1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The mid-to-late 1960s witnessed revolts, riots and attempted reforms across the
world. From the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 to the Situationist
influenced student revolt at the Sorbonne in 1968 and the “Prague Spring” in that same
year, many people across the world criticized – and in some cases actually undermined –
the status quo in their respective countries. One can view these internal engagements as a
reaction against the hegemonic power of the United States (with its NATO allies) and the
Soviet Bloc as they waged the Cold War. Post-war Western Europe, in particular, was
very much in need of American investment due to the destruction of much of its
infrastructure during World War II. This investment came with a price, however, as the
United States – both directly and indirectly – influenced the political, economic and
artistic lives of European citizens. In the case of France this influence was relatively
subtle, as President De Gaulle, an ally during the war, was hardly a committed supporter
of America and its interests. However, due to the massive influx of Marshall Plan money
into France’s economy, the United States still wielded significant influence, attempting to
keep socialist and communist ideals at bay. West Germany, on the other hand as a
defeated and occupied enemy, had little choice but to largely submit to American
interests in its political and economic reconstruction. In both cases, the United States
encouraged and promoted consumer-based economies that not only provided a hedge
against the Communist bloc but also became a market for American goods and services.
2
Countercultural groups in both countries, particularly the French Situationists and
the German Red Army Faction, reacted against these developments as well as what they
perceived as American interference. In France, the response by the Situationist
International (SI) took on a form of cultural criticism remaining essentially non-violent,
yet representing (they believed) a more thoroughgoing rebellion against the status quo
than even the Communist Party could hope for. The Situationists’ rejection of native
consumer trends sat firmly within the specifically European artistic and philosophical
context of Situationism’s precursors, Dadaism, Surrealism and Marxism. The CIA and
other representatives of the U.S. State Department subjected France as a whole to
economic and cultural pressure as a way of staunching socialist trends and consolidating
alliance with the West in general. While the SI only occasionally made specific mention
of the United States in its writings criticizing the growing post-war consumerism, books
like Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the Situationists decried this growing
consumerism as it seemed poised to take over all of Western Europe.
By contrast in Germany, Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary
Opposition or APO) groups like the Red Amy Faction (RAF) turned to violence and
instigated a series of bombings and kidnappings causing great concern worldwide. This
paper will compare the activities of the French Situationists with those of the West
German APO groups, arguing much more explicitly than previous scholarship that one of
the primary incentives for their actions was United States’ policy during the Cold War.
Furthermore, I argue that the French countercultural tactics diverged from those of their
German counterparts because of their different post-war experiences with the United
3
States and the rest of the allies. France was a co-liberator and followed a relatively
independent political path after the war. In fact, the French government was often as
much at odds with American policies as was French counterculture. France never viewed
the United States as an occupier and groups like the Situationists were never inspired to
bomb U.S. military installations or kidnap and kill businessmen as was the case with the
RAF. Germany’s status as a defeated and occupied enemy led to an increasingly violent
response from its counterculture, especially as the United States became embroiled in the
Vietnam War, inviting comparisons with West Germany’s own situation.
This study will not imply that the SI and APO existed and flourished solely due to
the existence of the Marshall Plan and the actions of CIA subsidiaries like the Congress
for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Certainly ambiguity towards the French and West German
governments’ own actions past and present, as well as disillusionment with Western
capitalism in general, provided fodder for rebellion. However, the influence of the United
States in so many aspects of Western European post-war life meant that Germany and
France could not follow completely independent economic and cultural paths. Due to the
relatively recent actions of the Nazis, it was unthinkable at the time for the Allies to give
Germany complete freedom in its own affairs; and it was in the interest of the United
States that West Germany remain firmly aligned with the West, especially as Cold War
tensions grew and East Germany became a permanent part of the Soviet Bloc. Ironically,
in order to bolster anti-communist forces, some former Nazis regained positions of power
and influence with the full support of the United States. This shift away from denazification caused many West Germans (particularly youth) to believe that with
4
American help, West Germany was to become a fascist state once again. The US and
Britain allowed France, as a fellow ally and a country liberated from the Nazis, to pursue
a more independent economic and political course that West Germany. However, France
was still prodded into the American sphere of influence through the actions of the CIA
and the CCF.
For France, West Germany and Europe as a whole, the years immediately
following World War II were defined by the struggle for dominance between the United
States and the Soviet Union. This struggle was not just an attempt to attain military
dominance, but was as much or more about cultural and economic influence. Through the
influence of CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the United States attempted to
direct the two countries away from any alignment with the ideals of socialism or
communism. The United States’ use of the arts as part of the economic agenda was an
attempt to showcase the ideals of freedom as inherent in a consumer-oriented capitalist
economy. However, the Situationists rejected this attempt believing it to be merely an
aspect of the greater “spectacle” that kept the populations entertained and unaware, while
the RAF ultimately reacted with violence against West German businesses and the
American “occupiers.”
Over the last twenty years America’s role in the cultural Cold War has drawn
considerable scholarly attention and historians have studied it from many different
angles. Some historians approach this topic from the vantage point of specific European
countries and others from the perspective of the United States. Historians and sociologists
have also delineated the connections between and among European and American
5
counter-cultural groups and how these groups fit into the larger picture of the post-war
world. However, none has thus far made a specific connection between the United States’
attempts at cultural and economic domination and the actions of countercultural
movements.
One of the key works documenting the United States’ involvement in the cultural
Cold War is Frances Stonor-Saunder’s 1999 book Who Paid the Piper? In this study
Stonor-Saunders analyses much of the extant information about the statespersons, artists
and intellectuals involved in the United States’ cultural war of the 1950s and 1960s. She
summarizes much of the revisionist historical writing on the U.S. government’s activities
during the Cold War era, particularly from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. She
argues that the CIA subsidized and exported works by former American radicals and
leftist intellectuals who had become disillusioned with the USSR due to Stalin’s reign of
terror and encouraged the Abstract Expressionist movement by funneling money to the
New York Museum of Modern Art.1
Who Paid the Piper draws from a large number of primary and secondary sources,
as well as interviews with artists and former CIA operatives who identify the roles of
figures such as Nelson Rockefeller, Joseph Schlesinger, Nicolai Nabokov and Jackson
Pollock in the service of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the cultural branch of the
CIA that will be discussed in the next chapter. One of the more interesting outcomes of
Stonor Saunders’s study is the revelation that a number of those identified with left-wing
politics supported the CIA’s actions in this regard. Many of these participants were
1 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books,
1999), 263.
6
former Communists who became disillusioned with the USSR’s actions under Stalin and
thus felt it imperative to maintain a strong front against potential Soviet influence in the
Western world.2
Richard Kuisel, in his book Seducing the French, demonstrates the widespread
anti-American sentiments across France in the aftermath of World War II. He shows how
the French population’s desire to maintain its “Frenchness” collided with American
attempts to create an ally that would support the United States’ economic and political
goals. All levels of French society felt this ambiguity about the United States –
communists, workers and eventually the De Gaulle administration – and while Kuisel
does briefly mention the special disdain that the Situationists had for the encroaching
consumer culture, the main subjects of his study are unionists, politicians and the greater
intelligentsia.3
Tony Shaw, in his book Hollywood’s Cold War and in related articles, shows how
the CIA and CCF used the media of film to disseminate American cultural ideals during
the Cold War. The CIA’s involvement in the animated film setting of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm is a primary example. The CCF made sure the team of directors
downplayed some of Orwell’s criticisms of capitalism as well as his implication that the
Soviet Union had betrayed socialism in order to keep the film aligned with U.S. policy.4
Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, Sabrina P.
Ramet’s and Gordana P. Crnkovic’s collection of essays Kazaaam! Splat! Ploof! The
2
Ibid., 253.
Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 33, 146.
4 Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 77-80.
3
7
American Impact on European Popular Culture since 1945 along with an additional
collection of essays titled Between Marx and Coca-Cola edited by Axel Schildt and
Detlef Siegfried explore the effect of the American Cultural Cold War on specific
European arenas. In particular, they document the fears many in Europe have had about
the effect on their own culture of the United States’ cultural and economic ideals (past
and present) as portrayed by the media of film, music and radio as well as the commercial
interference of the Marshall Plan in general. Authors reference Coca-Cola so often
because many cultural critics identify the company as equally representative of both
America’s economic and cultural influence.
These writers identify the growth of European consumer culture and determine
that many youth, in particular, aligned themselves with Theodore Adorno’s Frankfurt
School in their criticism of this change.5 The authors recognize common ground among
groups like the Situationists and the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO). Arthur
Marwick even makes a point of noting the evolution of some factions within the
Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union or SDS) into
the terrorist groups like the RAF.6 None of these studies, however, specifically connects
the different responses of European countercultural associations like the Situationist
International and Red Army Faction to their countries’ unique experiences under postwar American domination. Even Griel Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, which deals in depth
5 Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, introduction to Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in
Changing European Societies, 1960-1980, ed. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006),
16.
6
Arthur Marwick, “Youth Culture and the Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties,” in Between
Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980, ed. Axel Schildt and Detlef
Siegfried (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 45.
8
with the Situationists’ place in the fringe culture, approaches the topic using the
Surrealist-Lettrist-Situationist continuum merely as an a priori starting point from which
his analysis of (especially) punk culture follows.7
The study of why American actions and policies during the Cold War led to
terrorist activities in Germany but not in France is important for a couple reasons: First,
such an investigation can help us understand other instances of terrorism; post-war
Germany would not be the only place where the foreign policy of the United States
instigated or increased the activities of radical groups. Second, discussions of the cultural
aspects of American policy often take second place to those of military and economic
strategies, but an imposed cultural influence can sometimes result in even greater
resentment and stronger reactions from certain quarters. The combination of the two,
moreover, can cause particularly volatile responses.
An abundance of primary documentation can help us understand the responses of
both the Situationist International and the groups of the Ausserparlimentarische
Opposition. Both the Situationists and the Lettrists wrote a number of treatises and
articles in addition to producing books and films. There is likewise no shortage of
material by Ulrike Meinhof, Stefan Aust and others involved with the APO. Many
newspaper and magazine articles, with those appearing in the CIA-backed Bild and East
German-backed konkret of particular interest, document the actions of the Kommune I – a
literal commune founded by former Situationist, Dieter Kunzelman where the members
experimented with collective property and communal relationships – and the RAF. These
7
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth-Century (Harvard University Press. 1991), 53-56.
9
primary source documents identify United States policy as a catalyst for the development
and actions of the Situationists and the RAF. This identification is sometimes obvious,
especially when the writers invoke American actions in the Vietnam War or American
relations with the Soviet Union. Often, however, the link is not so clear-cut, and one is
required to follow the trail of influence emanating from the various groups representing
the U.S. State Department upon the West German government, then identify the effects
of the policies as they infiltrated European culture at large.
The French Situationists and the German Red Army Faction each responded
differently to the encroaching American-led consumerism of their respective countries. In
order to present the historical setting in which they developed, Chapter One will provide
an overview of the European post-war landscape in which the Situationists and APO
developed, followed by an investigation of American cultural influence in Western
Europe during the Cold-War era. Chapters Two and Three will separately analyze the
Situationists and West German countercultural groups, demonstrating why the SI
reactions to American policy were essentially non-violent while those of the German
RAF were far more extreme. The concluding chapter will sum up and integrate the
arguments as well as consider the legacies of these 1960s countercultural groups to the
punk movement of the 1970s, as well as the anti-consumerist protests of the present day
that the two groups helped inspire
10
Chapter 2
POSTWAR EUROPE
In order to understand the contrasting reactions of the Situationists and the RAF
in the face of post-war American policy, it is first necessary to understand the political
and economic landscape of Europe immediately following World War II. This chapter
will briefly describe the Cold War divide. It will also demonstrate how the United States
attempted to influence French and West German media and cultural development via the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a CIA-run beneficiary of Marshall Plan funds, in
order to direct the populaces away from radical, socialist or communist leanings. Finally,
this chapter will examine some of the artistic genres these actions affected. Many
countercultural groups in Western European countries exhibited increasingly antiAmerican behavior in response to the influence American economic and cultural ideals
had within their respective countries. Groups like the Situationists and the Red Army
Faction were also inspired by America’s own protests like the Los Angeles Watts’ riot in
1965; however, the European groups’ reactions to these events turned out to be very
different from each other.
The end of World War II resulted in the collapse of the tenuous alliance between
the USSR and the USA. Each side wanted the reconstruction of Europe to result in a
strengthening of its respective political and economic interests. This desire grew in
significance as the Allies began to rebuild Germany. Germany’s reconstruction ultimately
led to the creation of two separate and antagonistic states, each of which became a
symbolic microcosm for the two sides of the Cold War conflict as a whole. Post-war
11
France reflected a different but equally noteworthy response to the Cold War divide in its
desire to forge a path more or less independent of the United States.
The division of Germany also had repercussions for the political landscape within
the two halves of the country. Both East and West Germany reconstituted the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) which dated back to the Weimar
Republic. However, in East Germany the Soviets forcibly merged this formerly anticommunist party with the Communist Party, while in West Germany (FRG), the SPD
retained its anti-communist stance although still supporting the ideal of a socialist, neutral
Germany.8 The Communist Party was banned in the FRG by 1956.9 This ban, in
combination with the 1966 coalition the SPD formed with the more centrist Christlich
Demokratische Union (CDU), disappointed many on the left. With the Communist Party
outlawed and the Socialist Party compromised, groups like the RAF resorted to a more
radical response to what they viewed as an occupation by the United States.10 We will see
how these separate reactions affected the development of German and French
countercultural movements.
The Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961, provided a physical representation of the
Cold War’s symbolic “Iron Curtain” until its destruction in 1989. The Cold War divide
subjected Berlin’s inhabitants (both East and West) to ideological pressure as the United
States and the Soviet Union waged an ever intensifying psychological propaganda
crusade aimed at subjects on both sides of the Wall. Each side attempted to win the
8 Library of Congress, A Country Study: Germany, accessed March 31, 2014, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgibin/query2/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+de0037).
9 Ibid.
10 Andre Moncourt and J. Smith, trans, The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History. Volume I: Projectiles
for the People (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 308-309.
12
“hearts and minds” of the world’s populations and, in so doing, further the economic and
political systems respectively represented by the Soviets and the Americans.11 Because
the stakes of the Cold War were just as high as those in the previous “hot” war, many
officials in the West believed there was no room for neutrality or compromise.12 This was
true not only with respect to political and economic ideologies, but also in regards to
cultural and artistic standards. Each side attempted to influence the cultural direction of
other countries and to promote itself as the corresponding standard bearer.
During the years immediately following World War II, most European currency
was almost worthless; there were widespread strikes and a flourishing black market. In
response to these conditions, former American General and newly appointed Secretary of
State George Marshall announced the institution of the European Recovery Program,
better known as the Marshall Plan. Its main purpose was to fund the general
reconstruction of Europe and the program distributed almost thirteen billion dollars from
its inception in 1947 to its official end in 1951.13 The plan was also linked to an economic
and ideological agenda. As part of its Cold War strategy, the United States government
began using the Marshall Plan to influence the economic and cultural development of
West Germany and Western Europe. This tactic was accomplished first by discouraging
the native communist and socialist parties from winning elections, and then by inviting
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad
(Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 47.
12 Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since
World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 67-69.
13 The Marshall Foundation, The Marshall Plan, accessed March 1, 2014,
http://www.marshallfoundation.org/TheMarshallPlan.htm.
11
13
comparisons between European workers and their counterparts in the United States, both
in terms of their productivity and, as a natural consequence, their purchasing power.
The United States and the Soviet Union waged the Cold War primarily through
proxy wars and propaganda campaigns. While the use of propaganda was certainly
nothing new in the history of warfare, its implementation by both the United States and
the Soviet Union reached unparalleled levels in terms of extent and sophistication. The
USSR in particular had incentives to emphasize propaganda due to its comparatively
weak post-war economy and its initial lack of atomic weapons.14 Meanwhile, the
Eisenhower administration voiced concern about Soviet overtures toward “peaceful
coexistence,” believing that if fear of communism declined in the West, so would the
United States’ ability to enforce its interests worldwide and at home.15 Because each
country felt the need to maintain hegemony over its respective spheres of influence in
order to achieve dominion over the other, the United States’ and Soviet Union’s
propaganda techniques increasingly intruded into the cultural and economic lives of their
respective allies.
The Soviets likewise had their own cultural agendas, and under the auspices of the
Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) they codified the tenets of Socialist
Realism in East Germany, attempting to force all creative work into the artistic mold that
Stalin had decreed for Russia and the rest of the Soviet Bloc.16 The ideals of Socialist
Realism – that art must be representative and thus easily apprehended by the people, that
14
Stonor Saunders, 17.
Osgood, 74-74.
16 Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (New
York: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2009), 22-23.
15
14
its reality must be in a revolutionary context, and that it must be ideologically educational
(socialist)– virtually eliminated the techniques and artistic sensibilities of Modernism and
its multiple “formalist” and avant-garde subsets, including many works by artists with
leftist/socialist sympathies.17
In contrast, while the Western democracies had no official artistic style mandated
by their respective governments, the United States did have motives for encouraging
certain strains of art both domestically and internationally. For example, the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, through the New York Museum of Modern Art, promoted AbstractExpressionism and organized exhibits by artists like Jackson Pollock and Robert
Motherwell in Western European cities, including Berlin. Abstract-Expressionism was an
avant-garde style and, yet unlike Surrealism, it was strictly non-representational. By
supporting Abstract-Expressionism, the CCF could present the United States as a land of
artistic freedom while promoting an artistic style that did not easily lend itself to radical
political expression. Thus the CCF became the cultural arm of the Marshall Plan as an
additional bulwark against the threat of Soviet/Communist influence.
French and West German prominence in post-war Western European politics
meant that they were especially affected by the United States’ cultural and economic
agenda. Germany, as a defeated nation, had much less autonomy after the war than did
France, which the Allies liberated after its occupation by the Nazis and which, under
Charles De Gaulle’s provisional leadership, aided the American and British armies to the
end of the war. Even though the Allies officially permitted West German self-rule in
17 Mesch, 23; Andrei Sinyavski, The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), 148.
15
1949, England, France and especially the United States retained elements of control over
German politics and economy until they granted the FRG full sovereignty in 1955. By
hastening and occasionally bypassing de-nazification measures, the United States allowed
and even encouraged former Nazis and their sympathizers to become leaders in business,
the government and the police force in the new Federal Republic as a way of assuring
friendly political and economic policies.18 As we will see in Chapter Two, the existence
of former Nazis in such positions of power led directly to the RAF’s most violent actions.
The interjection of the CIA, CCF and other arms of the U.S. State Department
into Western Europe’s post-war culture collided early on with the respective countries’
own artistic trends as well as with cultural and economic philosophies, like that of the
French Surrealists and the German Frankfurt School. These groups were distinctly
opposed to the capitalistic and consumer-based economy that the United States was
promoting. In France this encouragement took the form of American-established
“productivity centers” in Paris and other urban areas. These centers showcased American
factory equipment and had business consultants on hand in order to push French
economic output so that their standard of living approached that of the U.S. The purpose
of the centers was to create additional markets for U.S. goods and produce sufficient
resources to support a military defense against the Soviet Bloc.19 Such actions met with
opposition from the French Communist party and its affiliated trade union, the
Confédération générale du travail, as well as from the Situationists and much of the
general public.
18
Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2006), 35.
19
Kuisel, 72.
16
The appropriation of the American avant-garde in the service of Cold-War
propaganda required at least the tacit approval of many artists and intellectuals. This
seeming collusion fed the ambiguities that groups such as the Situationist International
already felt for modern artistic movements. They saw much of modern art as inherently
susceptible to arrogation by the consumer market, rendering it both enticing and
meaningless to the populace.20 The Situationists viewed themselves as continuing on the
path set by the Dadaists, and to a lesser extent the Surrealists, who in the aftermath of two
immensely destructive world wars believed that art and life itself required a more
anarchic and yet at the same time a more playful and intuitive approach.21
In West Germany, members of the APO believed that by following an American
economic model, the West German government was seeking to erase the memory of its
fascist past, all in the service of stamping out revolutionary ideals. Kommune I founder
Dieter Kunzelman, believing that West Germans had missed an opportunity to remake
the economic landscape along a more socialist economic framework, said the “working
classes had lost the revolution to consumerism.”22 Likewise, the CIA’s support of media
like the German News Agency and Axel Springer’s popular right-wing Bild publication
furthered the anti-American views of the West German counterculture.23
Though they responded negatively to the influence of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom and the CIA, both the APO and the SI were encouraged by the United States’
20 Helmut Sturm and others, “The Avant-Garde is Undesirable,” (January, 1961), translator unknown,
Situationist International Online, accessed December 12, 2011, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/undesirable.html.
21 “The Meaning of Decay in Art,” Internationale Situationniste, (December 1959), translated by John
Shepley, Situationist International Online, accessed April 24, 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decay.html.
22 BBC, Baader-Meinhof: In Love With Terror.YouTube, accessed March 8, 2014,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd3LQXOLrOw.
23 William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (London: Zed Books,
2003), 104.
17
own protests and rebellions such as the April 17, 1965, anti-Vietnam War protests in
Washington DC and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965. The Watts
riots showed the Situationists the dark underbelly of American consumer society, while
anti-war protests gave the APO inspiration for their own radical ideals and actions. Thus
in a rather ironic way groups like the Kommune I found a model for their own discontent
in the midst of the very culture that they rebelled against.24
The end of World War II resulted in a deepening divide between the Soviet Union
and the United States along with their respective allies in Eastern and Western Europe. In
order to bring its own allies into alignment with American economic and cultural policies
the CIA used Marshall Plan funds to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The
CCF, which will be discussed further below, published journals, promoted and funded
artists (especially Abstract-Expressionists) and organized concert tours. These actions
were taken in order to promote the American, consumer-driven way-of-life to the world
at large.
The struggle for dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union
during the Cold War involved not only military and political tension but also cultural and
economic competition. The USSR wanted to show that communism provided a better
foundation that liberal democracy from which painting, music and other forms of art
could flourish. The United States wanted to prove the same under a consumer-oriented
capitalist economy. The CIA gave the Congress for Cultural Freedom large sums of
Marshall Plan money in order to fund concerts and exhibits across Europe and the rest of
24 Charity Scribner, “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction” Grey
Room. (MIT Press: Winter, 2007 No. 26), 34.
18
the world. The CCF also spent money publishing journals and directly funding media in
France and West Germany in an attempt to portray America in a positive light all in the
service of winning the Cold War.
Shortly after the end of World War II the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign
of cultural influence in occupied Germany, beginning with staged opera performances in
Berlin and culminating in 1947 with the opening of a “House of Culture,” also in
Berlin.25 The Americans had nothing comparable to offer and were vulnerable to Soviet
accusations that characterized them as a nation of “gum-chewing, Chevy-driving,
Dupont-sheathed philistines.” 26 The U.S. responded to this type of criticism with the
Amerika-Haeuser, a collection of institutes across Austria and Germany (and worldwide
as America Houses) that showcased American film, music, literature and art. The
Amerika-Haeuser were, in fact, successful in introducing a culturally significant side to
the United States of which many Europeans were unaware. The tenfold growth in
worldwide exportation of American literature alone bears this out.27 The success of the
Amerika-Haeuser led to the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The
CCF was an operation backed by the CIA and it characterized itself as an ostensibly
benign governmental organization established to showcase American art, literature and
music in Europe and the rest of the world.28 Initially known as the Berlin Congress, the
CCF came in to being early in 1950 as a gathering of anti-Stalinist and ex-Communist
intellectuals. The Berlin Congress changed its name to the Congress for Cultural
25
Stonor Saunders, 18.
Ibid., 19.
27 Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in
Austria After the Second World War. (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 149.
28 Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.), 79.
26
19
Freedom and, due to concerns about potential Soviet infiltration, moved its offices to
Paris at the end of 1950.29
Since the CCF had access to CIA and Marshall Plan funds it was able to create a
widespread web of influence touching on all aspects of European culture from music to
visual art to journal publications. A hallmark of the organization was its recruitment of
former leftists and Marxist intellectuals and artists known as the Non-Communist Left
who had become disillusioned with socialist philosophy as embodied by the Soviet Union
after the German-Russian non-aggression pact of 1939.30 Included in this group were
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a historian and aid to President John F. Kennedy, Abstract
Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock and composer Nicolas Nabokov (cousin of writer
Vladimir).
The CIA’s recruitment of these individuals was not as surprising as it might
otherwise seem given that at the agency’s inception its leaders, Richard Bissell and Frank
Wisner, considered themselves liberal men and believed that they were in the service of
promoting classic liberal values of political and artistic freedom.31 In fact, Senator Joseph
McCarthy attacked the CIA for harboring leftists, increasing its prestige as a haven for
free-thinking individuals.32 The purpose of groups like the CCF was not merely to show
the United States in a positive light but also to make sure that communism as an
economic philosophy never gained a foothold in Western Europe. The CIA achieved this
end most successfully with covert control of the media in France and West Germany.
29
Stonor Saunders, 86.
Ibid., 47.
31 Thomas, 11.
32 Stonor Saunders, 212.
30
20
One example of how the United States attempted to influence the media in
Germany was through the Springer Press and its primary publication Bild Zeitung. Axel
Springer, publisher of Bild, was both a virulent anti-communist and news sensationalist.
He received seven million dollars from the CIA after the end of World War II in order to
bolster his influence, and this relationship reportedly continued into the 1970s.33 Bild was
– and to a certain extent still is – a combination of right-wing newspaper and the National
Enquirer, and its reporters routinely used questionable tactics such as bribery and
entrapment in order to acquire their stories. The financial help from the CIA allowed Bild
to retain enough lawyers to fight any slander accusations the paper faced.34 Thus when
reporting on the protests of the SDS, the Kommune and other APO groups, Bild could
exaggerate the actions and motivations of those involved in order to frighten the general
public.35
The United States’ approach to political and cultural influence in France was
slightly different. Much of the ambivalence towards the United States of both the French
public and the De Gaulle administration was due to President Franklin Roosevelt’s initial
accommodations with the Vichy regime during World War II. Not even the FrancoAmerican alliance within NATO in 1949 could overcome French distrust. In any case, in
1966 France withdrew its forces from NATO and expelled all non-French military from
its territories.36 Reflecting this official ambiguity regarding its American partner, postwar popular sentiment in France tended towards neutrality in regard to the Cold War, and
33
Blum, 104.
Jakob Schmidt, Günter Wallraff im Interview über BILD (11. Juli 2006), accessed March 8, 2014,
http://www.readers-edition.de/2006/07/11/guenter-wallraff-im-interview-ueber-bild/.
35 Meinhof, 1948-49.
36 Kuisel, 18-19.
34
21
most of its public was not interested in aligning, economically, militarily, or otherwise,
with the United States or the Soviet Union. Washington officials, however, felt that
unless they adequately clarified American “diplomacy” and culture to European
intellectuals such that their countries would align with the U.S., America was in danger
of losing ground in the Cold War.37 In order to further this agenda, the CIA, using
Marshall Plan money, gave the CCF all the financing it would need to promote its
cultural agenda.38
While in West Germany the CIA funded the Springer Press and its already
existing news magazine Bild. In France the CCF took a slightly different approach
starting in 1951 by publishing its own magazine, Preuves (Proof), under the direction of
composer Nicolas Nabokov, a culturally well-connected White Russian émigré.39
Nabokov designed Preuves to compete with left-leaning newspapers like Le Monde and
pro-communist journals like Les Temps modernes by presenting a pro-American, pro“freedom” alternative.40 Much of the French public immediately viewed Preuves with
suspicion, questioning its legitimacy as well as its source of funding. To the French the
American phrase “pro-freedom” really meant “pro- capitalism.”41
In addition to providing financial support to friendly newspapers and literary
journals, the CCF’s other two primary areas of focus were promotion of arts and of
consumer-based economic theory. The CCF published journals, held art exhibits and
concerts and awarded prizes. In June of its inaugural year it adopted a declaration called
37
Pells, 67-69.
Stonor Saunders, 71-72.
39 Ibid., 12.
40 Ibid., 101.
41 Kuisel, 46.
38
22
the Freedom Manifesto, which outlined its support of intellectual and artistic freedom and
its toleration of diverse opinion in opposition to totalitarian (communist) states.42 Other
methods the CCF used in fighting the cultural Cold War was to showcase particular
elements of the American avant-garde in order to counter the notion that the United
States was a cultural follower and show that a free (and capitalist) society allowed an
artistic liberty that the communist world, in its push for Socialist Realism, could not
match.43 An example of the CIA/CCF’s technique was its support of the New York
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), especially the exhibition of Abstract-Expressionists.44
As a style Abstract-Expressionism proved to be advantageous because the CCF did not
want artists portraying events or people connected with communist or revolutionary
movements, a lesson learned by MoMA director Nelson Rockefeller in the 1930s in the
aftermath of his patronage of Diego Rivera.45 The museum obtained such rights of
patronage with the aid of Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of MoMA in the 1940s
and 1950s and who had long been a supporter of government funding for the arts. 46 The
State Department also made use of jazz music, especially that of African-American
musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, whom they sent out on tour in Europe both to make an
artistic statement and to counter the charges of racism that the Soviets made against the
United States. The CCF encouraged all of these actions because it believed in the ideal
42
Stonor Saunders, 268.
Ibid., 1-83.
44 Ibid., 255-256.
45 Rockefeller commissioned Rivera to paint a mural for the Rockefeller Center. Rivera included a portrait of
Vladimir Lenin in the mural which Rockefeller asked him to remove. Rivera refused and the mural was destroyed
(Ibid., 258).
46 Brian David Howard, “Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Pragmatic Liberalism, Public Arts Funding, and
the Cold War in the United States” Canadian Review of American Studies 34. no. 3 (2004), 293.
43
23
of consumer society that not only provided greater material wealth than socialism but
also created an arena where art and creativity could flourish. Unfortunately, many in
France and West Germany had a different view of American consumer society and the
CCF that promoted it.
From the end of World War II the United States promoted, both domestically and
abroad, a consumer culture supported by a growing middle-class bolstered by rapid
technological development. This effort, in conjunction with the endorsement of a
consumerist economic philosophy and an uncompromisingly anti-communist foreign
policy, was to have important repercussions within European counterculture. The next
two chapters will detail the history of this counterculture movement by recounting the
history of the French Situationists and the West German APO, respectively, as well as
how each responded to the United States’ intrusion into their countries economic and
cultural lives during the Cold War era. The Situationists reacted with culturally and
artistically informed writings: Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and the myriad
Situationist International newsletters which in turn inspired the 1968 student revolt at the
Sorbonne University of Paris, further precipitating a huge general strike across France.
The RAF, on the other hand turned to much more violent means of protest such as
bombing American military installations and kidnapping industrialists.
24
Chapter 2
THE SITUATIONISTS
Organized by writer and filmmaker Guy Debord in 1957, the Situationist
International grew out of the Lettrist movement (founded in 1946 by Isidore Isou), a sort
of proto-deconstructionist association. The Situationists were principally Marxist in their
philosophical leanings but carried their influence beyond economics into the cultural
realm. They inherited, with reservations, the countercultural philosophical line carried
over from the Dadaists by, for instance, protesting the culture of consumption that they
saw as overtaking Europe through the promotion of “spectacle” and a self-conscious
avant-garde at the expense of a more direct individual creativity.47 Situationist influence
through writings and even graffiti helped to encourage the Paris riots of 1968 when
student protesters at the Sorbonne precipitated a massive general strike throughout
France. The Situationist International movement officially ended in 1972 but its influence
reached beyond, first into the nascent punk scene the mid-1970s England, and by
extension into the “culture-jamming” anti-consumerist movements of today.48
Like the West German APO groups, the Situationists developed and operated
within a Western European cultural milieu which was increasingly subject to the
influence of the United States. However, unlike some of their West German counterparts,
Situationists never participated in nor promoted terrorist activities. They shared many of
the ultimate goals of the RAF, but believed bombings and kidnappings merely played
47 Timothy Clark and others, “The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution,” (1967)
translator unknown. Situationist International Online, accessed October 18, 2011,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/modernart.html.
48 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New
York: Harperbusiness. 2004), 1, 3, 7.
25
into the hands of the power structure and the “spectacle” it represented and were thus
counterproductive.49
Dadaist forms of cultural revolt directly influenced the Situationists four decades
later. Led by writers Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara and sculptor Hans Arp, the Dadists rose
to prominence in 1916. Their repulsion at the slaughter of World War I led to their
refutation of much of what modern society offered. They recognized that a civilization
capable of such destruction required a rethinking of its very basic philosophical – and by
extension, artistic – beliefs.50 They argued that there was no point in poetry or art that
extolled the mundane beauty of “flowers and vases” under such conditions.51 The
Dadaists developed the concept of “anti-art,” whereby artists directed their media towards
a radical deconstruction of everything modern society stood for: its religion, politics,
even its modern art.52 Influenced by writer Alfred Jarry, the Dadists also utilized humor
in their art, but in contrast to the aloof irony found in the Romantics, theirs was a more
direct humor manifesting “the heroic attitude of those who are unwilling to
compromise.”53 One can see this by noting the titles the Dadaists gave their works such
as composer Erik Satie’s Veritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) (Truly Flabby
Preludes (for a Dog)) or Les trios valses distinguées du precieux dégôuté (Three
Distinguished Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy).
49
Scribner, 39.
Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America.
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1991), 152.
51 Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (New York: The MacMillan Company. 1965), 44.
52 Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, 62-63.
53 Ibid.
50
26
In the midst of a clash with Tzara, poet/writer André Breton along with fellow
poets Paul Éluard and Benjamin Péret broke with Dadaism in 1922 and went on to found
Surrealism, a movement that recognized that recent political and scientific developments
required the imposition of “a new point of view” in order to further the aims of
Dadaism.54 The uncertainties of post-World War I economic and political instability,
which led to the Depression and the Second World War, along with the implications of
scientific discoveries, such as general relativity, precipitated a different direction from the
“destructive anarchism” of Dada.55 The Surrealists wanted to explore the unconscious
and the hallucinatory and to circumvent traditional reason and logic. For example, they
held the traditional novel in special disdain, noting that its internal logic fulfilled the
expectations of the reader and yet at the same time reflected a mechanistic worldview that
was no longer tenable. It its place the Surrealist writers substituted techniques like
automatic writing, which bypassed the rational mind and (they believed) revealed truth in
its purist sense. 56
Both the Situationists and their immediate precursors, the Lettrists, recognized the
Dadaists and Surrealists as important predecessors to their own movements. At the same
time, however, they viewed earlier movements with varying degrees of ambiguity.
Michèle Bernstein, who was a member of both the Situationists and the Lettrists,
explained: “Everyone is the son of many fathers. There was the father we hated, which
54
Nadeau, 79.
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity demonstrated, among other things, the equivalence between
acceleration and gravity, and the fact that time is variable with respect to the relative motion of the observers. This
completely changed the popular concept of time as an unalterable aspect of existence. Albert Einstein, The Meaning of
Relativity, Fifth ed (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956), 56-57, 90-91.
56 Nadeau, 81-83; .Automatic writing is a technique whereby the writer produces unconsciously often under a
trance or some other kind of altered state. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (New York:
Checkmark Books, 2007), 31-32.
55
27
was Surrealism. And there was the father we loved, which was Dada.”57 The Situationists
were interested in Dadaism’s anarchic tendencies and felt that the Surrealists had overinternalized the movement and had never overcome the same “class culture” currently
infecting modern society, thus rendering its art politically impotent.58
The Lettrist group attempted to bring back the more radical actions of Dada
through acts of subversion, like Isou’s disruption of a play by Tzara on January 21, 1946,
after which he expounded on his Lettrist theories to the subsequently nearly empty house.
The Lettrists created further disturbances by announcing the death of God at a mass in
Notre Dame and by starting a publication called Le Dictature lettriste (The Lettrist
Dictatorship), the title of which caused much consternation among the public in the
immediate aftermath of the fascist domination of Europe.59 The Lettrist movement
wanted not only to reassert but to surpass the artistic and politically anarchist qualities of
Dadaism that they believed had been lost.
With the formation of Situationism, Debord took Isou’s theories and applied them
to the realm of cultural critique. Debord believed that post-war European society still had
not come to terms with the psychological and cultural issues expounded by the Dadaists
and the true revolutionary spirit of Marx. The Situationists believed this state of affairs
was, in part, due to the fact that “classical Marxism” had done very little to address
cultural issues resulting in a reactionary return to “stylistic beauties of the past” and to an
57 Cited in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth-Century (Harvard University
Press. 1991), 181.
58 Thomas Hecken and Agata Grzenia, “Situationism” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism,
1956-1977 ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 23.
59 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 251-253.
28
avant-garde that spoke only of the “dissolution” of art to its own practitioners.60
However, there was an additional and vital aspect of society that the Situationists wanted
to combat – consumerism and with it the infiltration of the “American-style private
consumption of goods” in the rest of the world.61 The United States officially and
unofficially endorsed this consumerist economic program using the funds from the
Marshall Plan, often directed through the CIA.
Concurrent with efforts to remake the French economy in America’s image, the
CIA – as early as 1948 – was secretly funneling money to conservative parties in France
(and other countries) in order to thwart the efforts of their respective Communist
parties.62 Despite continuing resistance to the Marshall Plan and other forms of perceived
American interference, the French economy had made substantial gains by the mid1950s. This improvement, coupled the possibility of a thaw in the Cold War due to the
death of Joseph Stalin, the discrediting of American Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the
end of the Korean War, caused France, at least temporarily, to align itself in a more
substantial way with the U.S. and the rest of the NATO countries.63 There was still
substantial anti-American sentiment, however, especially among the left-leaning
intelligentsia represented through publications like Le Monde, which printed a series of
articles entitled “Imperial America.” The author of the series, Pierre Emmanuel accused
the U.S. of promoting anti-communism merely to expand its own hegemony and likened
60 “The Meaning of Decay in Art,” Internationale Situationniste, (December 1959), translated by John
Shepley, Situationist International Online, accessed April 24, 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decay.html.
61 Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life,” Internationale Situationniste #6
(August, 1962), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, accessed October 18, 2011,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/everyday.html.
62 Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since
World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 54.
63 Kuisel, 103.
29
the FBI to the Gestapo.64 Intellectuals like Emmanuel saw the encroaching consumer
society as representative of the United States’ “joyless materialism,” the flip side of
which was characterized by “sidewalk preachers, poor blacks and flag waving crowds”
and ultimately as a dead culture. 65 Such anti-American views were not new; indeed even
in the aftermath of the First World War many French noted and were dismayed by the
desire of American businessmen like Henry Ford to mold the population into consumers,
all at the expense of culture and individualism.66 But these views became even stronger
during the Cold War as the United States implemented the Marshall Plan.
Likewise, to Debord and the Situationists the promotion of American cultural
influence throughout the 1950s and 1960s seemed a particular validation of the dangers
they believed France and Western Europe faced. They perceived the forcing of American
ideals upon the French not only as cultural imperialism but also as a direct attack on true
creativity.67 In his book The Revolution of Everyday Life, Situationist Raoul Vaneigem
called this society the “dictatorship of consumer goods.”68 He quoted president
Eisenhower who said “to save the economy we must buy, buy anything.”69 Vaneigem
saw modern society’s comforts and entertainments as merely self-perpetuating drugs that
64
Kuisel, 44, 108.
Ibid., 44, 108, 111.
66 Ibid., 2.
67 Guy DeBord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s
Conditions of Organization and Action,” (June, 1957), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online,
accessed April 26, 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html.
68 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, (1967), translator unknown, The Situationist
International Text Library, accessed December 10, 2011, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/66.
69 Ibid.
65
30
had little more to offer than boredom – a boredom borne out by the fact that for all their
collective efforts and experiences, people were in reality more isolated than ever.70 They
had acceded to the consumerist vision of society even against their own interests.
According to Debord and his followers, the alternative to such a society was
Situationism, a word that refers to the idea that specific moments in life must reflect a
perpetual quality of passion. Each “situation” must be inspired by the purpose of the
specific moment in time and not by the arbitrary molds of identification that people
unknowingly accept as components of contemporary culture. “In a classless society there
will no longer be ‘painters,’ but only situationists who, among other things, sometimes
paint.”71 Debord was reacting here in part to the “US avant-garde,” which had a colony in
Paris and worked, in Debord’s view, “in the most tame, insipidly conformist manner,
isolated ideologically, socially and even ecologically from everything else going on.” He
was also responding to Westerners who in continuing acts of cultural imperialism
appropriated artistic ideals from the Third World.72
The Situationists’ focus on art was not merely an exercise in aesthetics, however.
They expressed their denunciation of the avant-garde within a definite revolutionary
context. One of the Situationist criticisms of Dada was that “it painted pictures on the
Mona Lisa instead of razing the Louvre,” and thereafter art had solely been an appendage
to the “spectacle,” an “integral part of . . . modern capitalism.”73 Even art produced by the
“bohemian” element of society was suspect because its works eventually became
70
Ibid.
Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Clark, “The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution,” 2, 7.
71
31
marketable.74 This spectacle of modern art included Abstract-Expressionism, Andy
Warhol’s Pop Art, and everyone involved in the “CIA-subsidized torpor of the latest New
Left.”75 Any true art, therefore, must be both an outgrowth of and a catalyst for the
“social disruptions” that the Situationists wished to bring about.76
The Situationists inherited this revolutionary ethos from Marx via Henri Lefevre,
a French theorist of critical Marxism and urban sociology.77 The Situationists along with
Lefevre, believed that recent followers of Marx never followed the philosophy through to
its logical end or “dropped the chestnut when it got too hot for them.”78 Debord said that
the revolution represented by the Situationist International was not merely for the purpose
of “determining the level of industrial production” or “who is to be the master of such
production,” as current Marxists believed, but was meant to address the very desires of
society in order to understand them as products of the current political/economic
system.79 They also broke with traditional Marxism by recognizing that Soviet-style
socialism’s appropriation of all private property led to greater insularity of private
“human qualities,” depriving society of individual creativity and rendering humans
74
Anselm Jappe. Guy Debord, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 85.
Timothy Clark and others, “The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution,” translator
unknown, Situationist International Online, accessed October 18, 2011,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/modernart.html.
76 Ibid.
77 Lefevre worked to establish Marxism as a cultural theory and in volume 1 of his Critique of Everyday Life
(originally published in 1948) stated that “subverting the everyday will open the way to. . . the real life.” Henri
Lefebvre, translated by John Moore, (Londan: Verso, 1991), xx.
78 Attila Kotanyi, “The Next Stage,” Internationale Situationniste #7 (April, 1962), translated by Reuben
Keehan, Situationist International Online, accessed October 18, 2011,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/nextstage.html.
79 Guy DeBord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s
Conditions of Organization and Action,” (June, 1957), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online,
accessed April 26, 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html.
75
32
“useless and socially non-existent.”80 These criticisms demonstrate that the Situationists
acknowledged American-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism as equally
invested in the annexation of private wants and creativity for the purpose of maintaining
the spectacle inherent in their respective economic systems.
Debord outlined the Situationist views in his most famous book The Society of the
Spectacle. Originally published in 1967, the work consisted of 221 numbered
paragraphs, which delineated how life under “modern conditions of production”
inevitably led to a society ruled by spectacle. 81 That is, capitalist production required
consumption in order to operate, and consumption required advertisement – a form of
propaganda – in order to maintain itself. Therefore the entire Western socio-economic
system was geared towards the provision of continual enticement for the population at
large.82 According to Debord, the growth of consumerist society had led to the increasing
fragmentation of time and life in general. Society had divided life into segments
representing production and leisure, a separation further reflected by the divisions of
social classes. Debord attributed the appropriation of leisure as “consumable time”
specifically to the United States and its population’s average television viewing of up to
six hours a day. This particular medium, he argued, had the “advantage” of fostering the
consumption of image as well as time, and thus reproduced the “spectacle” with ever
more intensity.83
Asger Jorn, “The End of the Economy and the Realization of Art” Internationale Situationniste #4 (June,
1960), translated by Reuben Keehan, Situationist International Online, accessed October 18, 2011,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/economy.html.
81 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), Paragraph 1.
82 Ibid., Paragraph 6.
83 Ibid., Paragraph 152-153.
80
33
Although the influence of Marx is apparent in Debord’s arguments in The Society
of the Spectacle, he meant to distinguish Situationism from Leninist/Stalinist modes of
thought, which again he saw as equally insidious in their effect on individuals and the
greater society. Likewise, Debord recognized progressive politics as essentially
inadequate to the needs of the modern populace. He believed that progressive movements
had realized only a few local successes in their attempts to “overthrow the economic
infrastructure of exploitation.”84 This stance was something for which intellectuals – in
particular elements of the New Left – often criticized the Situationists, accusing them of
having abandoned art for politics to the detriment of both. 85 Others such as art historian
T.J. Clark and former Situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith refuted this charge, stating
that what the Situationists did was to realize through political action “fifty years of
modernist experiment on the borders of [politics].”86 In other words, their ideas regarding
representation and its use within consumer society are just as applicable to politics as to
art.
Clark and Nicholson-Smith additionally viewed New Left critics, and their
publication the New Left Review, as apologists for the most nefarious aspects of
communism such as the Great Terror, forced collectivization, and suppression of the East
German and Hungarian revolts, which the Situationists also criticized.87 The New Left
84 Guy DeBord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s
Conditions of Organization and Action,” (June, 1957), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online,
accessed April 26, 2014, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html.
85 Parting with the traditional Marxism of the Old Left, the New Left emerged in the late 1950s and focused
on a more wide-ranging and international activism which led to the peace movements of the 1960s. Martin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977, 3.
86 T.J.Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, “Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International,” October, Vol
79. Guy Debord and the Internationale Situationniste (Winter, 1997): 29.
87 Ibid., 17-18, 20.
34
allowed their Stalinist leanings to flourish due to their own uses of spectacle giving lie to
the Communist Party’s assertion that they embodied the working classes and their
interests within.88 Under the communist countries’ propaganda machines and forced
collectivization man was still a “commodity.”89 Therefore, according to Debord, as of
1958, a true communist revolution had never occurred and so the old cultural
“superstructures” were still in place and at odds with the “progressive individual,” who
was still treated as a tool of production.90
By creating cultural disorder through activities such as dérive and détournement
(described below) the Situationists not only hoped to release the populations from
commodification (becoming part of the “spectacle”) but also to subvert the very
ideological symbols of society, both communist and capitalist. Debord viewed the
“spectacle” as “the result and the project of the existing mode of production,” existing at
the permanently in the lives of the population.91 The urban environment was also a factor
in the maintenance of the spectacle as well as the commodity society. The
psychogeography or overarching design of a city, its lines of communication represented
by walkways and motorways, all contribute to the existing economic and social
stratifications.92 The Situationists looked to find a way around the spectacle and the
“psychogeographical” pressures of modern civilization.
88
Ibid., 25.
Guy Debord, “Theses on the Cultural Revolution,” October. Vol 79. Guy Debord and the Internationale
Situationniste (Winter, 1997): 90.
90 Hecken and Grzenia, “Situationism,” 26.
91 Edward Ball, “The Great Sideshow of the Situationist International,” Yale French Studies, No. 73
Everyday Life (1987): 25.; Debord. Society of the Spectacle, 6.
92 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist
International Online, accessed April 19, 2014, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm.
89
35
The Situationists believed that commodification was an inextricable aspect of
modern society and that through the creation of “situations” and techniques such as the
dérive, people could neutralize its power.93 The Situationists created the term dérive to
refer to one of the methods used in the creation of self-referential moments in life distinct
from the roles that consumer society determines. The dérive (drifting) is an exercise used
to explore the hidden aspects of a city in both the physical and psychological sense. It is a
walk, but one that involves “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of
psychogeographical effects, and [is] thus quite different from classic notions of journey
or stroll.”94 Its purpose is to discover the “gravitational” forces within a city and thus
abandon oneself to them. The Situationists prearranged meetings in which the
participants knew neither where they would take place nor who was participating.95 The
participants “drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other
usual motives for movement and action” and, at least for a while, free themselves from
the regular pattern of life directed by the work and leisure activities of the consumer
culture.96
As much as Isou’s seemingly benign Lettrism was in reality an act of revolution,
so was the dérive and the other important Situationist tactic, détournement. The idea of
détournement was to disrupt, in however small a way, the homogeneity of everyday life
and hope that such “offences” would cause a chain reaction and a reversal of society’s
93
Ibid., 27-28, 31.
Guy DeBord, “The Theory of Derive,” Les Livres Nues #9: (November, 1956), translated by Ken Knabb,
Situationist International Online, accessed October 15, 2011, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html, 1.
95 Ibid., 3.
96 Ibid., 1.
94
36
trajectory toward the “spectacle.”97 The Letterists used tactics such as announcing the
death of God at a mass in Notre Dame Cathedral. Debord and fellow Situationist Asger
Jorn published a book called Mémoires, which exploited previously copyrighted material
printed in fragments pointing in all directions and finally bound in sandpaper in order to
ruin any books next to it on the shelves.98 Debord also spoke about the possibility of
“détourning” D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation so that it reflected an anti-imperialist
and anti-racist point of view in contrast to the original production and also in contrast to
how Debord viewed much of the United States.99 By such attempts at realigning one’s
relationship to society, the Situationists wished to go beyond Marxist revolt and actually
reinvent modern culture from the ground up by taking themselves outside of the capitalist
consumer machine represented in its most obvious form by the United States. They also
wished to reject the enforced conformity of the communist countries, and to undermine
the very ideals of production as held by both economic systems.
These superficially non-threatening attempts at cultural destabilization had very
real consequences in the mid- to late 1960s, leading to revolts across Europe and the
United States. In 1966 the elected student representatives at the University of Strasbourg
created a scandal and a minor revolt when they used university funds to distribute an
essay called “On the Poverty of Student Life,” co-written with the Situationist
International.100 This essay portrayed the supposed worldwide “rise of the students,” then
heralded by leftist intellectuals as an important progressive movement, as merely
Ball, “The Great Sideshow of the Situationist International,” 32.
Ibid.
99 Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” (1956), translated by Ken Knabb,
Situationist International Online, accessed April 19, 2014, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm.
100 Hecken and Grzenia, “Situationism,” 27.
97
98
37
concomitant with “overdeveloped capitalism.”101 With the help of the Situationists, these
students portrayed their financial poverty as rivaling that of the lowest of the working
classes, claiming that what awaited them after having suffered through their school years
was the life of a “low level functionary” in service to the consumer-oriented society.102
In 1968 a student revolt at the Sorbonne University of Paris further precipitated a huge
general strike across France. In addition to the many pamphlets and manifestos they
published during the events of 1968, the Situationists also disseminated their ideas
through posters and comics. It was by these means that radical student groups, including
those at the University of Strasbourg, adopted much of the Situationist philosophy.
According to the Situationists the general unrest of the mid-1960s was just an attempt by
the youth to glean some form of meaning out of their condition. Yet the SI ultimately
viewed the growing political action of students as merely another application of the
“spectacle.” While the students criticized the economic and political problems of the
contemporary DeGaulle regime, by voicing support for the communist regimes in the
USSR and China the Situationists believed the students aligned themselves with the
crimes of Stalin, Mao and others.
In a similar fashion, Debord recognized that the result of actions by ideological
anarchists like the German Red Army Faction were actually counter to those of the
Members of the Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg University, “On the Poverty of
Student Life: Considering Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects,With a
Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It,” (November, 1966), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International
Online, accessed December 12, 2011, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/poverty.htm.
102 Ibid.
101
38
workers and the general revolution. And while he recognized a certain kinship between
SI and the RAF he believed that the media attention provoked by the terrorist activities of
the RAF merely fed the “spectacle” due to a tacit alliance between the media and the
anarchists that fed the scandal-desiring public.103 The Watts’ riots, however, inspired the
SI and RAF equally. Debord gave full support to the rioters. In an article entitled “The
Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” published in 1965, Debord put
forth some of his strongest and most pointed arguments regarding modern Americanstyle capitalism. In this essay he recognized the impetus behind the Watts’ riot, viewing it
as a justified reaction against “the world of commodity,” to “the spectacle” of which
inner-city blacks (and others) had no chance of joining.104 Both the looting and the arson
brought into relief the ultimate contradictions of the American economic system. Debord
interpreted the theft of appliances by those who could not afford to pay their electric bill
and the burning of their own neighborhood as the ultimate ironic display of the failure of
the “affluent society.”105 The rioters’ actions uncovered the underlying structure of a
society where “the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s
monopoly of armed violence” kept them away from the economic security of the
mainstream. Debord also turned on its head the criticism that the people involved in the
riots betrayed “animal behavior.”106 He stated that this accusation was levied by a
103
Scribner, 32, 42.
DeBord, Guy, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale
Situationniste #10 (March, 1966), translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, accessed September 28,
2011, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
104
39
society that had treated humans as objects of commerce and conversely infused objects
with human qualities, resulting in an overreaction to the destruction of such objects.107
According to Debord the African-American population in Los Angeles was
responding as the group that suffered most from the alienation inherent in modern
capitalism. Surrounded by the opulence of Southern California – both real and implied –
African-Americans’ fate was to aspire to the commodity, but never to attain it, and thus
to represent the lowest rung of the hierarchy required by the American capitalist system.
The racism they faced was a permanent aspect of this arrangement. Debord wrote, “This
is why this American society itself must disappear – in America and everywhere else in
the world.”108 The spectacle had its greatest representation in the United States, and
economic and cultural forces had disseminated the specifically American facets of it
worldwide.
For Debord the rioting in Watts was defensible and was ultimately due to the
inherent inequalities of the American commodity system as a worst case scenario. He
gave a theoretical defense of the rioters’ actions as an attempt to “transcend the
spectacle.”109 But while the Situationists exhibited support for the Watts’ rioters, unlike
the West German APO groups, the SI never extended this support to violent actions in
their own country. Debord and the SI believed that such activities actually contributed to
the spectacle by inviting a response by the power structure and, as a result, become
relegated to the status of an image or a pariah against which the general population could
rally. The Situationists, in general, believed that through a remapping of city architecture,
107
Ibid.
Ibid.
109 Ibid.
108
40
and actions such as dérive and détournement, they could best subvert the modern urban
environment as represented and encouraged by the United States’ post-war influence. The
SI believed that these techniques could free people from the commodity system and keep
them from becoming part of the spectacle of consumer culture.
41
Chapter 4
WEST GERMAN COUNTERCULTURE
In contrast to the Situationists, Kommune I leaders Ranier Langhans and Fritz
Teufel viewed the rioting in Watts as a precedent for future action in Western Europe,
inspiring their bombing of the Kaufhof department store in Frankfurt, leading to the
increasingly violent actions of the RAF.110 West German countercultural groups
developed semi-concurrently with the Situationists, beginning with the various
Kommune. The Kommune ultimately diverged and evolved into groups like the BaaderMeinhof Gang, and later the Red Army Faction. Activists like Ulrike Meinhof viewed the
newly formed Federal Republic of Germany as a puppet of the United States and whose
position they likened to that of South Vietnam, which was also under heavy American
influence. Many participants in the West German counterculture believed that the
absence of a Communist Party combined with the German Socialist Party‘s (SPD)’s
historical rejection of communism left no political home for the more radical Left.
Because of these views, Meinhof and the rest of the RAF responded to the influence of
the United States, and the encroaching fascism they believed awaited West Germany by
bombing American military installations and kidnapping business leaders whom they
associated with interference by the United States. The RAF believed these actions would
110
Scribner, 34-35.
42
prove to the population that the state was vulnerable and would lead to a popular
revolution that rejected American military occupation and capitalism in general.
While the West German Red Army Faction adopted different, and ultimately
violent, means when protesting the United States’ cultural and economic intrusions, they
shared some commonalities with the Situationist International and in fact, the background
of Germany’s countercultural movements has a specific connection to the SI. Situationist
member Dieter Kunzelmann was instrumental in transforming the Munich contingent of
the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) into a precursor of the Kommune in 1962-63.
Kunzelmann drew on the theories of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s
“Frankfurt School” of cultural criticism. The Frankfurt School believed that the Western
world had not fully realized the promise of the Enlightenment, having surrendered to
excessive rationalism, monopoly capitalism and authoritarianism.111 They also held that
the capitalist system used modern culture and media – film for example – in order to
suppress the autonomy of the individual in the service of a consumer-based society and of
the bourgeoisie. Adorno, applying a quasi-Maxist/Freudian approach, believed an artist
should (with full autonomy) create in the service of the under-represented political and
economic voices in a given society. In this way art would be pure, free from the dictates
of the “commodity society.”112
The establishment of the Berlin Kommune also hearkened back to an unsuccessful
attempt by a group of young Russians to form a commune in Moscow in 1925. Many of
the difficulties the commune members or “Kommunarde” faced involved attempting to
111 Vincent B. Leitch and others, introduction to “From Dialectic of Enlightenment” in The Norton Anthology
of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch and others, ed (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 1221.
112 Leitch, 1238.
43
reconcile the ideal of shared property with personal relationships. They recognized the
fact that when material property was communal, exclusive relationships still “absorbed
the social energies” of those involved, resulting in a measure of discontent. When they
tried to mitigate this effect by establishing an ideal of open relationships they invariably
lost members. It was for this same reason that the Kunzelmann’s Munich commune
failed.113 Afterward, Kunzelmann returned to Berlin and founded the Kommune I (KI) in
1967. Kommune I, also known as the Berlin Kommune was the most famous of several
communes that dotted Berlin the late 1960s. Along with Kunzelmann, former army
explosives expert Rainer Lanhans and student Fritz Teufel were the primary leaders.114
KI was not immune to the problems that plagued earlier communes. Indeed, the ideal of
communal sexual arrangements remained elusive and sexism remained a blind spot for
many in this countercultural movement. The leaders generally relegated women members
to housekeeping chores, and because of this, women usually left the Kommune after a few
days or weeks.115
Like the Situationists in France, the Kommune members believed that the
consumerism represented by modern capitalist culture kept people occupied such that
they resisted attempts to overthrow the current political/economic system. This
distraction also kept the average person unaware of and apathetic about issues like the
Vietnam War.116 What kept the Kommune relevant and active – for at least a few years –
was a confluence of world events that caused an outpouring of support for such
113
114
“Kommunen in Deutschland” Konkret, ( Oct, 1968).
Alex Gross, The Untold 60s: When Hope Was Born (New York: Cross Cultural Research Projects, 2009),
243.
115
116
Gross, 224-225.
Schildt, 175.
44
movements all over the West. First was the United States’ escalation of the Vietnam War
and the related issues of imperialism and Third-World politics. American actions in
Vietnam provided protest groups like the APO with a target for both anti-imperialist and
anti-capitalist sentiments.117 The West German government supported the United States’
actions in Vietnam – with money as well as words – and some on the Left believed that
the United States increasingly solicited this support from its NATO allies in order to
counter the growing protests at home. President Johnson especially coveted support from
Germany due to Germany’s status as a divided country analogous to Vietnam. Ulrike
Meinhof alleged that the U.S. was playing the two Germanys off of each other in order to
justify its own actions.118
One of the actions the KI planned against the American war in Vietnam was to
have been a protest of American vice-president Hubert Humphrey’s visit in April of
1967. They planned to throw balloons filled with pudding at Humphrey. However,
someone tipped off the West German media, which overreacted with headlines like Bild’s
“BOMB ATTACK ON US VICE-PRESIDENT PLANNED IN BERLIN.” As a result
Kunzelmann and other KI members were arrested (but not charged) thereby foiling the
protest.119
The second world event was China’s Cultural Revolution instituted by Mao-Tse
Tung in 1966. Much of the West German counterculture movement supported China’s
Petra Rethmann, “On Militancy, Sort Of” Cultural Critique. no. 62 (Winter , 2006): 16.
Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather…We Don’t. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008)
Chapter 10, “Vietnam and Germany,” Para 1, Kindle edition, 1401.
119 Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the RAF (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2122.
117
118
45
version of communism as an alternative to that of the USSR.120 Kunzelmann in particular
believed that Mao’s Red Guard was a necessary force for the international revolution and
labeled those on the Left who opposed them as reactionary.121 These two events provided
the Kommune and other representatives of the New Left with rallying points against the
policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union and also encouraged the RAF in
the use of violent protest.
A third event was of even greater importance, not only for the West German
counterculture, but for similar movements all across Europe. This was the June 2, 1967,
protest against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin. In 1953 the United States, at the behest
of Great Britain, had helped overthrow Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh,
who was intent on nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The CIA reinstalled
Shah Reza Pahlavi to full power, effectively ending democratic rule in Iran. 122 The Shah
ruled as a dictator complete with a secret police force that used torture against his
political enemies.123 Thus when the government of the FRG invited Pahlavi to come to
West Berlin as a guest, the SDS, Kommune and other groups organized a protest that
resulted in the use of clubs and fire hoses on the protestors by the Berlin police and the
Shah’s security force. Years later American reporter Alex Gross called the event
“Germany’s Kent State.”124 “What followed was some of the most uncontrolled mayhem
I have ever had the occasion to watch or participate in. The police went after the students
with a ferocity I have never seen equaled, with truncheons, the stocks of weapons, their
120
Klimke, 275.
Gross, 213.
122 Thomas, 107-109.
123 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. (New York: Harper, 2003), 567.
124 Gross, 260.
121
46
bare hands . . . these policemen performed the best imitation of Gestapo officers I hope I
will ever see.”125 In addition to the many injuries from beatings, a policeman shot and
killed twenty-six-year-old Benno Ohnesorg. Ohnesorg was unarmed but the officer was
never convicted or otherwise reprimanded for his actions.126
The effect of this protest and the actions of the police was explosive. The
Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the student offshoot of the Social
Democratic Party, and other New Left organizations represented gained immediate
support from elements of the population that until then had remained on the sidelines.
Support among students swelled to the point that the SDS became a truly national
movement.127 The events also brought to light vestiges of the Germany’s Nazi past that
had remained hidden under the formal democracy of the FRG.
Much of the impetus for the struggle concerning groups like KI was due to
Germany’s recent past under Hitler. Most of the students had parents or other relatives
who had been involved with crimes committed by the Nazi regime, either through deed
or association or through willful ignorance. And due to recent memories of the Nazis’
emphasis on the importance of the family for the Fatherland, many of the youth found it
difficult to accept West Germany’s current emphasis on similar ideals in light of what
they believed to be a whitewashing of the Nazi years.
When the United States arrived as occupier at the end of World War II there was
an initial period of respect for American ideals. Indeed, immediately after the war many
Germans turned to the principles of the Unites States as a replacement for Nazism. The
125
Gross, 223.
Ibid., 236.
127 Klimt, 97.
126
47
victory of the Allies over Germany suggested that the American way of life was superior
to theirs. And it was not just the mainstream German population that held these views.
Reinhard Lettau – one of the leaders of the student movement – had spent a few years in
the United States just after the war. He spoke of “how pure and just and true the
American people were, very unlike Germans, and how Americans always dealt
democratically and fairly with one another and were not subject to all the petty prejudices
Germans suffered from.”128 This honeymoon period, at least for the Left, was not to last.
As the Iron Curtain descended, dividing Eastern and Western Europe, American
policy in West Germany shifted from denazification to rapprochement.129 A particularly
notorious example of this change is former German dimplmat Gustav Hilger, who had
connections to killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen which consisted primarily of the
SS and security police. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the deaths of hundreds
of Jews and Gypsies during the Nazi rule. Carmel Offie, in charge of enlisting spies for
the CIA across Western Europe, drafted Hilger as a recruiter with the blessing of George
Kennan (who had known Hilger in Moscow when Germany and the USSR were still
allies). Kennan was one of the architects of the Marshall Plan and later Ambassador to
the Soviet Union.130 This change in policy towards former Nazis was not only applied in
the case of the police and political and business leaders, but also in the case of cultural
and artistic figures like conductors Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwangler as well
as soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Both Schwarzkopf and Furtwangler merely
acquiesced to Nazi demands but von Karajan was actually a party member since 1933,
128
Brooks, 215.
Thomas, 34-35.
130 Ibid.
129
48
apparently conducting in Party uniform; yet his musical abilities were considered
important enough to overlook his unsavory political associations.131
The United States’ position was that Western Europe, and West Germany in
particular, represented the front-line defense against the encroachment of communism
and all its associated economic, social and cultural ideals.132 It was therefore important
that West Germany rebuild as fast as possible so that it could become a barrier against the
Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as a base for missiles. The State Department
thought that if they banned all former Nazis from employment in these strategic areas the
FRG’s economic development would stall. Likewise, organizations such as the Berlin
Philharmonic were to become important weapons in the Cultural Cold War, and whatever
personal background musicians like Furtwangler and von Karajan might have, they
would be able to maintain a certain level of artistic momentum in the service of American
interests. The United States could also count on former Nazis to be rabid anticommunists.133 The United States began to pursue a plan to rearm West Germany in 1950
(something that unsurprisingly disturbed the French) which the SDS protested in its
“Easter Marches” of the early 1960s.134 Likewise, RAF member Ulrike Meinhof as early
as 1962 decried the addition of these Wehrartikel (defense articles) to the formerly
“totally libertarian and totally anti-militaristic” West German Constitution as a blow to
democracy and freedom and as a capitulation to the desires of the U.S. under the
131 Stonor Saunders, 15, 226-227; Karajan would go on to a long and lucrative career specializing in much of
the late and post-Romantic repertoire that, ironically, included Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom the Nazis
forced to emigrate and whose music they had banned as degenerate.
132 Stonor Saunders, 27-29.
133 Thomas, 35.
134 Meinhof, 299; The Easter Marches began in 1960 and were protests against nuclear weapons and (West)
German rearmament, Meinhof, 201.
49
umbrella of NATO.135 She believed this change in policy to be part of an increasing
authoritarianism that along with the institution of “Emergency Laws” would stamp out
any and all opposition and lead the country back into fascism.136
Although the reaction of West Germany’s counterculture to American cultural
and economic hegemony would ultimately encompass outright terrorist activities in its
early years the RAF began its protests by robbing bookstores in order to redistribute
intellectual property.137 The RAF soon graduated to robbing banks, not for redistribution
but for their own needs, personal and professional – i.e. weapons and training. At this
point RAF members, which by now included Ulrike Meinhof, were fully committed to
the idea that West Germany was going to move in lockstep with the American economic
model and that West Germany’s “so-called economic miracle was a distraction to keep
[them] from thinking about [their] fascist past.”138
The origin of the RAF dates back to two incidents in 1968. The first was a
department store bombing carried out after hours on April 3, 1968 by Andreas Baader,
Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll and Horst Soehnlein. Their action protested West
Germany’s consumer-oriented capitalist system, as well as the Vietnam War. The
bombers wanted to highlight public indifference to the deaths incurred by the war as
compared to the extreme reaction over the 300,000 Deutschemarks-worth of local
property damage done to the department store. There were no deaths or injuries due to the
bombing. On October 13, the four arsonists received three-year prison sentences that
135
Meinhof, 1286.
Ibid., 1313.
137 Mentorn, Baader-Meinhof: In Love With Terror. BBC. (2002) Directed by Ben Lewis, YouTube.
Accessed April 20, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd3LQXOLrOw.
138 Ibid.
136
50
many in the West German counterculture, including Ulrike Meinhof (then a columnist for
the GDR-subsidized publication, konkret), deemed excessive.139 This sentence ultimately
provided impetus for the more violent actions of the RAF and others; however, the
reaction was not only against the judicial authorities who meted out the punishment but
also against the form of protest that the bombing itself represented. Meinhof deemed this
type of protest as pointless because it changed nothing; the store’s insurance would cover
the losses thereby maintaining the status quo.
In an article written immediately following the bombing, Meinhof made an
analogy comparing a department store to capitalism, noting its insufficiency in providing
a basic standard of living for all stating: “What capitalism provides can be bought in a
department store. What cannot be bought in a department store, capitalism provides only
partially, incompletely, or insufficiently; hospitals, schools, kindergartens, health
systems, etc.”140 She portrayed the 1966 riots in Watts as a further example: in the
aftermath of the riots African-Americans recognized that the capitalist “system” still
remained dominant, incarcerating those who desperate enough to loot or steal for basic
necessities. This desperation was because the state’s efforts to provide for the poor were
insufficient. Yes this same state punished those in need when they acquired what they
needed by non-legal means.141 Ultimately, her analysis of the department store bombing
held that it was counter-revolutionary and real revolutionary change required a more
direct attack on the power structure.142
139
Meinhof, 395.
Ibid., 2180.
141 Ibid., 2198.
142 Ibid., 400.
140
51
A second incident that caused further radicalization of Meinhof and others and led
to the formation of the RAF took place the following week on April 11, 1968, when a
right-wing house painter from Munich, Josef Bachmann, shot APO leader Rudi Dutschke
outside his home. Dutschke was seriously injured but survived the attack. Bachmann
claimed to have been encouraged in the shooting by anti-left editorials in the Springer
Press publication Bild, which was later discovered to have been subsidized by the CIA.143
Thousands of students protested in front of the Springer Press building in the weeks that
followed. Mass arrests followed, including that of Meinhof.
In the aftermath of these events, Meinhof divorced her husband (who happened to
be a konkret publisher), moved to Berlin and immersed herself in the left-wing scene of
the city. On May 14, 1970, she helped break Baader out of prison. The authorities had
agreed to let Baader work with Meinhof on a book about juvenile prisons, and they met
in the Institute for Social Research. Meinhof, Ensslin and two other women, Irene
Goergens and Ingrid Schubert, held up Baader’s guards, allowing him to escape. Georg
Linke, an employee of the institute, was shot and seriously wounded while Meinhof and
the rest escaped. This event marked the official beginning of the Red Army Faction,
which the Springer Press named “the Baader-Meinhof Gang.”144
The RAF represented the culmination of a number of historical countercultural
streams emanating from within post-war West Germany. Although the RAF ultimately
acquired the status of a terrorist organization, it managed to hold on to a measure of
legitimacy due to its roots in the student movements of the early sixties, especially the
143
144
Moncourt, 582.
Smith, 584.
52
SDS or Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, which students founded as an offshoot
of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) in 1946.145 Among the SDS’s
actions was a 2500-person-strong march against U.S. bombing campaigns in Vietnam on
February 5, 1965. The students along with Kommune I members marched to the Berlin
Amerika-Haus and egged the building.146 The Springer press responded with predictable
outrage.
The writings of RAF members, including those of Baader and Meinhof are replete
not only with references to American hegemony over West Germany, but also with
conflations of the interests of the two countries, with the FRG always in the subordinate
position. Meinhof, in a 1968 konkret article entitled “From Protest to Resistance”
examined the criticisms of those who decried the “stone throwing and arson” of the
groups like the SDS and Kommune and yet had nothing to say about the actions of the
Shah in Iran, the U.S. in Vietnam, or the instigations of Bild editors.147 Taking her cue
from the American “Black Power” movement, Meinhof considered the evolution from
protest to resistance as corresponding to the shift from speaking about what one does not
like to ending (through any means) what one does not like.148 As with her article on the
department store fires, Meinhof used this connection to justify the actions of the APO in
much the same way that the RAF would link their activities to Third World revolutionary
movements.
145
Klimke, 98.
Aust, 19.
147 Meinhof, 2136-2141.
148 Ibid., 2124.
146
53
In an 1975 interview in Der Spiegel, Baader and Meinhof, along with Ensslin and
Raspe (who were in the midst of a hunger strike from prison), made it very clear that they
considered West Germany a de facto colony of the United States, not just because of
American military presence in their country, but also due to the “standardization of their
social structures through the concentration of capital and consumer culture.”149 Meinhof
even asserted that Nazi Germany was ultimately a client state of the United States in light
of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.150 The post-war political structure of the
FRG that the Allies established – which included the banning of the Communist-Party –
effectively eliminated anti-capitalist (or “anti-fascist” in their words) resistance as a
viable force.151 Because of this state of affairs, the RAF alleged that in contrast to other
Western European countries like France and Italy, Germany had no political party
through which it might build a proletarian movement. The RAF compared its situation to
that of Third World countries like Vietnam, Chile, and even Russia circa 1917.152 As
RAF lawyer Horst Mahler later explained:
We thought that the people were not strong enough to liberate themselves.
Unable to identify with them, we had found another identity in the Third
World. From then on, we no longer felt like Germans, but like a "fifth
column" of the Third World in the Western capitals. . . The people weren't
moving, we thought, because they were afraid of the state. Therefore, they
had to be shown that the state was vulnerable.153
149
Smith, 308.
Klimke, 275.
151 The RAF believed that the restoration of the German military as part of American Cold War strategy was
a precursor to the restoration of a fascist state; Smith, 309.
152 Smith, 311.
153 “Interview with Il Manifesto,” November 6, 1977, quoted in "No Future in Terrorism," Intercontinental
Press, November 28, 1977, p. 1304.
150
54
This belief allowed them to justify their terrorist activities as necessary to destroy the
existing political infrastructure. A true socialist, proletarian movement could then emerge
in the resulting vacuum.
Many of the New Left considered this interpretation by the RAF to be an
overreach, if not an outright delusion. A November 1971 editorial by Renate Riemeck in
konkret titled “Give up, Ulrike” stated that while she agreed with Meinhof about the need
to challenge the “power machine,” they had all underestimated the wage-dependent
masses’ support for the status quo and their consequent disdain for violent protest.
Riemeck likewise criticized the RAF’s notion that the situation in West Germany was
comparable to that of the Third World:
The Federal Republic is not the place for an urban guerrilla
movement in the Latin American style. This country offers, at most,
suitable conditions for a gangster drama. Ulrike, you know that you and
your friends can expect nothing but bitter enmity from the German public.
You also know that you are condemned to play the part of a company of
spectres serving the forces of reaction as an excuse for a massive revival
of that anti-communist witch-hunt which was perceptibly discouraged by
the student movement.154
Public reaction to the RAF’s activities proved that Riemeck was correct. The
general population held the bombings and kidnappings in disdain and supported
the resulting buildup of West German police forces as well as the country’s
imposition of advanced security measures meant to specifically combat terrorism.
Meinhof, however, answered Riemeck’s charges with her own article
(never published) in the form of an allegory in which she compared Riemeck to a
slave mother entreating her daughter to remain silent in response to the
154
Aust, 194.
55
ignominies to which her masters subjected her.155 Shortly after this exchange, the
RAF instituted a series of actions known as the May Offensive.
The “May Offensive” began with the bombing of the U.S. Military Headquarters
in Frankfurt on May 11, 1972, resulting in the death of one U.S. soldier and injuring
thirteen others. This action was immediately followed by the bombing of police
headquarters in Augsburg on May 12 that resulted in ten injured; a car bombing on May
15 meant for judge Wolfgang Buddenberg (instead injuring his wife); the bombing of
Springer publishing house in Hamburg on May 19 in which thirty-eight people were
injured, and the bombing of U.S. Military Headquarters in Heidelberg on May 24, in
which three U.S. soldiers died and five others were injured.156
In a 1975 interview the RAF provided justification for these attacks consistent
with Meinhof’s earlier konkret articles. Spiegel asked if the RAF intended to continue
utilizing terrorism in the service of political protest in light of the repulsion it inspired in
the general public and others on the Left felt. Baader, Meinhof et al. answered with the
question, “Who does it repel?” They were heroes in Hanoi because their attack on the
base in Heidelberg ruined a computer that the U.S. military used to plan bombing raids in
North Vietnam. The RAF’s actions did not repel those who believed they understood the
extent of American domination. They thought that they could only counter the inherent
violence in an imperial system with a certain amount of violent action on their end.157
In 1977 the RAF instigated the so-called German Autumn, which began with the
attempted kidnapping and murder of Dresdener Bank chairman Jürgen Ponto on July 30,
155
Ibid., 195.
Meinhof, 630-633.
157 Smith, 315.
156
56
1977, and ended with both the Lufthansa hijacking and the assassination of kidnapped
industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer, on October 19, 1977.158 The
RAF would remain active for another twenty years, with succeeding generations carrying
out protests and attacks like the 1993 bombing of a women’s prison in Wieterstadt before
formally disbanding in April 1998.
Although the APO, the SDS and their constituents and offshoots like the
Kommune and the RAF recognized a myriad of inherently German issues and policies
worthy of protest and condemnation, it was actions of the United States – like its support
of the Social Democratic Party – that they believed stifled the growth of anti-fascist,
potentially revolutionary groups, which might have led Germany towards a more socialist
economic and political structure. The New Left saw West Germany as the primary
European pawn of American imperialist interests. Andreas Baader believed that the U.S.
had “bought off” political leaders like Willy Brandt and Kurt Schumacher in order to turn
them “against the German proletariat.”159 With a capitalist, consumer-based system not
only established and maintained by American money and influence but also led by a
number of former Nazis, much of the FRG’s counter-culture turned to violent protest in
an attempt to show the masses the inherent weakness in the system.
The cultural contingent of American influence went hand in hand with the
economic ideals that the U.S. wished to bestow upon West Germany. From the pardoning
of former Nazi artists as a means of shoring up institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic
to the establishment of the “Amerika-Haeuser” and finally the actions of the Congress for
158
Smith, 477; Aust, 300, 433.
Smith, 322; both Brandt and Schumacher were both leaders of the socialist but anti-communist Social
Democratic Party. Brandt became Chancellor of West Germany in 1969.
159
57
Cultural Freedom, Marshall Plan funds were put to use in a psychological battle for the
“hearts and minds” of European constituents in order to keep them firmly within the
American sphere. These cultural concerns, along with issues like America’s actions in
Vietnam War, and American support for West Germany’s anti-communist political
parties had a direct effect on the activities of the APO and its constituent groups.
58
Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
The decades following World War II saw the United States in a constant struggle
to maintain its cultural and economic hegemony over Western Europe and keep its
NATO allies firmly in the capitalist camp. Neutralism and non-alignment were not
acceptable positions. In addition to providing economic support under the guise of the
Marshall Plan, the U.S. State Department also created organizations like the Congress for
Cultural Freedom in order to promote America as a country of cultural import. Backed
by the CIA, the CCF organized concerts and art exhibits and produced publications
throughout Europe and the rest of the world.160 These organizations directly combatted
the cultural propaganda inherent in the Soviet Union’s “House of Culture” and the
“Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.”
Two of the most important battlegrounds in this cultural war were West Germany
and France. While Germany was a conquered enemy and France a liberated ally, each
country was subject to the cultural hegemony of the United States. As the Allies slowly
relinquished sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany they made sure that a
capitalist, anti-communist economy was left in place – along with American soldiers,
missiles and bases. The State Department’s desire for this state of affairs often took
precedence even over de-Nazification procedures, as they allowed former Nazi criminals
and sympathizers to hold important positions within the government and economy of the
re-formed country. The United States also took pains to influence the West German
160
Saunders, 1.
59
media by funding right-wing moguls like Axel Springer, whom they could count on to
editorialize in favor of the U.S. and its policies.
Prior movements influenced both the French Situationists and the German AOP
groups: the Dadists and Surrealists in the case of the Situationists and Frankfurt School of
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the case of the APO. All of the groups were
concerned about the direction modern society was heading, especially the Western
capitalist nations. The Situationists, along with the Frankfurt School, also worried about
the state of arts which they saw as ever more utilized in the service of consumerism, or
the “spectacle:” those elements of society – such as mass media and mindless
employment – designed to keep the populace entertained and complacent. Neither the
APO nor its constituent groups Kommune I and the RAF seemed to outwardly emphasize
the Situationists’ concern with cultural and artistic issues. They may have had sympathy
for those views and certainly both Dieter Kunzelmann and Rudi Dutschke as former
members of the Situationists were well versed in the spectacle’s appropriation of art, but
such fears took second or third place to what they believed was an encroaching
imperialist totalitarianism of the United States and Western-style capitalism.
In the context of the post-war world it is impossible to separate the promotion of
cultural ideals from economic ideals. Economic and military interests are likewise linked.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized that in order to further their
interests they had to fight the Cold War on all of these fronts. It was not enough (nor was
it practical) to focus solely on weaponry that both sides hoped they would never use. The
real front in the war was the hearts and minds of the global populations. The USSR
60
wanted to show that they represented a peaceful alternative to the exploitative and
imperialist capitalist nations. Toward this end, the Communist Party promoted Socialist
Realism, not merely out of aesthetic preference but also in order to serve and educate the
people within a revolutionary context. The United States promoted an ideal of economic
freedom and individualism that was reflected in its artistic and cultural expressions like
Abstract-Expressionism. The CCF endeavored to show that capitalism was inextricable
from civil and artistic liberty. The State Department wanted to show that only by aligning
with the U.S. could countries like France and Germany realize a high standard of living –
in the broadest sense of the term.
A large percentage of the populations of France and West Germany responded
negatively to the actions of the U.S. State Department and its constituents in the CIA and
CCF. However, due to each country’s different experiences during and immediately after
the Second World War, countercultural groups like the Situationist International and the
Red Amy Faction adopted different tactics and took their responses to very different
extremes. Both rejected the consumer-oriented society represented by the United States.
The Situationists were at one extreme within a large continuum of the French population
that viewed American interference in a negative light. The SI had forerunners dating back
to the beginning of the twentieth-century, and, in a similar fashion to the Dadists, took to
outwardly benign forms or protests like the dérive and détournement. In contrast, the
RAF viewed American post-war actions in Germany as the consequence of US military
occupation that had as its goal the reinstatement of a fascist regime and responded with
kidnappings and bombings.
61
Kommune I disbanded in 1969, the Situationists in 1972 and the RAF in 1998;
however, other groups like the “no logo” movement have taken up their mantle and
instigated protests against consumerism and the business concerns that profit at its
growth. Just after the official end of the SI, the punk movement of the 1970s brought
Situationist artistic ideals such as détournement out in a very public way such that
détournement ultimately and ironically became a fashion statement and part of consumer
culture. While there was some violence associated with the punk movement, it was not
linked to the sensibilities of groups like the RAF. In fact, the violence was more often
than not engendered by those on the outside. As much as Malcom McClaren, John Lydon
(aka Johnny Rotten) and groups like the Clash may have sympathized with the goals of
the RAF, there is no indication that they supported terrorist activities in the service of
such ends.
The RAF remained relatively quiet from 1979 – when they attempted to
assassinate then NATO Supreme Commander Alexander Haig – to 1985. Many of the
members in the meantime defected to East Germany and received training from the Stasi.
The bombing campaign resumed between 1985 and 1993, when the West German
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz)
infiltrated the RAF leadership, resulting in the death and arrest, respectively, of then
leaders Wolfgang Grams and Birgit Hogefeld. As a result of this action the RAF ceased
operations, formally declaring its disbanding on April 20 1998.161
161
Aust, 433-437.
62
Most groups that identified with the Left in the West both during and after the
active period of the RAF viewed its violent methods as counter-productive. Thus the
legacy of the RAF was rather limited. However, the ideals of the APO as a whole,
including the Kommune I along with those of the Situationists retain currency to this day
in part due to the limits of consumer capitalism. Granted, the economies of the West,
including the United States, did experience substantial growth during the 1940s and
1950s: however, many like the Situationists saw this trend as nothing more than a growth
of the “spectacle” that kept individuals trapped in the cog of the consumer culture. The
ability to buy more goods did not create a better quality of life, they felt; it merely created
expectations that only greater access to the “spectacle” could fulfill. Hence, once the
western economies began to decline in the 1970s, the critiques of Situationism and the
APO began to have a greater resonance.
Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States shifted from a
labor intensive, manufacturing-based economy, into a white collar, service-oriented
economy. This shift ultimately resulted in a loss of relatively well paid union jobs and an
increase in lower paid, pension-less and often temporary service jobs. A phenomenon
known as “stagflation” – a combination of high unemployment, high inflation and
sluggish growth – became the byword for the economic troubles of the decade.162
Additionally, there was a coincident change in the nature of consumer society reflecting a
shift from the acquisition of consumer goods, to the creation of personal identity through
the emulation of lifestyles represented in movies, television and magazines. Sociologist
162 Eric Porter , “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions,” in America in the Seventies, ed Beth L Bailey and
Dave Farber (University Press of Kansas, 2004), 59.
63
Ryan Moore puts it this way, “media spectacles, celebrity images and corporate brand
names have advanced from the status of merely “reflecting” society to become the
backbone of global political economy and constitutive of social relationships.”163 A
growing percentage of the commercial sector was no longer involved the manufacturing
of consumables (in the traditional sense) but created and sold “images” obviating the
need for skilled, unionized labor. This turn of events also occurred in England whose
population also suffered from a high unemployment rate in the mid to late 1970s.
The punk rock movement was one public reaction to this state of affairs. While
the origins of musical developments are notoriously difficult to pin down, some cultural
and social historians consider punk rock to have begun with groups like the Ramones in
New York City circa 1975.164 However, it was the Sex Pistols in England that brought the
movement to worldwide attention. Former Situationist International member Malcom
McClaren created the group in 1975. The iconography of the Pistols and later much of the
punk movement as a whole reflected much of the Situationist ethos, effectively
neutralizing the very idea of mainstream culture by first disassembling icons of political,
historical and consumer culture such as safety pins, Nazi imagery or pictures of Queen
Elizabeth, and then sending them back out reconstructed in various ways.
Reflecting the Situationists’ ambiguity about traditional progressivism and the
student protest movements, the punk movement was an attempt to deal not only with the
sixties counterculture that had gone mainstream and completely ingratiated itself into the
consumer culture, but also with a mainstream culture that had become so adept at
163
Ibid.
Ryan Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis New York: New York
University Press, 2010, 1.
164
64
assimilating the rebellious that the very idea of counterculture became effectively
meaningless.165 Commercial culture had absorbed the formerly revolutionary “hippie”
culture and fed it back to society shed of its radical and political elements.166 However,
the same thing happened to the punk culture as piercings and ripped clothing became part
of the mainstream, easily acquired at any mall.
Concern over the social control wielded by the consumer culture remains an issue
today, as seen in the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle to the movement
inspired by Naomi Klein’s No Logo (published in 2000) in which she criticizes the selling
of lifestyles linked to brand names like Nike and Starbucks to the Occupy Wall Street
movement that began in 2008. 167 Liberal Studies professor McKenzie Wark directly
connects current American anarchism to Situationism. Additionally, he believes that due
to our current and overwhelming “accumulation of spectacles” we have moved beyond a
political landscape and now exist in an “aesthetic economy” that is impervious to
political solutions, meaning that what passes for politics today is merely “the spectacular
organization of appearances” but nothing that can engender real progressive change.168
Even though his language indicates that this shift to the “aesthetic economy” is a recent
development, Wark’s statement reflects the same kind of problems that both the
Situationists and the APO groups recognized during the Cold War era. They both believe
that the consumer goods and activities that capitalism promises distract the general
165
Heath and Potter, 34-35.
Ryan Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction,” The
Communication Review 7 (2004): 307-313.
167 Heath and Potter, 328-330; Ibid., 5, 328.
168 McKenzie Wark, “This Shit is Fucked up and Bullshit,” Theory and Event Vol 14, Issue 4 (2011).
Accessed April 4, 2014. http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.csus.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.wark.html.
166
65
population such that they lose interest in combatting the real economic (and at least for
the SI, artistic) problems inherent in society.
With a view to the history of the RAF and Situationists, one can see that the
differences in their responses to American cultural and economic influence had lasting
effects on some of the groups that came after them. During the Cold War the CIA and the
Congress for Cultural Freedom accessed Marshall Plan funds in order to portray the
United States as a society of cultural importance and to attempt to forestall the
encroachment of communist and socialist ideals into the general populations of Western
Europe. French and West German countercultural groups reacted by decrying the
consumerism and economic and political imperialism that they believed the United States
represented. The Situationists and APO groups countered with varying degrees of
activism up to and including the bombings, kidnappings and executions of the RAF, often
against American targets. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that it is in the United States
where much of these groups’ recent influence has been manifest.
66
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