Subversive action

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Subversive Aktion was a small group that was critical of society and consumption and existed from 1963 to 1966 in Munich , Erlangen , Stuttgart and West Berlin . It emerged from the Munich artist group SPUR (1958 to 1962), took up the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and derived provocative, nonconformist actions from it in order to work towards a cultural revolution and to anticipate it symbolically in the here and now. Its founder was Dieter Kunzelmann , a prominent member was the future student leader Rudi Dutschke .

The group was from 1964 to the magazine stop out which covered a wide range of emancipatory leftist theories. Dutschke's contributions dealt primarily with neo-Marxism , the Third World and liberation movements . In January 1965, the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) accepted the West Berlin subgroup. The subversive action ended with the separation from Kunzelmann in April 1966. However, the SDS and the Commune I , founded in 1967 , took up some of their ideas and forms of action, so that they influenced the West German student movement of the 1960s .

founding

The artist group SPUR , founded in 1958, was accepted into the Situationist International (SI) in April 1959 . In the summer of 1960, Dieter Kunzelmann, known in Schwabing as a bohemian outsider, became a member of SPUR and wrote texts for their eponymous magazine. The sixth edition contained an expressionist-religion-critical text collage, for which some group members were charged with blasphemy . The seventh edition was critical of a non-action art avant-garde . The management of the SI regarded this as a violation of the SI guidelines and expelled Kunzelmann and three other SPUR members on February 10, 1962.

Kunzelmann, his brother-in-law Christopher Baldeney, Rodolphe Gasché and Frank Böckelmann as a new addition were planning a new, this time supra-regional group since the summer of 1963. On November 10, 1963, they founded Subversive Aktion in Munich in order (according to Kunzelmann's invitation) to start “a wave of microrebellions” in the sense of André Breton's revolutionary surrealism . Kunzelmann wrote some “non-binding guidelines” with which the four founders sought new members in their places of residence in Munich, Erlangen (Stuttgart area) and West Berlin.

Program

The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the group used as an occasion for a provocative leaflet entitled "You shot Kennedy too!" In it they interpreted the mass sympathy of the population psychoanalytically as an expression of a collective death instinct , which had been fulfilled on behalf of Kennedy, whereupon his widow was now moved near the Maria Immaculata . This is the result of a capitalist conditioning. “Breakdowns” like the Kennedy murder are a kind of test of whether the synchronization of the masses on consumption and production is still effective. The own manifesto means that the "managed magic no longer arrives everywhere".

The second and final edition of the "Non-Binding Guidelines" did so. The text described the living environment of the existing industrial societies using terms from the writings of Herbert Marcuse as an alienated "repressive society". Current capitalism instantly transforms any organized political form of criticism into an act of "affirmation". The “sacraments” (institutions) of civil society from birth to death certificate serve a psychological and sexual “deprivation” (expropriation) and are a form of “ terror ”. In contrast, humans can only realize themselves with a “subversive action”: “Criticism must turn into action. Action exposes the rule of oppression. ”This is how a new homo subversivus appears on the horizon of the cultural revolutionary avant-garde. This type of human accept as his task "to create space for all possibilities of the human in and around himself by overthrowing the valid order of values" and to experimentally realize these possibilities "hic et nunc in living execution".

Following on from the critical theory, whose writings were still little known in West Germany at the time, the subversives described the entire capitalist culture of prosperity of the post-war period as a “repressive society”. This feeds people off with illusory substitutes for consumption, with cinema, television and controlled leisure time, and integrates them so strongly that external repression through open police violence and prison is hardly necessary. The formerly resistant industrial workers and their interest groups, the SPD and trade unions, had also been integrated into the existing structure through these alternative offers, so that no revolutionary impetus could be expected from them.

The subversives, however, contradicted the cultural pessimism and the lack of practice of critical theory, which they saw as a renewed consolation of rebellious individuals. Instead, they wanted to anticipate the possible happiness in the here and now in order to make an anticipation of the liberated society tangible and to carry others away. Above all, sexuality became for them the starting point of a possible self-liberation: Living out the total pleasure principle could also enable people to make revolutionary political change again. That is why they propagated and planned imaginative actions that stimulate the senses. Considered but never realized, for example, renewing the myth of Robin Hood , robbing department stores and transporting all stolen goods on large trucks to suburbs and distributing them there, or seducing crowds to great orgies.

Actions

In the fall of 1963 Dutschke and Rabehl met the subversives Herbert Nagel and Rodolphe Gasché and became members of their group. This had no rules of procedure, no board and no membership fees, but was a discussion group that occasionally carried out decentralized spontaneous actions. In February 1964 they distributed a leaflet at the Free University of Berlin , which posed as an invitation from the "Hac (k) e (n) -Crux TEUTONICA to a traditional German Met-Shuffle". It satirized the practices and nationalistic history of the powerful student associations that established themselves at the FU at that time. In January 1963, the fraternity member Eberhard Diepgen ( RCDS ) was elected AStA chairman there, but was voted out of office shortly afterwards after violent protests. One year later, the Obotritia fraternity wanted to be registered as a student community at the FU worthy of funding.

Therefore, according to Dutschke's diary entry, the Berlin subversives tried to “make the whole ghost ridiculous” with the leaflet and to challenge the SDS and Argument Club to effectively resist these connections. RCDS members threatened to beat her. The Munich subversives criticized the action as unsolicited and too limited to the West Berlin student situation. Dutschke admitted that he was not a situationist; “Had no opportunity to do so in the GDR.” This started a conflict between him and Kunzelmann.

In May 1964 the subversives in Stuttgart disrupted a conference of German advertising managers and advertising consultants with a happening . On distributed leaflets, they accused them of stupefying the masses, covering up the real needs of the people and instilling illusory desire for ever more consumption: That is why they are the “preachers of oppression”. One day the common citizen will recognize this oppression and himself, see through the interest in underpinning the wrong whole and know "what he has to smash in order to free himself". The distributors were arrested, interrogated and fined, but ultimately acquitted.

In the same month, the subversives hung up posters with the title “Wanted Ad” at the universities of Munich, Stuttgart, Tübingen and West Berlin. Then they cited statements critical of society by Max Horkheimer , Theodor W. Adorno , Günther Anders and André Breton and asked: “The German intellectual and artist has known all this for a long time. But it stays that way. We believe that knowing is not coping. If the disproportion between analysis and action is unbearable for you too, write under the password 'Antithesis' to… Th. W. Adorno… “, whose postal address was given. Adorno then filed a criminal complaint against the poster authors; Böckelmann was sentenced to a fine. Adorno was known among left students as a theorist who rejected practical conclusions from his theory.

The re-election of Heinrich Lübke as Federal President (July 1964) criticized the West Berlin subversives with a poster as an empty spectacle of superficial pseudo-conflicts.

On the 3rd / 4th In September 1964 the Stuttgart subversives put up posters for the German Catholic Day there with the title “Message to the lambs of the Lord on Catholic Day”. In it, they criticized the cooperation between churches and Christianity with capitalism, referred to church-historical references to the Inquisition and fascism, and wished the “coup de grace of the repressive society”. The authors Böckelmann and Günter Maschke were arrested and sentenced to 16,000 DM in compensation for damage to property. Maschke's notes gave the investigators precise insight into the membership. Another leaflet denounced the double standards of the church, which does nothing against the capitalist pursuit of profit and global hunger victims. In October 1964 another “wanted advertisement” followed, ironicizing purely academic seminar Marxism with quotations and inviting seminarians to an evening of talks to recruit new group supporters.

On December 18, 1964, the West Berlin subversives called SDS, the Argument Club, African and Latin American students to a registered demonstration against the state visit of the Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tschombé , who had been involved in the murder of his predecessor. Because Tschombé was smuggled past the demonstrators inconspicuously after arriving at the airport, the subversives and the other 700 or so participants moved to Schöneberg Town Hall . In doing so, they broke through the police banned mile, mingled with ordinary strollers, gathered again at the town hall and demanded a conversation with the governing mayor Willy Brandt . The latter granted it and made the state visitor wait. His departure was then accompanied by demonstrative chants. The subversives thus successfully undermined the police strategy of keeping the demonstrators away from the addressees of their protest. This first "walking demonstration" became a model for later calculated violations of rules during student protests in West Berlin.

magazine

Starting in the summer of 1964, the group published a magazine with the ambiguous title stop in order to put their theories and forms of action up for debate, to recruit new members and to generate income. The Berlin group owned a Rotaprint printing machine and used it to create pirated prints of little-known texts from the period between the world wars. Kunzelmann preferred texts by the sexual psychologist Wilhelm Reich , Dutschke texts by the Leninism- critical communist Karl Korsch . Potential buyers were seminarians on topics such as “Marxism and philosophy in the 1920s”. The proceeds were to be used to buy texts for foreign left groups. The Subversive Aktion thus temporarily became a kind of underground publisher.

The magazine existed until the group was dissolved in 1966 and was produced with a wax matrix in A4 paper format . Dutschke (under the pseudonym Joffé, A. ) and Rabehl (pseudonym Menzel, R. ) represented the Berlin editorial team with the concept of “historical-economic analyzes”. The individual numbers of the attack were drafted at national group meetings, which the participants ironically referred to as “councils”. At the first council in Bad Wiessee in 1964 , Kunzelmann, Böckelmann (until 1964 editor-in-chief of the student literary newspaper TEXTUREN , Munich), Christofer Baldeney, Rodolphe Gasché, Herbert Nagel, the decorator Marion Steffel-Stergar (Kunzelmann's girlfriend at the time) and the Berlin graphic artist and printer Peter Push represented. The second “Council” took place from September 26th to 30th in Hamburg . The participants tried to bridge an internal group conflict, drafted a long-term actionist concept for the SDS and attempts to politicize works councils . As a result, there were disputes with local institutions of the SDS and the assumption of presentations and cooperation with SDS opposition groups such as the council socialist grouping of the Society for Scientific Socialism and newspapers such as Schwarz auf Weiß , published by Rudolf Gramke and Hans-Werner Sass .

In terms of content, the attack brought articles and contributions on the subjects of "The role of the anti-capitalist, if not socialist Soviet Union for the Marxist socialists in the world", "Breast-free as a symptom of bondage" (Kunzelmann 1964), "Social imperialism and social democracy" (No. 1). "Youth riots in the saturated society", "The importance of automation for a revolutionary movement" (Kunzelmann 1964), "Proletarian internationalism and imperialism" (No. 2), also: "Situationists, subversives and their predecessors" (Frank Böckelmann), "Empty. About youth riots before 1968 ”(Frank Böckelmann 1964),“ The false appearance of totality ”(Herbert Nagel, 1966) and others.

In April 1966, the original composition of the group changed, which was now called the “Study Group for Social Theory”. The magazine was then discontinued.

In the course of his turn to nationalism, Bernd Rabehl published a booklet on his own behalf in May 1999 under the title “attack”, which he distributed at the Free University of Berlin . He reacted to student protests against his speech “National revolutionary thinking in the anti-authoritarian camp of the radical opposition between 1961/1980” at the “Bogenhausener Talks” (December 5 and 6, 1998) of the right-wing fraternity Danubia Munich . There also had Horst Mahler and Peter Furth participated as a speaker. Mahler forwarded Rabehl's text to the right-wing populist magazine " Junge Freiheit ", which then published it.

literature

Own texts
  • Frank Böckelmann, Herbert Nagel (Ed.): Subversive Action - The sense of the organization is its failure. (1976) 2nd edition, New Critique, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-8015-0352-6
Secondary literature
  • Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke. The biography. Droemer, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-426-27752-2
  • Alexander Sedlmaier: Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in the Federal Republic. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2018
  • Silja Behre: Moving memories: Struggles for interpretation around “1968” from a Franco-German perspective. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2016, ISBN 3161541669
  • Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann: avant-garde, protestor, radical. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-647-37010-1
  • Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth (Hrsg.): 1968. Handbook on the cultural and media history of the student movement. Springer, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-476-00090-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann , Göttingen 2009, pp. 64–97
  2. ↑ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann , Göttingen 2009, pp. 98f.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke , Munich 2018, pp. 66–68
  4. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke , Munich 2018, pp. 70–75
  5. ↑ Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz: Rudi Dutschke: Everyone has to live their whole life. The diaries 1963–1979. Btb, Cologne 2005, p. 21 and footnotes 25–29.
  6. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke , Munich 2018, p. 65 f.
  7. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke , Munich 2018, pp. 69–71
  8. ^ River landscape 1964 Alternative scene
  9. ^ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann , Göttingen 2009, p. 107
  10. ↑ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann , Göttingen 2009, pp. 105f.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Chaussy: Rudi Dutschke , Munich 2018, pp. 88–93
  12. ^ Aribert Reimann: Dieter Kunzelmann , Göttingen 2009, p. 106 f.
  13. ↑ Single edition of the attack by Bernd Rabehl ( Memento from May 1, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Antifascist information sheet: Braunzone: 68er in front of the right fraternity »Danubia«. AIB 48 / No. 3, September 27, 1999