Municipality 2

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Giesebrechtstrasse 20 in Berlin-Charlottenburg

The municipality 2 was a community in Berlin-Charlottenburg , was tried in the collective to connect life with political work. Municipality 2 refers to the recently founded municipality I , compared to which it was also referred to as the "political commune ".

The municipality 2 began in August 1967, failed after one year in the summer of 1968 and has been documented by the parties in a book. Four men, three women and two children were involved. Most of the members came from the SDS . Participants included Klaus Gilgenmann , Jan-Carl Raspe , Hans-Eberhard Schultz , Eike Hemmer and Marion Steffel-Stergar from the Subversive Aktion group . There was sexual abuse of children in the commune .

Emergence

In June 1966, nine men and five women spent a week in a country house discussing the conditions for a revolutionary movement in Western Europe. What they had in common was that they had already taken part in actions by the anti-authoritarian left in Berlin and Munich and despised the “seminar Marxists” in the SDS working groups. At this meeting, the people of Munich took Rudi Dutschke's late arrival , who still wanted to meet his parents, as an opportunity to address personal problems with the help of psychoanalytic categories, which some perceived as psycho- terror . The commune discussion group in Berlin was first set up by Gretchen Dutschke , who had read reports on the American commune experiments, with the help of Rudi Dutschke. The two invited friends and acquaintances to the first discussion. After the annual SDS delegates conference, the discussion group in West Berlin at the beginning of September was expanded to a group of 25 to 30 members, to which Dieter Kunzelmann joined at the end of September . This group was called after US model already municipality , with this term to a close solidarity moved and not a living form. A large part of this group was very practice-oriented, which is reflected in a contribution by Bernd Rabehl from November 1966:

“Our goal is to set the community. Setting the community is the prerequisite for practice. Anarchist practice is the destruction of theory. we have resolved not to do any more trend analysis. This means that practice is possible in an instant. past anarchist movements failed because the time was not yet fulfilled. Historically there is now for the first time a possibility for us. "

They referred to Herbert Marcuse's thesis of the fringe group theory, according to which the contradiction of capitalist society can no longer be experienced in the sphere of production, but only outside against it. The group tried - still very clumsily - to break through the authoritarian style of discussion of the SDS using group dynamic elements.

On New Year's Eve in 1967, several people from the SDS and their surroundings decided to move into a common apartment. This group was called SDS-Kommune and saw itself as a forerunner of a new organizational form of SDS, which was to be gradually converted into living group collectives. In May 1967, a common fund was introduced into which all private incomes of the residents flowed and from which everything was paid. While the already founded Commune I , which had withdrawn into isolation to deal with personal problems, now refrained from communicating personal problems, the SDS commune tried to combine the personal with the political. In the summer of 1967 the SDS commune broke up, but in August 1967 seven adults and two children moved into a 7½-room apartment in Charlottenburg and founded commune 2.

realization

An essential element of the municipality was the collective organization of everyday life:

  1. "Horizontal financial equalization": private money was abolished, and money was generated jointly through the sale and printing of brochures (writings of the "Sex-Pol-Movement", by Wilhelm Reich and own brochures)
  2. Joint planning of consumption
  3. Joint organization of household chores (“alternate housekeeping”) initially through rotation, then supplemented by collective “campaigns”
  4. Bringing up children together

Raising children together should be anti-authoritarian . The two children first went to a kindergarten, which, however, after some time was viewed by the municipality as a storage facility. They then switched to one of the two children's shops organized by the Action Council for the Liberation of Women .

The commune saw its failure primarily in the failure of joint political work. Only a small part of the group worked intensively to arrest Fritz Teufel . This was attributed to the fact that women in the commune were unable to find common political practice that reflected their interests.

In January, the group began a group analysis based on psychoanalytic practice, which they called "series analysis":

“During the course of the evening, it was three or four of us in a row, the women on Tuesdays and the men on Fridays. During the first two evenings we didn't have any special seating arrangements. At the beginning everyone took some kind of seat, and then there was usually a longer pause until whoever it was his turn started talking. There was no fixed form of conversation. The sessions usually began with reports on current events and their psychological processing. There were enough occasions, people were annoyed, frustrated, or memories had surfaced about certain events. Overall, the group behaved cautiously, which, however, did not come from any particular knowledge, but rather was due to uncertainty. "

Sexual assault on preschoolers

Within Commune 2, adults committed sexual acts on children. This behavior was aggressively promoted and, for example, spread on a photo poster as a supplement to the course book (17th edition, published in 1969 by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger), as well as in a book about municipality 2. In the course book, the municipality member Hans-Eberhard Schultz described attacks on the four-year-old daughter of Dieter Kunzelmann on April 4, 1968. It also describes voyeuristically how the children in the commune performed sexual acts on each other, some of which were stimulated by adults. The political scientist Franz Walter wrote about the text of the course book: “That was and still is an oppressive document of the helplessness and speechlessness of a self-initiative that was conceivably amateurish and through which the undoubtedly pronounced psychological instability of most of its participants is reinforced and expanded even further has been. And right in the middle: two children, a boy and a girl, aged three and four, who were severely traumatized by all kinds of radical changes in adult caregivers. "

resolution

After the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke on April 11, 1968, the group was unable to continue to conduct the group analysis intensively. Although the collective took part in the mass protests, it was unable to achieve joint political work for the reasons mentioned above. The group analysis, which was resumed on May 1st, was carried out with varying degrees of interest and was only perceived by the Communards as "dragging along". Finally, they took the initiative and dissolved the municipality in the summer of 1968. They documented their history using protocols and analyzes in a book publication.

Publications

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Commune 2nd attempt to revolutionize the bourgeois individual. Combine collective life with political work! , P. 19
  2. Kommune 2, p. 210 (1969), 216 (1975)
  3. Now the children are talking , by Alexander Wendt and Daniel Fallenstein, Focus May 27, 2013
  4. ^ ARD Title Topics Temperaments: Pedophilia and the 68s. Retrieved June 18, 2020 .
  5. Franz Walter: The pedophile debate among the Greens in a programmatic and social context (interim report, p. 25). Institute for Democracy Research, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, accessed on June 26, 2020 .
  6. Municipality 2, s. O.