Bettina Röhl on Karl-Heinz Kurras and the Stasi revelations

Der Tod des Demonstranten (Death of the Demonstrator)- a memorial to Benno Ohnesorg by Alfred Hrdlicka, 1971: photo in Berlin 1990

I posted earlier about the story that came out in the German press last week about how Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West Berlin policeman who shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, had been an East German spy and an illegal member of the East German Communist Party (SED) since 1967. Ohnesorg’s death is generally understood as having been a decisive event in spreading the militant German student movement throughout West Germany, when it had been primarily a West Berlin phenomenon prior to that. And the movement in response became even more militant and, in part, violent.

In her blog post Tod von Benno Ohnesorg: Staatsmord aus Ostberlin?, journalist Bettina Röhl Die Welt 22.05.2009 gives some quirky interpretations of the history of that event and its aftermath. I’ve laid out my understanding of the Ohnesorg killing and its repercussions in my earlier post, so I won’t do another overall recap here. She argues that the biggest impetus to the spread and increased militance of the student movement after June 2 was due to the resignations of West Berlin's Mayor and Police President, which signalled to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), i.e., the militant left opposition, that state authorities were weak. In other words, she argues that insufficient authoritarianism by West German officials let the student movement flourish that otherwise could have been restricted.

In doing so, she makes contradictory arguments about the power of the student movement, which she heavily implies was essentially a creation of East Germany. In one place, she argues that the movement would have developed pretty much the way it did, violence and all, without Ohnesorg’s killing. Yet she also argues that if the public had just known then about Kurras' Stasi (East German Security) ties, that the movement couldn’t have gotten any traction from the killing.

But the West German state hardly showed itself to be weak in dealing with protesters, then or later. On the contrary, their training in crowd control was based on a scenario of crowd actions in support of an act of Soviet/East German military aggression against West Berlin. In the situation of the late 1960s, the overly aggressive police tactics had the effect of polarizing the situation in university cities all over West Germany, including conservative Bavaria. The Ohnesorg killing became a symbol of that, but it became a symbol because police excesses were real.

"Enteignet Springer" (Expropriate Springer) became a popular slogan of the student movement shortly after Benno Ohnesorg's death

Her self-contradicatory argument that the APO would have been undercut by the immediate knowledge that Kurras was a Stasi agent is essentially based on the notion that the APO admired the East German version of socialism, which for the most part wasn’t really the case. APO activists expressed solidarity with protest movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia and were generally critical of East German "Stalinism“. She also ignores the ham-handed pugnacity of Social Democratic Mayor Heinrich Albertz in the immediate wake of the killing, as well as the hysteria of the Springer press. On the latter, she is explicitly in denial, writing that they were "die einzige, die damals einen kühlen Kopf bewahrte" (the only ones who kept a cool head back then). That’s imaginative, for sure, but it‘s astonishing revisionism that could only be defended by defining "cool head“ as something like "recklessly irresponsible“. (Die Welt was then and is now a Springer paper.)

Her post also carries a tone of what we in America would call "culture war" polemics, i.e., she still wants to discredit the DHF's (darn frigging hippies, in the nice version) of those days while imagining that their malign influence is present all over the place in present-day German culture. She talks, for instance, about the "die 68er-Ideologen und auch das gigantische Millionenheer der Mitläufer von 68" (the Sixties ideologues and also the gigantic army of millions of fellow-travelers of the Sixties) who are supposedly resistent to facts about that period. DFH's, in other words. And historians of the period who don't share her dismissive atitude toward the DFH's are acting as "security guards" to protect some DFH conventional wisdom about the 1960s.

Having fairly recently read a number of accounts of the period - not least of them Röhl's own highly informative book on the subject, which shows a level of care in narrative and analysis that is missing in her blog post - I don't know who she may be talking about there. I've reviewed here two 2008 books on "1968" by leading German historians Norbert Frei and Götz Aly. Neither strikes me as some DFH ideological position paper. On the contrary, most of the analysis I've seen from German writers on that period seem to take a critical view of events, especially on the ideology and practice of violence.

Röhl also paints with a very broad brush in her post when she writes:

Indes war die Propaganda der APO eine ganz durchsichtige Angelegenheit: Die 68er-Bewegung, die damals noch APO-Bewegung hieß, baute auf dem Tod von Ohnesorg ihre Legende auf, dass der Staat derjenige war, der zuerst Gewalt angewendet hätte, auf die die friedliche Massenbewegung nur reagiert habe.

[In this way, [Ohnesorg's shooting] was a very obvious opportunity for the propaganda of the APO. The Sixties Movement, when then was still called the APO Movement, built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence, to which the peaceful mass movement only reacted.]

Here she seems to be so intent on denigrating the APO that she manages to simultaneously exaggerate and minimize the significance of the Benno Ohnesorg shooting. Sure, his death became an element of the APO's propaganda. Just as the events of that day became an element of the Springer press' hysterical campaign against the student movement - a cool-headed hysterical campaign, according to Röhl. But it became a widespread symbol for the APO because the image and the context resonated strongly with so many young people given how they saw the police acting.

And I'm not sure what it means to say that the APO "built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence". However emotional a turning point the Ohnesorg may have been for many APO activists, for those among them who advocated some form of political violence, I don't get the impression that "who shot first" was a particularly important question.

A video accompanying the following article addresses some of these issues: Stasi-Fall Kurras: Birthler weist "rätselhafte" Vorwürfe zurück Die Welt 26.05.2009

Other related links:

Dutschke-Sohn fordert neue Suche in den Stasi-Akten von Einar Koch Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Der Fall Benno Ohnesorg: Jetzt spricht die Frau des Todes-Schützen Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi