It’s as if Rodney King had been beaten by Black Panthers inside the LAPD: a change in the perpetrator’s identity changes everything about our understanding of the incident.

It was forty-two years ago today, on June second 1967, in West Berlin. Unarmed, unthreatening literature student Benno Ohnesorg was participating in his first protest (against the Iranian Shah’s visit), and was shot dead by a West Berlin cop named Karl-Heinz Kurras.

Kurras was found innocent in court, but the case galvanized student protest in West Germany. An entire generation, born post-war and raised in the shadows of the Iron Curtain, suddenly came to view their own government as fascist and bad.

Last week, forty years later, archivists going through the files of the East German secret police, discovered that Kurras was a spy.

While further research has failed to demonstrate that he was acting on orders, the symbolism of the story is incredibly troubling. Ohnesorg has been canonized (to the right: see this monument to him, image from Wikipedia) by the left as an innocent victim (that much is certain, in any case) of an irreparably brutal government.

In the short run, the late sixties and seventies, the murder was fuel for significant protest (including leftist terror) and wide-ranging soul-searching in the West, to the point that Germany went on the path to becoming the popularly left-leaning place it is today, with a gut-level distrust of Western powers.

Meanwhile, the story begs the question of memory: for those for whom Ohnesorg's death was a cornerstone to much of their values and moral decisions for forty-two years. Now what?