Word: wessell
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...agree with Andrew Jamison's remarks on etiquette in Saturday's Crimson: hissing is bad manners; though if Herr Wessel is a member of the German SDS, he cannot be much concerned with manners or the "liberalistic" rules of fair debate...
Possibly some of the people who hissed Herr Wessel know something about the accomplishments of the German SDS in recent months. For instance, of the two people killed in the Easter riots, at least one and presumably both were killed by stones. Der Spiegel, until that point very favorable to the radical students, wrote: "Both these deaths must be charged to the SDS." (I am aware that last spring's Easter riots were precipitated by the brutal attack on Rudi Dutschke, but the death of two innocent people hardly aided Dutschke's cause.) Of course German policemen have been brutal...
Andrew Jamison seems to think that the Harvard community should be chastised for not submitting docilely to the spectacle of boredom and inarticulateness presented by Dietrich Wessel. It seems to me that Mr. Wessel's "history of German SDS" could have been better rendered by Michael Walzer in twenty minutes, or by a competent poet or film-maker in ten. Mr. Wessel was a failure as a rhetorician and as a disseminator of radical thought: that was the overriding reality of the Sept. 27 fiasco in Lowell Lec. He was simply out of touch with the mainstream spirit...
...hard to believe that Mr. Jamison is not putting us on: does he really feel that the tedious, humorless thought purveyed by Dietrich Wessel and by the more calcified thinkers of the radical left is worth an hour and more of our Friday evenings? It is even harder to believe that Mr. Jamison could be "embarrassed to go to Harvard" because of the audience's reactions: I felt, with every burst of laughter and derision that night, that we were a healthy body defending itself against strangulation. May our laughter and derision be stronger for the next Dietrich Wessel. John...
...radicals merely talk about the system and the war. Perhaps it takes people on all levels of commitment to bring about a truly radical movement. But it's hard for me to believe that radicalism is at all helped or strengthened by the kind of people who hissed Dietrich Wessel on Friday night. --ANDREW JAMISON...