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Famous Like Me > Actor > C > Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Profile of Daniel Cohn-Bendit on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Daniel Cohn-Bendit  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 4th April 1945
   
Place of Birth: Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, Midi-Pyrénées, France
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Ash Wednesday 2004 at Biberach/Riss

Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit (born April 4, 1945) was a leader of the student protesters during May 1968 in France. He is currently co-president of the group European Greens - European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.


Childhood

Cohn-Bendit was born in France to German-Jewish parents who had fled Nazism in 1933. He spent his childhood in Paris. He moved to Germany in 1958, where his father had been a lawyer since the end of the war. He attended the Odenwaldschule in Frankfurt, a secondary school for children of the enlightened upper middle class. Being officially stateless at birth, when he reached the age of 18 he was entitled to German and French citizenships, but he renounced the latter in order to avoid conscription.

May 1968

He returned to France in 1966 to study sociology at the University of Nanterre (a North-Western suburb of Paris). He sooned joined the larger and classic national anarchist federation Fédération anarchiste, which he left in 1967 in favour of the smaller and local Groupe anarchiste de Nanterre and the Noir et rouge magazine. Although residing in Paris, he was frequently able to travel back to Germany, where he was notably influenced by the murder 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 student organization of the SPD, for a lecture in Paris, which had an influence on the later May events.

In Nanterre Cohn-Bendit was a leader in claims for more sexual freedom, with actions such as participating the occupation of the girls' premisses, interrupting the speech of a minister who was inaugurating a swimming pool in order to demand free access to the girls' dormitory, which contributed in attracting to him a lot of student supporters later to be called the Mouvement du 22 mars, a group characterized by a mixture of Marxist, sexual and anarchist semantics. On the fall of 1967 rumours of his upcoming expulsion from the university led to a local students strike, and his expulsion was cancelled. On the 22 of March 1968 students occupied the administrative offices, and the closing of the university on the 2nd of May helped move the protests to downtown Paris.

From the 3rd of May 1968 onwards, massive student riots erupted in Paris against Charles de Gaulle's government, led mainly by left-wing anti-communists. The already media-savvy Cohn-Bendit quickly emerged as a public face of the student protesters, along with Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar and Alain Krivine. His Jewish origins were exploited by the movement to enhance the comparison between authorities and fascism, a common trend of 1968 counter-culture, with slogans such as "We are all German Jews".

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, caused the trade unions (and eventually the Communist Party) support the students, and from May 13 on, France was struck by a general strike.

However Cohn-bendit had already retreated on the 10th of May with a few friends in the Atlantic coast city of Saint-Nazaire, seeing that his Nanterre group had become a minority without political influence in the larger Paris students movement. Cohn-Bendit's political opponents took advantage of his German passport and had him expelled from Saint-Nazaire to Germany on the 22nd of May as a "seditious alien". On the 27th the Communist-led workers signed the Accords de Grenelle with the government; on the 30th supporters of the president organized a successful demonstration; new elections were called and at the end of June 68 Charles de Gaulle was back in power.

On the whole Cohn-Bendit had partcipated 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 nineties on his return to France.

The Frankfurt years

Back in Frankfurt in the family house, Cohn-Bendit became one of co-founders of the autonomist group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle) in Rüsselsheim. In that group was also his friend Joschka Fischer. Both were later to become leaders of the Realo wing of the German Green Party, alongside many former communist, and non-communist libertarian leftists.

Some have suggested that the group participated in violent action, which was common in the German extreme-left of the early Seventies. But testimony from witnesses appears contradictory, sometimes unreliable. Communal apartments were common on the Left, and peaceful political activists could easily have shared living quarters with terrorists, without further collaboration. In 2003, a request was presented by Frankfurt prosecutors to the European Parliament, requesting they waive the immunity of MEP Cohn-Bendit, in the context of a criminal investigation against Hans-Joachim Klein, but the request was rejected by the assembly. Cohn-Bendit admitted having helped Klein on several instances, notably when Klein surrendered to the police.

While Fischer was more concerned with demonstrations, Cohn-Bendit worked in the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung bookshop and ran a kindergarten, with the stated ambition of radically transforming German mentalities. Later in 2001, he was accused of pedophilia in the context of a political campaign against Joschka Fischer as German minister of foreign affairs, and in the wider context of conservative movements seeking to undermine the cultural legacy of May 1968. The ground of the accusation was the following quote from his book Le grand bazar, published in 1976: "It happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and began to tickle 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 even so." Cohn-Bendit acknowledged that the passage had been carelessly written and recognized it as inappropriate. He asked for the text to be understood in the context of the sexual revolution of the Seventies and the provocations of the time. No former parent or child from Frankfurt Kindergarten expressed any complaint, and a group was even formed in his defense.

In the late Seventies, as many revolutionary movements were petering out, he became editor of the Pflasterstrand, the alternative magazine which served as house organ to the anarchist-oriented Sponti-Szene in Frankfurt. There he begun taking part in eco-struggles against nuclear energy and the expansion of the Frankfurt airport. When the Sponti movement officially accepted parliamentary democracy in 1984, he joined the German Green Party.

In 1988 he published in French "Nous l'avons tant aimée, la révolution", a book full of nostalgy for the 1968 counter-culture, and where he announced his shifting for more centrist policies.

In 1989, he became deputy mayor of Frankfurt, in charge of multicultural affairs. Immigrants made up some 30% of the city at that time. He also developed a more tolerant policy towards drugs addicts.

European MP

In 1994, he was elected to the European parliament, although he had been placed on the eigth rank only on the electoral list, because of his support of military intervention in Bosnia, German Greens at the time not supporting the resuming of German military intervention abroad.

At the next European elections in 1999 he reentered French politics as the leader of the French Green Party (Les Verts) list. He found considerable support in the French media, who often feature him, even when he does not represent or is at odds with the French Green party. He reached percentage of 9,72 of votes, a score since then unequaled by French Greens.

In 2002 he became president of the Green parliamentary group, together with the European orthodox anti-leftist Monica Frassoni.

Throughout the Nineties and early 2000's, Cohn-Bendit attracted controversy for his independent views, from the Right for being a strong proponent of freer immigration, the legalization of soft drugs, and the abandonment of nuclear power, from the Left for his pro-free market policies, supporting military interventions in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and frequent collaboration with centrist personalities (Bernard Kouchner, François Bayrou...).

His disregard for conventional European politics of Left and Right has made him more unpopular in France than in Germany. The French Green Party and the French Left in general remain more attached to these distinctions, whereas in the German Green Party, the moderate Realo wing had already won over the hardline Fundi wing, possible alliances with the Conservatives were no longer taboo, and "Blairist" policies under the center-left Schröder government, such as Agenda 2010 and the Hartz I - IV laws, found considerable support. He was also accused of not giving to the French party the percentage of income that all MEPs and other elected members are supposed to give to their party, although the party had officially agreed to exempt him before his first election in France. This, alongside his pro-European attitudes, led him to participate to the 2004 European elections on the German side, where he became the first male candidate on the list.

In February 2004, in the context of the preparation of his electoral campaign and in the wider context of the final drafting of the European constitution, to which his friend Joschka Fischer directly participated as German minister of foreign affairs, he led the foundation of the European Green Party in Rome, which he described as the first stone of European citizenship. Other commentators described this new structure as a mere adaptation of the former Federation of European Green Parties, only delegates from national parties being allowed to vote, individual supporters being only entitled to receive information, and all other federations of European parties having had to adapt their statuses later in 2004 to the newly edicted regulations from the European Commission about European political parties in order to continue receive public fundings. However Cohn-Bendit as usual was early and energetic in presenting this innovation to the media.

During this congress in Rome he also confirmed his involvement in favour of free software. He publicly confessed not understanding much about computer terms, but supporting license-free software as part of a stronger market economy.

In 2005 he took an active part in the campaign in favour of the European constitution during the French referendum. The treaty was considered by a large part of the Left as the European version of globalization, and Cohn-Bendit became loathed by the campaigners against the treaty as one of the symbols of Center-Left leaders collaborating with neo-liberalism through international institutions, along with Pascal Lamy from the Socialist Party. He also singled himself out by appearing publicly with right-wing leaders, contrarily to the tactics adopted by the French Green party and the Center-Left during that campaign.

Bibliography

He is the co-author, with his brother Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, of Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (1968). This book combines an account of the events of May 1968 with a critique of Stalinism, the French Communist Party and the trade union establishment. It remains available today and has had some lasting influence on anarchist and socialist thought.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Daniel Cohn-Bendit