A Political Biography of Karl Heinz Roth

A Political Biography of Karl Heinz Roth

(originally published in the book …und es begann die Zeit der Autonomie, by the editorial collective Frombeloff)

Preliminary Note:

The following presentation is not a well-balanced biography. We present the political development of Karl Heinz Roth (in the following: KHR) in order to enable access to his texts. We are not concerned with reconstructing a compete curriculum vitae, but rather with shedding some light on the historical and political environment in which discussion and action took place and the texts were written. Political standpoints are of course never the products of individual people, but rather the results of collective contexts. But they are also not completely without a subject: the participants reach certain assessments and decisions precisely from their own personal experience and history.

Father, Mother, Bundeswehr

KHR was born in 1942. His mother initially worked as a seamstress, later as a housewife; his father was a police officer. He describes his family background as “rather economically miserable, small-time conditions” in the gray and ossified Adenauer era. KHR was the only child of the family to “make it” to high school (Oberschule) and did his Abitur in 1961 “at the expense of my three sisters.” Despite these restricted economic conditions, his contact with “proper” workers was limited to experiences as an unskilled worker during school holidays.

In 1961, KHR was drafted into the Bundeswehr. Experiences in basic training (the singing of Nazi songs, target practice against imaginary “Ivans”) led to an “initial politically conscious step”: the refusal to be sworn in, and switching to a medical unit. But the forms of protest remained “institutional”, “completely on the basis of military law.”

He first refused obligatory military service in retrospect, when he took up the study of medicine in 1962. His social engagement at this time was limited to publishing a left-intellectual cultural periodical. When a professor gushed about the possibilities of medical research opened up by the death penalty, which had last been carried out in the initial post-war period, KHR assumed it was a slip of the tongue. “My trust in those institutions which supposedly guarantee the free democratic basic order of this society was badly shaken, but not yet broken.” That would change.

SDS Activities

In 1965, KHR moved to Cologne in order to further his studies at the Institute for Brain Research there. He wasn’t able to enter the Institute. A campaign was raging at the university against the introduction of the “simple emergency laws’, which contained the possibility of forced labor and press censorship in the case of a ‘state of emergency’. KHR joined the student movement and became an emergency advisor of the Socialist German Students League (SDS). There, he attempted to radicalize the somewhat hopeful student protest. He pointed out that it was a matter of preventing the emergency laws, since they represented a further restriction of basic democratic rights, which had already been pruned.

Over the course of the next few years, the student revolt against the emergency laws, the war in Indochina, and for the liberation movements in the “Trikont” expanded to become an anti-authoritarian, extra-parliamentary mass movement. But according to KHR’s estimation, it had decisive limitations: the assaults by the state security apparatus were taken too lightly; moreover, actions were overwhelmingly carried out by the student elite. “We didn’t understand how much our targeted breaking of the rules and our constant engagement shook up the late capitalist FRG as soon as they spread to the exploited strata.”

In practice, the attempts at expansion looked like this: SDS activists would for example conceptualize, together with trade unionists, educational seminars for workers. Conflicts were pre-programmed, for example the issue of the limitation of resistance to the workplace and its code of industrial relations. To check the reality, student cadre went on site. KHR took a job during the semester breaks as a factory paramedic in the final assembly shop at Ford. The working conditions there exceeded even the wildest imagined horrors. “My experience was that the despotism with which labor-power was squeezed was unlimited. The transfer line was a monstrosity, which pressed the foreign workers on both assembly lines into a brutal corset of precisely calculated working rhythms (…) the workers who were crushed there day after day, were hardly recognizable as human beings anymore; desperate individuals, played against each other on the line, harassed down to the last detail of their labor process by the function masters at their control consoles.” The task of the factory paramedic consisted among other things of keeping them from total collapse with the aid of stimulants. The question of how to develop resistance out of these conditions remained unanswered at the time. KHR traveled “so to speak, through all of the existing currents of the labor movement, but these experiences mainly left behind a bitter aftertaste.” “The real core of the contemporary contradiction between workers and capital appeared somehow taboo.”

In 1967 he moved again, this time with his partner to a stronghold of the extra-parliamentary opposition, Hamburg. The alliance between "the students in the city center and the young proletarian subculture in the working class suburbs" that was just emerging there was subject to tightening repression from all sides: measures such as the expansion of the youth police and special units, infiltration of the scene up to targeted arrests of spokespeople. In addition, there were gestures of distancing from the emerging action group by the "Rockers out" factions of the established university-based groups.

KHR was arrested following the 1968 May Day demonstration. A student general assembly thereupon resolved that he should evade the expected preventive custody, "as one example among many of how to resist in a phase where attempts are being made to destroy the extra-parliamentary opposition [...] through exemplary tough measures." After a year underground, during which the emergency SDS advisor appeared at many events, KHR surrendered to the justice system. The investigation against him was dropped in 1970 as a result of the amnesty law.

A further important political field in SDS was the struggle against the hierarchical professorial university. In publications about socialist higher education policy co-written by KHR, the significance of knowledge and education in West German capitalism was analyzed, and the relation between intelligentsia and workers discussed. Linguistically very much in the orthodox ML style, there is analysis of the extent to which the intelligentsia is an integral part of the capitalist system and, accordingly, is exploited and subject to modernization comparable to that of the working class.

In 1970, KHR concluded his study of medicine. Even before then, he had dealt with the problems of the Trikont (the "tricontinental" countries or "third world" - translator's note). At this time, he began to work increasingly within an internationalist framework, and joined the group TRIKONT (see below). After the massacre of Palestinians carried out by the Jordanian army in September 1970, KHR and other members of the former university group answered the call by the Red Crescent for international medical aid, and went to Palestinian refugee camps for a few weeks.

From the University to the Proletariat

the TRIKONT group

Over the course of the year 1969, the university group TRIKONT developed out of one of the products of the disintegration of SDS-Hamburg. It was a quite mixed association of around 50 Palestinian, Greek, Italian, and German leftists who worked in the AStA international office (AStA = Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss, the executive student government body at most German universities - translator's note). There, they provided practical solidarity by providing information at the university on the liberation movements and their goals, and gathered support. The following year, KHR became an activist in the TRIKONT group.

The TRIKONT group understood itself to be internationalist, not social democratic, and above all, as distinct from the emerging Marxist-Leninist splinter groups, non-centralist. In implementing the proclaimed general solidarity with the liberation movements of the Trikont, the contradictions within the group became increasingly apparent. Accusations were made that a few comrades of the TRIKONT group only wanted to make it an auxiliary of their own organizations. Furthermore, there was a general dissatisfaction with the limitation to the social sphere of the university.

A failed university congress in early 1970, in which the TRIKONT activists also participated, was the catalyst for the shift away from university politics and toward the proletariat. The group's analysis was that floundering about in university politics and its own lack of any concept would sooner or later lead it down the path of many APO groups, which at best would end in the radical reformist cul-de-sac. What the APO lacked was a concept that brought together the struggles and those fighting while at the same time placing them within a larger framework. The process of ideological unification of the TRIKONT group ended for the time being on January 31st, 1970 with the publication of a programmatic declaration. The TRIKONT group - including all factions - henceforth called itself 'Proletarische Front - Gruppe westdeutscher Kommunisten.' (PF)

Proletarische Front (PF)

The PF's objectives with regard to the function of its 'Programmatic Declaration' were ambitious:

"The question of the program takes on special significance because without a program that sets forth the communists' basic outlook, precisely defines the next tasks, and provides general answers to all questions of agitational work as a whole, there will be no communist party truly worthy of the name."

In only 20 pages, a broad spectrum is covered, from the global situation to the steps for implementing revolutionary perspectives. "The workers and peasants of the tricontinental, alone unable to smash the system of imperialism at the global level, are one of the elements of fermentation supporting the conscious antagonist of imperialism, the global socialist proletariat, in its revolutionary struggle"; The PF declared its support for "the process of proletarian emancipation, understood in this way, according to its abilities." "However, long-term success in constructing socialism in the non-industrialized countries will equally depend on the proletariat of the highly industrialized imperialist countries smashing the imperialist state [...] as a result, no national organization of the proletariat alone will be able to successfully oppose in the long run a Europeanized monopoly capital with three dozen multinational corporations at its core."

After all, it was completely overlooked that the working class in the main EEC countries had long been multinational in composition: "in order to weld the workers firmly together in struggle against the common enemy, international capital, it is necessary to organize them at the point of production in grassroots proletarian organizations, regardless of nationality. If there is no revolutionary vanguard capable of making clear to the workers the composition of the surplus value of combined capitals - which do not only dispose of their own labor-power - then struggle can easily become an instrument for the implementation of partial interests in the sense of the interests of a metropolitan labor aristocracy."

In the course of the unification process of the parts of the TRIKONT group into the PF, a metamorphosis also took place in its understanding of internationalism. Concrete solidarity with liberation movements faded away, making way for an approach that focused on the struggles of the metropolitan proletariat. What disappeared with it was also an understanding of the different nature of struggles in the countries of the periphery, which could not be based on an industrial proletariat, since it was still barely developed there. The PF's fixation on the proletariat as the historically most advanced class, the only one capable of overcoming capitalism/imperialism, limited its perspective to struggles in other metropolitan countries. This was justified in terms of the perceived Neo-Leninism of the liberation movements, which the members of the TRIKONT group, during a visit to Palestine, viewed as tremendously distant from the masses.

With regard to the class conflicts of the West German proletariat, the group supported the struggle for "revolutionary transitional demands", such as:

- the struggle against the intensification of exploitation / for the 6-hour day

- against wage differentials

- for the conscription of all classes to carry out "useful labor"

- against the content and institutions of bourgeois culture.

The PF understood itself to be a non-Leninist party. Its organizational orientation was toward Rosa Luxemburg, pursuing the formation of "organs of proletarian power, committees and councils." A parallel structure was to be constructed for is own organization, which regarded itself as a vanguard:

"The basic units of the PF are cells consisting of no more than 5 people. Each full member is the member of a cell, and at the same time a member of a proletarian base organization (workplace, neighborhood, university, or youth group). The cells elect delegates to a fortnightly general assembly, out of which the party congress is developed."

The big party congress never came about, the fractionalization of the TRIKONT group continued into the PF. One year later, the next issue of PF stated:

"For the time being, the PF has fallen behind its programmatic claims. The composition of the cadre personnel (...) was exceedingly heterogeneous - a dilemma that strongly impaired it from the beginning. The internal differences were so strong that the ML faction (henceforth appearing under the name "Blue Faction") was systematically booted out at the instigation of some members. Other splits developed over discussions concerning openness or tactics within the organization - a White Faction, labeled "spontaneist-Luxemburgist", split off.

In mid-1971, the Red faction, PF Hamburg, consisted of only 12 members. A qualification phase was therefore envisaged for the coming period. Investigations into the production sector - in Hamburg this was mainly the port and the shipyards -, into the general conditions of production, and into repression and the military were launched. Other sections had a more practical orientation, building a center for dockworkers and organizing proletarian shared apartments (so-called Wohngemeinschaften). The "Aktionsprogramm 72" stated the common thrust to be put into action: it was a matter of "determining revolutionary strategy from the present social conditions and each of the (...) practical steps only serves a single goal: to promote and advance the initiative and revolutionary struggle of the masses."

Workers' wage struggles were seen as the concrete and foremost starting point. Because this terrain had been neglected for so long, it was now dominated by the reformist unions. The latter, due to being integrated into the system ,merely drove the workers to consolidate their own exploitation. The PF opposed union pacification tendencies with the demand 'more pay, less work."

"The struggle against the decline in the relative wage is presented as the struggle against the attempt by capital to accumulate by means of increased and intensified exploitation, again and again and at a higher level." Massive wage demands would shake up the model of accumulation. The theory of the political wage was implemented in the political work of the WWA ("Wir wollen Alles") groups. Analogous to the expanded conception of the wage struggle - which was not limited to the terrain of collective bargaining, but also influenced outside the workplace: by prices, inflation, rents, etc. - practice should also not be limited to the workplace. "For the dictatorship of capital, the relationship of domination of dead labor over living labor, has long ceased to be confined to the immediate process of production." For example, capital requires an institution such as health care, where "labor power is repaired in case of damage or wear in material production." "The production, reproduction, and repair funds for labor power represent nothing other than general social conditions for their immediate exploitation in the capitalist production process."

So much, or rather, so limited, for PF's wording on 'partial strategies.'

PF's Connection to 'Potere Operaio' - In Theory...

The workers also thought the demand 'more pay, less work" was correct. This confirmed once again that the traditional forms of organization of the workers' movement no longer had anything to do with the reality and resistance of the class. "The present widespread apathy of the West German workers is also due to the fact that the appeals to co-determination, for trade union opposition activity, etc., do not affect proletarian interests." The PF was theoretically confirmed by the Italian workerists (Tronti, Negri, Bologna), who proved that an 'other' workers movement with autonomous, decentralized forms of struggle existed. The PF wanted to create a corresponding organization.

Because the new multinational type of worker was highly mobile, the PF constituted mobile commandos, intended to make targeted interventions at respective locations. Furthermore, it became evident that in these struggles the most radical demands and forms of struggle were put forward and applied by foreign workers. "The on-site workplace committees will fundamentally (...) have a multinational organization. As initial practical experience from other anti-centrist groups shows, there are by no means insurmountable obstacles to this; on the contrary, it has even been possible in individual cases to mobilize West German workers by taking advantage of the higher level of consciousness of the foreign comrades. On the other hand, the principle of multinational association must not be limited to the workplace committees. The foreign workers are mostly housed in barracks, and are especially shamelessly exploited in their social reproduction." (PF Nr. 7, 1972, p. 27)

...and in Practice

Long before there was theoretical agreement with the Italian comrades, there was practical agreement. As early as 1971/1972, the focus was on mobilizing and agitating among foreign workers. Presence in 'foreign worker' camps, accompaniment of trains for those taking vacations in their countries of origin, but mainly direct action at the workplace level constituted the main fields of action. They wanted to build durable structures on this basis of a future mass strike. How much of the PF's assessment was to prove true was later demonstrated by the example of the Ford strike.

However, the PF's activities were not limited to the national context. Given that the mass worker was the central figure of the worker in all the Fordist industrialized countries of Western Europe, international connections were pursued. The PF participated in an attempt to link workplace intervention groups in West Germany with those in Northern Italy, France, and England. To this end, its activists undertook a series of trips to foreign workplaces, for example to Italy or to Renault-Billancourt. These efforts led to a congress of international auto workers in 1974.

The 1973 Ford Strike

In the 'wildcat strike wave' of 1973, and the Ford strike in particular, all the theoretical considerations of the operaist groups were confirmed. They were no longer able to influence the course of the conflicts. While the Ford strike raged, the PF practically no longer existed. The strike wave of 1973 ended - it can be said today - a cycle of workers struggles and, at the same time, a 60-year-old form of exploitation that had begun at the beginning of the 20th Century with Ford and Taylor. The 73 strikes were qualitatively new because they were not carried out by relatively class-conscious skilled workers, as the 1969 strikes were, but rather by the lowest-paid workers (the mass workers), most of whom were employed on the assembly lines (with a labor immigrant share of 80% in some cases). These also had a decisive influence on the forms of struggle. These were, as KHR noted at the time, "the first actions in which the mass worker (...) took action outside of any reformist paternalism. The strikes could be crushed, the type of mass worker was nowhere near as dominant as in Italy and the influence of the German unions was greater. Moreover, the economic crisis did not manifest as virulently as in Italy."

It should be noted, however, that this stage of workers' struggles was a unique phenomenon in the history of the Federal Republic. The state, the companies, and the unions considered the events to be so dramatic that they joined forces and went over to open repression whenever the autonomous strike committees didn't allow themselves to be dissuaded by wage concessions from continuing the strike, but rather unflinchingly pursued their increasingly qualitative demands (paid breaks and special vacations for assembly line workers, slowing down the speed of the line and reduction of time cycles, abolition of the lower, so-called 'light wage' groups, a system of premiums, and improved vacation rules, etc.).

The paramount importance of these struggles was obvious, because "the fact that such demands (...) could become the object of struggles at all (...) can be understood as a sign of changes in the workers' consciousness (...). Here one could speak of a possible starting point for a fundamental problematization. If this semblance of irrevocable determinacy disintegrates and the political core of the capitalist organization of labor becomes clearer, then the organization of labor would have to become the direct object of political struggles by the workers."

Overall, the strike wave was an expression of a comprehensive systemic crisis, followed by the economic crisis, which in turn soon provided the framework of legitimization for a comprehensive attack on all sectors of the West German multinational working class.

The tragedy for the West German Operaists was that they had anticipated the wave of wildcat strikes in their analysis, and the Ford strike possibly exceeded their wildest expectations, but they were unable to practically intervene in the struggles. At the regional level, individual workplace groups succeeded in providing material support for the demands of the mass workers, but overall the organization lay follow.

Irreconcilable points of view developed out of this impotent feeling of having squandered a 'historic opportunity.' Some now consciously and exclusively limited their field of action to legal workplace work; the port group, which was quite well-anchored anyway, retained its concept of agitation and self-organization, and a third group (which included KHR) assessed the failure of the Ford strike as another military defeat for the left. They began to think about how to better prepare for similar confrontations in the future. This was also the motivating factor for conducting systematic research into the history of the revolutionary labor movement.

The Disaster of Eckhofstraße

On May 23rd, 1973, six police units armed with machine guns surrounded the building at No. 39 Eckhofstraße. Curious neighbors were driven back into their apartments under the threat of armed force; the collective fleet of the state security, from armored reconnaissance vehicles to ambulances, sealed off the street. The police stormed the building and dragged out the shackled squatters (later they were investigated according to section 129 of the German criminal code, "forming a criminal organization." The demolition company immediately went to work under police protection, and with taped-up license plates. That was the end of the occupation on Eckhofstr., in which the comrades of the Proletarian Front had also actively participated. During the six-week occupation of the building by various prominent representatives of the Hamburg Sponti scene, a veritable smear campaign - led by the Springer papers - was waged in order to break the initial acceptance by neighborhood residents.

The PF was also part of the colorful mix of Hamburg militants, consisting mainly of young workers, school pupils, and students. They were interested in establishing a proletarian cultural and youth center in this neighborhood as well, as they had previously tried to do near factories or camps for foreign guest workers. Their own base was too narrow for such a project, so the PF tried to inspire the enthusiasm of other leftists through the Eckhofstr. occupation. These centers were intended to break the isolation of 'foreign workers' in the camps.

The press defamed the squatters as "organized terrorists", "political rockers", "gangsters", "criminal elements", before which the entire neighborhood trembled. In the midst of all this was the already well-known "doctor in the black mask", about whom BILD reported on April 24th, 1974 that he dressed in black and was pulling all the strings. Karl-Heinz Dellwo and Bernhard Rössner would also make names for themselves.

Daily media terror, constant police presence, identity checks, and the criminalization of solidarity events were attempts to convince even the last skeptic that the squatters were indeed dangerous instigators of chaos. The state repression at all levels was even successful to the extent that the DKP/SHB controlled AStA of the University of Hamburg collaborated with the state security organs against the squatters.

Among the squatters, the room for maneuver also became increasingly narrower, communal projects in the neighborhood were pushed back due to repression: all that remained was the mere defense of the house. In the pamphlet on neighborhood organizing, the squatters gave a self-critical summary: "to the extent that we actively resisted the police, the militant grouping in the house grew. Increasingly, the struggle against the brutal police operations and the feared large-scale attack became the main topic among the squatters. Thus, the tactical concept of the unity of action of Neuer Heimat, the state apparatus, and the press was partially successful. (p.2)." The end of the occupation was also the end of the PF: the experience of massive repression destroyed the consensus of the group.

Night in Cologne-Gremberg

On May 9th, 1975, KHR, Philipp Werner Sauber, and Roland Otto were stopped by police in a parking lot in Cologne-Gremberg. The cause was a phone call claiming the three were car thieves. Identification and vehicle documents were checked. The police believed all of the IDs to be genuine, but Sauber and Otto had fake papers. There was thus nothing against them in the registry of wanted person. In the case of KHR, in whose name the car was registered, the keyword 'anarchist' lit up the police computer. This alerted the officers, who aimed their weapons at the occupants of the car in order to shoot immediately in case anything unanticipated occurred. With weapons drawn, the police ordered the three to step out of the car in order to be searched. Sauber opened the passenger door and then attempted to flee. Officers Grüner and Pauli fired immediately. Grüner shot KHR, who was about to step out of the car, in the back, and also shot at the fleeing Sauber. Sauber, injured, shot back. Pauli was shot through the heart. Grüner was also severely injured. KHR tipped out of the vehicle and remained on the ground, unconscious. Otto sat with hands raised in the backseat. Although Sauber was unable to flee due to his injuries, another officer emptied his magazine into him, and sicked his police dog on KHR.

This reconstruction of the events is based upon witness testimony at trial. What happened on the night of May 9th in the parking lot in Cologne-Gremberg can no longer be reconstructed exactly. That is the case was precisely the intention of investigators. Immediately after the arrests of KHR and Otto, the police imposed a news blackout. They did not even search the location afterwards for projectiles, which would have been indispensable for the reconstruction of the shooting. They left this job to neighborhood children at play the next day. During the trial, important parts of the files were 'lost.' Days after, the newspapers announced: "Terrorists Murder Cologne Officers" and "Suspected Lorenz Kidnapper Shot." The campaign of prejudice and denunciation began. KHR - "doctor by day, terrorist by night" (Kölner Rundschau), "under the perfect mask of the good Samaritan and humanitarian is the grimace of an extremist who walks over corpses" (Springer) - and Otto, who still had to serve out the rest of a sentence for bank robbery, were supposed to be members of a terrorist group, the Bewegung 2. Juni. Although the officers had fired first and neither of the two survivors had made use of the weapons they were carrying, they were declared the perpetrators. The killed and injured police were depicted as victims of terrorism. The Cologne police booked a manhunt success against terrorism. The Hamburger Abendblatt reported with satisfaction on May 17th: "According to Herold (of the BKA, the federal police), the readiness of the population has grown since the occupation of the German embassy in Stockholm and the shooting during the arrest of anarchists in Cologne."

Otto and KHR were held in solitary confinement. Both were to be charged with membership in a terrorist organization, murder, and attempted murder. KHR, whose life was in danger, was shuttled back and forth between the correctional facility and the hospital. On the first day of the trial, the state of his health even shocked the representatives of the tabloid press: “Tumult and tears at Appellhofplatz – trial broken off after three hours. Roth, who was seriously ill, was treated by the emergency doctor in court; returned to prison by helicopter.” [Express]. For him, an individual struggle for survival began against permanent surveillance, interrogations by political police, against the ignorance of prison doctors who saw patients “as subhumans, at best as malingerers”, and who “behaved toward them not as doctors but as part of the penal system, as special members of the penal system”, but above all struggle “against dehumanizing solitary confinement and against a body that no longer wants to go on.” Even at the beginning of the trial, KHR did not have his own doctor. He described the two and a half years of jail/clinic/solitary confinement himself as follows: “I owe my survival to my coincidental qualification in medical matters and a broad campaign for a suspended sentence...the entire strength of the resistance stands and falls with the question of whether it is able to fight for an alternative to solitary confinement for the prisoners that isn’t controlled by state security agencies. Without the preceding campaign of support, Otto and I would not have been able to adjust to the situation of the trial with the sobriety and precision which is indispensable for an effective defense. In any case, I would not have been able to bring the consequences of solitary confinement under control.”

The campaign for a suspended sentence, which was initiated in Autumn of ‘75 and included several support committees in various cities, was successful in the sense that it was able to involve broad sections of the public, including within the SPD. However, it concentrated and limited itself exclusively to exposing the medical scandal of the “Roth case.” “The limitation, but also the chance, of our initiative was to go public only with documentable facts. We refrained from evaluating the circumstances as torture or a program of extermination, and from any statement on the course of events and their political classification (leftists in particular did not always make this easy for us)…”

Public relations work also exerted pressure on the trial. The state was forced to drop the murder charge. The defense succeeded in bringing forth unpublished, exculpatory evidence. The police officers who testified as witnesses became increasingly entangled in false statements and perjury, and finally, the presiding judge resigned at his own request due to bias.

The ‘Second Part’ of the trial, in which “statements by the defendants without direct reference to the course of events,” “which possibly allow conclusions to be drawn about the inner attitude of the defendants at the time of the alleged crime” were also to be heard, was dropped. The evidence of the state security agencies was too fragile and controversial. On July 26^th, 1977, Otto and KHR were acquitted of the murder charge; at the same time, the court retroactively convicted the deceased Sauber of murder. Otto: “They [the judiciary – editorial note] acquitted us at the expense of Philipp Werner Sauber, whom, contrary to the truth, they made out to be the guilty party, and declared a murderer...I know very well that large parts of the ‘left’ have also done this and are still doing it. For them, Philipp – and everyone else in the underground – were and are non-persons.”

Release from Prison to ‘Revolt’ – The German Autumn

KHR’s release from prison in July 1977 coincided with the German Autumn, with Stammheim, and the Schleyer kidnapping. Whereas by the mid-1970s, against the backdrop of RAF activities and also due to the pressure of state persecution, large sections of the West German left had already abandoned positions in favor of radical practice, they now finally split over the question of violence. KHR did not go along with accompanying termination of solidarity towards those engaged in armed struggle – one need only recall the ‘anticipatory obedience’ of the Sozialistisches Büro, which, unsolicited, distanced itself in the sharpest tone from both the RAF and any form of militant resistance. As he had before 1977, he again dealt with the strategy of the RAF, the behavior of the left towards the ‘urban guerrillas’, as well as the repression of the West German state. For him, the establishment of the ‘small crisis staff’ represented the establishment of a dictatorship that “liquidated the entire formal parliamentary system within a few weeks.”

Furthermore, KHR was a member of an independent commission of inquiry that sought to uncover the events of the Stammheim “Todesnacht”. Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that A. Baader, G. Ensslin, and J.K. Raspe had committed suicide, but regarded it as plausible that the apparatus of political power could have murdered them.

In response to the German media’s self-imposed one-sided coverage of the events of autumn 1977, effectively a Gleichschaltung, KHR initially participated into the founding discussions for an independent, left-wing newspaper project, from which die tageszeitung (‘taz’) would later emerge.

Time to Read

While still in jail, KHR began to study the standard work The Making of the English Working Class by the English social historian E.P. Thompson. KHR and the other staff members of Autonomie felt encouraged by Thompson’s methodological approach of ‘history from below’, since this was precisely the approach that had been followed since the studies on “the ‘other’ labor movement.”

Thompson’s work had great significance for the Autonomie editorial board because of its reference to an autonomous ‘moral economy’ of the proletariat and the new understanding of class subjectivity and constitution derived from it. The detachment of ‘autonomy’ from the factory as a locus of primary social meaning and the turn/orientation towards all areas of proletarian everyday life taking place at this time because of the destruction of the model of the mass worker, was supported by the reception of Thompson’s work. Mass poverty increasingly became the object of Autonomie’s socio-analytical interest, especially for KHR. With the ‘discovery’ of the sphere of reproduction as a site of proletarian resistance against the capitalist and domination-technical intrusion into everyday life, a theoretical hierarchy of different struggles was abandoned.

The preoccupation with ‘moral economy’ was soon followed by the political demand for a ‘living wage’/’guaranteed income’. Beyond the collective socio-historical approach of the Autonomie editorial collective, KHR had a personal connection to the categories of ‘existential value’ and the demand for a ‘guaranteed income.’ As a doctor practicing in a proletarian section of Hamburg, he had (and has) everyday contact with people permanently affected by the pressures of valorization and poverty.

At this time, KHR also began a renewed investigation into National Socialism, which became an increasing focus of his interest in the course of the following years. At the beginning of 1978, a talk held at the “Tunix” congress in Berlin was published under the title “A New Fascism?” In it, KHR lays down some of his basic positions on the Third Reich. He evaluates fascism as an anti-capitalist mass movement, which however was booted out in 1934 by “Nazi planned capitalism”, “the German variant of the New Deal.” Since no profound social revolution had taken place in 1945, the Federal Republic of Germany had been built upon the personal and structural continuity of National Socialism. Only the form of the structure of rule had been modified, as a modernized ‘social-technical class control.’

From the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ Autonomie

In 1978, Autonomie fell apart. Over time, the Frankfurt faction had become increasingly focused on its own self-importance, and accused the Hamburg faction of being too theory-laden. Thomas Schmid from Frankfurt describes the joint meeting as follows: “It was one of the first meetings after Karl Heinz (Roth) got out of jail...words weighed twice as heavy. Still weakened and ill, he presented his concept for the journal. When I thought, Autonomie is done, (Walter) Günteroth came forward: he could only believe half of it; Karl Heinz had barely escaped with his life and should deal with that. Then he fell silent. He had, Walter continued, just done a carrot-based treatment. In his left arm, he felt the presence of his father. Walter said this very calmly and gently. Roth went out and said, ‘that’s enough, I’m going back to Hamburg right away.’”

The publishing house Trikont then parted ways with Autonomie. Other authors from the Frankfurt scene published two more issues of the magazine, then publication was discontinued due to lack of money and an orientation. Individual Frankfurters (including Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit) would from now on stride mightily forward on the road to the fleshpots of parliamentarism and would soon lead the ‘Realo’ wing of the Greens. Already in the same year, with KHR’s participation, Autonomie, Neue Folge was founded as a publication. It would be published until 1985. Initially, there was a stronger focus on conditions in the ‘tricont’, springing from the preoccupation with the resistance of pauperized masses of the South that began in the course of the reception of Thompson’s work. Thus, the first issue of Neue Folge dealt with the movement of the People’s Modjaheddin in Iran. Their struggles were seen as a resistance of tricontinental poverty from within a still intact ‘moral economy’ against capitalist modernization. In the following year, part of the editorial team (including KHR) travelled to Iran to gather information on the ground and to offer practical help to the movement, such as medical care in West Germany.

In 1980, KHR held a talk in Berlin during the first Health Day on the topic of family and population policy under National Socialism, “Auslese und Ausmerze” (“Select and Eradicate”). The conference was a counter-event to the official Doctor’s Day. The strong interest shown by the attending alternative health practitioners, nurses, anti-nuclear activists and other ‘eco-movementists’ encouraged the speaker to take a far-reaching step: KHR began to flirt with a balancing act between radical systemic critique and professional research on National Socialist social policy. As a result of further conferences on this topic, the Verein zur Erforschung der nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik was founded in Hamburg in 1983.

It was in this context that initial contact was made with Jan Philip Reemstma, an heir of a Hamburg tobacco company and sponsor of the left, who would later for many years be the donor of various projects in which KHR participated.

The ‘Revolts’

The beginning of the 1980s was the peak of the ‘new social movements’ in the Federal Republic of Germany. In multiple cities, there were heavy street fights, a wave of house squatting swept over the republic, and the anti-nuclear movement mobilized hundreds of thousands on the occasion of the demonstration against the nuclear power plant in Brokdorf. The revolt in the streets was the open eruption of the increasing refusal of large sections of the youth to accept the performance principles of the system and the destructive after-effects of the Fordist model. Since the mid-1970s, “class resistance in the phase of restructuring shifted out of the factory into the social terrain. As workers autonomy was dismantled in the factories, the class there made redundant, rationalized away, mobilized and recomposed, a revolt against the capitalist determination of life unfolded in the interstices of youth unemployment and the welfare state, culminating in 1980-83.” (Franck Düvell: Von der Krise der Arbeit zur neuen Bremer Sozialpolitik; unpublished master's thesis, Bremen 1987; p. 31)

The Autonomen played a significant role in these social conflicts, which KHR described as a “social revolt.” They most consistently practiced the right to a ‘self-determined life’, and militantly defended it. Especially in the struggle against the nuclear policy of the Federal Republic, they became an important factor in the left. However, with the strong orientation toward self-interest, and the hostility to theory in favor of ‘politics in the first person’, they reached a dead end. Practice became a fetish.

Early on in KHR’s work, the changed status of the reproductive sphere in the theory of Autonomie was linked to the recognition that the increasing refusal of work was initially only negative. Beyond the refusal, what mattered now was “to anticipate from the radical negation of labor the qualitative transition to the liberated social activity of the masses, which will be based on all the accumulated social wealth and the immense unfolded productive forces of the capitalist epoch so far.” The increasing subjugation of everyday social life to the logic of domination by capital must and would be countered by ‘tentative models’ of a different mode of social togetherness. The abolition of social atomization (for example in small families, suburbs, at the workplace) finds its expression on the part of the class through autonomous, collective counter-models.”

For Autonomie, the ‘new social movements’ were on the one hand the bearers of these counter-models in everyday life and the subjects of their domination-free redemption: “Counterculture is today no longer a pleasant appendage of revolutionary processes, but formative in a revolutionary sense, a conscious anticipation. It is a strength of revolutionary movements and initiatives when they evade their organization and unification – they thus show that they act resolutely in the first person and reject renewed domination.”

The ‘old Autonomie’ had already dealt with the ‘ecology question.’ In the ‘Neue Folge’, the ‘nuclear state’ and resistance against the destructive technology of the rulers became main topics. KHR later referred to the fascistic tendencies of parts of the now established ecology movement. In 1980, Autonomie made the (vain) attempt to establish a supra-regional organizational nexus with militant parts of the anti-nuclear movement.

In autumn of 1981, the first house on the Hafenstraße in Hamburg was occupied. Right from the beginning, KHR had contacts with the residents through his work as a doctor. He participated in the founding of the ‘Komitees zur Verteidigung der Hafenstraße’, an alliance of local intellectual figures. For KHR, the Hafenstraße project was associated with the hope of creating a free space escaping the web of (welfare) state control. Over the years, KHR held a number of solidarity speeches or published texts in connection with the preservation of the squatted houses.

Autonomie experienced a crisis in 1981/82. Increasingly, the question arose concerning the practical use of the accumulated knowledge beyond theoretical production and historical reconstruction. One practical possibility was seen in the elaboration of a social revolutionary programmatic orientation aimed at unifying the decentralized partial struggles. This programmatic orientation, the elaboration of which KHR was involved in, was published under the title “Social Revolt and the Question of Organization” at the end of 1982. The paper was an attempt by Autonomie to introduce social revolutionary content into the ‘revolt.’ The most important political task was described as the ‘homogenization of the new mass poverty’, to be achieved by building up decentralized autonomous networks.

In the same year, in the paper ‘Militant Investigation’, KHR attempted a theoretical grounding of social revolutionary positions. He criticized Marx’s theory of value as a one-sided understanding of the capital-labor relation, since it only dealt primarily with the surplus value aspect. In his reflections, KHR is concerned with a ‘dynamization’ of paid labor-time, which the class (re)appropriates from capital. On this theoretical basis, he demands the egalitarian ‘existential wage’ as a political means of struggle of the proletariat. In contrast, in the succession of the workers’ inquiry of operaismo, the concept of a ‘militant inquiry’ as class analysis and means of struggle is developed in a fragmentary way.

At this time, Autonomie/KHR saw in the so-called 'Jobber movement' (or casual workers' movement) the potential subject for the 'homogenization of mass poverty' against social cuts and forced labor. However, they did not regard the Jobber movement as the successor of the mass worker as the central type, and against the backdrop of increasing mass poverty, there occurred a demarcation from positions that "tie the revolutionary organizing process exclusively to the function of the subject as labor-power."

Autonomie saw its role primarily as providing the revolts with materialist theory. The hopes invested in these movements were not fulfilled, but it must be noted that KHR undertook immense efforts at the time to have an effect on the practical resistance against the system. A number of talks and essay from these years in which he puts forward his viewpoints on class structure, forms of struggle, and the content of struggle bear witness to that. Subsequently, he increasingly oriented toward the political reorganization of the left.

After the 'Revolts' - The End of Autonomie

In 1985, the final issue of Autonomie - Neue Folge was published, regarded by the editors as a conscious conclusion of the Autonomie project and, by their own admission, presenting a balance sheet of the discussions and results of the previous years. The contents of the issue were fundamental essays on various aspects of proletarian social history and the 'techno-economic mechanisms of violence' of social policy against the self-determination of the class. Particularly in these essays, the theoretical positions of the editors can be ascertained through their engagement with Marx's critique of political economy and Thompson's social-historical approach. The text on the Bretton Woods imperialist system is the result of a thread pursued by D. Hartmann on structural continuities between Nazi large-scale planning and the U.S.-dominated world economic order after World War II.

Institutionalization of Research

In 1983, KHR helped found the Verein zur Erforschung der nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik. Alongside scholarly treatises on the history of science, KHR co-wrote the book Die restlose Erfassung ('The Complete Registration') together with Götz Aly in 1984 in connection with the census. The book analyzes the census techniques of the Nazis as the foundation of the Holocaust. In 1985, the Dokumentationsstelle zur NS-Sozialpolitik emerged from a split in the Verein. It published, inter alia, the first draft of the 'Generalplan Ost', which at the time was presumed to have been lost. In 1986, the Verein was transferred to the Hamburger Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte des 20.Jahrhunderts.

KHR had repeatedly emphasized the importance of linking revolutionary practice with adequate theoretical formation. Elsewhere, he described the task of the radical intelligentsia in the struggle against the system as the networking of the various single-issue movements, the organization of counter-information structures, and the establishment of independent think tanks for planning against the crisis state. It is probably in this context that he understands his current activities at the foundation. For him, this project is linked to the hope of institutionalizing social revolutionary research in the form of an autonomous 'think tank.'

The foundation conducts research and publishes with a focus on the topics of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, and National Socialism and the post-war years, but has expanded this framework in the last few years. It has published, inter alia, fundamental studies on the role of the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, IG-Farben, Siemens, and Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich as well as 'Generalplan Ost.'

In addition to his involvement in most of these projects, KHR has devoted himself primarily to two areas of research in which he can be considered an absolute expert: the 'Ostplänen' of the Nazis and the Deutsche Arbeitsfront and its affiliated Arbeitswissenschaftliches Institut. A working hypothesis of KHR's historical research on National Socialism is the assumption that the unraveling of World War II took place within an overall plan to solve the 'social question'. Since 1986, the Foundation has published the quarterly 1999 - Zeitschrift für die Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts.

Collapse and 'Anschluß'

In 1988/89, KHR, along with the Vereinigte Sozialistische Partei [translator's note: a regroupment effort between West German supporters of Ernest Mandel's Fourth International, and the Maoist KPD/ML], Jutta Dittfurth, Rainer Trampert and Thomas Ebermann, was heavily involved in founding the network Radikale Linke. It was an attempt to assemble all those parts of the left not striving for integration or comfomity, under the motto of 'radical negation.' Petrified fronts within the left, which had finally appeared marginal since the demise of socialism, were to be broken up in order to obtain a perspective for action through an overarching organizational context. In May 1990, a congress of the Radikale Linke took place in Cologne. The project fell dormant within a short period of time time.

KHR positioned himself numerous times publicly against the annexation of the German Democratic Republic, and within the framework of the Nie Wieder Deutschland campaign, called for a boycott of the 'Reichstag elections' of December 1990. The Stiftung für Sozialgeschichte helped organized the conference 'Keine Stimme für Deutschland' ('no vote for Germany'). In his various analyses of the annexation, KHR, in a number of points, anticipated the current social situation. He engaged critically in particular wit the role of the intelligentsia in this connection. According to KHR, the intellectuals had increasingly taken leave from the oppressed and went over - such as during the Golf War - to the side of the rulers with stupid arguments.

In the spring of 1992, KHR wrote a post-doctoral thesis at the University of Bremen on the topic of the intelligentsia and social policy under National Socialism, using the example of the Arbeitswissenschaftliches Institut of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, a complex he had dealt with for many years.

And not to forget one thing: for many years, KHR has been active as a doctor of general medicine in a joint practice in Hamburg-St. Pauli.