Central Council of Roaming Hash Rebels

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Central Council of the wandering (sometimes wrongly: wandering) hash rebels , also for short: hash rebels or wandering hash rebels , was an ironic self-term used mainly in 1969 by a militant left-wing extremist organization. The left- wing terrorist group Tupamaros West Berlin later emerged from this milieu . The hash rebels made a name for themselves by supporting increasingly radical forms of protest and action against the German state or the West Berlin Senate and its representatives (primarily from the police and the judiciary).

Together with the Tupamaros West Berlin and the Black Rats , the hash rebels belonged to an underground movement, also known as the Berlin Blues , that had emerged from the city's hashish scene. This was more anarchist oriented. Their protests were originally directed mainly against the restrictive drug policy of the Berlin Senate and the numerous drug raids in pubs. The individual, mostly loosely formed groups of the “blues” cannot be strictly differentiated from one another, as happens occasionally, as they are rather changeable names for more or less the same, loose circle of people. From November 1969 continued in selbigem Although the expanded to a political program and spectacular actions suggestive own naming Tupamaros West Berlin through, yet remained well from the hash rebels talk. In particular due to their increasingly aggressive rhetoric, their anti-Zionism and their legitimation and use of force in attacks with incendiary or explosive devices or the use of firearms, the groups of the "blues" became an important transition phenomenon between the protests of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the terrorist protests Activities of the Red Army Faction and Movement June 2nd .

The most famous members of the circle were Dieter Kunzelmann , Ralf Reinders , Michael "Bommi" Baumann , Ronald Fritzsch , Norbert "Knofo" Kröcher , Bernhard Braun, Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weisbecker . The violent deaths of Rauch and Weisbeckers between December 1971 and March 1972 (both were shot by police while attempting to arrest them) immediately led to the formation of the June 2nd Movement.

prehistory

A preliminary stage of the “Central Council of the Wandering Hash Rebels” developed out of a commune experiment on Wielandstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg . The main tenant of the apartment in question was the lawyer Otto Schily . The group of up to 20 people known as the “Wielandkommune”, including Georg von Rauch and Michael Baumann, practiced a deliberately anti-bourgeois lifestyle based on the example of Commune I, whereby they saw themselves as the avant-garde of fundamental social change. Drugs and sexual experimentation were the order of the day; One earned one's livelihood by printing and selling primarily socialist classics and routine shoplifting in supermarkets (“proletarian shopping”).

In the first half of 1969, however, contacts between the Wieland municipality and members of the K1 and another flat-sharing community in Nimrodstrasse in Berlin-Waidmannslust around Reinders and Fritsch formed a loose circle, for which the consumption of hashish and "shopping in" were only starting points for even more decisive attacks could be on the existing social order. The commune experiment was supposed to be converted into a fighting political practice. This should no longer include spontaneous, often amateurish acts of violence (such as throwing stones, etc.), but better organized, targeted, and also more dangerous forms of attack.

In fact, arson attacks on judicial facilities, consulates, police stations as well as judges and public prosecutors increased all over West Berlin in the winter of 1968/1969. There was also competition between individual left groups over the claim to have carried out the most radical actions. These often petty rivalries were a general trend of this time: after the loss of its charismatic identification figure Rudi Dutschke and the failure of the protests against the emergency laws due to long-term ideological differences in the second half of 1968, the APO began to crumble into numerous individual factions. A clear sign of this was the disintegration of the SDS, which began at the latest in September of the same year with the gradual separation of the K groups .

The violent events of 1968 were partly responsible for the partial readiness for radicalization: the assassination attempt on Dutschke and the subsequent Easter protests of the APO (especially in front of the publishing house of the Springer group in the Kochstrasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg ), the brutal one Action of the French police against demonstrators during the Paris May as well as the soon notorious “ Battle on Tegeler Weg ” in Berlin-Charlottenburg on November 4th, 1968. There it was on the occasion of a court of honor proceedings against the attorney Horst Mahler for the most severe confrontation of demonstrators with the Berlin police arrived with numerous injuries on both sides.

The second important development in 1968/1969 that contributed to the formation of the hash rebels was the increasing spread of illegal intoxicants in Berlin and other German cities. This was especially true for products made from cannabis (hashish and marijuana ), but also for hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline and soon also for heroin . The importance of this trend was controversially discussed within the left protest movement. Some saw it as destructive or even counter-revolutionary, since the consumption of intoxicants paralyzed people's ability to act politically and the buying and selling of drugs even by the smallest dealers perpetuated the dependency-creating market laws of capitalism . The one held from circles of hashish rebel against that intoxication seemed mind-expanding and therefore beyond Droeger ideology debates have the potential to make people aware of their disenfranchisement attentive, and could then animate to resist. Thereby one saw the possibility of anchoring revolutionary ideas in a “proletarian” subculture and thus to overcome the gap between the academic APO and the actionist-anarchist commune movement. The different perspectives on how often and how much was allowed to be stolen repeatedly resulted in serious conflicts within the municipalities mentioned. Several times these ended with representatives of the “hash faction” being shown outside the door.

Rebel romance and the willingness to take more radical actions as well as the unconditional desire to defend the “right to be intoxicated” soon came together in an explosive manner. Inspired by the urban guerrilla idea of ​​the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the anti-imperialist and social-revolutionary writings of left-wing masterminds such as Che Guevara , Mao Zedong , Régis Debray and Robert F. Williams , it was concluded in the vicinity of the Wieland commune that only an avant-garde revolutionary fighters in the big cities of the West could change the political system and thus become true counterparts and allies of the liberation movements in the third world .

The abandonment of remnants of a bourgeois existence (such as a permanent, official address) and the willingness to use open violence against representatives and institutions of the state and its “allies” were seen as a prerequisite for the functioning of the actions of such rebellious structures. The circle of urban guerrillas that emerged from the Wielandkommune was given the name Central Council of the Wandering Hash Rebels by Dieter Kunzelmann in the early summer of 1969 in a deliberately ironic refraction , whereby this name suggested a degree of organization that did not initially exist. The members of the hash rebels should not only go "underground" in their minds, they also committed serious crimes more often in the following three years. Michael Baumann later summed up this time: “This terrorism, there was progress in the time of the Wieland. It was important that we continued there. ”However, this radicalization ultimately led to the Wielandkommune breaking up, because the majority of its members did not want to take the step from living experiment to political struggle.

Planned attack during Nixon's visit

One of the first actions of the later so-called “hash rebels”, which went beyond the previous scope of sporadic incendiary devices, was an attempted fire bomb attack on the motorcade of American President Richard Nixon , who paid a short visit to Berlin that winter day. Nevertheless, this attack was supposedly only intended as a “beacon”, so the aim was to “give Mr. Nixon a brief scare”. In order not to endanger passers-by directly, von Rauch and Baumann deposited the incendiary device on scaffolding at the Berlin branch of the German Patent Office in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the building of the former Reich Patent Office . Apart from the fact that Nixon's car parade did not go right past this point (the route led via Blücherstrasse and Urbanstrasse and thus parallel to Gitschiner Strasse, where the patent office was located), the bomb failed because of a broken ignition cable. Baumann and von Rauch then dismantled them the following night and deposited them in the Wielandkommune refrigerator.

The explosive device, a mixture of sodium chlorate and Pattex with an alarm clock as a time fuse, was given to the two of them a day or two beforehand on the occasion of a teach-in at the Republican Club in Wielandstrasse, a main meeting place for the left-wing scene in Berlin, in preparation for Peter’s presidential visit Urbach was handed over. Urbach had come into contact with apo circles as a supposedly helpful craftsman who carried out installations in commune I and the Wieland commune, but actually worked as an agent for the Berlin office for the protection of the constitution . In this early phase of militant actions by left groups, Urbach was always willingly available from 1967 to 1970 as a main supplier of Molotov cocktails, incendiary or explosive devices and firearms.

Since his final exposure as a spy after Andreas Baader was arrested on April 4, 1970 , this has fueled speculation that Urbach was an agent provocateur whose services to assist in attacks and other criminal activities were coordinated with or even ordered by the authorities. Baumann, for example, later wrote in his memoir about the Nixon episode that the protection of the Constitution had "put the bomb in the hands of the hash rebels via Urbach. We didn't overlook that at all during that time, we were the henchmen of a very specific cop strategy. ”The historian and journalist Gerd Koenen, however, reports an objection at this point. He also criticizes the fact that Urbach was later taken out of the country by the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution and given a new identity as one of the “most incredible scandals of the Federal Republic of Germany”. At the same time, Koenen also complains about the tendency of the early urban guerrillas, which is becoming manifest at Baumann, to want to “issue a clean bill of health through this super agent ”.

Breaking up of "Commune I"

Possibly through a tip from Urbach, a week after the failed attack on Nixon's visit, on March 5, 1969, a police search of Wielandkommune, Kommune I and other apartments. While the bomb remained undetected in the refrigerator on Wielandstrasse, an incendiary bomb, probably also from Urbach, was tracked down in the K1. As a result, all community members were provisionally arrested and arrest warrants were finally issued against Rainer Langhans and Dieter Kunzelmann on the grounds that they had planned a “bomb attack on a constitutional organ”. This meant the Federal Assembly , which had met a few hours earlier on March 5, 1969 in the Palais at the Berlin radio tower to elect the new Federal President Gustav Heinemann (SPD). Kunzelmann later claimed in his memoirs that the fire bomb had been deposited in the K1 by Urbach on behalf of the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The arrest of the two well-known Communards led, also through a cleverly launched campaign by their friends Uschi Obermaier and Ina Siepmann , to renewed (albeit modest) protests by the APO with violent demonstrations and attacks in Berlin. However, in connection with the discovery of the fire bomb, there were later no charges against Langhans and Kunzelmann at all, perhaps because the Office for the Protection of the Constitution did not want to risk the well-placed spy Urbach being exposed at that time. After a month of imprisonment, the K1 members were surprisingly released on April 10, 1969. Nonetheless, the fire bomb affair ushered in the end of Commune I. On March 8, Langhans had already distanced himself from the "political story of the civil war", as Kunzelmann now represented it, in a letter to his friend, Horst Mahler, a lawyer from prison. He speculated that the fellow communard might not be so unfortunate to have been imprisoned because of his "shitty, hopeless situation" in Commune I.

The interests of Langhans himself turned more and more in a hedonistic , also spiritual direction during this time ; In contrast to Kunzelmann, he lost interest in political issues in the narrower sense. A few weeks after their release from prison there was a final confrontation between the two and their different “programs” in Commune I. Kunzelmann's experiments with hard drugs also played a role. Because Langhans had the majority of the other Communards on his side, the dispute ended with the expulsion of Kunzelmann. After Fritz Teufel , he was the second member of K1 to be shown outside the door.

Kunzelmann and the Hash Rebels

After being kicked out of Commune I, Dieter Kunzelmann and Ina Siepmann joined the growing group of hashish consumers who, without having a permanent place to stay, only move between the communes in Wielandstrasse and Nimrodstrasse, between other apartments and various trendy hangouts " haunted ". It was no coincidence that Kunzelmann soon gave the group its succinct name, the Central Council of the Wandering Hash Rebels, which made fun of the pompous names of some student political groups. The key word here was also the treatise On the Mentality of Wandering Rebels , in which Mao Zedong had denounced the indiscipline of non-hierarchically organized revolutionary gangs against the background of the Long March . What seemed an abomination to Mao, who was oriented towards the cadre principle, had a special charm for the anarchist Kunzelmann. He and Georg von Rauch quickly became the leading figures of the "hash rebels" ".

Kunzelmann reports in his memoir that it was not until the autumn of 1969 that he and von Rauch and the Tupamaros West Berlin developed plans for the creation of a "real" urban guerrilla group. However, as early as the spring / early summer of 1969, the “hash rebels” were discussing actions that were clearly going in a terrorist direction. In this context, his ex-fellow communard Ulrich Enzensberger remembers a vague plan by Kunzelmann from that time to kidnap a Berlin public prosecutor and hold him in a trailer that has been converted into a “people's prison”.

However, such considerations were not typical for this phase. The hash rebels, who proclaimed their program in the underground magazine Agit 883 and on leaflets, were primarily concerned with a protest against the criminalization and prosecution of hashish consumers in West Berlin. Particular annoyance was caused by the repeated police raids in popular hash rebels meeting places such as Zodiac (Hallesches Ufer), Mr. Go (Yorckbrücken), Unfathomable shelter for travelers ( Fasanenplatz ), tea room (Xantener Straße), Sun (Joachim-Friedrich-Straße) or Park ( Halensee ). However, in their calls for resistance against “the modern slave-owner system of late capitalism ”, which threatens the right to “one's own free decision about body and form of life”, they also sprinkled clear battle slogans. In a leaflet distributed in the summer of 1969, they self-confidently described themselves as “the militant core of the Berlin subculture” who “declared active war on police and departmental terror” and organized “retaliatory attacks against the police”.

literature

• Stefan Aust. The Baader Meinhof complex . Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1985.
• Bommi Baumann. How it all began . With a foreword by Heinrich Böll and a comment by Michael Sontheimer. Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1991.
• Marco Carini. Fritz Teufel - If it helps to find the truth . Hamburg: Concrete, 2003.
• Ulrich Enzensberger. The years of Commune I: Berlin 1967-1969 . Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004.
• Gerd Koenen. Vesper, Baader, Ensslin: Primal scenes of German terrorism . Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003.
• Dieter Kunzelmann. Don't resist! Pictures from my life . Berlin: Transit, 1998.
• Günter Langer. The Berlin 'Blues': Tupamaros and wandering hash rebels between madness and understanding, in: Eckhard Siepmann u. a. (Red.), Che Shah Shit: The sixties between Cocktail and Molotow , Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, 195–203. [2]
• Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch. The June 2nd Movement: Talks about hash rebels, the kidnapping of Lorenz, prison . Berlin and Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv, 1995.
• Miriam Spies. Acid, Mao and I Ching. Memories of a Berlin hash rebel . Mainz: Gonzo, 2008.

Web links

• Haschrebellen.de - How it all started
• Be high, be free, terror must be included
• Leaflets of the Central Council of Roaming Hash Rebels

Footnotes

1. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber : Left-wing extremism in Germany: A critical inventory. Wiesbaden 2014; Springer, ISBN 978-3-658-04506-7 , pp. 167-168
2. ↑ An example would be: Langer, Der Berliner “Blues”.
3. ↑ Michael Baumann: How it all started. P. 54.
4. ↑ Baumann, How It All Began , 53.
5. ↑ Baumann, How everything started , 54. This argument for a general explanation of the origins of left-wing terrorism in the Federal Republic and West Berlin expanded in: Langer, Der Berliner Blues.
6. ^ Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader , 257.
7. ↑ Kunzelmann, Don't resist , 110.
8. ↑ An abbreviated copy of Langhans' letter to Mahler is reprinted in: Kunzelmann, Leisten Do Not Resistance , 111. See Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune I , 317-28.
9. ↑ Ulrich Enzensberger: The Years of the Commune I. S. 328.
10. ↑ Dieter Kunzelmann: Don't resist! , P. 125; Ulrich Enzensberger: The years of the commune I. S. 333.
11. ↑ Berliner RockWiki , accessed on June 24, 2010
12. ↑ Hash rebels self-promotion leaflet, summer 1969. [1]