Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl

Klaus Rainer Röhl, now a conservative nationalist (in American terms), "national-liberal" in German terms

This is the fourth of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET. 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.

Klaus almost inevitably becomes a secondary character in Bettina's book about her parents, given the drama and infamy of her mother's later career as a terrorist with the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). I've touched on some of the most significant parts of his role in the book in the previous posts. He comes off in Bettina's account - in which he is heavily quoted from interviews she did for the book - as an entreprenuerial type of guy. Even though it's more than a bit unorthodox of him to have take "venture capital" for his Konkret magazine from Communist East Germany (DDR, after the German initials).

But after he and Ulrike broke from the underground Communist Party directed from the DDR and they cut off funds for the magazine, he made it work in good entrepreneurial fashion, selling advertisements, getting donations for the magazine, and coming up with marketing techniques to boost circulation. He seems to have been especially good with the networking/smoozing/social-climbing aspects of the publishing business in Hamburg.

His (and Ulrike's) accomplishments with Konkret are illustrated by this brief (and not entirely flattering) description from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:

Die Zeitschrift "Konkret" erscheint bis heute und bezeichnet sich selbst als einzige linke Publikums-zeitschrift Deutschlands. 1955 von Klaus Rainer Röhl aus dem Vorläufer "Studentenkurier" gegründet, wurde die Zeitschrift zunachst vom Zentralkomitee der FDJ und von der verbotenen KPD finanziert. Zeitweilige Chefredakteurin und Star-Autorin war Ulrike Meinhof, bis diese sich, nach ihrer Beteiligung an der Befreiung Andreas Baaders, zum Untergrundkampf entschloss. Röhl musste sich von seinem Nachfolger Hermann Gremliza (ab 1974) den Vorwurf gefallen lassen, "Konkret" danach zu einer "Yellow Press der APO" gemacht zu haben, da die Inhalte mit der Zeit immer populärer und auch sexistischer wurden. Gremliza hatte den Anspruch, "Konkret" wieder zur "Speerspitze eines seriösen linken Journalismus zu machen. Und zumindest hat von Theodor W. Adorno über Heinrich Bö11 bis Jean Paul Sartre die Speerspitze der europäischen Linken mindestens einmal in den letzten Jahrzehnten in "konkret" geschrieben.

[The magazine Konkret still appears today and syles itself as the only German magazine for the popular left audience. Founded in 1955 by Klaus Rainer Röhlfrom its predecessor Studentenkurier, the magazine was first financed by the Central Committee of the FDJ [DDR-directed Communist Youth organization] and by the outlawed KPD [DDR-directed West German Communist Party]. It's sometime chief editor and star author was Ulrike Meinhof, until she decided for the underground strugge after her participation in the freeing of Andreas Baader [from police custody]. Röhl found himself accused by his successor Hermann Gremlize (beginning 1974) that he had made Konkret into the "Yellow Press of the APO" [extra-parliamentary opposition], because the contents over time became more and more popular [i.e., less intellectual] and also more and more sexist. Gremliza had the ambition to make Konkret again into the "spearhead of a serious leftist journalism". And at the least, the spearheads of the European left from Theodor W. Adorno to Heinrich Bö11 to Jean Paul Sartre have written at least once in recent decades for Konkret.]

That last sentence leaves the impression that it was only under Gremliza's ownership and editorial direction that his occurred, but that was not the case. Röhl also published such high-profile writers in the magazine.

In Bettina's book, Klaus appears most sympathetic during the time immediately following Ulrike's going underground. The stress of having your ex-wife become a fugitive from justice on attempted murder charges would have been bad enough. But as I described in the first post, Ulrike also sent their twin daughters to Sicily and almost sent them to a Palesinitan orphans' camp in Jordan. They were missing for four months before Stefan Aust, a former Konkret staffer, retrieved the kids from Sicily thanks to a tip from someone who had left the RAF group.

In the weeks following, Klaus had to contend with the constant threat that the girls would be kidnapped again and sent to a Palestinian camp. Working his connections, he got a commitment from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which ran the orphans' camps that they would protect the children and refuse to let the RAF put them into a camp. Soon the RAF turned their immediate attention more exclusively to bank robberies and burglaries of government offices to steal documents like passports to facilitate their illegal activities.

One can easily imagine that going through such an experience would make a person rethink certain aspects of his life. Whatever the motivation, Klaus changed his public persona. In a book published in 1974, Fünf Finger und keine Faust, he described his years as a secret Communist acting on the behalf of the DDR in publishing Konkret. Bettina's books adds documentation to those activities through interviews and through documents from the archives of the Stasi, the DDR's secret police.

As Bettina recounts it in her Epilogue, Klaus joined the SPD (Social Democratic Party), which had been considered little more than fascists with clean shaves by the APO, not to speak of how the terrorist groups saw them. He did some more publishing ventures, none of them notably successful. As Bettina rather delicately puts it, his later magazines, all of them short-lived, were "increasingly filled with naked girls".

In 1992, he began studying with Ernst Nolte, an historian who had by then become notorious for some seriously revisionist history, such as the argument that the Holocaust was the fault of the Russians. Klaus became a member of the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party) - liberal in the European sense, not the American - and became a conservative nationalist, which is called "national liberal" in Germany. (Again, "liberal" means something different in most of the world than it does in the US.)

In his articles and in books like Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus (2002) [Forbidden Mourning: End of the German Taboos] Deutsche Tabus: Ungefragte Antworten (2004) [German Taboos: Answers to Questions Not Asked], he has expounded the dreary liturgies of German nationalist types in undistinguished prose. In Verbotene Trauer, he begins by defending Hitler against accusations that he had lost faith in the greatness of the German Volk by the end. The rest is a long recitation of rightwing whining about how bad the Germans had it during the Second World War, with no meaningful political context other than whiny nationalism, and how the tyranny of leftist political corrections and the guity-tripping about the Jews has prevented the German people from properly understanding it all.

In the history of the real world, the "de-Nazification" program after the war was little more than a joke. But Klaus argues that it was instead horrendously effective and continues to this day, thanks in particular to those Jews of the "Frankfurt School", in the form of "collective guilt". In particular, collective guilt for the Holocaust. Again, in the real world, German leaders and intellectuals have pretty much always rejected any notion of "collective guilt". The formula used by German officials is that there is no such things as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. (A formula that American politicians could usefully import.)

You get the drift. And there's no lack of complaining about how the Germans paid Israel and other Jews a lot of money and yadda, yadda. You could describe both the books I mentioned in the terms Stefan Reinecke uses in reference to Horst Mahler, a founder of the RAF who later became a flaming rightwinger, as "germanische Donnergrollen." Mahler went even further to the right than Klaus did, but that's another story.

The sad state to which Klaus has come in his rightwing politics is illustrated by an essay called "Götterdämmerung: Was wird bleiben von 1968?" (Twilight of the gods: What will remain of 1968 ["the Sixties"]?) from Deutsche Tabus:

Was hat die Generation '68 geschaffen, und was war positiv an 1968? Nichts. Das Land ist vernachlässigt wie seine Städte und seine zersiedelten Dörfer. Der Beton der nach dern Krieg wieder aufgebauten Hauser brockelt, die Fassaden und Wände der einstmals vorbildlich modernen Schwimmbäder und Bibliotheken werden rissig und verrosten, die Farbe blättert ab. Die fabelhaft künstlichen, autofreien Stadtkerne sind von jener gesetzlich vorgeschriebenen "Kunst am Bau" befallen, den die ideenlosen Nachfahren von Joseph Beuys und Fritz Wotruba für viele zehntausend gute D-Mark aus Stahl und Beton verfertigt haben. Manchmal hat eine Stadt auch eine der wie ein Hefeteig unförmig auseinanderlaufenden Plastiken von Henry Moore erworben, fast jede Stadt im Ruhrgebiet hat er für würdig befunden, eines seiner Kunstwerke an einem öffentlichen Ort aufzustellen. Der Rest der verbleibenden Mauern und Wände ist wie von einem Pilzbefall befleckt mit Grafitti und alltaglichem Schmutz. Unwohnlich und unbewohnt, fremd und unheimlich erscheinen die Städte. Sie sind einander bis zur völligen Gleichheit ähnlich, gleich öde und trostlos am regnerischen Alltag wie in sommerlicher Hitze, und die sogenannten Stadtteilfeste mit Flohmarkt und Glühwein genormt und langweilig von Flensburg bis Pforzheim. Tags werden diese Städte von Arbeitslosen und Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach Ausbildungsplatzen und Arbeit, rat- und hilf esuchenden Alten und Schlüsselkindern glücklos bewohnt, nachts atem- und ratlos durchstreift von Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach dem letzten Kick, nach der schrillsten Disko, nach der neuesten Aufputschpille, die das seit ihrer frühen Schulzeit schon zur Gewohnheit gewordene Haschisch übertreffen soll.

[What did the "Sixties" generation achieve, and what was positive about 1968 {i.e., "the Sixties"}? Nothing. The country is as neglected as its cities and its depopulated villages. The concrete of the house rebuilt after the war are crumbling, the facades and walls of the once model modern swimming pools and libraries are cracked and rusted, the color fading. The fabulous artistic, auto-free city centers have smitten by that legally imposed "art on buildings", which for many thousands of Deutschmarks {which hadn't been the German currency for years when that book was published} the idea-less successors of Joseph Beuys and Fritz Wotruba have been prefabricated out of steel and concrete. Sometimes a city also will have acquired one of those vaguely-shaped plastic sculpture by Henry Moore like piece of dough spread all around; almost every city in the Ruhr District has found one of his artworks worthy to be displayed in a public place. The rest of the remaining walls is dirtied with graffiti and everyday dirt. The cities look unlivable and empty, strange and eerie. They are like one another to the point of complete sameness, equally deserted and bleak on a normal rainy day in the summer heat, and the so-called city district festivals with a flea market and hot spicy cider standardized and boring from Flensburg to Pforzheim. Some days these cities are inhabited by the unemployed and young people looking for training spots and work, old people looking for counsel and help and latchkey kids, in the nights tramped through breathlessly and cluelessly by youth looking for the next kick, for the newest disco, for the newest stimulant pill, which will outdo the hashish to which they have become accustomed since their earliest school years.]

And all of it the fault of dirty hippie leftwingers like these:






Now, the guy on the right in the second photo is Fritz Teufel, who eventually became an RAF terrorist. But what did even that have to do with sculptures in the pedestrian zones in German cities that Klaus doesn't like?

It sounds to me like the short version of Klaus' rant just quoted would be: I'm old and grumpy and resent anyone and everyone who still wants to get out of their house on the weekends.

It calls to mind Tom Tommorrow's memorable portrayal of Rush Limbaugh as the Presidency of Barack Obama began:


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, klaus rainer röhl, raf, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, ulrike meinhof