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

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

Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof, 1964, around the time of her break with the underground Communist Party in West Germany (Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is the second 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.

This post deals with the adult career of Ulrike Meinhof, mainly known as one of the leaders of the German terrorist group, the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF).

The Wikimedia Commons photo above is sourced, "Private picture, supplied by Ulrike Meinhofs daughter, Bettina Röhl". And the copyright information states, "The copyright holder of this work allows anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification", with the emphasis in the original. This suggests that Bettina sees this photo as a particularly appropriate representation of her mother.

Ulrike as successful journalist and secret Communist

Klaus Röhl became a member of the KPD (German Communist Party) on the day in 1956 when it was outlawed in the Federal Republic (West Germany). Ulrike later joined his as a Party member.

Not only were they members of an illegal party. The SED (ruling party of Communist East Germany) was funding their magazine, Konkret. Bettina gives a long account of their dealings with their Party handlers from the DDR and their trips to the DDR to meet with them over issues with the magazine. She did extensive research in the DDR archives that provides contemporary documentation on events described to her by her father and others she interviewed.

An American edition of this book would probably require some special introduction to describe the contorted relationships among the two German states in the 1950s, especially. The Soviets and the DDR (East Germany) continued to hold out the theoretical prospect of national unification on the basis of a neutral Germany along the lines of Austria's neutral status. There were extensive personal and political contacts between East and West Germany. And the border was not sealed until the Berlin Wall went up in late 1961.

But accepting funding from the DDR for their newspaper could have gotten the Röhls charged with high treason. Bettina's description of their dealings at this time reads something like a spy novel. They seemed to have enjoyed the intrigue at some level. But it also had to be nerve-wracking at times. Not only did they have to worry about discovery by West German intelligence. But they could also have been blackmailed by the DDR over their illegal operations.

Ulrike was more a "true believer" than Klaus, who seemed to have little interest in Communist theories, though at the time he supported their politics. There was constant tension with their handlers over their need to write articles critical of the DDR to maintain credibility with their western readers. Eventually, the tensions came to a head in 1964. Klaus and Ulrike resigned from the Party and the SED cut off funds to Konkret, probably expecting they would soon return and agree to the SED's demands. But instead, they sexed the magazine up, i.e., they ran more stories about sex though it remained primarily a political magazine. And they were able to make it work financially through advertising and financial support from well-wishers.

Bettina says that the SED/KPD was happy to accept Klaus' resignation. But they never removed Ulrike's name from the Party rolls, even after she became an RAF terrorist.

During this time, Ulrike built a strong reputation for herself as a journalist and political commentator. As the alternative movements of the 1960s developed - the sexual revolution, the "extra-parliamentary opposition" (APO in the German initials), the hippie movement and so on - konkret became the magazine for the movement.

Bettina doesn't give intensive treatment to Ulrike's articles, many of which are still in print in book form. But she does say that part of her reason for writing the book is to evaluate the pre-RAF aspects of her life including her career as a journalist, which she thinks historical accounts have given insufficient attention.

Bettina describes her parents' activities at the time matter-of-factly. She quotes a letter from Ulrike written in 1959 accusing a rival faction in the Anti-Atomic-Weapons movement of being a group that "zahlenmässig relativ klein ist, aber durch ihr Geld die Macht hat", (relatively small in numbers but has power through their money) referring to the rival faction's support from the SPD. Bettina writes:

Dass sie selber inzwischen zu einer kleinen Gruppe gehört, die Macht und auch Geld hat, verschweigt sie. Es muss als Propaganda gewertet werden, dass ausgerechnet diese subversiv für eine Diktatur arbeitenden illegalen Mitglieder der KPD von Anfang an die Legende vom "Verleumdet- und Verfolgt-sein" nährten und ihr Image pflegten, zu Unrecht verdächtigt zu werden. (S. 284)

[That she herself at the same time belonged to a small group, that had power and also money, she was silent about. It must be regarded as propaganda that precisely this member of the KPD, who worked subversively for a dictatorship, from the beginning on noursihed herself on the legends of "being smeared and persecuted" and worked on her image of being unjustly held in suspicion.]

One article in particular, which Ulrike wrote in late 1958 for an antiwar publication called argument called "Entspannung - trotz Berlin?" (Detente - despite Berlin) and which Bettina reproduces in full, provides an early example of what Bettina's sees as Ulrike's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. This is the time when the Soviet Union was threatening again to cut off Western access to West Berlin. This was a protracted crisis which really only ended when Moscow changed their approach and ordered the DDR to build the Berlin Wall.

In the article, Ulrike takes a clearly friendly stance toward the official Soviet position on the Berlin crisis of the time. But at the same time, she makes some sensible, pragmatic arguments on the possibilities for reducing tensions between the two Germanys, arguments that foreshadowed the later Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt.

Bettina analyzes another article that Ulrike wrote for Konkret at the time her marriage to Klaus was coming to an end, from the January 1968 issue. The article was about a young man named Jürgen Bartsch, who sexually molested and murdered four boys and almost murdered a fifth, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Her article is an extended argument that various social failings of West German society had made him into the murdered that he became, such as the poor quality of the foster care system. As Bettina puts it, the article holds the murderer himself innocent of any personal responsibility for his crimes.

There's certainly nothing wrong about looking at social factors that increase the liklihood that individuals will become criminals. But what's striking about Ulrike's treatment of the case is her seeming indifference - even extreme indifference - to the suffering of the children who were innocent victims of the killer.

Bettina believes that the article reflects her mother's own attempts to grapple with the personal problems that were besetting her at the time. And also the it is a "key document in this break in the life of Ulrike Meinhof". Bettina observes that the article is still often seen as an example of cool, analytical work that examined the facts without regard to the moral judgments her analysis might produce. But, she writes, the factual basis of the article was thin; she didn't research the trial records themselves. Ulrike did interview the killer himself - who ironically was housed in the same jail where she herself would later be imprisoned.

Instead, she portrayed the convicted murderer as the victim in disregard to his own very real victims. "The four boys who were gruesomely abused and then murdered, were not discussed by her with a single feeling or thought, not a single word," writes Bettina. Her suggestion that this article reflects how the death of innocents was becoming an abstraction in Ulrike's mind. And an abstraction not worth worrying about.

Ulrike became deeply involved with the leftwing activist movement in Berlin, where she now lived, and elsewhere in Germany. She became good friends with Bahman Nirumand, one of the leading figures of the movement. She retained full custody of the twins and experienced the stresses of being a single mother with a professional career.

This video clip in German with English text translations shows her in (apparently) 1969 (even though the label on the clip says 1970), the year before she went underground, evidently depressed and talking wearily about the strains of raising children and pursuing a career.



Ulrike in the RAF

This is the best-known part of Ulrike's life and career, and has been described in great detail in a variety of places. The RAF's beginning is normally dated to May 14, 1970, when Ulrike and several others sprang Andreas Baader from police custody. The went into hiding for formed a formal organization. In the fall of 1970, they trained in an Al Fatah camp in Jordan. Before she was arrested in June 1972, she participated in a number of illegal and violent RAF actions: bank robberies, burglaries of passport offices, and six bombings, [including attacks on American military bases]. According to Bettina's account, five people were killed in those attacks and many wounded.

Ulrike Meinhof's image from wanted poster

She writes, "Ulrike Meinhof was concretely resposible involved in the organization of the Springer attack [a bombing of the Springer publishing offices] in Hamburg, where 34 people were wounded, some of them seriously, by two bombs." She also became the official spokesperson for the group. The German authorities considered her to be the chief author of several RAF manifestoes, with names like "Stadtguerrilla und Klasskampf" (Urban Guerrillas and Class Struggle).

The RAF was supported to some degree at various times by the DDR, though promoting that brand of terrorism was not the main thrust of East German intelligence and subversive activity. The DDR offered sanctuary to some RAF members, a situation memorably dramatized in the film Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000), English title The Legend of Rita. But while the RAF might not have been able to operate exactly as they did with East German help, they were very much a homegrown West German terrorist group.

As I mentioned before, Bettina relates that the East Germans never formally kicked her out of the Communist Party, for reasons that are not entirely clear from her account. She relates that some of Ulrike's friends tried while she was underground to arrange for her to received sanctuary in the DDR, but she was arrested before such a plan could be pulled off.

Having become all-too-familiar with torture practices committed by Americans under the Cheney-Bush torture program, I would have to say that the extreme isolation in which Ulrike was kept for a large part of her confinement sure sounds like torture to me. At the very least, it must have contributed to the mental state which eventually led to her suicide.

Bettina and Regine were able to visit Ulrike three times during 1973. She writes that Ulrike permanently broke off her contacts to the twins at the start of 1974, even returning their letters to her unopened. Bettina relates the break to the arrival of Gudrun Ennslin in the Köln-Ossendorf prison. The RAF members were able to meet together to discuss their joint defense strategy and Ulrike became more fanatically committed to the group. Although Ulrike herself was a leader of the group, this is one indication that she was powerfully influenced psychologically by Ennslin, and probably also by Baader, who seemed to have exercised strong charisma on the group members.

Ulrike did send a request to Klaus through her attorney in 1976 to bring the kids to see her once more on the following weekend at the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison where she and her fellow RAF defendents were being held during their trial. The twins declined that particular invitation, intending to visit her sometime within the following weeks. But Ulrike committed suicide in her cell days later, on May 9, 1976. She left no suicide note.

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, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, ulrike meinhof

Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof

Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006) is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel.

The name of her mother, Ulrike Marie Meinhof (1934-1976), is familiar to many as one of the leaders of the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), a deadly group of domestic terrorists that shook the politics of the 1970s in Germany. I reviewed the current movie about the RAF in a post last year, in which I also described some of the group's terrorist activities. That film, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, is nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

She co-authored a famous cover article with Carola Niezborala in 1995 for Der Spiegel, Unsere Mutter - "Staatsfeind Nr. 1" 29/1995 vom 17.07.1995 about her notorious mother. (PDF Version) I was impressed with the writing in that article, which made me curious to read this new book, which clocks in at 641 pages.

Her mother Ulrike became one of the most famous terrorists in Europe. Her father Klaus started a political-literary magazine financed for years by Communist East Germany, which eventually became a leading leftwing journal in 1960s West Germany. For decades now, Klaus has been what in Germany is called a "national-liberal", which in the American political vocabulary would translate to "conservative nationalist". And you think your family has issues!

I'm going to talk about the book in four separate posts: this one and the next on Ulrike Meinhof, the second on Bettina's analysis of political events in the book, and the third about Klaus. Since they were all three named Röhl, I'm going to use their first names for clarity.

Loving your monsters

In a review of a Robert Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson, Gary Wills once explained that Caro was so focused on Johnson's ugly characteristics that he failed to capture his strong points. Wills described the problems by a counter-example, noting that "it took a Shakespeare to write about Richard III, and an Olivier to play him. They both loved their monster." (Monstre Désacré New York Review of Books 04/96/1990)

The strength of Bettina's book is that she literally loved her "monsters". And it gives the relentlessly fact-based book the dramatic tension of a novel, as she insists on being not only unsparing but fair, but also realistic and fair. There's also more than a hint of tragedy in her chronological account. Because pretty much anyone who's actually reading the book will know that Ulrike became a terrorist and the leader of a murderous group, dying relatively young by her own hand in prison.

Bettina's task seems to be more difficult in the case of her mother. Ulrike not only abandoned her and her twin sister, the story she relates in her 1995 Spiegel article as well as in the book. It was actually worse than that. Ulrike hid the two children in Sicily when she went underground in 1970 without letting Klaus know where they were. And she intended to send them to a Palestinian orphans' camp in Jordan where she was told she would never be able to see them again, requesting that they be raised as revolutionary fighters. A family friend, journalist Stephan Aust, managed to find them and take them back to Germany.

After Klaus had the kids safely back home, the Ulrike and RAF still planned to kidnap the two girls and send them to a camp. Bettina writes matter-of-factly near the end of the book, "Das von Meinhof und Proll ausgesuchte Waisenlager in Jordanien wurde wenige Wochen nach der geplanten Verbringung der Kinder vollständig zerbombt, kein Kind überlebte." (The orphans' camp in Jordan that [Ulrike] Meinhof and [Astrid] Proll had found was thoroughly bombed a few weeks after it had been planned to bring the girls there. No child survived.)

In the following YouTube clip in German, Bettina explains that this experience gave her a strong sense that, even though the RAF and their admirers may have seen them as idealistic revolutionaries who only attacked individuals they believed were enemies of the people, in fact they were willing to hurt innocents, as well.



Ulrike Marie Meinhof

Ulrike's biography can be quickly summarized as follows. She was born in 1934 in what later became East Germany. Her father Werner Meinhof - who joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) on May 1, 1933, died in 1938 at age 38. Her mother Ingeborg Guthardt Meinhof entered the University of Jena and took up residence together with a fellow student, Renate Riemeck, ten years younger than she and 15 years older than Ulrike. The two women left Jena as the bombings grew more intense and the Russian Army advanced, and took the children to western Germany. When Ingeborg died in 1949 from the flu after a cancer operation, Renate became the guardian of Ulrike and her older sister Wienke, and raised Ulrike to adulthood.

Ulrike entered the University of Wuppertal and later the "Hochshule" (College) at Münster. As a university student in the late 1950s, she became active in the movement against stationing nuclear weapons in Germany. Through her anti-nuclear-armament activism and writing, she became acquained in 1958 with Klaus Rainer Röhl, editor of a small leftwing magazine published in Hamburg called Konkret, which was secretly financed from its inception in 1955 until 1964 by the East German Communists.

Ulrike began working at Konkret as a writer and editor in 1960 and fell in love with Klaus, who left his first wife for Ulrike. They married on December 27, 1961, the same date Ulrike's parents had married. They had twin girls on Spetember 21, 1962, Regine and Bettina ("Gina" and "Tina"). Ulrike became a well-known journalist in Germany and began filmmaking. She split with Klaus in February 1968, when he fell in love with another woman. Ulrike was deeply involved in the radical activist movement around Berlin in 1968-70 and became acquainted - and deeply impressed with two radicals who had firebombed a department store in Frankfurt, Andreas Baader (1943-1977) and Gudrun Ennslin (-1977), . She went underground in May 1970 with Baader, Ennslin and others and formed the RAF. Ulrike was one of the four main leaders of the group in its early years along with Baader, Ennslin and Horst Mahler. She was their chief theorist, i.e., she wrote their manifestos.

After a short period training with Palestinian guerilla fighters in Jordan, the RAF began a series of terorist actions. Arrested in June 1972 along with Andreas Baader (1943-1977) and Gudrun Ennslin (-1977), Ulrike spent the remainder of her life in prison and in court, mounting a protracted defense along with Baader, Ennslin and Jan-Carl Raspe. She committed suicide in her cell on May 9, 1976.

Renate Riemeck und "die Freunde Ulbrichts"

The most fascinating part of the book to me is Bettina's description of the world of intrigue in which Ulrike and Klaus moved in the 1950s and 1960s as members of the illegal KPD, the West German Communist Party, which was actually directed by the ruling party of Communist East Germany. In these posts, I'm going to refer to the East Germany Communist Party as the SED, or Socialist Unity Party, which technically was a fusion of the East German Communist and Social Democratic Parties, though in reality it was a loyal Soviet-line party, with a particularly strong traditional Communist bent, or "Stalinist" in the context. And I'll refer to East Germany as the DDR, the German initials for the German Democratic Republic (typically abbreviated in English as the GDR).

Renate Riemeck (1920-2003) is an important part of this aspect of Ulrike's life.

Renate Riemeck on the cover of Der Spiegel 23.08.1961

Bettina is somewhat oddly circumspect about Renate Riemeck's sexuality, though I would think any reader would draw the conclusion that she was a lesbian. She quotes Klaus referring in passing to Renate's "lesbian" style. And she relates what must be one of those favorite family stories, about how as a little girl she would not be convinced that Renate was actually a woman, because of her characteristically masculine was of dressing. Renate made a point of wearing a dress once to convinced "Tina" that she was female, an event which apparently made a comical impression on all involved. And, not surprisingly, failed to convince the young Bettina anyway.

She also describes that Ingeborg's family was very skeptical of Renate when she and Ingeborg moved in together. They said that something "wasn't quite right" ("nicht stimmte") about Renate, in particular noticing her masculine appearance ("die so aussah wien ein Mann" - "she looked like a man") and seemed to be a "father" to Ulrike and Wienke. And Renate later moved in with another women with whom she lived for six decades. She kept house while Renate worked, mostly at home as a writer.

The reason I mention this in particular is that I wonder to what extent the need to be discrete about Renate's lesbianism made Ulrike accustomed to having a "clandestine" life. Because certainly in her work with Klaus and Konkret as a secret member of the illegal KPD surreptitiosly meeting with East German agents who provide illegal funds for the magazine, she lived a kind of double life. And then, obviously, again in the underground RAF.

It's notable in this connection that Bettina quotes a letter from Ulrike to Klaus, in which she alludes to having had sexual experiences with women. Though Bettina gives no indication that Ulrike's love interests during her life with Klaus and afterwards were anything other than heterosexual.

But Renate had others secrets as well. As Bettina describes, Renate had her own clandestine Communist connections. In fact, Renate achieved political fame (and notoriety) of her own as the lead candidate of the Deutsche Friedensunion (DFU) in the parliamentary elections of 1961. Renate even rated a cover story in Der Spiegel, the country's most influential "quality" news magazine. The DFU was generally regarded as a Communist front party, which Bettina's account leaves no doubt that it was. It was mocked by critics, who joked that its initials DFU stood for "die Freunde Ulbrichts" (the friends of Ulbricht), referring to Walter Ulbricht, then the head of the SED and chief ruler of the DDR.

The Spiegel article, Rot und Rosa 35/1961 (23.08.1961), pretty much describes the DFU as a Communist front group. That term comes from the Communist strategy of the "united front", and does not imply that everyone involved is a Communist either politically or organizationally. According to Bettina, Renate denied having been a secret KPD member or even aware that the DFU was a front group, though Bettina doesn't find the latter claim credible.

That 1961 Spiegel article mentions Ulrike:

Zwischendurch war sie Mutter zweier Pflegekinder geworden, von denen sie eines, namens Ulrike Marie Meinhof, dermaßen päppelte, daß die Kleine heute als Chefredakteurin der ultralinken Hamburger Studentenzeitung "konkret" amtiert, deren Finanzquellen ebenso unklar sind wie die von [Gerhard] Gleißbergs "Anderer Zeitung".

[In the meantime, she [Renate] became the mother of two foster children, of which one by the name of Ulrike Marie Meinhof, ... in the same way, that the little one [Ulrike] serves as the chief editor of the ultraleft Hamburg student newspaper "konket", whose financial source are just as unclear as those of [Gerhard] Gleissberg's "Anderer Zeitung".]

Gleissberg was described in the article as being instrumental in working with the DDR to found the DFU.

The article even featured a picture of Ulrike with the caption, "Pflegekind Marie Meinhof ... fand Zuflucht bei der Junggesellin" (Foster child Marie Meinhof ... found refuge with the bachelorette [Renate]".

The DFU never gained much influence. In the summer of 1961, it looked to make a strong enough showing in the polls to possibly enter Parliament. But when the Berlin Wall went up, the DFU's popularity plummetted and never recovered.

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, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, ulrike meinhof

Obama, Bush and the Iraq War

I recently started reading the German-language blog of German journalist Bettina Röhl, which has the catchy name of Sex, Macht und Politik (Sex, Power and Politics) and appears on the Web site of Die Welt Online.

She has been trying to poke holes in the excessive admiration she finds for President Obama in the German press. In Irak-Wahlen: Später Triumpf des George W. Bush! 02.02.2009, she suggests that Obama should thank our former Dear Leader Bush for the progress in Iraq. She praises the provincial elections that took place on Saturday and suggests that the elections are some kind of real-life rebuke to those in America and Germany - she mentions Obama, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) und former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Green) - who warned that the Iraq War could become another "Vietnam".

She writes that the removal of Saddam Hussein was "ein Segen für die Menschheit und ein Segen für den Irak und die von ihm ermordeten und geschundenen Menschen" (a blessing for humanity and a blessing for Iraq and the people who were murdered and mistreated by him). She goes on to say that "der Irak ohne Saddam Hussein einen erfreulichen Weg in die Gemeinschaft der zivilisierten Staaten macht" (Iraq without Saddam Hussein is making a joyous [!?!] way into the community of civilized states). She also has the impression that the results of last Saturday's provincial elections in Iraq show that "ein laizistischer Staat seinen Weg macht und islamistische Kräfte nicht mehrheitsfähig sind" (a secular state is making its way and Islamist forces are not able to win a majority).

I made comments there at her blog, which I'll recap here.

The Iraq War had two clear official purposes, specified in the Congressional Resolution of October 2002 authorizing war. (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002) One was that war was the only remaining method of dealing with Saddam's (nonexistent) "weapons of mass destruction". The other was that the President must show that Saddam's government had a definite link to Osama bin Laden's Al Qa'ida.

Dick Cheney and George Bush made both claims repeatedly and publicly, especially on the "WMDs". Both claims were not only false but falsified.

And for that, we do have George Bush and Dick Cheney to thank.

Even disasters can have some positive consequences. But the purpose of the Iraq War was not to wage a "war of liberation" in Iraq, though Bush and his supporters were happy to call it that. The purpose was to deal with those two threats specified by Congress. Both of which turned out not to exist.

I'm happy about the Iraqi provincial elections this past Saturday. And that is also the case for all war opponents in America as also for the war's fans, I would think.

But I'm not such a great optimist as she about the situation in Iraq.

The elections on Saturday could only take place under the most stringent security measures. All private auto traffic was banned, for instance.

Political violence in Iraq has certainly not ended.

According to the early reports, the electoral participation was around 51%. High by American standards (as a percent of eligible voters). But nevertheless not an unqualified good sign.

There were thousands of eligible voters who say they were not allowed to vote. (Vote suppression isn't the exclusive province of American Republicans!)

The elections show, so it appears, greater voter support for centralist trends. But that also makes the risk even greater for conflicts between Arabs and Kurds.

And later this year comes the vote in Kirkuk over the future status of the province, which carries a big risk for conflict.

Also according to the early reports, the Da'wa Party of Nuri al-Maliki and their coalition partners have won this election. As one of the two large Shi'a parties there, Da'wa is very pro-Iran. That's not necessarily good for the Western democracies. The relative strengthening of Iran was an unavoidable consequence of Cheney's and Bush's Iraq War.

Da'wa is also an Islamist Party. Juan Cole calls it a cult-like organization. More secular parties seemed to have also done well. But it's not a stampede toward a secular state.

The provincial elections were not applause for the Americans. Cole writes, "It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure."

I really do hope that the withdrawal of our troops goes relatively peacefully. And that things go that way in postwar Iraq, as well. But it is also realistic to recognize that new civil wars between Shi'a and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds, Shi'a and Shi'a could develop. Regional wars with Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iran could also take place. Turkey already has a small war going with the Iraqi Kurds.

The Germans can be very glad that they didn't make Iraq into their problem. It is still very much a catastrophe for Iraq and fur the US.

Juan Cole has provided reporting, commentary and links on the provincial elections at Informed Comment posts of 02/01/09 and 02/02/09.

Bettina - or Frau Röhl, if we observe the formality her commenters did - left a comment responding to me and other commenters. She argued that her main point was not to oppose Bush-bashing or to defend Bush's Iraq policy, but rather to insist on a clear view of Obama and his Presidency. As she puts it, "Was Obama gelingt oder woran er scheitert, das hat Einfluss auf alle Menschen weltweit." (What Obama achieve or on what he fails, that has influence on all people worldwide.) True enough.

But her particular post turned on at least hypothetically accepting a view of the significance of last Saturday's elections in Iraq that is very, very optimistic.

In her post she also argues that Obama's decision to keep Bush's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on at the Pentagon was an indication of his intention to maintain continuity with Bush's policies in Iraq. Now, I disagreed with Obama's choice of Gates. (As excited as I am about what he done so far, I'm not one of those starry-eyed Obama idolizers about whom Bettina is so concerned.) But my concern about Gates wasn't because I thought Obama intended to follow Bush's policies. I was concerned because Obama intended to pursue very different policies and that Gates might try to undermine them in some way.

As this report (Generals Seek to Reverse Obama Withdrawal Decision Inter Press Service 02/02/09) from historian Gareth Porter points out, the new Commander-in-Chief has different ideas about how to approach things than Bush. He's so far sticking to his plan of withdrawing all combat troops within 16 months.

More on those Iraqi elections last weekend:

Iraqi Election Success? Not So Fast by Michael Knights Foreign Policy Online

Elections Could be a Telling Signpost by Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service 02/01/09

The following is the German text of a long comment I left on her Bettina Röhl's blog, mistakes and all:

Ich freue mich auch über die irakische provinzielle Wahlen von Samstag. Und das is auch so für alle Kriegsgegner in Amerika wie auch Krieg-Fans, wurde ich denken.

Aber ich bin nicht so ein grosser Optimist wie Sie.

Die Wahlen letztem Samstag konnten nur unter die grosste Sicherheitsmasnahmen stattfinden. Alle private Autoverkehr war verboten, z.B.

Politische Gewalt in Irak ist gar nicht beendet.

Nach die frühe Nachrichten war die Walhbeteiligung nur um 51%. Hoch für amerikanische Verhältnisse. Aber trotzdem nicht unbedingt ein gutes Zeichen.

Es gab thousande Beschwerden von Wahlberechtigte, die sagen, sie wurden nicht erlaubt zu wählen.

Die Wahl zeigt, so es scheint, grössere Wähler-Unterstützung für zentralizierende Trends. Aber das macht das Risiko auch grösser für Konflikte zwischen Araber und Kurden.

Und spater dieses Jahn kommt die Wahl in Kirkuk, welche grösses Risiko für Konflikt trägt.

Auch nach die fruhe Nachrichten haben die Da'wa Partei von Nuri al-Maliki und ihre verbundete Koalitionspartner diese Wahlen gewonnen. Als eine der zwei grösse schiitische Partein dort - und Da'wa ist auch islamischtisch - ist Da'wa sehr pro-Iran. Das ist nicht unbedingt gut für die westlichen Demokratien. Die relativ Verstärkung Irans war eine unvermeidbare Folge von Cheneys und Bushs Irak-Krieg.

Die provinzielle Wahlen waren keine Applause für die Amerikaner. Juan Cole von der University of Michigan schreibt, "It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure."

Ich hoffe wirklich, dass der Rückzug unserer amerikanischen Truppen friedlich geht. Und in Nachkriegs-Irak auch. Aber ist es auch realischtish zu erkennen, dass neue Bürgerkriege zwischen Schiiten und Sunnis, Araber und Kurden, Schiiten und Schiiten entwicklen könnten. Regionale Kriegen mit der Türkei oder Jordanien sind sehr denkbar. Oder auch mit Saudi Arabien und Iran dabei. Die Türkei hat schon einen kleinen Krieg mit den Irak-Kurden.

Die Deutschen können sehr froh sein, dass sie nicht Irak zu ihrem Problem gemacht hatten. Es ist wirklich noch eine Katastrophe. Für Irak und für die USA.

Tags: bettina röhl, iraq war, obama administration