Today, many Europeans look at the late 1960s as the “Good Old days”, but they did not necessarily feel like that to the people alive at the time. It was, after all, a scary age, one of confusing change and ideologically charged confrontation. Anticommunist hawks imagined a desperate last-ditch defense against the red tide engulfing the globe while hardline leftists eagerly awaited the dawn of world revolution, and shifting allegiances on both sides made it hard to keep track of just who you were supposed to be hating at any given point. In the midst of all of this, young people everywhere experimented with new ideas of community and justice, and sometimes, things came together in fascinating ways.
Just like they were unaware they were living in simpler, happier times, the people of Hannover in 1969 also did not know they were experiencing an age of carefree prosperity, so when the Üstra company operating their tram announced a 33% fare hike for 1 June, many were worried. Especially young people depended on public transit and the higher price bit hard into strained budgets. Their parents might have gritted their teeth and shrugged it off, but this was a generation that lived and breathed activism. They were going to organise. University and secondary school students began what would become one of the most successful grassroots protests in modern German history: the ‘Red Dot’ (Roter Punkt).
Germany in the late 1960s was a rapidly changing nation. The grim, shameful silence following collapse and defeat after the Second world War was challenged by a younger generation, strict social conventions were loosening, and the influence of a wider world was making itself felt everywhere. Music and films, literature and clothing, freer travel, and not least, food made Germany a more cosmopolitan and freewheeling place. For many Germans, their first experience of this, either through travel or vicariously, was Italy, and one of the quintessentially Italian foods that young people came to know and love was pizza. It was fascinating – a challenge to notions of ‘proper’ food, flexible, imaginative, romantic, and adventurous, and best of all, if you lived far from one of the few, but rapidly spreading pizzerie in the country, you could actually make it.
The unjustly neglected culinary writer Grete Willinsky gives early instructions in her 1961 Kulinarische Weltreise:
For the yeast dough: c. 300-400g flour, 15-20g yeast, two tbsp pork lard, a pinch of salt, some warm water. For the topping: 1 1/2-2 lbs firm tomatoes, about 6 anchovy fillets, 250-300g mozzarella (or a soft Emmental cheese), 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, 2-3 tbsp oil and 2 tbsp pork lard (or oil only), salt, pepper, marjoram (origano).
You prepare a yeast dough of middling firmness and leave it to rise in a warm place, then roll it out 1/2cm thick and cover an oiled baking sheet (with a raised edge). After the dough sheet has risen once again, brush it well with oil, sprinkle the grated Parmesan over it, and distribute the peeled, quartered, slightly squeezed tomatoes, the chopped anchovies, a little salt, pepper, finely crushed marjoram, and finally the the thinly sliced mozzarella (or soft Emmental, as it will hardly be possible to find the Neapolitan curd cheese (Quark-Käse) in this country) on it. Scatter pieces of lard or drizzle oil over the entire pizza, then slide it into a hot oven. Bake at a good heat for 20-30 minutes and serve hot, cut into squares with a sharp knife. Red wine tastes excellent with it!
(Grete Willinsky: Kulinarische Weltreise, Frankfurt 1961, p. 44)
This is far from the dish that Americanised convention has settled on as pizza in Germany today, and in some ways rather surprising. I am sure few Neapolitans would see lard as an essential ingredient, for one thing. But these are early days, the time when more and m,ore middle-class families could afford to go to Italy and others craved the experience on their family dinner table. By 1975, the activist and cookbook writer Peter Fischer takes a very different tone:
If you are in a pub and feel a craving for some pizza, and you also know you can trust the cook, have your pizza at the Ristorante. Otherwise it’s off to the kitchen and make it yourself. Also consider that your pizza can make many comrades happy and that even the more austere kind of female comrade will show you a little smile for this dish. It’s all quite simple:
First the dough: Crumble about 30g of yeast, stir it into lukewarm water (1/2 cup) and leave it to rise in a 50°C oven. Sift 500g of flour into a bowl, form a well in the centre, and pour in the yeast along with 2 beaten eggs, one tbsp vinegar (acquire wine vinegar, which you will need in the kitchen regularly anyway), 3 tbsp olive oil, and 1 cup of lukewarm water. Season this with one tsp of oregano and a little salt, then work it into a dough from the centre towards the edge. If the dough should be too stiff, add more water. Knead the dough, remove it from the bowl, lay it on one hand and strike it with the other until it forms bubbles. Then set it in a warm oven to rise. Now, the dough can be placed on a greased baking sheet, draw it out, and flatten it with both hands until the entire sheet is covered evenly with dough which should now rise once more. You can also distribute it across several round baking sheets, e.g. the cheap sheets on which we usually bake the layers of cakes (Tortenböden), and bake the pizza in two or three turns. The dough must be quite thin.
The topping: It is essential that plenty of oregano and grated cheese go on top of the pizza. It you want it to be ‘genuine’, use mozzarella. What else goes on the pizza is lest to your taste, your fancy, and your capacity to improvise.
E.g. Simply cover it in tomato slices, OR add sliced garlic with the tomatoes OR add onion rings AND anchovies AND artichoke hearts AND black olives, AND sliced mushrooms, AND salami slices (not pseudo-salami, rather none than that), AND pickled peppers AND SO FORTH.
Finally, once the topping has been composed, scatter oregano and cheese over it, drizzle it well with olive oil, and bake it in a preheated oven at 250°C for 20 minutes at most. All must be well done, both dough and topping, but the pizza must not be dry. You’ll have it figured out by the third try at the latest. Always eat pizza straight out of the oven, with salad and dry wine. Do not let anyone talk you into buying sweet plonk (süßliches Gesöff)
(Peter Fischer: Schlaraffenland, nimms in die Hand. West Berlin, 5th edition 1981, p. 78)
This is interesting in all kind of ways. Few people today would put herbs (or eggs) into a pizza crust, and we still see no trace of the tomato sauce that has become ubiquitous. Further, the concern over authenticity (real mozzarella) and quality continues. This recipe is written for a very different world, though. It belongs in an urban, unconventional , freewheeling life of flatshares, activism, and hedonism. Culinary knowledge, low-key wine connoisseurship (rejecting the mid-century love of sweet wines), and the hint of a liberated sexuality were widely aspirational. A few young people actually lived like this, and many more dreamed of doing so.
When they ate their pizzas and planned their rebellion, what did these young people come up with in 1969? They developed a shockingly successful scheme combining protest and mutual aid. Identifying themselves by a red dot on white, the symbol of their movement, groups of young people boarded tramcars without buying tickets and explained their purpose to other passengers. Others built the basis of a boycott. Motorists sympathetic to their cause placed the red dot on their windshields, stopping at prearranged locations to pick up riders. Organisers guided traffic and kept track of destinations, making the operation run as smoothly as possible while doing their best not to disrupt the normal flow of traffic. Meanwhile, demonstrations actively blocked trams, stopping traffic, while handing out leaflets to passers-by demanding the fare increase be revoked.
Initial demonstrations in early June were met by a massive police presence, water cannon, and mass arrests, but the demonstrators succeeded in blocking the tram network on several occasions. As the protest gathered momentum, the response by the wider public proved broadly sympathetic. People could see the point and many, also irked at the higher fares, joined the movement, refusing to use the trams or offering rides in their cars. At the height of the boycott, all traffic on the network came to a standstill between 12 and 19 June. Labour unions and even the city council, long unhappy with a for-profit tram owned by outsiders, came out in support. It was estimated that up to 50% of drivers displayed the red dot, volunteering to take passengers through the city, and the widely expected chaos failed to materialise. Confronted by this shockingly united front of determined protest, the tram owners gave in. The boycott was ended on 18 June to complete victory. Fares returned to their previous level, and the city purchased the trams from their private owners to integrate them into a wider public transit network.
To be fair, this was not the first instance of this, just the most impressive. A fare hike in Bremen the previous year had led to blockades and riots, also forcing the city to return to the previous price. Protests at higher fares subsequently erupted in other German cities around this time, often adopting the red dot symbol, and while none were as completely successful as those in Hannover, many achieved partial victories. This stood in striking contrast to many more abstract political causes and illustrates what is possible when shared concrete interests create solidarity.