Rudi Dutschke at La Leprara

On 16 July Fausto and I took a flight to Santa Fe for the rehearsal of the Bassarids, conducted by me, directed by Bodo Igesz and set by Rouben Ter-Arutunian. A fabulous chorus, made up of vocal students, also delivered their cues precisely while dancing or standing on their heads or climbing around in the decorations. Felsenstein would have been in tears of joy. Every few days I called Marino: Yes, Rudi is fine, the treatment is successful and there are no disturbances. His Gretchen had joined him. - After the last performance of the Bassarids in Santa Fe (in the finale they always burned impressive bonfires, Midsummer or Autodafé fires on all the hills around), a small jet took us to Aspen, Colorado, whose famous canyons we passed through, for a totally rainy weekend with symphonic music, chamber music and even scenic music by Henze.

On the third day of the voyage, already long out at sea, Fausto boredly opened Italian daily newspapers and a few magazines he had bought in New York. A complete shock: they carried pictures of my house in Marino, precisely described, now no longer secret, residence of the dangerous subversive, German public enemy No. 1. We on the ship: in a panic. It was impossible to telephone Italy from the high seas. When we finally arrived in Rome, Fausto and I, the biggest hype, caused by the way by German journalists, was already over: Some bastard must have told them the place where the patient was. The television teams, helicopters and tele-lenses had been withdrawn after an eight-day siege. Rudi stood at the Stazione Termini accompanied by a contingent of about a dozen carabinieri waiting discreetly in the background, who would now accompany us to Marino, keeping us under surveillance and keeping my house surrounded on all sides, day and night, for weeks, months. They even had a direct phone line to the Ministry of the Interior. Outside the house, we were followed at every turn. The carabinieri kindly went to buy cigarettes or letters for my autograph-donating guest, they were friendly and felt something like admiration for Rudi Il Rosso.

The Leprara had become Rudi's headquarters, guests came and went in large numbers, important visitors or those who felt important, in any case always at least twice as many as were beneficial to him. The Italian left, especially those to the left of the PCI, turned up, I translated in the conversations, listened and tried in this way to get a picture of what seemed to me an increasingly complex world, the contradictions, defeats and incompatibilities of the political struggles. The Vietnam War was by no means over and on 21 August, as we heard on the Cristofero Colombo, Warsaw Pact troops occupied the CSSR, causing a great moral and political disaster. It divided people and their opinions, diminished the sympathies of the Western left for the ruling conditions in the Eastern Bloc countries and the way of dealing with the concept of socialism practised there. And Fidel Castro's eagerly awaited statement on Prague disappointed: it was a problem to see the otherwise unflappable Fidel willing to compromise with the superpower. The fact that the reasons were obvious did not make it any easier at all.