"I'm a revolutionary," the student activist Rudi Dutschke told the young American theology student Gretchen Klotz shortly after their first meeting in Berlin in 1964. Revolutionaries had to be married to the revolution so there was no room for a wife, he explained seriously.

But love soon caught up with revolutionary zeal: two years later the couple married in Berlin, and fought together in the German Socialist Student organisation, which led the explosive 1968 student movement and transformed postwar German society. They were anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist, they protested against the Vietnam War and Third World poverty.

Yet Rudi Dutschke paid a price for being the impassioned leader of the student movement: at the height of the protests in 1968 he was shot in a Berlin street by a rightwing extremist who had been stirred up by hysterical public reaction against the students. He survived the attempted assassination, but died 11 years later in an accident triggered by the epilepsy he developed as a result of the shooting.

Now his widow has written a biography entitled We had a barbaric, wonderful life (Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schones Leben), which draws on personal recollections and Rudi's diaries, and which is proving as popular with students today as with the generation whose lives were so influenced by him. On a visit to Germany, Gretchen Dutschke, who now lives in Newton, Massachusetts, explained why mainstream Germany reacted so violently against the 1968 student movement and its leader.

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"We really thought we could change the world and find new ways of living together in solidarity. We wanted to change economic and political structures.

"But in the German student movement the starting point for many people was dealing with the country's Nazi past and what their parents had done. Then the Germans had the specific situation that half of their country was part of so-called real socialism," she says.

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In a postwar, divided Germany and amid the widespread fear of communism, the extreme leftwing students were associated with the communist threat and were portrayed as the "enemy within". Dutschke had been brought up in East Germany and fled the GDR regime. He always opposed the Soviet regime and fought those of his comrades who supported it and - it now transpires - were supported by it. "Rudi was the clear example, if people wanted to see it, that the student movement did not equal East Germany," says Gretchen.

Dutschke's friends describe him now as a kind and intellectual man. He was an athlete who did not drink or smoke. Yet the portrayal of him in Germany's mainstream press was as a threatening rabble-rouser. "People were constantly reading in newspapers like Bild, in the Springer publications, that we were public enemy number one, things like 'take it into your own hands, we must get rid of these people'. People were reading stuff like this every day."

In this climate of incitement and animosity rightwinger Josef Bachmann shot Dutschke on the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin at close range through the head. Bachmann later committed suicide. But Dutschke did not die. He underwent a long recovery process to regain his speech and intellectual faculties. The family moved to Switzerland, then to Italy.

They spent two years in Britain, where he began to study for a doctoral degree at King's College, Cambridge. But in January 1971, despite a long campaign, Britain finally refused to grant the couple and their two children residence, claiming Dutschke's political activism posed a potential threat to national security. The family finally settled in Denmark. Following the assassination attempt, the socialist student movement soon split and some activists took the terrorist path. Rudi Dutschke did not, and the biography describes discussions he had with some, such as Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler.

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In his later years Dutschke found a new political home in a new green party in Germany. It was a natural political progression from their earlier campaigns, Gretchen Dutschke says, because it was addressing "how economies can be structured to make them self-sustainable," although he was critical of the party's "tendency to forget social questions and he thought his role in the Greens was to keep reminding them of that," Gretchen says. On New Year's Eve 1979, at the age of 39, Rudi Dutschke died from a fall during an epileptic fit.

Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schones Leben: Rudi Dutschke, Eine Biographie by Gretchen Dutschke, is only published in German by Kiepenheuer und Witsch, Cologne, DM45.