Abstract

Who was Hans-Jürgen Krahl? As the opening chapter of his book Konstitution und Klassenkampf indicates, he was a student from Southern Germany whose life largely coincided with that of the whole German New Left. Born in a backward, almost feudal social context, he originally became fascinated by the promise of bourgeois emancipation. Thus, he moved from the CDU to Heidegger's philosophy, logical positivism, to finally come to a New Left Marxism and a revolutionary viewpoint. After a period of intense theoretical and practical involvement in the turbulent politics of the late 1960s, his life came to an abrupt end in 1970 in an automobile accident — precisely at the time of the decline of New Left politics.