Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings

Author Bettina Röhl

This is the third of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006). The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.

Bettina's criticisms of the German left scene in the 50s and 60s have quite a bit of what I would call a "neoconservative" tone to them. By which I mean great familiarity with the scene but a not only critical-minded but somewhat moralistic, scolding tone. However, the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) has been far more intensely discussed in Germany than in the US, where they are scarcely known. So there are a lot of nuances to navigate for anyone deep into the discussions and polemics in Germany over the facts and meanings of political events connected to the RAF.

Although I'm focusing here on what I see as weaknesses of her historical analysis, I think she does an exceptionally good job of providing a balanced and dispassionate analysis of her parents' particular political positions in the events she relates. And of their strengths and weaknesses.

And her criticisms of the left scene more generally don't read like the "repentant leftist" tone her father Klaus Rainer Röhl has long used. The criticisms she makes are serious-minded. But they suffer from the substantive problem that often affects political discussions of a vague concepts like "the 60s". In Germany, like in America and many other countries, the "left" activists of the 60s fit the description of Jackson Browne's old song, "Before the Deluge":

Some of them were dreamers and some of them were fools
And for some them it was only the moment that mattered

Her comments are more relevant to especially political-minded activists on the ideological left, like her parents at the time, and stars of the student left like Rudi Dutschke. She seems particularly annoyed at those who made a hero out of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung in the standard English spelling at the time which is still used in German). But her criticisms sometimes have an all-or-nothing air to them. She gives no indication that what a political figure symbolizes for someone can be quite different that what the symbol-figure himself actually thought or did.

Juan Perón of Argentina in the last years of his political career managed to appeal to a broad public, from pretty much fascist types to "mainstream" liberals and conservatives to social-democratic minded labor activists to Maoist guerrillas. Ché Guevara to this day is a popular symbol of rebelliousness, though most of the young and even not-so-young people who have a Ché t-shirt or other Ché kitsch probably know next to nothing about his actual career.

She actually explains that very point (S. 533):

Fakt ist, die dicken Bucher mit Mao-Zitaten, die man im Fischer Verlag bald uberall in Deutschland kaufen konnte, wurden zu Bestsellern, die Spruche Maos zierten bald jedes studentische Plakat an der Universitat oder wurden in Zeitschriften, wie beispielsweise auch in KONKRET, in dicken Lettern unter einem Mao-Portrat abgedruckt. Grund fur diesen Schwung von Ideen aus China war natürlich die chinesische Kulturrevolution, die ihre Wellen mit Beginn ihres Wirkens in China nach Europa und in den gesamten Westen aussandte und die von Rudi Dutschke und vielen anderen aufgesaugt wurde, als sei Mao der neue Gott und seine Spruche und Buchlein Bibelworte. Scharenweise werden die Linken in Westdeutschland in diesen Jahren der guten alten Sowjetunion untreu und schliessen sich euphorisch der chinesischen Kulturrevolution an, die sie mit der eigentlich im Westen stattfindenden "Kulturrevolution", der Popkultur in Amerika, verwechseln und zu einem eigenen Modegemisch verarbeiten, das ein echter Mix aus Cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, den Rolling Stones und dem Revolutions- und Weltkriegsgetöse Mao Tse-tungs wird. Anders als Mao Tse-tung, der jeden Drogenkonsum brutal bestrafte, oftmals mit dem Tode, gesellten sich sehr schnell bei den Westlinken zur Popmusik die Drogen und wurden eine Art essentieller Bestandteil ihrer Ideologic, Bewufitseinserweiterung usw.

[The fact is that the thick books of Mao quotes in Fischer Publishers editions that one could suddenly buy all over Germany became bestsellers. Quickly the sayings of Mao decorated every student placard in the university. Or they were printed in magazine, as for example in Konkret, in thick letters under a Mao portrait. The basis for this fad for ideas from China was, of course, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which with the beginning of its workings in China sent its waves to Europa and the entire West. And they were sucked up by Rudi Dutschke and many others as thought Mao were a new god and his sayings and pamphlets words from the Bible. The leftists in West Germany in these years were untrue in droves to the good old Soviet Union [she means that ironically] and fastened themselves euphorically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Which they confused with the "cultural revolution" that was actually taking place, the pop culture in America, and with their own fashionably constructed mixture that became a real mix of cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Mao Zedong's revolution-and-world-war racket. Differently than Mao Zedong, who the consumption of [illegal] drugs brutally punished, often by death, the Western leftists joined themselves to pop music and drugs and those became a kind of essential element of their ideology, consciousness expansion, etc.]

But she uses that as part of her criticism of the moral/intellectual failings of young Germans who read Mao pamphlets, and doesn't seem to register that the very mixture of contradictions she describes means that to be an "admirer of Mao" in West Germany in the 1960s didn't mean that someone was an enthusiast for every page of his ideology or every act he took as China's leader. And in fact, however incongruously, Mao symbolism often went together with libertarian and radical-democratic ideas in that scene.

And, as her quote above alludes to, embracing "Maoism" was also a way in which people so inclined could advocate a revolutionary Marxist ideology that also rejected, radically rejected, the brand of Soviet-style Communism practiced in the DDR.

She seems to forget that anyone who hasn't believed something stupid at one time or another was either never young or has been missing a brain. So, for instance, when she claims that Rudi Dutschke, of whom she had fond personal memories as a child, had as a goal (S. 530) "nicht etwa, um die dritte Welt an das Niveau der ersten [Welt] heranzuheben, sondern um die erste Welt auf das Niveau der dritten Welt abzusenken" (not for instance to raise the Third World to the level of the First, but rather to sink the First World to the level of the Third World), and includes him among the group that "versuchten ... die vietnamesischen Kriegs-Verhältnisse auf deutsches Terrain zu übertragen" (attempted to bring the Vietnamese war conditions over onto Germany terrain), and:

Mit Vietcongschen Untergrundmethoden und Gewaltaktionen sollte die Bundesrepublik von innen angegriffen werden und gemäss den Idolen von Mao Tse-tung und Ho Tschi-minh zur Revolution aufgerufen werden.

[The Federal Republic should be attacked with Vietcong-like underground methods and violent actions, and, following their idols Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, should be aroused to revolution.]

... she produces a stereotypical hostile "culture war" type image that doesn't tell us much more than that she didn't like that particular group's politics. And while that's understandable, Dutschke himself was a former East German - and therefore had some direct experience of left in a dictatorship - who viewed himself as a Christian and whose revolutionary ideology was a hodge-podge. (Bettina does say explicitly that he was a "Christian and neo-Marxist".) His actual influence came through his eloquence, activism and good publicity sense. Although he is credited with the famous phrase, "the Long March through the institutions", his actual intellectual influence as such on the German left was minimal.

Dutschke did talk quite a bit about the need for violent revolution, although he did decline to lend his support to the creation of the RAF. On the other hand, he attended the funeral of RAF member Holger Meins, who starved himself to death in a hunger strike in jail, and famously said, "Holger, the struggle continues." Yet he later said that was an emotional response and sent a political message he hadn't intended to send. And Dutschke was consistently opposed in public and private of the brand of terrorism that the RAF practiced, despite the inconsistencies he undoubtedly displayed in his public and private discussions of revolutionary violence.

German student leader Rudi Dutschke: he envisioned an "urban guerrilla" movement in West Germany

Rudi Dutschke was not a pacifist. And he did at times advocate a German version of the "urban guerrilla" that he derived from the "Foco" concept of Regis Debray, who was then and still now thought to represent Che Guevara's theories of revolution. Few if any today would defend the idea that Debray's theories of that time were any kind of meaningful guide to political activity in the developed world. And Dutschke's own ideas on the subject were eclectic and not particularly well-thought-out.

The extent to which Dutschke's influence promoted violence and/or the kind of terrorism practiced by the RAF is a hot topic of dispute among historians of that particular time. Bettina's account of that issue is more vague and polemical than analytical.

But the balance she manages to maintain in her approach is illustrated by the fond personal memories she expresses toward, Dutschke, who was a friend of her parents. In this German-language video, she reads a passage from the book about meeting him when she was a young girl:

Still, outside a few idealizers of poverty here and there - or revolutionaries with ascetic tendencies like Gudrun Ennslin - it wasn't really the case that Dutschke and his admirers wanted to pull the "First World" down to the level of the "Third World". They actually did have something like the opposite in mind. You can say they were unrealistic or misguided or whatever. And you can say that the actual effect of their actions taken to some practical extreme would have resulted in destroying the wealth and prosperity of the rich countries. But it's misleading to present that as the goal of their ideology, even if we're focusing on the highly politicized, activist left like Dutschke and the SDS. But Bettina seems more than a little frustrated that "68ers" like former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Rudi Dutschke's widow Gretchen are unwilling to renounce - engage in "self-criticism"? - a "Maoism" they claim they never embraced in the first place. Bahman Nirumand, who became a close friend of her mother Ulrike in the years before she went underground, gives a better historical generalization in "Sehnsuchsräume: Warum die Revolution ausblieb" (Areas of longing: Why the revolution didn't happen) (from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:

Diese Solidarität, die allgemein den Angehörigen der Länder der sogenannten Dritten Welt schwärmerisch entgegengebracht wurde, entsprang nur bei weningen aus politischer Einsicht und Überzeugung, sie speiste sich vielmehr aus einem sehnsuchtsvollen Romantizismus, sie spiegelte die exotischen Sehnsüchte einer zorningen, rebellierenden Jugend, die dem eigenen Dasein entfliehen wollte und nach Weggefährten Ausschau hielt. Die Jugendlichen waren entschlossen, sich um jeden Preis von dem erstickenden Muff der Nachkriegszeit zu befreien, mit der Vergangenheit, mit der Geschichte ihrer Eltern zu brechen, der Wohlstandsgesellschaft, der Konsumgeilheit eine Alternative entgegenzusetzen, die verkrustete Ordnung, die irrationale Autorität des Staates, der Univeristät, der Schule zu zerschlagen, sie wollten vor dieser Gesellschaft fliehen und suchten - unter anderem - Zuflucht in einer ferngelegenen, fremden Welt, bei den Befreiungsbewegungen der sogenannten Dritten Welt und später bei religiösen Sekten. Es war ein Streich der Geschichte, dass sich die Modernisierung Deutschlands teilweise über die Entwicklungsländer vollzog. [This solidarity that was generally enthusiastically provided to those connected to the countries of the so-called Third World, originated only with few from political insight and conviction; it nourished itself much more on a wistful romanticism. It reflected the exotic longings of an angry, rebellious youth who wanted to flee from their own being and looked for fellow travelers. The young were determined to liberate themselves at all costs from the suffocating mustiness of the postwar era; to break with the past, with the history of their parents;, to set up an alternative to the affluent society and its rank consumerism; to smash the encrusted order, the irrational authority of the state, the university, the school. They wanted to flee from this society and sought - among other things - flight into a faraway, alien world, in the liberation movements of the so-called Third World, and later in religious cults. It was a trick of history that the modernization of Germany played partly on the developing countries.]

Not that Nirumand was unaware of the potentially very destructive side of such romanticism. On the contrary, in the same essay he describes trying to talk Ulrike out of her desire to go underground and take up a violent struggle. Bettina interviewed him for her book, also, and recounts part of a story about Ulrike that Nirumand relates in the essay just quoted. Nirumand himself became a huge influence on the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition) in West Germany through his 1967 book Persien, Model eines Entwicklungslandes (Persia [Iran]: Model of Development). According to his account in the essay quoted above, the Iranian exile community in West Germany was also influential on the student activists because the politicized members of that community were well-organized and could set up demonstrations and political events quickly. They also provided a kind of community feeling and sense of solidarity which were goals that the alternative movements among Germans also hoped to achieve for themselves. And specifically on the subject of "Maoism" (which was not the same as Debrayism), it's also the case that an interest in Mao Zedong's theories of political warfare was scarcely limited in developed countries to those who wished to emulate them. Anyone interested in understanding wars like that in Vietnam in the 1960s is likely to have paid some attention to Mao's ideas. Certainly, the US military and counterinsurgency experts outside the military were doing so. The Great Helmsman Mao Zedong: he wasn't German In fact, I just read an essay by Sebastian Haffner, a leftist writer who was published in Konkret, about Mao Zedong's theories. It originally appeared as the introduction to a 1966 German collection of Mao's writing, Theorie des Guerillakriegs oder Strategie der Dritten Welt. A large part of the essay is devoted to describing the particular situation in China in the 1920s, 30s and 40s which Mao was addressing in those works, conditions of which his original audience would have been intensely aware and therefore would need little background explanation. But, as Haffner wrote, that was not the case for most Europeans in the 1960s. He even includes a section explaining the reason why Mao's theories of warfare were not appropriate to any situation in Europe. But, again, these ideas were influential among the "68ers", however eccentric or derivative their West German versions of understanding them were. Bettina in her book mentions that in his first article for Konkret, Rudi Dutscke, one of the key leaders of the radical student movement, recommended Nirumand's book, Mao's "Little Red Book" and a book called Vietnam - Genesis eines Konfliktes by Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng. And she notes that even today, those three books are recommended for those who want to understand the radical APO movement in Germany at the time. She adds that she would also include Edgar Snow's book Red Star Over China in that list. None of those books are about Germany. But they were influential in forming the romantic Third Worldism of the APO at that time, which found its most extreme form in terrorist groups like the RAF. The four posts on this book: Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl bettina röhl, raf, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, rudi+dutschke, ulrike meinhof