Daniel Cohn-Bendit
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Cohn-Bendit was born in France to German-Jewish parents who fled Nazism. His parents returned to Germany soon after the end of the war, and he first went to school there. He returned to France in 1965 to attend university, as a German citizen, at the Department of sociology of the University of Nanterre.
In May 1968 Paris exploded with student riots against Charles de Gaulle's government and then a general strike . The charismatic Cohn-Bendit, long a leader of leftist student groups, quickly emerged as a leader and a public face of the student protesters. His Jewishness and/or Germanness being an issue to opposition to his activism, after the protests had collapsed and de Gaulle emerged victorious he was expelled from the country for being a seditious alien.
Back in Germany, he became one of co-founders of the autonomist group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle) in Rüsselsheim. In that group, was also his friend Joschka Fischer. Cohn-Bendit followed a number of careers in Germany before joining the German Green Party and becoming deputy mayor of Frankfurt in 1989. He was elected to the European parliament in 1994, and then in 1999 he reentered French politics as the leader of the French Green Party (Les Verts) list for the European elections.
Cohn-Bendit has long 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 and for supporting military interventions in Bosnia and Afghanistan.
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.
He is a also a noted football fan.
External links
- Daniel Cohn-Bendit (http://www.cohn-bendit.de/) (de en fr)
- Detailed English Autobiography (http://www.cohn-bendit.org/dcb/bio-lang-engl.htm) (en)
- German Greens (http://www.gruene.de/) (de)
- French Greens (http://lesverts.fr/) (fr)de:Daniel Cohn-Bendit
es:Daniel Cohn-Bendit fr:Daniel Cohn-Bendit he:דניאל כהן-בנדיט no:Daniel Cohn-Bendit