By James Hogg
Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of international history
Roman Danyluk and Gabriel Kuhn’s From Hash Rebels to Urban Guerrillas is the first English academic resource on West Berlin’s 2nd of June Movement, a leftist militia that terrorised West Berlin in the 1960s
and 1970s. During the 1970s, the Movement robbed banks, bombed political targets, and, in February-March of 1975, kidnapped Christian Democrat Union (CDU) politician Peter Lorenz (pp24-5). Despite these exploits, English-language sources on the Movement are rare, relegated to heavily disputed pop memoirs (explored in the book’s first and final sections)1 or accounts of Berlin’s more notorious militia, the Red Army Faction (RAF). 2 Yet the Movement clearly diverged from the ‘Stalinist’ RAF, and were sometimes more successful (p345). While there’s room for more scholarship on the subject, Hash Rebels nevertheless offers a unique glimpse into the second moment of world revolution after 1917 – the global uprisings of the long 1960s (p2).
Largely translated from the original German by an anonymous North American activist (with help from the editors), the book reproduces the 2nd of June Movement’s entire corpus including interviews, pamphlets, articles and court statements by individual members (p.ix). Structured chronologically around the Movement’s origins, activists, theoretical works, prison terms, and eventual dissolution, the documents in Hash Rebels thus raise key questions about the utility of armed struggle, horizontalism and anti-imperial activism in the metropole/global North (p.x). While the editors omitted some documents for inaccuracies or general superfluity, this is an otherwise comprehensive repository of the Movement and the first time these documents have been available in English.
In January of 1972, the 2nd of June Movement emerged at a meeting of ideologically diverse militants from West Berlin. These included the Central Council of Roaming Hash Rebels (from which the book derives its title), Berlin’s anarchist Black Cells, the feminist Women’s Liberation Front, and armed militias like the Tupamaros West Berlin. All agreed the time for armed struggle was nigh. They adopted the title ‘2nd of June Movement’ after the 2 June 1967 police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg, an unarmed youth who’d been followed, isolated, and murdered by officer Karl-Heinz Kurras for protesting the state visit of the Shah of Iran (p18). The name was thus a permanent reminder of ‘who had shot first’ (p18). Equally important was their self-definition as a ‘movement’. The founders stressed their rejection of hierarchical organisation to instead build an ‘armed core’ around which a people’s struggle would coalesce (p18). Almost as rapidly as they emerged, the 2nd of June Movement acquired an arsenal of weapons and a network of safehouses, garages, and printshops to proliferate their message and foment attacks on the State (p19).
Another central theme of Hash Rebels is the 2nd of June Movement’s relationship with the more notorious (and studied) Red Army Faction (RAF).3 A source of support in the Movement’s early years, they diverged in key respects. First was the ideological gulf between the anarchist-minded 2nd of June Movement and the Marxist-Leninist RAF (p21). This also bred critical tactical differences. Whereas the RAF believed actions spoke for themselves, 2nd of June militants felt the ‘people’ should understand their activities and thus enacted novel stunts and propaganda. The RAF also employed the same ferocity as ‘the enemy’ – which meant indiscriminate and often lethal violence – while the 2nd of June Movement tried to avoid ‘deadly’ confrontations (p22). Perhaps most importantly, however, the 2nd of June Movement sought a social base above ground, which led other sections of the West German left – including the RAF –to besmirch the Movement as merely ‘populist’ or ‘fun guerilla’ (pp20-2).
However, 2nd of June activists were not social anarchists seeking personal autonomy from capital and the state. They carefully deliber-ated the utility of popular agitation, armed struggle, and permanent revolution to abandon the stagnant ‘academic’ left and build their movement from below (p20). For example, in a 1978 interview of Movement heavyweights Fritz Teufel, Roland Fritzsch, and Gerald Klöpper, they centred fun as a method, effect, and goal of radical politics, as only ‘state violence [could] enforce dullness’ (p203). Yet even the most repressive arms of the State rarely ‘drowned out’ the Movement ethos. While on trial in 1980 for kidnapping the CDU politician, Peter Lorenz, the courtroom antics of Teufel, Fritzsch, and Klöpper clocked ten melees, 211 orders of silence, eighty-eight threats of expulsion, and – most importantly – 614 fits of laughter (p241).
Yet if the ‘fun guerrilla’ allegations were overstated, the anti-imperialist rhetorical flourishes expressed in Movement documents rarely – if ever – translated into actions for the Global South. For instance, while
the Lorenz kidnapping was justified as an affront to the nexus of Israeli, Chilean, and American despotism, the Movement’s goals were simply to ‘get [German] prisoners out’ (p119). While Reinders claimed during the 1980 Lorenz trial they were attacking ‘the heart of the beast’ (pp219-220), he admitted in a 1995 interview the ‘exclusive focus on liberating prisoners’ meant the kidnapping achieved little in political terms (p119). This inertia resulted despite hijacking a plane to Yemen to secure their escape (pp29-31), which augmented the Movement’s international notoriety but was a nuisance for the Yemeni government, who welcomed their West German comrades with tanks.4 Though internationalist in orientation, the Movement failed to resonate beyond the domestic sphere, a clear limitation of attempting to launch an insurrection against global imperialism from within the West German metropole (pp219-220).
Besides the Movement’s own justifications for its actions in interviews and pamphlets, readers are left to draw their own conclusions about its scope and significance. However, these questions have been addressed elsewhere in both English and German.5 For example, Catriona Corke’s research shows how the Movement’s armed struggles, while couched in anti-imperial rhetoric, only ever made concrete demands to benefit ‘the West German militant Left’ and were typically ignored or coldly received by the global southerners they claimed to represent.6 Neither the book’s editors nor the source documents concretely address this schism (besides Reinders’ brief reflection), despite having critical implications for the limits of anti-imperial solidarity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Regardless, the book demonstrates that the 2nd of June Movement formed an important, if under-recognised, revolutionary movement in the milieu of the global 1960s, and should be the definitive English resource on the Movement for years to come.
Notes
- Bommi Baumann, How it All Began: The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001.
- J. Smith and André Moncourt, eds. and trans., The Red Army Faction: a Documentary History, vol. 1. Projectiles for the People, Oakland, CA:PM Press, 2009.
- Catriona Corke, ‘Prisoners of the World Unite: The Internationalism of the 2 June Movement from Berlin Moabit Prison’, German History 40, no. 3, 2022, ff. 15.
- Corke, ‘Prisoners of the World Unite’, p437.
- Jeremy Varon, The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, University of California Press, 2004; Charity Schribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy, Colombia University Press, 2015.
- Corke, ‘Prisoners of the World Unite’, p431.
