by J. Smith
Organizing under the names Quinn the Eskimo, Judas Priest, and Frankie Lee (all characters from Bob Dylan songs), they would later explain,
During the fall of 1977 a political discussion took shape among us that encouraged us to initiate Tunix. We experienced the reaction of the left to the events surrounding… Schleyer and Mogadishu as a cringing before an imaginary attack on the part of the state. Many were taking cover as they would from an approaching thunderstorm and were crying, “Don’t get wet!” Pessimism had spread even among us. We no longer believed it possible to accomplish a revolutionary project.32
No sooner had they announced the conference, the three left on vacation to Sweden. As one of them admitted years later, “We didn’t even know if anyone would show up.” When they returned from their holiday, however, they found that thousands had signaled they would be attending—suddenly the scene prepared itself, almost overnight, to host one of the most important political gatherings of the decade.
Tunix—a play on words that means “Do Nothing”—attracted thousands of people from both the counterculture and what was known as the undogmatic (meaning non-Leninist) left. Workshops discussed setting up a new ecological political party and a new left-wing national newspaper, while political theory was debated with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Johannes Agnoli, and other intellectual superstars of the day.33 The conference ended with a march through the streets of West Berlin, as noted in the Tagesspiegel:
For the first time in years, a demonstration in Berlin turned violent. When a crowd of about five thousand people gathered to end the three-day TUNIX meeting at the Institute of Technology, paint bombs were thrown at the police outside the women’s prison in Lehrter Straße and cobblestones outside the court house in Moabit’s Turmstraße. The protesters included Spontis, Urban Indians, and other nonorganized leftists. They came from Berlin, West Germany, and Western Europe…. Swastikas and SS runes were painted on police vehicles…. The American House in Hardenbergstraße was bombarded with rocks…. A huge German flag saying “Modell Deutschland” was pulled through the streets by a sound truck. At the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimstaler Straße, the flag was burned with police and passers-by watching…. Anarchists carried banners saying, “Stammheim Is Everywhere,” “Away with the Dirt!” and “Gross!” Graffiti was painted on houses along the marching route, for example, “Free the Agit Printers” and “Anarchy Is Possible.” Outside several prisons, the protesters chanted, “Free the Prisoners!”34
Defiant rhetoric notwithstanding, Tunix did not augur any escalation of resistance as such. Rather, it was another sign of the gravity of the RAF’s conflict with the state in ‘77 that anything organized in the months following was obliged to refer back to the German Autumn. What did end up coming out of Tunix were a series of concrete plans to build left-wing infrastructure, and there followed a period of dramatic growth in the already-important West Berlin alternative scene—health food stores, co-ops, bike shops, etc. As one historian of the period explains, “West Berlin turned into the secret capital of the alternative movement. A 1979 survey claims that about a hundred thousand people in the city counted themselves, at least in a wider sense, among the alternative scene.”35
One product of the conference to have national significance was a new daily newspaper, the tageszeitung (Daily News), which became more commonly known as taz. Radical weekly newspapers had existed in almost every city previously, but only one, Info-BUG, had ever had a truly national circulation, and even then, it had been focused on West Berlin and had been banned the day of the Stammheim deaths. Even before this ban, though, there had been discussions about establishing a more “respectable” newspaper. As Wolfgang Ströbele recollects, “We were annoyed with the pamphlets of the undogmatic left, which were actually full of biased and often false information, and we were upset about the alignment of formerly left-liberal papers like Frankfurter Rundschau and Spiegel, which had in the meantime become social-democratic-liberal and loyal to the government.”36
The Tunix Conference in West Berlin, a milestone in the development of the countercultural, antiauthoritarian, and alternative movements. Musicians performing at opening ceremony (left), people demonstrating on the closing day; flags from the anarchist-syndicalist CNT-FAI fly alongside flags from the Red Aid (Rote Hilfe) prisoner support group (right).
This had become particularly glaring in the state’s confrontation with the guerilla, especially in 1977, so while taz would never be sympathetic to the RAF, the shameless subordination of the press to the government’s counterinsurgency dictates was a catalyst for its inception. As has been noted elsewhere, in this way the German Autumn “had a unifying effect on the diverse and diffuse counterculture, particularly in its channels of communication, that is, the alternative press.”37
taz would become the voice of the APO generation, now styling itself the Tunix generation, and would eventually establish a national circulation dwarfing that of any scene publication.38
At the same time as the challenges and innovations of the nonparty left were being discussed at Tunix, one of the other main tendencies that had emerged from the APO—the Marxist-Leninist K-Groups—was grappling with an even gloomier perspective. This current, the West German expression of what in North America is known as the New Communist Movement, had almost exhausted its possibilities by 1978. As the Maoist road faltered, West Berlin was once again the site of an experiment that sought a way to move forward, now in the unlikely form of a new electoral party, the Alternative Liste, officially founded on October 5, 1978.39
Bringing together activists from the Citizens Initiatives, women’s groups, the alternative scene, and a heavy contingent from the KPD, it has been argued that, initially at least, the AL served as a front group for the latter. However, as it was soon swamped by all kinds of people to the left of the SPD, it quickly underwent a political metamorphosis, capturing and captured by many of the same energies represented at Tunix and in taz. As Ernst Hoplitschek, one of the AL’s founding members, would later reflect,
The AL marked the end of the political sects of the seventies. But without the old, classical left blocs of those years, without the programmatic, personnel, and organizational framework of the Maoist KPD, self-critically speaking, the AL would not have existed.40
The different incarnations of the post-APO left were collapsing into a new synthesis. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that some of those who rallied to the new party had spent time in the guerilla and its support milieu: Dieter Kunzelmann and Gerd Klöpper, for instance, had been close to the 2nd of June Movement and the West Berlin Blues scene that had preceded it.41 Hans-Christian Ströbele and Otto Schily, two lawyers who had risen to prominence defending RAF prisoners, were also involved in establishing the AL, though Schily publicly withdrew from the project on the day of its official founding, in protest against what he feared would be the untoward influence of so many Maoists.42
The Alternative Liste was a sign of things to come. Fifteen months later, in January 1980, AL delegates attended a gathering in Karlsruhe to found the Green Party. While the AL would remain significantly more radical, both parties represented the same class shifts and generational journeys, and together they would, in time, redraw Germany’s political map. (As for Chancellor Schmidt, he dismissed the new party: “They’re just environmental idiots,” he said, “who will have disappeared again soon.”)43
Mesmerized by the success of its electoral gambit, the Maoist KPD would disband in 1980, to be followed by one after another of the rival K-Groups, as the AL and Greens reaped the most benefit from this implosion. Although the Greens and AL both styled themselves “antiparty parties”—promising to operate on behalf of the movement, behind enemy lines as it were—it has been observed that “the Left’s disguise was already taking on a life of its own, and it was beginning to adopt the characteristics it had been pretending to possess.”44
Although some critics would make much of the Marxist-Lenin
ists’ rally to the state—arguing that their conservative cultural and organizational politics had predisposed them to such a turn—the radical edge of the undogmatic left, represented so well at Tunix, had also been dividing into two broad tendencies, one of which was similarly finding its way back into the system. Like many former Maoists, these too would make their journey home by way of the left’s new electoral vehicles.
Complicating this survey of the late ‘70s left is the case of the women’s liberation, or feminist, movement. While it too had emerged from the APO, both its scope and its ideological framework make comparisons with the Spontis or K-Groups (which some sections overlapped with, and others disdained) awkward and of limited use; if in some ways feminism was part of the left, it was also much more than just that.
In the context of this movement, women had developed practical projects around violence against women, collective childcare, reproductive rights, and much more; this was supplemented by a theoretical production that took the ruthless criticism of all that exists in directions hitherto unknown. Years before the alternative scene, women had built counterinstitutions ranging from bars and theatre troupes to newspapers, shelters, bookstores, and autonomous women’s centers. As with the Spontis, the idea of “autonomy”—no matter how vaguely defined—was a cornerstone of this movement,45 often taking the form of a desire to remain independent from not only the state, but also the “male left”:
As women began to move out from the base they had constructed, defining more and more areas of conflict, raising issues such as birth control and lesbianism, which increasingly placed the very issue of interpersonal relationships on the agenda, tension began to develop between the women’s movement and the rest of the extra-parliamentary left and between women and men in traditionally male-led left organizations. By 1973 this tension had exploded into a full-fledged public split. Two strains of Feminism emerged more clearly defined from this split. Socialist Feminists continued to work on the general extra-parliamentary left in mixed groups or coalitions. Radical Feminists chose to work in women’s groups defining their issues and priorities outside of the influence of the male-dominated currents of the extra-parliamentary left.46
After an International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women was held in Brussels in March 1976, the issue of violence against women became increasingly prominent. Attended by over two thousand women from forty countries, the Tribunal addressed medical and economic crimes, rape, political prisoners, crimes against lesbians, spousal abuse, prostitution, pornography, and the murder of women.47 The first battered women’s shelter was established in West Berlin that year, followed by the first Rape Crisis Line and the first annual Walpurgisnacht demonstration48 in 1977. At the same time, women were active fighting for abortion law reform, the rights of lesbians, access to childcare, and increasingly around ecological issues, which formed a bridge with the antinuclear movement then in its heyday.
As the movement continued to grow, further divisions appeared between different conceptions of what women’s liberation might mean—equality with men under the reigning conditions, a change in the way all of society was organized, the dominance of supposedly “female” characteristics, or something else altogether?49
As one revolutionary women’s group would recount, this was a time of “polarization within the women’s/lesbian movement. The powerful upsurge of the ‘new women’s movement’—with its initial plethora of militant actions against sexism and its radical shift in personal lifestyles—had already ebbed away…”50
The focus on building counterinstitutions had paved the road for “professionalization” and state funding that often went hand-in-hand with the exclusion of more radical women. At the same time, the idea that there was a “genetically defined female nature” (what in North America would be termed essentialism), while it could facilitate women’s involvement in ecological or peace movements (seen as naturally female concerns), could also lead in a quietist and even reactionary direction:
Taken with New Age ideas, some women began celebrating “women’s intuition” and found tarot cards to be a way to divine the future. This inward turn in the movement signaled “a new femininity” and celebration of motherhood…51
As the women’s movement felt increasingly isolated, its projects taken over by government monies or turned into established ongoing businesses whose subversive cutting edge seemed blunted, many women felt disenfranchised by the turn toward motherhood and a new femininity. As many women turned further inward, limiting themselves to their private spheres of lovers and close friends, radicals felt that the slogan “The personal is political” had been turned on its head—to the point where the political was irrelevant.52
Or as some women active at the time have recalled:
A section of the women’s/lesbian movement withdrew from the offensive implementation of women’s demands and from provocative actions into inner life and the esoteric. Initially conceived of as an expansion of feminist political activity by numerous women/ lesbians, for many this approach rapidly evolved into a conscious dissociation from radical public feminist politics.
Others held on in order to empower themselves and others, to create social spaces for resisting sexist violence, and to, for example, establish women’s houses. Even this political and very important and necessary work was engaged in and presented by many women/lesbians as an alternative to and distancing from militant resistance. With this the professionalization and institutionalization of many women’s/lesbian projects began.
Radical women/lesbians often felt isolated and many of them returned to the mixed groups, which had themselves also been decimated in the extreme.53
Looking back in 1980, the group Women Against Imperialist War explained:
There was a split in the women’s movement that was the result of a narrow and false concept of women’s liberation that was intended to detach their struggle against the patriarchy from its economic and political function in imperialism (because politics and economics are men’s thing), thereby leaving the entire system of gender and imperialist division of labor unaddressed. On the other side were women who withdrew into the mixed left-wing groups to struggle against the political system here (no longer contributing their political demands and goals to the women’s movement).54
Like the antinuclear movement, the feminist movement was something larger and more diverse than either the Spontis or the K-Groups, yet like the latter feminism offered the possibility of a radical critique of society as a whole. As such, the challenges facing the women’s movement overlapped and combined with the crises occurring elsewhere, just as the resolution of these would shape the forms and possibilities for both women’s ongoing resistance and their cooptation.
But that process would take years to play itself out. In the meantime, as the ‘70s came to a close, things could seem bleak, save for the new illusions of making change within imperialism. While there were shoots sprouting beneath the snow, on the surface what was visible were the new structures that the APO generation had built, the very ones with which so many of their number would be integrated by the state.55
Poster from the late 1970s: “Until we are finally free, we will have to tie many sheets together.”
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1. Christian Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 39. This chapter relies heavily on Joppke’s account, which is one of the better studies of the ebbs and flows of the antinuclear movement in the 1970s and ‘80s.
2. Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollak, The Atom Besieged: Antinuclear Movements in France and Germany (Boston: MIT Press, 1982), 22.
3. Joppke, 93.
4. Ibid., 94.
5. Ibid., 93.
6. Ibid., 94.
7. Ibid., 117.
8. Along with the women’s movement, the Spontis, K-groups, and Citizens Initiatives comprised the main strains of the West German left in the 1970s. For more on
this, see Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 433-436, 441-452.
9. Joppke, 104.
10. Ibid., 97-98.
11. John Vinocur, Associated Press “Little Towns Get Big Results,” The Greeley Daily Tribune, March 6, 1975.
12. United Press International, “Demonstrators Again Take Over A-Plant Site,” The Independent (Long Beach, CA), February 25, 1975.
13. Ruud Koopmans, “The Dynamics of Protest Waves: West Germany, 1965 to 1989,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 5 (October 1993): 653.
14. Joppke, 101.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 102.
17. Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 103-104.
18. Joppke, 103.
19. Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 86.
20. Despite its name, Autonomie predated the German Autonomen by several years. Founded in 1975, it would provide “a historical bridge from the 1968 student revolt to the autonomous scene of the 1980s.” Geronimo, 63-66.
21. Joppke, 106. Readers may have noticed that nary a year passed in the Federal Republic at this time without some demonstration or riot being described by someone, somewhere, as “the worst political violence ever” in the country. This is not just testimony to the steady escalation of social conflict that followed the 1960s, but also to the temptation (widespread among writers) to always frame matters in terms of extremes.
