuit. One protester, a twenty-six-year-old theology student named Benno Ohnesorg, who was participating in his first demonstration, fell to the pavement under a rain of blows. As he lay on the street a police officer shot him in the head—accidentally according to the officer, on purpose according to some witnesses. An hour later Ohnesorg was pronounced dead at Moabit Hospital. The next day Springer’s Bildzeitung ran a picture of the dead student, declaring that he had been killed by the demonstrators themselves. Günter Grass, on the other hand, called this “the first political murder in the Federal Republic.” Upon leaving town the next day, the shah was asked by West Berlin’s recently elected mayor, Heinrich Albertz, if he had heard about the fatality. Yes, said the shah, but the mayor should not let the incident get him down; that kind of thing happened in Iran every day.

Of course, the death of a political protester was anything but routine in West Berlin, and the Ohnesorg case provoked an extended bout of soul-searching. Mayor Albertz, who resigned his office in the wake of the shah riots, later argued that the authorities’ hard-line reaction to the escalating student demonstrations could best be understood in terms of West Berlin’s geopolitical vulnerability.

In the years after the building of the Berlin Wall we developed an extreme sensitivity to everyone and everything that had contributed to the reality that our city was now walled in. We were fully fixated on the fact that this city, in its current condition, could remain free only through seamless cooperation with the United States. . . . In this situation there suddenly appeared demonstrators with red flags and Ho-Chi-Minh slogans, attacking our guarantor power as a destroyer of humanity and freedom. It was hard to take psychologically.

Albrecht’s explanation overlooked the fact that police forces were reacting harshly to student protests in many other parts of the Western world at this time. Yet it was undoubtedly true that West Berlin’s unique status as a walled city, with its shut-in population of self-dramatizing students and short-fused police, made it a perfect stage for the bitterly confrontational politics of the era.

Benno Ohnesorg’s death convinced some in Berlin’s radical scene that the “system” was so rotten that it could not be reformed through the usual parliamentary methods.