Baader-Meinhof myth exploded http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25612505-7583,00.html
Michael C. Moynihan June 10, 2009 ON June 2, 1967, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, exited a performance of The Magic Flute at the Berlin Opera House to a throng of rock-throwing protesters, already into their second hour of battle with police. As the situation escalated, Karl-Heinz Kurras, a detective sergeant in the West Berlin police force, approached an unarmed student he misidentified as a ringleader of the protest. After tussling with the suspect, Kurras unholstered his Walther PPK service pistol and squeezed the trigger. A single bullet smashed into the temple of 26-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg. He died 20 minutes later. Stefan Aust, former editor of the newsweekly Der Spiegel and author of a popular history of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terror group (also known as the Red Army Faction), cites the Ohnesorg killing as "a turning point in the thinking and feeling of many" in Germany; a martyrdom that would function as a foundation myth for the country's radical left movement, many of whom would later transform into university-educated urban guerillas. A simple narrative soon emerged on campuses across Germany: Ohnesorg, a pacifist active in Protestant student groups, had been brutally murdered by the "fascist pig" Kurras. When Kurras was twice acquitted in the killing - he claimed the shooting was accidental - it further "proved" that West Germany was merely a rump state of the Third Reich. Following the Ohnesorg shooting, philosopher Theodor Adorno momentarily abandoned abstruse Marxist theory for unambiguous hysteria, declaring that "the students have taken on a bit of the role of the Jews". To future Baader-Meinhof leader Gudrun Ensslin, the shooting demonstrated that West Germany was a "fascist state (that) means to kill us all". Ensslin, a 27-year-old pastor's daughter, provided a tidy apophthegm for those who would join terror organisations such as Movement 2 June (a tribute to Ohnesorg) and the Red Army Faction: "Violence is the only way to answer violence." And it is this narrative that has persisted until last week. According to new documents uncovered by two German researchers, Kurras was not the fascist cop of popular indignation but a longtime agent of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and a member of the East German Communist Party. In a rare moment of justified breathlessness, the ever-excitable German tabloid Bild called it the "revelation of the year". While there is no evidence that Kurras acted as an agent provocateur in shooting Ohnesorg, it is doubtless true that had his political sympathies - and his covert work for the Stasi - been known in 1967, the burgeoning radical student movement would have been deprived of its most effective recruiting tool. As Bettina Roehl, the journalist daughter of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, argued in Die Welt, the glut of post-Ohnesorg propaganda helped establish "the legend of an evil and brutal West Germany" while minimising the real brutality of communist East Germany. For those who sympathised with the 1968 student Left, the Kurras revelation struck like a thunderbolt. In an interview with The New York Times, Aust argued: "The pure fact that (Kurras) was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not." Otto Schily, who provided legal counsel for many Baader-Meinhof terrorists and would later serve as chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's interior minister, admitted that the Ohnesorg case must be "politically and legally re-evaluated". But when it comes to the wickedness and depravity of the (fantastically misnamed) German Democratic Republic, re-evaluation is not something most Germans have been keen to engage in. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was only a superficial reckoning with the crimes perpetrated by the East German state. One or two high-profile trials against the likes of Stasi chief Markus Wolf and a handful of unenthusiastic prosecutions of border police officers and party functionaries were soon followed by a spasm of Ostalgie, nostalgia for the former dictatorship, famously represented by the kitschy television series The GDR Show, hosted by former Olympic figure skater and Stasi collaborator Katarina Witt. (The New York Times picked up on the trend last year, headlining a book review "East Germany had its charms, crushed by capitalism.") That the country's communist past has been treated with a mixture of airiness and apathy was tacitly acknowledged in a recent Der Spiegel cover story on the Red Army Faction terrorists. With the release of Uli Edel's Oscar-nominated film The Baader Meinhof Complex, a dramatic retelling of Bonn's battle with left-wing terrorism that eschewed the romanticism of previous cinematic treatments, the magazine declared that Edel effectively "destroyed the myth of the RAF", a group that was occasionally trained, funded and sheltered by the Stasi. Indeed, that his service to the Stasi might provoke outrage seemed to mystify Ohnesorg's killer. Interviewed by Bild, Kurras, now 81 and living in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, acknowledged having been a member of the East German Communist Party: "Should I be ashamed of that or something?" He denied having worked for the Stasi, though suggested that if he had, that too was of minimal importance. "And what if I did work for them? What does it matter?" In the context of recent German history, this is almost a fair question. Surely Kurras noticed that many of Germany's 1968 radicals have triumphed in their long march through the bourgeois institutions; from Schily to former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who was an active and deeply radical member of the hard-left Frankfurt collective Spontis, and French-German student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party. And why would one consider it inappropriate to have joined the East German Communist Party when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the same party simply reconstituted itself under a different acronym and entered the Bundestag? Authorities in Berlin have opened an investigation into Kurras's covert relationship with East Germany and have threatened to revoke his state pension. It would be a small penalty for someone who offered his services to totalitarianism, but in a country tired of historical introspection it should be considered a victory. -- Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
