Kommune 1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

Kommune 1 or K1 was the first politically-motivated commune in Germany. It was created on January 1, 1967 in Berlin and finally dissolved in November 1969.

Kommune 1 developed as a reaction against traditional German culture and morality in which very conservative moral conceptions prevailed, in particular concerning sex roles and sexual morality.

Contents

[edit] Emergence

During a meeting in the early summer of 1966 in Kochel, some members of the Munich branch of Subversiven Aktion (like Dieter Kunzelmann) and the Berlin-based Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund ("SDS") (like Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl) discussed how to break from what they considered to be narrow-minded and bourgeois concepts.

Dieter Kunzelmann had the idea to create a commune. Kunzelmann soon went to Berlin. In Berlin, the SDS had its first "commune working group", which advanced the following ideas:

  • Fascism develops from the nuclear family. It is the smallest cell of the state from whose underlying character all institutions are derived.
  • Men and women live in dependence on each other so that neither can develop freely as people. This cell had to be smashed.

When it was proposed that this theory should be realized as the practice of a life as a commune, many SDS members left, including Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, who did not want to give up their marriages and lifestyles. On New Year's Day 1968, eight men and women met in the house of the writer Uwe Johnson in the Friedenau district of Berlin. They called themselves Kommune 1.

The early communards included Dieter Kunzelmann, Fritz Teufel, Ulrich Enzensberger, Dorothea Ridder, Dagmar Seehuber and Volker Gebbert. Rainer Langhans joined in March.

[edit] The First Phase: Bizarre acts of provocation

Kommune 1 was infamous for its bizarre actions which oscillated between satire and provocation. These actions became models for the "Sponti" movement and other leftist groups.

[edit] The "Custard Assassination"

As life within the walls of the commune was growing tedious, the communards decided to turn their internal experience into actions. The first of these actions was to be the "custard assassination" of US Vice-President Hubert Humphrey who was scheduled to visit Berlin. The day before his arrival however, on April 5, 1967, the communards were arrested. The tabloid Bild's headline was "Humphrey to be assassinated", the weekly Zeit spoke of "Ten little Oswalds". Even the New York Times featured a report on the dangerous plan of eight communards to attack the Vice-President with custard, yoghurt, and flour. Because of this negative publicity, Uwe Johnson hastily asked his friend and neighbour Günter Grass to evict the students from his flat. The next day, the communards were released and gave their first press conference – they had become celebrities, while the press and police officials had disgraced themselves in front of the public. The publisher Axel Springer called the members of Kommune 1 "communards of horror" from then on. Hardly a week passed without the communards staging some kind of outrageous provocation somewhere in Berlin, which the press only too eagerly jumped on.

[edit] The visit of the Shah and the K1 Photo

During a demonstration against the visit of The Shah of Iran on July 2, 1967, Fritz Teufel was arrested and accused of treason. It was not until December that he was released, after he had began a hunger strike. In the streets, sympathizers held wild demonstrations, chanting "Freedom for Fritz Teufel" and "Drive the devil out of Moabit!" (Moabit being Berlin's prison and Teufel being German for devil). During Teufel's absence from Kommune 1, the infamous photo of the communards' naked behinds was displayed with the headline: Das Private ist politisch! ("The personal is political")

[edit] The "Arsonist's Lawsuit"

On June 6, 1967, the "Arsonist's Lawsuit" was filed against Langhans and Teufel because of flyers calling for arson against department stores, which read, "Holt euch das knisternde Vietnam-Gefühl, das wir auch hier nicht missen wollen!" ("Catch that burning Vietnam feeling that we would not want to miss at home!") The court ultimately ruled in favor of Langhans and Teufel, however. They later told the story of the lawsuit in their book Klau Mich ("Steal Me"), which rose to cult status.

[edit] Reactions

The hedonistic attitude of the communards, who did only what they felt like doing, not only polarized the bourgeoisie but also polarized the political Left. The SDS especially disliked the cheeky flyers of the communards ("Water cannons are paper tigers") that were signed with the acronym SDS, hence, they expelled the "revolutionary rowdies" in May 1967. In the weekly newspaper Zeit, Klaus Hartung wrote: "There has never been a more successful political theory than the one that requires revolutionaries to revolutionize, and requires everyday life to change in order to change society."

Kommune 1 developed into a kind of contact point for alternative thinkers; hardly a week would pass in which the commune was not appealed to for help. The house was under a veritable siege by friends and groupies that adored Teufel and Langhans. The number of women waiting to see Teufel led to his expulsion from the commune. He went to Munich and later took part in the Movement 2 June.

[edit] The Second Phase: Sex, drugs and Uschi Obermaier

By the end of the 1960s, the societal climate had changed. In the late autumn of 1968, the commune moved into a closed-down factory on Stephanstraße in order to reorient. This second phase of the Kommune 1 was characterized by sex, music, and drugs.

On September 21, 1968, the commune went to the Songtage (song days) in Essen, the Federal Republic's first underground festival. There, Langhans met and fell in love with Uschi Obermaier, a model from Munich. She lived with the Munich-based music commune Amon Düül, but soon she moved in with the communards of Kommune 1, who shared one bedroom. Soon, the press called Langhans and Obermaier the "best-looking couple of the APO".

The politization of the private sphere and the fact that Langhans and Obermaier spoke openly about their relationship and about jealousy constituted the next breaking of social taboos, ushering in the sexual revolution. Later, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and others followed their example.

Soon, the commune was receiving visitors from all over the world. Obermaier fell in love with Jimi Hendrix, who had one morning turned up in the bedroom of Kommune 1. Her modeling fees rose sharply, she was given a lead role in Rudolf Thome's cult movie Rote Sonne (Red Sun), and her photos were all over posters and magazine covers. Rumour has it that the magazine Stern paid her 20 thousand Deutschmark (the price of a Porsche 911 at the time) for an interview and nude photos of this self-confident woman of the commune movement.

[edit] The end of Kommune 1 and its legacy

Eventually, the energy of Kommune 1 was spent. Kunzelmann's addiction to heroin worsened and the other communards expelled him from the commune. (It is said that the other members of the commune left of their own will). In November 1969, when a gang of Rockers raided Kommune 1, it was clear that its days were over. Obermaier and Langhans went to Munich.

A table from one of the rooms of the Kommune 1 was bought by the Green Party politician Christian Ströbele. During meetings around that same table, the newspaper Taz and the German Chaos Computer Club were founded. The table was stolen in 1990, and there is some speculation as to its whereabouts today.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Note: This article is translated from the article Kommune 1 in the German-language Wikipedia

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../k/o/m/Kommune_1.html"
In other languages