Today we’re sharing an interview recorded this week with Gabriel Kuhn speaking about the West German urban guerrilla group the 2nd of June Movement, the book he co-edited on this subject entitled From Hash Rebels to Urban Guerrillas: A Documentary History of the 2nd of June Movement (from PM Press and Kersplebedb), the milieu from which it arose, how it compared to other groups at the time like the Red Army Faction, and some of the legacy of their critiques and interventions on radical politics in the autonomen movement and beyond.
For the hour we speak about the context from which the 2nd of June Movement grew (alongside the Red Army Faction, Revolutionary Cells and others) in the 1970’s, their goals and actions, the timing of the book and the legacy that these groups left to German society and the autonomous movements that continued.
• Our prior interview with Gabriel on Liberating Sapmi
• Gabriel’s blog: https://lefttwothree.org/
• A blog collecting documents of this period: http://germanguerilla.com/
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Featured Track:
- 5:45 by Gang of Four from The Peel Sessions
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Transcription
TFSR: We’re joined by an Austrian-born historian, author, and sports fan, Gabriel Kuhn. Gabriel was on the show years ago to talk about Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North, in which he collaborated alongside Maxida Märak. I am excited for us to speak this time about the recently released book From Hash Rebels To Urban Guerrillas: A Documentary History of the 2nd of June Movement out from Kersplebedeb and PM Press. Would you care to introduce yourself further to the audience with any gender pronouns? I already he’d you twice, so I’m happy to correct that. And any location, affiliations, or other information that may be helpful for the audience?
Gabriel Kuhn: Sure, we’ve met before. The pronoun is correct. It’s fine. I use the pronoun he. Yes, you mentioned that I’m originally from Austria. I left the country in the 1990s, traveled a lot, and then ended up in Sweden in 2007. I’ve been there for almost 20 years. I’ve been active in the autonomous extraparliamentary left since my days in high school. That will be the late 1980s. Just because I like to do it, a lot of work went into publishing projects. I like to write and translate and just generally work with text, but I’ve also been involved in different groups and organizations. Currently, I am mainly involved with the SAC, which is an IWW-style syndicalist labor union in Sweden. I think that’s it for an introduction.
TFSR: Would you say IWW-like because it doesn’t participate in electoral politics with its syndicalism or what makes that distinction?
GK: Oh, because it comes from the same labor union tradition, syndicalism. What’s its gist compared to most other labor unions? We organize all workers, not divided up by trade. It’s not a trade union. More combative, confrontational principle of direct action, a very strong federal, direct democratic structure. I am the General Secretary of the Union, which sounds great. I have absolutely no decision-making powers. We have a separate committee of folks who make all the decisions. The ultimate goal that you’re working towards is not just better wages and better conditions at the workplace but libertarian socialism. It just comes from the same tradition. The organizations were founded around the same time. The IWW would have been in 1905, if I’m not mistaken, and the SAC in 1910.
TFSR: Probably some of the same people founded both.
GK: There is actually an overlap between them because so many Swedes emigrated to the United States around the time. Joe Hill, for example, is of Swedish origin. Our organization owns the house in Gävle that he grew up in. There’s a little museum. And then also some of those folks then returned to Sweden, so there was a lively exchange between the organizations in the 1920s into the ‘30s.
TFSR: A lot of Swedish immigrants were participating in the timber industries in North America, which is incredibly dangerous, hard work, and a lot of strong unionism among the workers there.
GK: The SAC had some of its strongest locals in the north because of both the mining and the forest industries.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, speaking of history, in 2009, you translated for the same publishers a collection of the 2 June Movement veteran Klaus Viehmann entitled Prison Round Trip. I understand that you were involved in an autonomous and anarchist journal in Austria called TATblatt in the 1990s. Could you talk about how you felt the ripples of the antiauthoritarian and anticapitalist movements of the long 1960s in Central Europe as you politically developed?
GK: Yeah. Just real quick. The pamphlet you mentioned, Prison Round Trip by Klaus Viehmann, is a text by him about his prison experience, essentially. It’s a short prison survival handbook, and the pamphlet has a couple of extra texts prefaced by a North American political prisoner. That was that.
In response to your question, yes, I mentioned earlier that I started to be active in autonomous extraparliamentary leftist politics in the late 1980s, which was just about at the end of the urban guerrilla experience in Germany, and the impact of what was then about to come was very big. Those groups left a mark on German society as a whole, obviously the left as well. At the time that I started to get involved, that was a period when the analysis of what happened started. There was an element of self-critique. You were looking at things that had benefited the left, things that maybe did not. But I would say, all through the 1980s and then also into the 1990s when the so-called autonomous movement was strong in Germany—and now I will speak about Germany, I said I came from Austria, but the two countries, because of the common language and everything, are in many ways, closely tied to each other, also the autonomous left—we certainly had conversations where that history didn’t pop up, but it was very present. Also, in terms of the book, it was interesting for me to work on this now, 30 years later, because most of the texts that are in the book I had originally read in German a long time ago, and revisiting them was very interesting. I was always a fan of that particular group, the 2 June Movement, so it was also nice to be able to get back into that history and dig a bit deeper and contribute to the spread of that history.
TFSR: So you mentioned having the texts already. Can you talk a bit about how the book came about? Because you were working with collections and translations that other people had also put together. What were the dimensions of the story that you were hoping to bring to new audiences with the expansion of Roman Danyluk’s collection and that translation from an anonymous comrade?
GK: That background, it’s a bit of an odd history. I’ll try to make it short and not too complicated. There are two people in North America who have done quite a lot of translations from the urban guerrilla groups in Germany, and they had plans to do a book about the 2 June Movement based on those translations. And I knew about this. This goes back 15 years or so. The question of whether I was going to get involved to bring out an English-language book about the 2 June Movement came up before. I always just said I know there are people working on it, and that was it. I don’t look at radical publishing as some competition. Those folks have it covered, and there is plenty of other stuff to do, so I’ll do other things. But then, for different reasons, that project got delayed, and I knew that some of the translations had been done, but then other steps, like fine-tuning them and writing notes and introductions, didn’t seem to happen. That was one thing. The other thing was that I knew that PM Press was pretty keen on a 2 June Movement book. And then the third thing was that, as you mentioned, Roman Danyluk, a German comrade, published a very comprehensive German history of the movement and talked to a lot of former members. He’s a comrade, so it’s very insightful. And I just felt like, “Ah, man, I should be able to tie those threads together.” You have these translations, you have this great research done by Roman, and you have a publisher willing to publish a book about this group. So I entered this particular project mostly as a type of coordinator who thought that maybe we could work over those translations, use parts of Roman’s book for an introduction and commentary, and then bring it out with PM Press. It ended up being more work than I thought because once I started, I made a couple of extra trips to Berlin, and I added some other texts. It ended up being more work than I thought. But as I said before, it was fun. I’m glad the book is out. That’s the background of how it came about.
TFSR: I imagine that there’s a part of the timing that correlates to the fact that the materials were present. You’d been collecting this already 15 years ago, and you said that you were aware of some of these translations, but also the people who were engaged, some of them are still alive, but they’re starting to get older. They’re starting to maybe lose some memories. They’re starting to age out. Did that contribute to the decision of when to put this out, or did the desire to see this material and the discussions associated with it come back into the conversation? This might be a cynical question, but with so much artificial intelligence translation availability, was there any sense of like, “These were human translations that were done, and we want to get this good stuff that people put work into out in a timely fashion before some crappy versions come out.” Does any of that ring a bell?
GK: Yeah. I hear two separate questions in there. So, two responses. The first one is about the timing, the people involved, and the former members and memory. I feel slightly uncomfortable now because I was involved in a similar project in Sweden in recent years, documenting the biographies of militants who came to Sweden from Latin America in the 1970s as political refugees from the military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. And I was doing it with a comrade in Sweden. And for us, that was clearly a motivating factor because that was really more oral history. We would go out and interview these people. And one factor was that we felt that there was not that much time left to do that stuff. Most of these people are in their 70s and 80s. And then some people took offense to that because they’re like, “What are you saying about these people’s age?” But with all that said as a disclaimer, yes, of course. There’s an element where you think about, “Okay, if this was done 20 years from now, it’d be very difficult, whether it be members of the group or any contemporary witnesses.” It becomes more difficult to do that work because there are fewer sources. So that was a factor.
The translation is a very interesting question because it’s such a general question about translations and artificial intelligence, and something I think about because I’ve translated a lot. To be honest, I am one of the people who believe that most translations will soon be done by artificial intelligence, and a lot of them will be fine, but there are certain niche operations that are still difficult to do for artificial intelligence and might continue to be difficult to do. And in this particular case, that’d be one of those niches. And it’s because there is a lot, especially in the text of the 2 June Movement, there’s a very specific political jargon from that time that I think is hard to pick up if you are not familiar with that history. Plus, there is a lot of wordplay, humor, and satire, which is also hard to pick up. I think, in this case, a human translation will be better, not only now but probably, I would say, even 10 or 20 years from now. But this was not a motivating factor in bringing out the book. It was just a factual response to your question.
TFSR: That’s great. I appreciate that. It is an amazing thing to be able to, at this point, have it embedded in your web browser, where there’s an opportunity to translate a website in front of you, and understandable. It comes out a little bit janky because spoken human, the political jargon as you said. I’m sure the subcultural jargon from the blues or just from the autonomous scene in Germany at that period of time is all going to be a little bit untranslatable. The other part of that question was, and we can get to that later on in the conversation, besides the age of the people, did now feel like a time when this conversation, in particular, should be recurring or remembered, or just the elements matched up, and it just made sense to get it out as soon as possible?
GK: I think the latter. Maybe we can talk about this more later. There are some universal themes that are part of that history and are addressed in many of those texts that you can always apply to the current historical moment you are in. But had the book come out 10 years ago, that would have been just as fine or better. There are all these advantages and disadvantages. Had it come out 10 years ago or 15 years ago, the book would have come out earlier, and a whole generation of activists internationally would have already access to that history. One advantage of waiting a little longer is that maybe the reflections become a little deeper at times. More time has gone, more political developments have happened. What I’m saying is maybe it’s a better book now than what we could have done 15 years ago. In this particular case, certainly, because Roman’s comprehensive German history wasn’t out yet, and his research was very valuable for this book. It’s exterior circumstances. I think it’s a good book with universal themes that could have come out pretty much at any time.
TFSR: I was hoping you could talk about the history, just to give context for the movements and the groups that we’re talking about, of armed workerist struggles against the State in Germany that would have been known to the generation of the 2 June Movement, and what living reminders might have been around for them at the time? Another element of it is how did the horrors of the Nazi regime toppled over 20 years before shape the political consciousness among the left at the time that we’re talking about?
GK: Again, two questions that overlap. I’ll start with the historical background or tradition of armed resistance in Germany. In the 1920s to early 1930s, the workers’ movement in Germany, as well as the more radical militant wings, was very strong. There was a revolutionary moment in Germany right after World War I when the Kaiserreich crumbled and collapsed, and it was unsure where the country was heading politically. There were also very strong radical currents within the left, which were then in an ensuing civil war-type situation, subdued by the Social Democrats combined with reactionary military forces. That’s a special part of German history. But also in the 2 June text, sometimes there are explicit references to the communist-anarchist groups that were fighting the reactionary forces, and then also the social democratic sellouts, whatever you want to call them. In the 1920s, there were armed uprisings in Germany from 1918 to 1923. There was early armed resistance to the Nazi regime. There’s definitely a history to tap into.
In terms of who of those people were still around in the 1960s-70s when those groups emerged, some people were. But I think what was the closest historical link was the resistance to the Nazi regime, armed or unarmed. That was a clear reference point that also, at that time, was only maybe 20-25 years earlier. Which brings me to your second question, and that is the overall impact that the Nazi regime had on that generation of activists. And that was huge. Even today, if you look at some of the idiosyncrasies of the German left, for example, in relation to the conflict in the Middle East, Israel and Palestine. A lot of that cannot be explained without the history that goes back to a regime that was in place almost 100 years ago. Imagine a time when that regime had been in place only 20-25 years ago, where not your great-grandparents but your parents had some role in it, either as active supporters or passive bystanders or active resistors. That whole era of German politics, including left-wing politics, cannot be explained without that history.
TFSR: Can you paint a picture of some of the economic and political conditions in West Germany 20 years after the toppling of the Nazi regime and some of the aspirations swirling around that set the stage for the actors that we’ll be speaking of?
GK: The economic situation in Germany was relatively good. People speak of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, the economic boom in Germany after World War II, closely tied to the US Marshall Plan, which can be sold as a very generous gift to Germany but of course, was tied to a bunch of economic and political conditions. To this day there are huge US Army bases in Germany, for example. That’s our part of that history. But economically, it helped Germany get back on its feet. When I say Germany now, I mean West Germany. Germany, at the time, was divided. You had the capitalist West, and then the state socialist East. And then Berlin was a bit of a special case. West Berlin was tied politically to West Germany, but it was geographically isolated, basically an enclave in the middle of East Germany, also with certain parts of the city belonging to the East German state. Politically, West Germany functioned as a liberal democracy. The critique that was also an important part of the radical left, including the armed groups at the time was that there hadn’t been a really clear cut from the Nazi past. The critique could take on different forms. It could be that, essentially, it was still a fascist state, just with a democratic facade. Or a milder form would be that the political system has changed, but if you look at people in positions of power, both in politics and economics, but also, for example, in the justice system, those were people who had also had high-ranking positions during the Third Reich. So, just through them, there was some continuation there. Those were the conditions. So, the critique was like a double-edged thing. On the one hand, West Germany was criticized from the far left as an ally to US imperialism and yet, at the same time, also as a country that had not fully eradicated its Nazi past. Both of those elements were part of the critique of the German state at the time.
TFSR: Based on a little bit of history that I’ve read, it seems like that does pan out in some of the larger policy decisions in West Germany and the creation of the post-war intelligence services. A lot of the focus continued shifting. It wasn’t about eradicating certain parts of the population, but there was a very fervent anti-communism or anti-socialism to the policies that fell in line with the US despite having worked with Stalin during the war for some very material reasons. It just shifted to continue fighting against the invasion of communism and all the values that they feared would come with that.
GK: Yeah, it was the era of the Cold War. This alliance at the end of World War II between the Soviet Union and the Western allies against Nazi Germany had its historical reasons. It was a pragmatic decision that very quickly after the war turned just into a global battle of ideologies and different political systems, and Germany, with its division, was very much at the heart of it. One should also say, though, which is interesting from an analytical perspective, that most—there were exceptions—but most of the harshest left-wing critics of the West German state in West Germany and West Berlin at the time were also critical of the state socialist system in East Germany. It’s a complicated history. There was also some collaboration, as history has shown, but if you look at the discussions in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the state socialism as it existed at the time wasn’t the real socialism that it was called in the German-speaking world and was held as this glorious example that you were striving after, compared to the West German state. People were looking at other… If you came from a more libertarian current, more libertarian socialist options, but even more traditional Marxist-Leninist folks had a variety of views. It was also the time of this Sino-Soviet split. Some people were more looking towards China, and it was complicated.
TFSR: I remember also seeing at some point in the book—it might have been in the introduction—that there were references to a period of militant labor struggle in the 1950s that was harshly repressed by the West German state also. There was also a recent memory of labor attempting to coordinate and organize for its own benefit being repressed by the post-war West German state, too. This would have been, even if not the individuals who were a part of the extraparliamentary opposition in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, maybe their parents, older siblings, whatever, would have remembered, like, “Okay, this is where we’re at.”
GK: There’s that history, but also very good that you bring that up because it’s important, at least for the 2 June Movement. In the late 1960s, not closely related to the New Left, but just happening around the same time, there were wildcat strikes, especially in the German auto industry. A lot of Italian migrant workers were involved who partly were inspired by the operaists, independent workers’ revolts and strikes in Italy. And especially within the 2 June Movement, there was a faction that was strongly inspired by that history as well. So that is a strong aspect, particularly then, that inspired and motivated the 2 June Movement.
TFSR: Now is a good time to get into the details of the book. Could you talk about where the name of the 2 June Movement came from, what this 2 June Movement was, and a bit about the social milieu called the Blues that it came out of, give an overview of the main characters?
GK: Yes. The name comes from an event that occurred, not surprisingly, on 2 June 1967 when a German student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead during a demonstration in West Berlin against the visit of The Shah of Persia, Iran. There were demonstrations all day. Why were there demonstrations? Because his regime in Iran was seen as a dictatorial authoritarian regime, and people were protesting the collaboration of the West German state with that regime. There were also quite a lot of political radicals from Iran in German exile. They were also involved in organizing those protests. They were going on all day in Berlin. And then Benno Ohnesorg, as the tale goes, it was the first time he participated in a demonstration, and then when things got rowdy in the evening, a police officer followed him into an alley and shot him unmotivated. There was no threat, really. That was a big event for the extraparliamentary left in opposition at the time. It seemed like the state was escalating the conflict. The stakes became higher. When five years later, this group formed, the 2 June Movement, they took that name. When members were asked, “Why did you choose the name?” what often came up was that it was to make people remember who shot first, essentially, that the violence, this escalation came from the state, and that was a very significant date that showed that.
So the group itself, as I said, formed in ‘71, early ‘72, and was more or less a merger of different smaller groups in West Berlin and West Germany that had already engaged in militant direct action, fire bombings, property destruction, and the like, with a similar ideological background, which was more operaist left, communist anarchist. In the historical consciousness of the radical German left, the 2 June Movement is sort of the anarchist counterpart to the better-known Red Army Faction, which had been founded a bit earlier and was more of a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist organization that had more prominent members, did more spectacular actions with more people dying. That attracted more media interest. And sometimes, when you talk to members of the 2 June Movement, they’re not super comfortable with the anarchist label. It wasn’t really used at the time either, and I think it was because there was a blend of ideological influences, which you can also see in the autonomous movement in Germany as a whole. The people came from anarchist backgrounds but also left communists with different strains. But as a shortcut, that was definitely a dividing line there.
You did also ask about the Blues. The subcultural background to that, we’re talking about dividing lines here. So one would be ideological, which I just outlined, between the 2 June Movement and the Red Army Faction. Another one would relate to the background of the members. While the Red Army Faction was more of a student-type milieu, middle class, the 2 June Movement had a very strong proletarian element in its membership. And then there’s the cultural aspect. Everyone, even Red Army Faction members, would have come from the German counterculture of the time, which was the late ‘60s, and rock music and drugs and all of that. But there was a divide in the sense that the 2 June Movement members, early and especially in West Berlin, came from the city’s underground scene called the Blues at the time. Hash Rebels was one of the groups that then merged with others to form the 2 June Movement. That is an indication of the drug of choice of most of those members in that particular group at the time. So they were part of a particular scene in Berlin, very rooted there also locally, which was different for the Red Army Faction, which had members from different parts of Germany with maybe less of such a direct link to a specific and geographically rooted counterculture.
TFSR: By the time the 2 June Movement was coming up, RAF had already been operating. There were predecessors, and people in 2 June, as you said, like the Hash Rebels, had already been doing these activities before they gave this name to it. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the predecessor groups that had named themselves, like RAF, maybe you could go a little bit more into what began the period, what was seen at the beginning of this period of extraparliamentary opposition, or the urban guerrillas in Germany?
GK: We talked about ‘67 and Benno Ohnesorg and the escalation of the conflict. What happened was that different groups within the left thought that in order to continue being a relevant political force, you had to answer to that escalation, and that answer was to arm yourselves and engage in direct militant action. In that sense, it’s also important to note, like when I said that here you have the Red Army Faction, and then you have the 2 June Movement, and there are certain dividing lines. That’s certainly true. However, they still came out of a very similar milieu, where a lot of people had personal contacts, and some people were on the edge of which group to join. They had contacts with both. There was certainly no hostility there. It was coming out of the same milieu but then was going into slightly different directions for reasons I mentioned: political, cultural, and others.
Right now, I’m really making this short, but for the Red Army Faction, I think the main motivation, also, if you look at their earliest programmatic texts for engaging in armed struggle, was to bring the anti-imperialist struggle. At that time, Vietnam, of course, was also a big factor in German politics, but in general, it was a national liberation struggle in the third world, as it was called at the time. You’d bring them to the imperialist Metropole and become a representative of those struggles there. That would have been more the anti-imperialist line, and then the counterpart to that was the social revolutionary line, where it was more about strengthening the social movements and the protest movements that existed in Germany and adding a militant, armed element to it, which, in the analysis, was seen as something that ideally would strengthen those movements, would allow them to not just be on the defensive end of the escalating struggle with the state, but to challenge the state. There were also ideas, especially on the Red Army Faction side, that “if you challenge the state enough, then the democratic facade will also disappear, and the fascist core will become more obvious, which then might radicalize more people.” Something that did not happen, but that was, I guess, also part of the idea that was around at that time.
There were different motivating factors for groups to pick up arms. I should also say I was talking about the Red Army Faction, the 2 June Movement. Another organization network with armed militant resistance emerged, the so-called Revolutionary Cells, with a feminist sister organization called Rote Zora—that was also in the early 1970s—which was social revolutionary predominately, I suppose, but had an anti-imperialist element there as well. Again, all those distinctions were important and real, but they weren’t all that clear-cut, even within some of these groups. Some of the 2 June members, when the organization dissolved in 1980, then joined the Red Army Faction. You had these discussions within the organizations all the time.
TFSR: And I imagine that those discussions were ongoing. Maybe the Red Army Faction’s line at that point was different from the early ‘70s when they were taking certain kinds of actions, especially because it was a new generation of activists involved, the first ones having been killed or died in prison or what have you, or gone underground. But just to get a little bit deeper into this distinguishing between the anti-imperialist perspective and the social revolutionary perspective. I would love to hear your interpretations of how the concepts of who the revolutionary subject was, where the change had to occur, and what the role of those groups was in making that change. You’ve already talked about the Red Army Faction at one point believing that they could heighten the contradictions within the imperial core to the degree that the gloves come off, the mask comes off, and the Metropole resists. What were the goals of the armed actions, and what precautions did they take? With the Red Army Faction, as you said, a lot more people died, and they seemed to have an understanding, at least after the fact in their statements, of what was acceptable losses among the German population or whatever population they were affecting, were, and what change they were trying to bring about, as opposed to the more dug into the proletarian scene and the workers’ and the community’s social revolutionary perspective, which had a much lower death count. Sorry, that was a rambling question.
GK: It’s not necessarily a rambling question. It’s just a big question that entails a lot of under-questions. But yeah, I’ll try to answer a few of those. Where do I start? Maybe with the precautions. One thing that you could say is that since I already introduced the Revolutionary Cells, I can use them here to illustrate what I’m going to try to explain. Once you go underground, of course, precautions are a necessary element of your everyday life, and they will require a lot of energy, time, resources, and focus. That was true for both the Red Army Faction and the 2 June Movement. The Revolutionary Cells, for example, made a decision not to go underground. That was more of a model in the more recent political history of the US. If you think of the Earth Liberation Front, for example, that would have been more similar. Different cells that shared sometimes rather vague ideological tactical base of agreements but then were operating very independently. Sometimes, you wouldn’t know who the people in the other cells were. None of them was underground, which to some degree, I suppose, limits you in what you can do, but also means that you don’t have to spend as much time and resources in just maintaining your underground community. The precaution part was that it was very big once you had taken that decision.
In terms of which actions you would choose, one thing that happened very quickly with the Red Army Faction, then partly with the 2 June Movement as well, was that the repression of the state was very harsh, and you had people both being killed and imprisoned very early on, which meant that, from a pretty early stage, a lot of the actions that were taken were in the context of a direct confrontation with the state. They were about getting prisoners released. It was a show of strength in a way that developed its own dynamic that partly, some would say, largely moved away from the original goals of engaging in armed resistance to strengthen revolutionary movements. It just developed its own military dynamic. But if you go back to the origins, the ideas of or the ambitions of the Red Army Faction, perhaps, were bigger. The way I interpret the different lines and different outlooks is they represent a lot of discussions that were going on globally among revolutionary groups. If I start with the 2 June Movement, you described the actions that they didn’t seem so enormous, not something on a grand, spectacular scale, but that was also part of the idea. You would, as the militant part of broader social movements, engage in actions that aren’t that difficult for others in that movement to replicate if they felt that they had the personal capacity to engage in those kinds of actions, like firebombing or whatever.
On the big scale, if you now take the most spectacular actions that the Red Army Faction, at least indirectly, was involved with—airplane hijackings—that is very difficult to pull off. You need enormous infrastructure, sometimes the help of friendly state intelligence units. That’s on a completely different scale. And I think if you have an idea that with those actions, you could strengthen global revolutionary movements that are on the edge of bringing about revolutionary change that you would then be able to bring to other parts of the world and other countries. I could see how within that logic that will make sense. But if you have a view like, “No, this is way too alienated from mass struggle and mass protests, which is what we want to be connected to…” One programmatic text of the 2 June Movement says, “We are only of anger, and in this sense, that we take up arms, but we are struggling with a broad range of people and have the same goals.” That is a very, very different concept. And the 2 June Movement very strongly stands for the latter. And so did the Revolutionary Cells as a whole, although this anti-imperialist group that they had in the 1970s was more verging towards the rough tactics, if you will.
TFSR: Could you talk a bit about what happened to the 2 June Movement? You mentioned people were being killed, people were being captured, even from early on. It escalated, so that the organization or the network became at war with the state in order to get certain gains so they could continue fighting. Could you talk a bit about some of the characters? The first time that I had heard about this organization was this title, How It All Began.
GK: Yes, Bommi Baumann’s book. That’s the introduction to a lot of people, both in the German-speaking world and maybe especially internationally, because there’s little else. Before this book came out, there was little else to turn to.
TFSR: And a number of the voices in the book that you edited tear Baumann a new one.
GK: He became a very controversial figure within that scene.
TFSR: I wonder if you could talk a bit about what happened to the individuals that were involved in the 2 June Movement.
GK: Sure. Different political histories. There is no one really that comes to mind that would have been a big turncoat, like they would have started working for the state, at least not openly. How could you sum it up? Some people, when the 2 June Movement dissolved in 1980, basically because most of its members were imprisoned and there were different ideas about how to continue, and a part split off and joined the Red Army Faction. That’s the first answer: Some of the members joined the Red Army Faction. Others, especially those who didn’t, because of principled reasons, when they were released from prison, continued to be active in the autonomous left to varying degrees. Some were more publicly present than others but essentially continued doing politics on the same principles that they started doing politics but in different times and different contexts, so it expressed itself differently.
You had some people, maybe Norbert Kröcher and Fritz Teufel, who were in that milieu, but they were the characters who didn’t particularly belong to any particular group and maybe sometimes said controversial things. And you had people like Bommi Baumann, who like I said before that he was controversial, because he was one of the people, for example, who had contact with agents in East Germany, and it was never quite clear how much information he provided about his group to those folks, and I think people around him have different opinions on that. Then there was Inge Viett, for example. She was one of the 2 June members who joined the Red Army Faction. And then also was one of the Red Army Faction members who were discovered in East Germany living under a new identity after the collapse of the East German regime and the reunification of Germany.
And you had members who left Germany and were active abroad. There was the Lorenz kidnapping, which was the best-known action of the 2 June Movement, where they kidnapped a conservative politician in Berlin and then exchanged that person for five prisoners that were flown to Yemen. One of those, Ina Siepmann, she became active in the Palestine liberation struggle and died in Lebanon. Another one of them, Rolf Pohle, ended up in Athens in Greece, lived there, and was active for a long time. You have a wide variety of different political biographies, but most of them you could again tie to the reasons, the motivations, and why they once upon a time joined the 2 June Movement. It just then went different ways.
TFSR: Just to reel it back, when we talk about the autonomous anti-capitalist movements, this isn’t something that you see in the United States by that name. When people talk about it here, it’s usually people who have read up on Germany or Italy or some other European states during the ‘60s and ‘70s. And the context feels exotic in the way that people would say Antifa as opposed to just Anti-Fascist organizing. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, especially if former members are going back and joining autonomous milieus afterward, what impact did the actions of these armed extraparliamentary movements had within the autonomous movements, and what legacy they have after at least the period of the 2 June Movement as an armed group ended.
GK: I think the main thing that comes to mind is that because of that history within the radical left in the German-speaking world—radical/militant, I guess there are other forms of radicalism, but those are the ones I’m referring to here—the discussions about the armed struggle were very present. It was a real history that was very close, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s. And as I said earlier, there were evaluations. Where do you go from there? And some participants were still in prison or had just come out. What’s your relationship with them? So it was whether you were critical or more sympathetic to the specific actions or what these groups had done, they were always a reference point. Somehow, they were always present. That’s one thing.
The other thing is that perhaps because of that history, the bar for militant resistance was fairly high. I think we are both old enough to recall the significance in the global north of that ‘99 Seattle protests and all of the discussions that came out of that, about black bloc tactics and property destruction. I just felt that sometimes, coming from that milieu that I was politicized in, people had these long discussions about whether militant actions are good or not, and it’s like, “Okay, what happened?” and someone had broken a window or so. You’d be like, “Oh, okay… What?” I think there was just a different level you were used to, a different level of militant resistance. I felt there was a difference, sometimes, between the German-speaking world. Not that it was only there. You could go to Italy, which has a similar history.
So that was one thing, just in terms of the legacy of that, the continued discussion about armed resistance or what militant resistance in general means. Plus, the fact that you had people around, also in your circles, who came from that history and that you had to relate to them was not necessarily a clear-cut way to do so for all people involved. I don’t know if there were any particular political consequences, but it had a clear impact on the milieu and how you looked at things and possibilities and discussions. I’m trying to think, is that still true today? To some degree. Although some of that history, especially with the Red Army Faction, which some of that history has also been co-opted and now reduced to the crime and the spectacle. There are films and exhibitions. Today, it poses a challenge of how to relate to that history because you have these people who co-opt that history. And how do you relate to that and to the ongoing state repression and criticism? And how do you, on the one hand, distance yourself from that, while at the same time being able to do a more meaningful, if you will, internal evaluation of that history? Sometimes it’s not that easy.
TFSR: I do want to ask more about the alienation and the representation of these images fed back to us, the co-optation. But I would be curious about hearing from your perspective how the project TATblatt or the InfoBlatt or these different news sheets that were produced from within the movement that would reproduce statements from… There was a movement of communication methods, zines, pamphlets, and newspapers that were mixing in counter-cultural critiques in the Blues alongside carrying statements by groups like the RAF, whose first action was carried on page 6 of one of these and didn’t really seem like an important thing compared to the amount of space that they took up eventually.
But even after the period of armed struggle that June 2 participated in, the culture had these ways of disseminating ideas that were, I’m sure, contributing to discussions and arguments that people were having within the wider milieu, even if they weren’t participating in these groups, even if they weren’t in these groups that had names, there were still affinity groups, and there were still collectives that engaged in this operaist or communal or network of struggle. You mentioned that when someone gets out of prison, and they come back into the movement, you interact with them, and you get to have this engagement directly with the ideas of this person who was engaged in this heightened form of struggle. Can you talk about the methods, like if I were living at the time, how would I have heard about these discussions and some of these info sheets that were going around? What mediums did the movement use to communicate internally, not just the armed movement but the wider counterculture that it formed out of it?
GK: I think you’ve given the answer yourself. Now, in hindsight, it was quite an impressively well-organized network of publications. And when I say impressively well-organized—you get to print these things, you have to distribute them. And I think there was a combination of them, and there was a number of local publications that you could pick up, but there were some—like in Austria, that would have been the TATblatt for many years, in Germany, Radikal—some key publications, that you could get nationwide that sometimes had to operate from abroad because of state repression but still managed to get copies of the publication across all of Germany. And those were very important. I often think of that now with the internet, the way that that facilitates communication in many ways and makes things faster, but it also makes it more widespread, chaotic, and sometimes more difficult to keep track of who’s talking to who and when.
With some of those publications, and there’s always a danger of romanticizing, I recall that discussions weren’t three words on an internet thread that are answered by three other words. Then you read through these threads, and you don’t really know what’s what. There were long articles published, and then there would be responses published in the next issue three months later, and they were quite substantial, and people had taken their time. Also, you didn’t know who the publishers were. In most cases, you didn’t know who the authors were. They were part of the milieu. Just the text gave that away. There were infiltrators—you always have to deal with that. But yeah, it was just a very productive underground political publication culture.
TFSR: I guess Fizz is one of the names that come up in here, but there’s one of them that has a number attached to the end of it that I just am going to fixate on until I remember what the name of it was.
GK: Agit 883.
TFSR: Yeah, especially for any movement that any oppositional group that considers itself part of the movement, it seems like having—to bring back the Earth Liberation Front—having the press office operating so that the ideas can get out there. Especially if you’re interested in reproducibility of actions, getting your ideas and your motivations out there in a way that aren’t shaped by the powers that want to claim other motivations to it, or whatever, seems really important.
GK: It’s also just the history. As I said, there was strong repression against these operations, which is an indication that the state also understood that that was an important means of the protest movement. The so-called Agit printers, for example, were arrested and had court cases hanging over their heads. But in terms of distribution, one thing that I think the 2 June Movement was proud of was how to distribute news. After the Lorenz kidnapping that I mentioned earlier, the explanation that they had, when after the kidnapping was over and there was all sorts of media coverage, they wanted to say their part about what happened. They did a… You could call it a little zine that they distributed thousands of copies of within a 20-minute time frame in Berlin because it was a dangerous thing to do for everyone involved. They put stacks of copies at strategically chosen places so they would then spread into different communities and be read by different people. They were able to post stuff like that. Again, it was impressively organized.
That action was also often used as an example. When the 2 June Movement operated, there was a core group of underground militants, but there was a broader movement of people living above ground around them. Without those circles, they, for example, could have never distributed all of these thousands of copies in a 20-minute time frame. It can’t be done by 10 people. So that was always used as one of the examples that should illustrate or that seemed a very convincing example of having close ties to a broader movement and not just operating in isolation.
TFSR: One thing that I didn’t ask about, in terms specifically of Berlin, because you talked about the special status of it during the period of the Cold War, during the occupation—one side the Soviet Union was occupying and holding, and then the other side was the US, Britain, and France—and because of the city’s location as an island within occupied East Germany, as opposed to occupied West Germany, can you talk about how and why counterculture specifically was drawn to that area, the idea of people avoiding military or civil service by going to this place, and how that created the scenario that a lot of the Blues were thriving in?
GK: Well, I wasn’t in West Berlin at the time, but this is the impression that you get: I think, to begin with, Berlin for a long time has been a cultural center, a melting pot in Europe. It was always a thriving, exciting, culturally-interesting city. And then West Berlin, during this period of the division of Germany, on top of that, had very specific characteristics. One of them, as you mentioned, was that as a resident of West Berlin, you were exempt from military service in West Germany, which, other than that, was compulsory for all young men living there. That was one of the reasons why people who, either as pacifists or just because they didn’t want to serve for political reasons in the German military, moved to West Berlin, in addition to, again, a tradition of a critical student scene, a vibrant underground culture, strong partly-militant proletarian tradition, surrounded, essentially, at that time already by a wall. You weren’t supposed to cross, although there were opportunities to do that. I’m too young. I wasn’t there. The first time I went to Berlin was, I think, in 1990, but when I hear people talk about it, the impression I get is that it was just a very special, vibrant place in Europe at the time, with a special status in many different ways.
TFSR: Considering the position of the German state now at the center of the EU and center of the European economy, and as a strong partner in NATO, things have obviously changed from the days when the 2 June Movement were active and developed, even if it’s on a trajectory. Skipping back a bit to like the aftermath of the 2 June dissolution in 1980 or the subsequent years, what assessments can one find in this collection of essays that span decades by former members of groups like June 2, of the impact of their struggles, and the ideas that they were sharing?
GK: You mean how they would apply to the current historical moment?
TFSR: Less about reproducing their actions today, but more about, like, have they said like, “Did we change the trajectory? Did we just do our part?” You can’t control history, but did they feel like they fed into patterns that have proved to be useful for Empire? What sort of after-the-fact hindsight views did they have?
GK: Yeah, very interesting. I’m not sure if there are many texts that would offer responses to that. My guess also is that if you’d asked people, the answers would probably be quite different. What you don’t really find is, as I said before, there’s not much regret or apologism, which doesn’t mean that there can’t be self-critical assessments. But I think that those were decisions made at a certain historical moment, and at that moment they seemed the right decisions to make. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have made them. I think most would agree that if there were very high hopes attached, perhaps they weren’t fulfilled. The groups didn’t contribute, just like no other group really did contribute to radical political change in West Germany. It certainly contributed to a political culture that, I would say, then my generation, which is, in a sense, the generation following, still experienced as inspiring and exciting.
Very hard to say how that would have been if those groups had not existed. It seems impossible to say. I’m just talking from my perspective because I feel I can’t talk for former members of those groups. This is also one of the reasons why I find it important to have a book like the one that we have brought out now. This is part of radical history. This is what it describes, what some people, at a certain point in time, thought was important to do, and in order for us who sympathize with the motivations and the ultimate goals of those people. And when we think about what we want to do today, or what’s possible to be done today, a reflection about that past, I think, is very helpful. That’s as far as I can come up with a response there. It’s just an important part of history. There’s some value in just documenting that history, and it’s not just because it sounds good or whatever. I am a firm believer in the possibility of making current political action better by reflecting on what others with similar goals and motivations have done before.
TFSR: Often, memories are created by the powerful to teach lessons that they want us to learn, and groups like this one that we’re talking about are memorialized either by the admission of failure by reformed members or cynical posthumous psychological diagnoses by public pundits, or the washing away of forms of resistance to neoliberal, capitalist hegemony and visions of the individual subject, making an idol out of one specific Che or whatever. I would love to hear you talk about those representations that the capitalist spectacle has given of the armed movements of the long ‘60s in Germany and the self-reflection that you would like to inject into the movement and into thought in opposition to that. There’s the Baader-Meinhof movie that was pretty entertaining, sexy, violent, and stuff a few years ago. And there are groups like that are digested and spat back out at us from Hollywood in a lot of cases.
GK: If you look at how people sell stories, what elements in media, film, and literature usually help? Violence, death, sex, drugs, underground culture, something that’s wild. You have those elements in that history we were talking about, and if you want to use that to sell a product, you tell that history by focusing on those elements, at least if it’s historically far enough detached, and also in a sense politically, where I think that people feel that there’s very little danger of doing stuff like that and instigating new or similar movements because that’s just a different time and it’s long ago. The people can do that. Some people make money off of it, and it just becomes part of capitalist exploitation. It could also be part of some radical chic or folklore or whatever. What all that means, that requires special analysis. Maybe there are elements that could be turned into something positive so some people, at least, learn about the existence of groups that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and then they go on to get better material. I don’t know. ’ll leave that aside.
What’s interesting to me is that instead of focusing on all of that, you focus on the politics, which usually in representations that focus on the violence and the sex and the intrigue are missing. This is not the first project that I’ve worked on where I’ve tried to bring out the political history of stories that have been told in other ways. I did a book about the so-called Blekingegade Group in Denmark. It’s a group of people who, in the 1970s and ‘80s, robbed post offices and warehouses and cash in transit trucks in Denmark and are among the most successful “criminals” in Danish history. But all the money was given to Third World liberation movements. That, of course, again, is the stuff where there was a TV series made about that in Denmark. So all that stuff’s done, but in the book I did, which I think some people think, “Oh, that was boring,” but it was just focused on the politics because I think that’s more interesting, and I think that’s where I can do my part.
Coming back to that with this book, it’s similar. I’m just interested in the politics. I’m not interested in who did what. Those are also questions that often come up. People can discuss this for a long time: “Who was involved in that particular action, and who pulled the trigger there?” or I don’t know. The big questions that people ask. That, to me, is not interesting. What’s interesting is the politics, the motivations, why people did what they did, what they were hoping to achieve, the question of whether they did achieve it, stuff like that. That will always be, unfortunately, I believe, a minority of folks who are more interested in that part than the spectacular part, sensational part, or whatever you want to call it. That’s what I can and want to do.
TFSR: One of the essays, I think, near the end of the book, was talking about the state recognition of the period of conflict of the 1960s and ‘70s. There was an art show with some of the elements from those days and a specific narrative being told, other than the sexy Hollywood narrative of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and bombs. It would have told the story of “well, there were some people that disagreed with how things were, and they did some bad things, and then they felt bad about it afterward. And now look at the wonderful world that we have in front of us.” I wonder, not just from the extreme Hollywood titillation view of selling products or selling the image of the revolutionary, if you could talk about the role that this has in the lack of resolution of that. The state wants to tie up a bow, put a few names of people that they feel have been rehabilitated, and then move on. This is the same thing in the US, for instance, that is done with the period of Black Liberation and the Civil Rights Movement, the whitewashing of these stories to say, to engulf that as a part of the new and improved American state that’s “moved beyond white supremacy.” Has the German state, as you’re aware, how is it like approached this period of conflict? What story has it told about it, and how have people pushed back?
GK: Those two things, what you’re describing, it’s a different approach from the economic exploitation of it, but it goes hand in hand in the sense that, as I said, in order to make that stuff sellable as a product, you have to take the danger out of it. The processes that you’re describing are a part of it. And I would agree. The less economically exploitatious, statesman-like serious… Approaching social peace, who’s analyzing this period. The story, I think, would be that even if you maybe can be sympathetic to these people’s beliefs—they saw injustice in the world that they wanted to correct—they obviously made very wrong decisions. And the way it’s all ended proves it because they ended up in prison. Some of them died. A lot of them died. And look, there was no major change. Clearly, they made wrong choices, and let that be a lesson for you and future generations. And having a critical mind is very important. But veering off into extremism or radical forms of politics, clearly, is a problem also for you if you follow down that path. I think that would be a very brief and simplified summary of the official narrative also among the liberal left, which, I suppose, is part of that history.
The pushback would simply be in refusing to take those periods of history and a) let them be a lesson in so-called “anti-extremism”—“This should not be done. It never works. Not only does it not work, but you’ll ruin your life.” And also b) to put it in the box where it’s only a part of history—that was 30 or 40 years ago. If you’re interested, pull out that box, have a look, and then put everything back in. That’s it. Because a) that’s not true, that’s not how history works. There are traces of those things that happened, and there are lessons to be learned beyond just saying, “Okay, we don’t do that.” And b), and this related to what I have said before, if we are convinced that the system we live in is not doing the best for the people under it, that life could be better if it were organized differently, then we have to look at radical attempts to make things different.
What I’m trying to say is that the pushback to that narrative is that that history is alive, and we want to keep it alive. That doesn’t mean we can replicate something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. That won’t work because times have changed, and we have to find new ways. But both in terms of inspiration and because certain themes are lifted—for example, if you read the 2 June book now, there’s the history part, but there are also topics that relate to the left and the working class, political tactics in general, and the perpetual question of militant resistance, not just in a moral sense but in a practical, tactical sense. All of these questions are still as relevant as they were at the time, regardless of how those specific histories then played out. We can only have relevant discussions today if we pick up on what these comrades have done and discussed before us. That’s it.
TFSR: Why throw away the material product of people’s struggles that we can learn from, why not incorporate, reflect on, and take what seems useful from it?
GK: Yeah, that would have been my answer. It would have been much shorter.
TFSR: Are there any things I didn’t ask about that you wanted to touch on while we’re on this call?
GK: It’s a standard question at the end of longer interviews, and I’ll give you my standard response: No, I don’t, because I don’t think about it.
TFSR: No burning issues?
GK: I’m happy that you are showing interest in these matters, and I will try to answer your questions as well as I can. This is important history. I’d be very happy if people took the time to look into it. I know people have a lot to do, but I think engaging with it honors that history, and it’s beneficial for our discussions today.
TFSR: And it’s not a book you have to read cover to cover. You can pick and choose. For example, I was reading sections or specific essays by people whose later reflections I found interesting.
GK: Certainly, it’s that kind of book. It’s a collection of documentary texts. I hope the chapters and texts are introduced well enough—it’s short—so you can look through it and find what interests you most. It’s more of a resource book than something that needs to be read cover to cover.
TFSR: Not to conflate these two things, but a) Are you aware of anyone working on a documentary history of the Revolutionary Cells? They seem really interesting to me, they lasted a long time and had a lot of influences between them and Rote Zora. b) Not to say that you are doing that, but what are you working on now?
GK: The answer to your first question about the Revolutionary Cells is the same as the one I gave about the background of the 2 June Movement book. The same people who planned a 2 June Movement book were planning to do a Revolutionary Cells book as well. My sense, though I don’t have a recent update, is that it’s in a similar state—there are drafts of translations, but not much more.
I haven’t started discussions about getting involved. I’m not saying I would not do it, but for different reasons I had stronger motivation to work on the 2 June book, not because I’m less interested in the Revolutionary Cells as such, but because when you start thinking about doing a book, you have to consider a lot: Are you the right person to do it? Can you do it well? Do you have the time? It would be more difficult. But I hope, regardless of who does it, I hope such a book becomes available.
The most recent I’ve done was helping to get a translation ready for an English edition of the autobiography of a Sámi activist. The Sámi are the Indigenous people of northern Europe. A man named Niillas Samby was involved in militant action, something very rare in Sámi history. He and a couple of other people were intending to damage a bridge that was leading to the construction site of a hydropower dam that the broad movement was protesting in the early 1980s. The bomb they were carrying detonated too early, and he got severely injured. He was facing 20 years in prison in Norway but managed to escape to Canada, where he was sheltered and adopted by First Nations communities. After a few years, he returned to Norway, where the charges were not entirely dropped but were significantly reduced. Now, 40 years later, his autobiography that he has written. It’s fantastic. I’m very excited for it to become available in English. That was the latest project I worked on. There were a couple more translations I hope to do this year, but I’m working 40+ hours a week for the union now, so the time for publishing projects is somewhat limited at the moment. I’m passionate enough to find time on the side.
TFSR: What publisher can we expect? Is there a publisher already set up?
GK: Yeah, the Niillas Samby autobiography will come out from PM Press.
TFSR: Cool, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Thanks a lot for taking the time to chat and for all the work you put into this.
GK: Well, thanks for inviting me. Tempted to say, “always a pleasure,” but it’s been a few years before the first time. But yeah, it was great. Thank you!