Swiss Review 2/2018

19 Swiss Review / March 2018 / No.2 The sense of being able to change the world seemed to unite the movement, overcoming all differences. Yes, there was a sense of that. We’ll start again from scratch and do a bet- ter job, especiallymorally. Ethics was a very important aspect of 1968. Small factions of the movement came from the SP or the Workers’ Party. But a much larger part came from church circles. Greater solidarity with and justice for the Third World, guest workers and women – all of this was based on strong ethical convic- tions. What role did the protest against the Vietnam War play? This conflict raised many people’s po- litical awareness, as did the socialist revolution in Cuba, the fight to liber- ate French-occupied Algeria and also the dissident movements in the East- ern Block. These events showed us the emergent resistance against “imperi- alism” and the Eastern European re- gimes. Andwe sawourselves as part of this resistance. That is also the way the representatives of the prevailing order saw you. The authorities responded by repressing the protests. Yes, this was during the political cli- mate of the Cold War, secret files and espionage. But that’s just one half of the story. The other half was the will- ingness to engage in debate with us and to discuss our concerns, even amongst the traditional elites. Really? There was also a great spirit of open- ness in some of the universities. Uni- versity administrations and many professors wanted to debatewith us. I later experienced the same thing my- self as a teacher. I taught at a voca- tional college for the deaf in Zurich. Our principal was the president of a local SVP branch, but he still sat down with me once a week to discuss mat- ters. But weren’t you once barred from the profession? No, that’s not true. I was not appointed to a senior teaching position at a gram- mar school inWinterthur and lostmy teaching contract for political reasons, but I was able to teach at other state schools. Osterwalder (second from the right) and other members of the Revolutionary Marxist League an- nounced in June 1975 that the party would run in National Coun- cil elections in 12 cantons. Photo: Keystone Fritz Osterwalder, 50 years on: “Tradi- tional liberalism was one of the enemies, but it is the bedrock of a democratic society.” Photo: Adrian Moser