Georg von Rauch (anarchist)

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Georg von Rauch (* 12. May 1947 in Marburg , † 4. December 1971 in Berlin ( West )) was in the student movement of the 1960s active, then a member of the radical left-wing militant scene in West Berlin.

Life

Georg von Rauch was the youngest son of the historian , Marburg university lecturer for philosophy and later Kiel professor for Eastern European history Georg von Rauch .

In 1961, for disciplinary reasons, Rauch had to leave the Kiel School of Academics and move to the Zinzendorf High School in Königsfeld in the Black Forest . From the Alumnat referenced 1965, he passed his A-levels in 1966 externally from. Immediately thereafter, Rauch married the painter Illo Wittlich (* 1935) and began studying philosophy at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel . In 1967 he had a daughter. After the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, which contributed to the heating of the political climate in the Federal Republic of Germany , Rauch, who was very interested in politics, switched to the Free University of Berlin . Soon after his arrival in Berlin, Rauch joined the Socialist German Student Union and was involved in various left-wing initiatives, especially in the field of educational policy and in the protest movement against the Vietnam War . Here he became increasingly radicalized.

Wieland municipality

During this time Georg von Rauch lived in a commune on Wielandstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg . The main tenant of the apartment in question was the lawyer Otto Schily . The group of around 10 to 20 people, known as the “Wielandkommune”, to which his friend Michael “Bommi” Baumann belonged as well as Rauch , practiced a consciously anti-bourgeois lifestyle based on the example of Commune 1 . They saw themselves as the avant-garde of a fundamental social change. Drug use and sexual experimentation were the order of the day; The livelihood was made by, among other things, the pirated printing and sale of socialist publications.

Self-image as an urban guerrilla

From the Wieland commune, a loose circle finally formed, for which the consumption of hashish and shoplifting became the starting point for further attacks on the existing social order. The events of 1968, in particular the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke on April 11, 1968 and the tough crackdown by the French police in May in Paris, encouraged radicalization and led to a break with the state. Inspired by the urban guerrilla idea of ​​the Tupamaros in Uruguay , with an anti-imperialist and social revolutionary attitude, it was concluded in the vicinity of the Wieland commune that only an “ avant-garde ” of revolutionary fighters in the big cities of the West would become “true allies of the liberation movements in the Third World ” could. According to a circle of friends, Rauch drew his political self-image from the theory and practice of historical anarchism .

As a prerequisite for the functioning of the actions of such groups, the abandonment of the last rudiments of a bourgeois existence (such as a fixed, official address) and the willingness to use open violence against representatives and institutions of the state and its “allies” were considered. The group of urban guerrillas that emerged from the Wieland commune, of which Rauch and Baumann were among the most active members, soon referred to itself in a deliberately ironic refraction as the central council of the wandering hash rebels . As a member of this so-called Central Council , which was to become one of the most important preliminary stages of the June 2nd movement ideologically and personally , Rauch not only went underground in his mind, but also committed serious crimes in the following three years. Rauch traveled to Jordan together with Ina Siepmann , Albert Fichter , Dieter Kunzelmann and Roswitha Lena Conradt at the end of September 1969 and received training in firearms and time bombing in an Al-Fatah camp there from October 5th . The plan arose to form a group in Berlin for the “armed struggle” against “US imperialism ” and “ Zionism ”. This meant acts of terrorism using incendiary bombs against various institutions that were seen as a means of suppressing the Palestinians and other peoples.

After Georg von Rauch, Thomas Weisbecker and “Bommi” Baumann (among others) beat up the Quick journalist Horst Rieck , Rauch was arrested on February 2, 1970. He has been charged with coercion, assault and attempted robbery.

On July 8, 1971, he managed to escape. The more precise circumstances soon became legendary in the left-wing sympathizer scene under the catchphrase “confusion go-out”: Von Rauch and Baumann and Weisbecker had to answer the criminal court in Berlin-Moabit for the attack on Rieck that day however postponed. Rauch and Weisbecker, who looked alike, had switched roles in the courtroom, which apparently no one had noticed. Therefore, when the judge Baumann and Weisbecker granted exemption from their custody and asked them to leave the courtroom, in contrast to their co-defendant, Rauch was able to walk out of the justice building in place of Weisbecker without being noticed. When Weisbecker later revealed his identity, he was also released, but soon afterwards wanted again with another arrest warrant for helping Rauch to escape.

death

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After five months on the run, Georg von Rauch was caught by civil investigators on the evening of December 4, 1971 in Eisenacher Strasse, near the confluence of Kleiststrasse, in Berlin-Schöneberg , and was fatally hit in the head by a police officer in an exchange of fire.

Rauch had previously tried, together with "Bommi" Baumann, Hans Peter Knoll and Heinz Brockmann , to repark a stolen Ford Transit that was already under surveillance by the police and the secret service. According to the authorities, the attempted arrest led to the exchange of fire, in which a total of around 25 shots were fired by both sides. In doing so, the people who were finally able to escape besides smoke opened fire.

Baumann said in an interview with Spiegel two years later that smoke shot first; the investigators fired almost simultaneously. He also shot himself. These statements essentially confirmed the representation of the judiciary. In his book How everything started, Baumann put this statement into perspective again: “Today I have to say that I no longer know who pulled the gun first. I thought it was Georg, but after all the mess I can't really remember. "

Georg von Rauch is buried in the Eichhof park cemetery near Kiel.

Aftermath

Rauch became something of a martyr to sympathizers soon after his death . Among other things, the former nurses' home of the Bethanien Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg , which was seized by the squatter scene, was renamed by its occupiers as the " Georg von Rauch House ". The rock band Ton Steine ​​Schherd around their front man Rio Reiser dedicated the Rauch-Haus song to this in 1972 . The terrorist organization Movement June 2nd also tried to uphold his memory.

In the left, the shooting was received as murder , which resulted in several preliminary investigations into insults . Because of a letter to the editor from Erich Fried in Spiegel , in which he called the killing a "preventive murder", Fried and the responsible editor Heike von der Osten were charged with insult and acquitted in 1974. In 1975, Klaus Wagenbach was convicted of insult in the second instance after he had spoken of "murder" in relation to the killings of Benno Ohnesorg and von Rauch.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann: Avant-gardist, protester, radical. Göttingen 2009, p. 232
  2. ↑ Brigitte Fehrle: 30 years ago the anarchist was shot: the death of Georg von Rauch that was never resolved . In: Berliner Zeitung , June 2, 2017
  3. ↑ "Can I sleep with you?" ( Memento from March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 29, 2009. In conversation: Klaus Wagenbach
  4. ↑ Friends, throw away the gun . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1974 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Baumann, Bommi: How it all began . Frankfurt / Main 1977, p. 108 .
  6. ^ Gerhard Mauz : "A serious, terrible case" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1974 ( online ). Tilman von Brand: Fried, Erich and von der Osten, Heike . In: Groenewold, Ignor, Koch (ed.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Processes . http://www.lexikon-der-politischen-strafverarbeitung.de/glossar/fried-erich-und-von-der-osten-heike/ .
  7. ↑ Riebard Schmid: In Berlin, was sentenced Klaus Wagenbach for insulting the police not murder say . In: Die Zeit , No. 12/1975
  8. ↑ Joachim Wittkowski: Poetry in the press: an investigation of the criticism of Wolf Biermann, Erich Fried and Ulla Hahn . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1991, p. 128 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Rauch, Georg von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German left radical
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Marburg
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1971
Place of death Berlin