During my first stretch as a student at Berkeley I was constrained by still living at home. Then in the 1967-68 academic year I went as an exchange student to Germany, far from the parental gaze. I immediately went out and joined the most radical group I could find: the German SDS.

West Germany was a tantalising place to be in 1968. We were so close to France, and sometimes went there, yet our own left movements weren’t a patch on those of the French.

At one point Germany did erupt, after a deranged housepainter shot and nearly killed our best known leader, Rudi Dustchke. Ach, die deutschen Anstreicher, said my friend Tete – these German housepainters! Hitler had been one too.

We blamed the rightwing Springer press, which had run hate campaigns against the student left. Langhaarige Affen – long haired apes – was their favourite description. Thousands of student blockaded the Springer printing works in major cities, and tried to prevent distribution of the tabloid Bildzeitung. The police cracked heads and cleared a way for the trucks.

I was in Goettingen which had no printing works, but we could try to stop the papers getting through to the shops. The shipments were expected around midnight. Dozens of left activists crowded into our favourite tavern, and the level of bravado began to rise as the beer flowed. The word was that the papers would arrive by train, under the badge of the federal mail. Interfering with mail was a serious offence, and I started to get nervous, but our leaders and their macho speeches shamed me into following them to the station. Fearing police truncheons, we made ineffectual attempts at self-protection; Tete stuffed newspaper into his beret.

At the station everyone was stirred up. Fiery speeches began, the police presence grew. As the likely arrival time for the train approached, I got more worried. I had no experience of confrontation. I was partly alarmed, partly relieved to see I wasn’t the only one in a state of anxiety – in fact people standing close to the cops were rather subdued, while the level of bellicose rhetoric and shouting seemed much higher in that section of the crowd well away from the front line. Tete made a great speech from a position of safety.

The mail arrived. The cops told us the Springer papers weren’t inside the containers, so why didn’t we just go home. ‘Lies! Bullshit! Let us see!’ No, they wouldn’t let us visually inspect the mail. But after negotiations they agreed to let our leaders fummeln – rummage around – inside the bags. Sure enough, no papers.

We went home, feeling totally wired. Ich habe agitiert! Tete told his mother, wide eyed. ‘I’ve been agitating!’ And so he had. The next day, however, the Springer papers were on all the news-stands. They had arrived by truck.

France remained a touchstone. When the famous student rebellion broke out in May, we listened to live broadcasts from the barricades on Radio Luxemburg, and made brave but vague noises about hitching to Paris at the end of term.

Someone trying hard to get there was Danny le Rouge, the prominent French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. He was also a German and had found himself in Germany when Paris erupted. His efforts at reaching Paris were matched by those of the French police trying to stop him.

One day we were sitting in a lecture theatre debating some political theme, when a serious-looking, bearded young man leapt onto the platform. "Comrades! Important news. Comrade Daniel Cohn-Bendit has arrived in Paris." What a sensation.

The audience broke spontaneously into the Marseillaise. Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé...

The bearded young man motioned impatiently for silence. ‘No Comrades. The Marseillaise is a bourgeois anthem.’ Oh. We looked at each other … and then we broke into a stirring rendition of the Internationale.

Those were the days.