We threw Kunzelmann and his "Kommune 1" out of the SDS in 1967 because he was always distributing leaflets which argued the to the SDS, on the grounds that he and the commune were anti-authoritarian. And he refused to abide by any resolutions, although they resolutions were arrived at in plenary meetings and were therefore relatively democratic. It also had to do with the he staged, such as when he burned papier mache figures of East German leader Walter Ulbricht and US vice-president on Kurf?rstendamm boulevard. Nobody understood what that was supposed to mean. It was idiotic. But he saw himself primarily as an artist, not a political person.
In a supposedly secret flat of the Tupamaros West Berlin which was known to everyone in the leftist scene. It was the time of the split in the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO ): founded the KPD/AO (German Communist Party/ Set-Up Organisation"), Joscha Schmierer , who worked in the planning department in the Foreign Office during the Red Green coalition, founded the KBW, the West German Communist Federation, in Heidelberg. And the Trotskyists founded their mini parties.
I could well imagine it. I just know that Kunzelmann's writings at the time, seen from today's perspective, do not qualify as leftist anti-Semitism, but as .
Lots of them couldn't believe their ears! They simply weren't prepared for that sort of thing. It was the equivalent today of a group of young men in the standing up and saying the is progressive. It'd take weeks for you to figure out what was happening among the editors ? and that's how it was for us. At first we just couldn't believe our ears. I didn't make any friends by saying this was leftist anti-Semitism.
What was the reaction in 1969 among the radical Left to the plot to blow up the Jewish Community Centre? As Wolfgang Kraushaar appropriately puts it, this was Kunzelmann's attempt to regain his authority among the militants...
... yet he failed utterly. In Kunzelmann's diary, which is now in the hands of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research , he wrote ? and he'll be kicking himself now because it was his vanity that made him write it ? that he was on the verge of desperation because the German Left was not prepared to support his campaign with the PLO against the Jews. Kunzelman never made the distinction between the Jews in the diaspora and the State of Israel. This is what he was completely on his own in the radical Left.
The fact that the attack targeted Jews in Germany as Israelis and also the date, November 9 , leave no doubt that this was an act of anti-Semitism. The radical Left in no way supported Kunzelmann ? but it barely recognised this as a clear instance of anti-Semitism. Why not?
It's absolutely astonishing. The fake bomb was not taken very seriously at all back then. As I remember it, I was one of a very few to react it, with my article "What is anti-Semitism?" in . For a long time the subject was not breached on the Left. To put it rather cynically: as usual the friends of East Germany put the blame on the Right. That was their standard response to anything that was complicated in any way. And in this instance the anti-authoritarian Left seemed to be content to accept this line of argumentation.
My brother writes in his "confession" in Kraushaar's book that he didn't even know the significance of November 9 at the time. He was apparently so that it didn't even dawn on him. The commune members didn't discuss things analytically or with a view to history. Their lives were all about the struggle. When you read this today, you recognise echoes of the thirties and the movement in Germany whose focal point was also the struggle, or "Kampf".
Yes, I was aware that the bomb was provided by intelligence agent . Kunzelmann let himself be supplied with defect bombs from the stockpiles of the German intelligence. And anyway it was a .
All bombs that came from Urbach had this technical defect. These couldn't explode. Another fake bomb was later found in Kunzelmann's ice compartment. The intelligence irresponsibly tried to smuggle these things into the student movement. But one way or another, Urbach's superiors were aware they didn't want to plant any active bombs ? unlike a few months later when Peter Urbach provided the first generation of the RAF with real weapons.
Yes. But it has yet to be found out who was behind the attempt to arm the student movement. Peter Urbach now lives in the USA, under protection and with a false name. He could clear things up at least partially. But no one has ever tried.
At that time we faced a . On one side we were fighting the US war in Vietnam. There were demonstrations nearly every day ? it's almost impossible to image this sort of thing nowadays. We were permanently in action. On the other hand the extra-parliamentary opposition had just split. I made the mistake of thinking that this New Left could still be held together, and joined the editors of . That was completely idealistic. Then in early 1970 I abandoned the attempt when I saw these city Tupamaros were just using me. informally belonged to Dirk Schneider . He was later uncovered as a active in the Green Party exectutive.
So the continual mobilisation was what prevented people from seeing this anti-Semitic attack. But why did almost it take decades for the Left to start talking about it?
It was taboo to say there could be something like anti-Semitism on the Left. Because the Left had been a , because it had suffered together with the Jews in the concentration camps, it never thought it possible that this problem could also exist in its own ranks. I was severely criticised at the time, even by comrades I still think highly of today. They said, "Tilman, you shouldn't make such a big thing of it. We can settle this internally." When I started discussing it openly with my article on anti-Semitism I was treated like a bit of a renegade, as if I were eroding the solidarity on the Left, and opening a that had to be cleared up among ourselves. But it was never cleared up. That was the problem.
No, you're assuming something there. The SDS was always on very good terms with leftist Zionist groups, even long before 1969. The SDS saw itself as a for the leftist Zionists in Israel that had been against the Israeli occupation policy since 1967. At a key SDS congress in 1967, comrades from Heidelberg had submitted a resolution that the SDS should break off all ties to Israel. I was there! Rudi Dutschke intervened and threatened that if that went through, if the Maoists mobilise a majority, then the Berlin contingent would get up and leave. Rudi was very clear that it shouldn't come to a vote. He was on very good terms with leftist Zionist circles, and held no anti-Semitic positions. It didn't come to a vote, and the question was deferred. Then came the attack on Rudi, and with it we lost our most reflective friend of the Israeli Left. For as long as the SDS kept on functioning, he prevented the West German Left from taking a clearly .
Some of the sympathisers of the SDS back then - G?nther Maschke, Reinhold Oberlercher, Horst Mahler und Bernd Rabehl ? are now more or less open anti-Semites.
I can't say if that was always the case with Mahler and the others. I didn't know them well enough. Those are five people out of roughly 3,000 in the hard core of the SDS. It's appalling that there were people like Mahler at all in the new Left. But we're talking about an in the student movement back then, you've got to keep that in mind.
Good question. I'd say it was a mistake that Rudi didn't insist that the Israeli occupation policy and the growing anti-Semitism in parts of the student body should be discussed at the student conference in 1967. Instead we kept the question from the agenda with tactical manoeuvres. We didn't take the subject of underlying anti-Semitism in the German Left. That was a mistake.
One of the major impetuses for the 68er movement was its rejection of the pall of silence surrounding acts committed by the elder generation. Then in 1969 an anti-Semitic act happened in its own ranks, or to be more exact: on its margins ? and everyone was evidently so busy with the revolution or Vietnam that they didn't see it?
Yet the contradiction remains. We have to free ourselves from the idea that the second generation after the Holocaust, the children of the perpetrators, were able to simply cast off the inheritance of their fathers with a sweep of the hand. There was an unconscious relationship of delegating between generations ? perhaps the young generation's eternal comparison of Israel with the Nazis was an unconscious attempt to qualify their parents' guilt...
Some social psychologists even see the street battles of 1968 as an attempt by the children to recreate the violence experienced by their parents. Is there anything in that?
I think that kind of speculation doesn't get you anywhere. It just turns the facts upside down. My experience was: after 1945. That violence didn't come from us. In January of 1952 for example, SDS students demonstrated against the new films by Veit Harlan, who'd made the hate film "Jud S??" under the Nazis. They were beaten up terribly. Another example: We wore shirts and ties to the anti-Shah demo on July 2, 1967, and were chased by the police. It's a wonder there weren't three or four deaths, and that only Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed. The violence was in society. There was violence among the Berlin police and the population as a whole. At the time it was a real . When we demonstrated against the US Vietnam policies, 80 percent of the population was against us. Nowadays you can't start to imagine what it was like! For us students it was like .
No. I was about ten years older, I finished high-school at night school and I'd spent time at sea. My motto was: rebellion is justified, but . When you're in the minority, you can't force your opinions onto the majority. That was the subject of a lot of my discussions with Rudi Dutschke. He was the only one I could talk to about things like that. Rudi understood my position, even though he thought it was wrong. In the mid sixties, the majority of society didn't want to think about the. Yet culturally, the student movement was a lot more successful than I'd thought was possible.
No, I was always against making yourself illegal ? just like I was against the RAF and the idea that the first RAF generation had been murdered in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart. It took a long time for the German Left to take a critical look at itself. It'd had its back against the wall for a long time, and didn't have the chance to think about itself.
That also goes for the Left's relationship to Kunzelmann. In fact after 1969 it should have been clear he was an anti-Semite. Nonetheless he was a representative for the Alternative List (AL) in the Berlin state parliament in the 1980s. Why did the AL think they could win the elections with Kunzelmann?
Because it didn't take the subject seriously. In 1984 when I raised the subject of anti-Semitism on the Left again, it came to nothing. Now Kraushaar is trying it again ? and I'm afraid it still won't lead to anything. Together with the others I excluded Kunzelmann from the SDS. But I have to admit, I never really took him seriously. I always thought of him as a. And that's still how people on the Left think. They should stop trying to play the problem and call anti-Semitism by its name. But I don't think we'll be able give this problem the attention it deserves.
In fact I don't think he was so popular. He was physically a wreck because of all the drugs he took. It was only when he went to prison that he finally got a grip on himself. But I'll put the ball back in your court: The and played along with him. For the press he was a lot more attractive than the SDS and its serious discussions. Kunzelmann said: "I rub shit in your face." He was full of bawdy jokes, a bit in the tradition of Luther. But he was also a. He always read , and complained that the Left didn't understand that was the best paper of all: "They always write nice things about me" ( is often held responsible for the death of Rudi Dutschke, on account of the virulent hate campaign mounted by the paper). That was all he cared about. For us on the other hand, was a threat. A hate paper.
It was only on Christmas 2001 that he told me he was the one who carried the bomb into the Community Centre. When he told me we had a long argument.
Yes, but that's wrong. The first I heard about it was in 2001, after our mother died. He told me about it, and explained why he was only telling me then. At all costs he'd wanted to prevent our mother from finding out about it. She'd been active against the Nazis and considered herself a friend of Israel. My brother certainly felt shame at what he'd done. I told him. "Abi, what you did isn't anti-Zionist, it's anti-Semitic." He agreed that it was totally wrong, but maintained it was an anti-Zionist action. I said: "If you act against the Jews in the diaspora and hold them responsible for the Israeli occupation policy, then you're doing exactly what the neo-Nazis do, namely equating the Jews in the diaspora with the Israelis." It took a long time for that to sink in. Three days later we were at the place of a mutual friend from the youth movement. My brother asked our friend if he also thought what he did was anti-Semitic. All our friend said was: "Of course it was." Now my brother accepts that, but it took a while.
The Boy Scouts, but the religiously unaffiliated ones. By the way, that's another thing the 68ers haven't ever dealt with. A whole lot of people in the Berlin SDS came from the Boy Scouts or the "B?ndische Jugend" youth movement. But no one's ever talked about that.
In 1969 you helped your brother escape to Sweden. Would you have done that if you'd known he was the one who planted the dysfunctional bomb on November 9?
No. I wouldn't have helped him if I'd known. I'd have left him on the street, to his own defences. I told him that, too. I wouldn't have handed him over to the police, you don't do that to your own brother. But I wouldn't have helped him. That would have been bitter for him ? and for me too.
I also thought I knew about it. But then we sat down and thought about it, and came to the conclusion that I hadn't known. All I knew was that he was part of the Tupamaros West Berlin. He was also on one of the first RAF wanted posters ? wrongly so. And just a couple of weeks ago he told me something else: the dysfunctional bomb was wrapped in ' coat ? and he came from a Jewish family. His father ? as far as I know ? was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp for being a Jew and a communist. And Dieter Kunzelmann, that scumbag, should explain once and for all why he'd had the bomb wrapped in Weisbecker's coat. Tommy's father was a dentist, and Tommy broke into his safe to steal gold, on order from the Tupamaros. Imagine! The Nazis had been the ones to take all the gold from the jaws of their Jewish victims. What kind of mind has Kunzelmann got? He could already have sued me in 1984. But he hasn't. And he knows perfectly well why not.
Sixty years after the end of World War Two, Russia is seeing a dramatic under President Putin's leadership. As hopes for prosperity dwindle, star is on the rise again.
The ended in Germany on May 8, 1945, with the of the German forces. We've gathered articles dealing with various aspects of the war. looks at the Russian perspective: victory celebrations and re-Stalinisation. analyses the competing myths in Eastern Europe, while sees the of German and Japanese cities as the first act of the Cold War. And two articles by look at and the state of the in Berlin.
May the 8th is the anniversary of the end of , but was it really a liberation? Each European country has a of the war, and there is no real consensus on the Holocaust either. With the EU entry of the countries the competing myths will no longer exist in isolation, but will have to be contested with the neighbours.
From right wing fraternities to the red dawn of Marxism. In his short life, the charismatic went from the far right to the far left. A biographical sketch .
What can we learn from today? Trust in the free flight of conceptual imagination, mistrust of any kind of authority and knowing when you can safely go to bed.
In response to the furore caused by Oliver Hirschbiegel's film "The Downfall", historian describes how many Germans were seduced by of generous state handouts and high-speed history making.
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