Krahl, Hans Jürgen

Hans-Jürgen Krahl (17 January 1943 – 13 February 1970) was a West German philosophy student and political activist who came to wider prominence as a participant in the '68 Student Protest movement of which, in the eyes of admirers, he was a leading ideologue. He was a leading member of the fractious Socialist German Students' League. During the mid-1960s, Krahl became a star student and doctoral pupil of the polymath-philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Early in 1969, after four years during which Krahl treated Adorno as an academic mentor, there was a falling out between the two men, however. This arose in the context of a student occupation of the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in which Krahl was involved. Adorno, as director of the institute, summoned the police to evict the "trespassing" students on 7 January 1969. Adorno died suddenly later that same year, eleven days after the end of the trial process that followed on from the events at the institute. Krahl himself was only 27 when he was killed, a front-seat passenger in a motor accident on an icy road north of Marburg, barely six months after the death of Adorno. His reputation as the great theoretician of Europe's '68 movement, able and willing to grapple with both the ideological and the economic mechanisms of mature capitalism, persists among scholars of the political left. Much of Krahl's written work, which included large amounts of material delivered orally – albeit in perfectly formed prose structures – and recorded at the time, to be transcribed onto paper only much later, was published posthumously.