Legalized Repression and the Therapeutic State

The Berster Case, Part Four

Kristina Berster in 1979

When Kristina Berster arrived in Heidelburg to study in 1970, German young people were restless and angry. The rhetoric had turned revolutionary since the days of "Ban the Bomb." This paralleled the trajectory of American dissent. The US "New Left" had also passed a tipping point, marked by the Chicago police riots and the "days of rage" that launched the Weather Underground.

In West Germany, protest turned violent with demonstrations in Berlin and the bombing of two empty department stores by Andreas Baader and Gudrin Ensslin. The purpose of the bombing, announced Baader, was "to light a beacon" against the consumer society. "We set fires in department stores so you will stop buying," added Ensslin. "The compulsion to buy terrorizes you." An incomplete analysis, it nevertheless struck at the core of German complacency in a time of intensive economic development.

The couple and some accomplices were caught and convicted, but not before they found support from one of Germany's leading leftist journalists, Ulrike Meinhof. Released in 1969 during the appeal of their cases, Baader and Ensslin went underground with Meinhof's assistance. On September 29, 1970, with the robbing of three West Berlin banks, the Red Army Faction was born. 

To justify the tactic, Baader explained that the first problem of the revolution was financial support.

Dark clouds began to descend. West German police turned to automatic weapons and extreme tactics, anyone who looked like a nonconformist risked spontaneous interrogation, roadblocks became common on the autobahn, and new search, arrest, and gun laws were passed. The excuse for such a broad extension of police powers was the nationwide search for the Baader-Meinhof group. It didn't matter that the fugitives were responsible for only five of the 1,000 robberies committed during their heyday.

Witnessing the isolation of prisoners and the alienation around her, Berster couldn't accept it. She was already steeped in politics and radical concepts of therapy. One US thinker who exerted a strong influence, Thomas Szasz, had written about the "myth of mental illness" and the emergence of a therapeutic state. He also inspired William Pierce, the mathematician who shared his story of harassment and involuntary commitment after blowing the whistle about security procedures and high-tech repression.

In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry Szasz proposed, "The parallel between political and moral fascism is close. Each offers a kind of protection. And upon those unwilling to heed peaceful persuasion, the values of the state will be imposed by force: in political fascism by the military and the police; in moral fascism by therapists, especially psychiatrists."

Berster was fascinated by the critique of institutional psychiatry, and simultaneously repelled by German psychiatric units where patients had no rights and anything could be interpreted as crazy. A new criminal psychiatric unit was under construction in Heidelburg, geared toward mind control and the use of complete isolation. During the dispute over it, someone tried to set fire to the site.

The violence escalated with the shooting of several police officers. In response, the government widened its dragnet to root out the conspiracy. Help came from an informer, Hans Bacchus, who had read books on guerrilla warfare before leaving the student scene. He subsequently supplied the police with a list of people he accused of radical activity or terrorist sympathies. Among the names was Kristina’s.

Apprehended as a suspect, she was charged with having "built up a criminal association." The maximum sentence was five years. But even pre-trial detention could mean serious time. Some suspects were already being detained in solitary for long periods. It was exactly the type of treatment she had been protesting.

Berster spent the next six months in detention, watching the erosion of her right to legal counsel. Even her lawyer's office was raided. Police alleged that Eberhard Becker had photographic files of the Heidelburg police department's employees. Although the evidence was never produced, he was barred from participating in her trial. Obstruction of justice charges were later leveled at two other attorneys representing defendants in the case.

A pattern of harassment aimed at defense attorneys was emerging. The pressure intensified with laws that permitted the exclusion of lawyers and the holding of trials without the presence of defendants. In reaction, some young people joined the Red Army Faction. 

Kristina went back to school, but continued her prison reform work.

In early May 1971, the Red Army decided to strike at political targets in retaliation for the bomb blockade of North Vietnam. They hit an officer's club in Frankfurt, the Augsburg Police Department, the parking lot of the State Criminal Investigation Office, and finally, on May 24, the US Army's European Supreme Headquarters in Heidelburg. A month later they were caught. 

At first, people thought the country would finally return to normal, easing attacks on civil liberties and ending the state of emergency. Instead, the "emergency" was institutionalized.

Red Army leaders were locked in "wipe-out detention," a luminous white world of total sterility in which fluorescent lights were always on and every window was covered. Their soundproof cells, filled with nothing but white noise, were in a section of the prison called the Dead Wing, a place off limits to all visitors except lawyers and relatives. Reading material was heavily censored, and other prisoners were never seen or even heard. 

When Jean-Paul Sartre saw Baader after two years in the Dead Wing, he said, "This is not torture like the Nazis. It is torture meant to bring on psychic disturbances."

This type of confinement was "the most effective way to destroy personality irreversibly,” Kristina told me during our jailhouse interview. "Humans are social. When you cut that off, when people are not able to talk or relate to others, an internal destruction begins. You become catatonic, and somatic problems begin."

Despite the growing risks, she continued to fight for small improvements like allowing prisoners to see and hear one another. But reforms faced new obstacles. Not only had public sentiment hardened against the Red Army; the Right, prodded by the Springer newspaper chain, had pushed through more repression laws. A Decree on Radicals, passed in 1972, denied "a position of civil service...if the candidate has been politically active in either an extreme rightist or leftist group." Any doubt about a person's support for the "free democratic basic order" would henceforth be sufficient grounds for blacklisting. It was an effective job ban in a country with 16 percent of workers in this sector.

The Decree also permitted the executive branch to create political isolation without directly banning political parties. Instead, it created a category of "constitutional enemies." Acts no longer had to be proven; the job ban punished attitudes, and the enemies list extended to "sympathizers" who were indifferent to or critical of the state's war on terrorism.

A prominent target was Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll, who had criticized the demagoguery of the Springer press. Conservatives tried to ban his books, and the police harassed his son. His hate mail was signed, he once noted sardonically, while complimentary notes were apt to be anonymous.

Kristina Berster and her co-defendants became convinced that a fair trial was impossible. There was ample evidence that the outcome was rigged: exclusion orders against their lawyers, the treatment of prisoners, new laws, and Right-Wing propaganda. Therefore, in an open letter to the court they announced that they weren't showing up, and would instead hold a counter-trial at which they could present themselves for judgment. A huge audience, gathering from across Western Europe, attended that event. But many people left confused. 

Disagreement had erupted over the use of violence. Many people were attracted, but Berster rejected the idea. Nevertheless, persuaded that the official trial could not be just, she joined those who decided not to appear.

At first she didn't believe she would have to become a fugitive. But when "wanted" posters went up it was clear that she would not be free for long if she stayed in West Germany. By 1973 the national mood was grim, much akin to the repressive climate of the Nixon era, when the anti-war movement cracked and the country continued to reel from politically-motivated assassinations. By the time Bacchus, the informer whose testimony had originally implicated her, had recanted, she was out of the city, living on the edge, cut off from family and friends.

Perhaps leaving had been a mistake, she thought. But it was too late to turn back.

Five years later, while Berster was in Montreal looking for a way into the US, a German lawyer was being convicted of "conspiracy" for assisting his clients to maintain their identities. Kurt Groenwold, who had defended Red Army Faction leaders during the intervening years, was sentenced to two years in jail because his assistant had provided support for the suspects. Defending "enemies of the state" in anything but a perfunctory manner had become grounds for a conspiracy charge.

It was the first in a series of similar cases. The court had rejected Groenwold's argument that his clients had the right to determine the nature of their own defense. Such a defense, ruled the court, would "promote the ideas of the defendants." Those ideas were too dangerous to be heard.

The crackdown on left-leaning lawyers was no surprise. German attorneys had already been disbarred and indicted on similar charges. This served as a major incentive for Bill Kunstler to take Kristina’s case after she was caught attempting to enter the US. Groenwold's conviction reminded him of what had happened to Kristina's first attorney.

After an early attempt to disbar lawyers in 1971, the federal parliament had passed amendments pointedly labeled "Lex Baader-Meinhof." They provided prosecutors with legal grounds to bar overly-aggressive lawyers, to limit the number of lawyers on a case, and to exclude defendants from their own trials if the court believed that "they willfully caused their own unfitness."

On March 11, 1975, Groenwold was excluded from the Baader-Meinhof trial. Three months later he was disbarred. He had "only been disbarred," he thought, "perhaps because of my wealthy family associations...I have been lucky for now." But criticism of the constitution or government had become a crime, and lawyers could now be jailed for objecting to prison conditions.

"Always the so-called liberals and social democrats come to power and make the state bigger and more powerful," noted Groenwold. "They think that if they do the work of the fascists, then the fascists will never come to power. But always, the fascists eventually come to power and then the social democrats are arrested by the very policemen they hired."

In 1978, the Bertrand Russell Tribunal concluded that constitutional rights in Germany were being seriously eroded by repressive laws, censorship, and a job ban. Perhaps those chilling effects were the price of Germany's preoccupation with order. In any case, dissent was no longer to be tolerated. The prescription for social crisis was prior censorship, confiscations, blacklisting, detention, the Radical Decree, and much more.

There was also an unanticipated side effect: a new generation of terrorists. Even Andreas Baader, who had been locked up for five years by the time former SS official Hans Martin Schleyer was murdered, disapproved of such actions. On the eve of Baader’s own mysterious death from gunshot wounds, he told a chancellery official that he had never approved of, and would never approve of, terrorism in its current form of brutal actions against uninvolved citizens.

By this time, however, both the state and its enemies had gone beyond symbolic bombings and police riots. Despite protests from former Red Army supporters that terrorism provided an excuse for more repression, the violence of the new generation continued, capturing the imagination of some disaffected young people. Danny Cohn-Bendit, who had moved to Germany from France after the 1968 student uprising there, concluded that the Germany Left was trapped in a battle that was a product of German society itself.

None of this, of course, made it into the record during the Berster trial. It was one of several ironies in her situation. Rejecting the violence that had enveloped her homeland, she had left Germany only to be haunted by its specter, then exploited by the US intelligence community to justify excessive counter-terrorist tactics. 

Guilt by association was clearly a cheap shot. But it made good copy, and provided a flexible excuse for almost anything in response.

Greg Guma's new book, Dons of Time, will be published in October by Fomite Press. Next in this story, a simulated siege and following the counter-terror money.

When Dissent Becomes a Crime

The Berster Case, Part Three

In a courtroom crowded with supporters and gadflies, reporters and government minders, Kristina Berster took the witness stand on a Tuesday in October, 1978. After remaining silent for three months, the alleged "terrorist" suspect was about to present a defense.

She had attempted to cross the border from Canada prompted by a mixture of fear and hope. She'd been seeking refuge from a "counter-terrorist" fever in her homeland. "I wanted to start a new life," she said, "to live openly once again, to have a legal existence. I was no longer able to go on with life underground."

As a student at the University of Heidelberg almost a decade before she had been part of the anti-war movement and joined an alternative therapy project. The purpose of the Socialist Patients Collective was to "find out the reasons why people feel lonely, isolated and depressed and the circumstances which caused these problems," she explained. But in June 1971, as a political crackdown on dissent swept West Germany, members of the group were accused of criminal association, based on the testimony of a police informer who later recanted.

Kristina spent six months in detention, including three months in solitary confinement. In 1972, she was finally released. But a year later she faced another trial. At this point she went underground and left the country. The next years were spent in Holland, North Africa, the Middle East, and France. But after German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer, a former SS official by the way, was killed after a kidnapping she realized that it wasn't safe for her in Europe either. 

After the death of Aldo Moro in Italy leaving felt like a matter of survival. In May 1978, Stern magazine, Germany's version of Life, printed the pictures of 34 "most wanted terrorist suspects." Kristina made the list.

"Everyone arrested as an alleged terrorist is detained for between two and three years in complete isolation," she told the court. Before she could say more, however, the prosecution objected, the testimony was stricken, and the judge banned further statements on the political aspects of the case.

US Attorney William Gray's cross examination had a different objective. By using phone logs, asking why she decided to leave Europe, and digging into the origins of her fake passport, he was searching for prior contact with the New York City boutique owner who had helped her reach the US border. The questions pointed to a hidden conspiracy; in other words, support for the FBI scenario.

Since this "simple border case" was really a vehicle to expose a plot linking foreign terrorists and US activists, conviction on a minor border violation wouldn't be enough.

During her second day on the stand Kristina explained that her instructions on how to get into the US had come from Chilean refugees living in Paris. This intrigued Gray. But he was even more eager to know where she had lived during her underground years, a line of inquiry she and her lawyers hoped to avoid. Since she had stayed in Libya and South Yemen, Middle East countries out of favor with the US, her answers might prejudice the jury. Taking the Fifth, on the other hand, would undermine her credibility.

The judge urged the lawyers to strike a deal. The countries would henceforth simply be known as A and B, and Berster would simply admit that she had felt safe during the time she spent there.

On re-direct Bill Kunstler probed her decision to leave France -- not just where and who, but why. But the answer was blocked. Neither Gray nor the judge wanted testimony about her fear of persecution.

"Mr. Gray opened that door," snapped Kunstler. "No, he hasn't," the judge shot back. They were close to the confrontation that had looked inevitable since the opening moments.

A day earlier, Kunstler had issued a warning when Coffrin let Gray ask about her underground years. "All right, Judge. You are opening it," Kunstler said. 

"I am not controlling this," the judge replied. A strange admission.

"All right, as long as you are on notice that now we are going full blast," Kunstler countered. To which the judge replied hotly, "You may not be allowed to go full blast." That, too, was a warning.

Kunstler shifted to another line of questioning. Why didn't Kristina think it was wrong to enter the country secretly? It was a direct extension of questions Gray had asked, but he objected anyway.

Kunstler prowled the chamber, flashing angry glances at the prosecutor and the judge. Circling the prosecution table he returned to the podium and pounded on his notes. "I want to get to her state of mind, and why she thought she was not wrong."

Coffrin wouldn't budge: No testimony on West Germany would be admitted. Kunstler was boiling mad. Shouting, he charged that the judge had ruled consistently against the defense. If the jury had been watching, that outburst might have brought a contempt citation. But they’d been herded out earlier. 

A decade after the Chicago 8 trial, Kunstler had not lost his ability to provoke. This time around, his powerful yet studied rage led to a private conference in which the judge merely reamed him out for "impugning" the integrity of the court.

By the following day, Coffrin's attitude had softened a bit. Kristina would be allowed to explain why she felt that her actions hadn't been wrong. "I had been accused, originally, unjustly of things I had not done," she explained. "I was wanted for associating with people suspected of terrorism, and I knew that other people suspected and in jail had died under mysterious circumstances."

Gray objected but the testimony continued. About lying to border officials, she said, "I was afraid of being detained, checked out. If police agents found out I would be deported right away and I wouldn't get to contact lawyers and ask for asylum." 

But why pick the US.? "I spoke the language," she said. "It had customs and culture similar to Europe. I thought the US was independent of Germany. I thought I could find understanding and support for my situation, since this country has a long tradition of accepting refugees."

When she stepped from the witness stand the defense rested its case. But there was so much more she hadn't been permitted to say.

Next: Cracking down on freedom, off the record in Germany

Scare Tactics: Counter-terror and the Berster Case

By Greg Guma

Preventing violence. It's a basic goal of law enforcement, and if the methods are legal and ethical, actions intended to prevent potentially violent activities raise few fundamental questions. But when governments go beyond that, when they target people or groups for their views, associations, or criticisms of government policies, they cross the constitutional line.

In a 1969 US Supreme Court case, Brandenberg v. Ohio, the majority made it clear: The government can’t legally "forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or law violation except where such advocacy is directed toward inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." In other words, without a "clear and present danger," suppressing speech and punishing people for their associations are out of bounds.

By the time that ruling was issued, however, the federal government of the United States had been engaged in a covert program directed a domestic targets for years. In a 1976 report by the US Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, the program known as COINTELPRO was described as "a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence." 

The dubious premise, explained the report, was that law enforcement must "do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order."

Possibly on those grounds, but clearly at the instigation of certain major corporations, the intelligence community actively infiltrated and spied on anti-nuclear activist groups in the late 1970s. By then I was already worried about the loose and misleading use of the word “terrorist.” But until I met Kristina Berster I had no idea just how far so-called anti-terrorist “preparedness” could go.

On July 3, 1978, my son Jesse was born, the most life-altering moment I'd ever experienced. Two weeks later, just back from a week covering stock car racing in Vermont, I heard that someone had been arrested crossing the border from Canada. The newspapers were calling her a terrorist.

The public first heard about Kristina Berster on July 20, about four days after her arrest. Attempting to cross into the US on foot, she’d become lost and been nabbed by a Customs agent. At first, the FBI knew only that she was a West German citizen wanted for something called "criminal association," a crime that did not exist in the US. The source of the charge was her previous membership in a radical therapy group, the Socialist Patients Collective. According to German authorities, some of its members may later have joined the notorious Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group, a radical underground dedicated to armed struggle.

This stale, circumstantial evidence was enough to launch a nationwide terrorist scare. For FBI Director William Webster the arrest was a chance to buttress his claims that urban terrorism was on the rise, part of a push for more agents and expanded authority to investigate citizens who were "reasonably believed" to be involved in "potential" terrorist activities. So far, the requests had been denied. Instead, criticism of the Bureau was mounting as Congress discussed a charter to define and limit its activities.

Webster's July 20 press conference had a simple purpose: to announce that a foreign terrorist had been caught in a conspiracy with US citizens. Break out the duct tape! His remarks stopped short of calling Berster a member of Baader-Meinhof, but Bureau's press spokesmen quickly contacted their favorite reporters as off-the-record sources to provide additional details. The next morning newspapers across the country spread the news in bold headlines

      TERRORIST HELD AFTER ATTEMPT TO ENTER U.S.

Some accounts even printed an agent's speculation that Berster had come to Vermont in order to assassinate the president of BMW. After all, he was planning a visit to Rutland.

One of the first Vermont reporters contacted was Burlington Free Press reporter Mike Donoghue, who had excellent police contacts. He received a wake up call about the arrest early on July 20 and ripped some AP copy that directly called her a Baader-Meinhof member. When I asked him about the source of his story, Mike declined to say. But the managing editor of another Vermont daily, The Rutland Herald, revealed that FBI press officer Tom Harrington had fed the information to his reporter.

Harrington denied it. "We didn't put her with any group," he claimed. Nevertheless, most US newspapers that day called her a terrorist, using that loaded word without much hesitation. But the ruse could be maintained only for a short time. A week later, another FBI press official issued a low-key retraction. Although barely noticed, that statement admitted the Bureau had no evidence that Berster was a terrorist. 

The change in position had been forced on the FBI after West German officials issued their own statement, calling her a "fringe figure" whom they might not bother to extradite. In any case, she was now an illegal alien facing federal conspiracy charges.

By then I had become embroiled in the case. Several friends had formed a defense committee, and, in early August, I visited the Albany lockup to speak with the "terrorist" in person. What I heard was a tale of persecution and flight. The resulting cover feature was published in the “back to school” issue of the new Vermont Vanguard Press. The cover photo showed an intense young woman in shackles under heavy guard.

“Was Kristina Berster Tried and Convicted by a Prejudiced Press?” asked a cautiously provocative headline inside, above an investigative report that shared her side of the story and examined both the FBI's "disinformation" operation and the media's distribution of the distorted story.

But the Vanguard’s editor was worried that we might be going too far, and decided to hedge his bet with a disclaimer. Describing me as a member of the Defense Committee (not actually true), he noted that my story raised questions about "objectivity and conflict of interest." Fortunately, he concluded that objectivity is a myth, and that my "pro-Berster sentiments" did not prevent me from doing my job.

Still, my credibility was on the line and the FBI's manipulation of the media had proven effective. Kristina Berster might be technically innocent until proven guilty, but in the eyes of the public she was a terrorist until proven otherwise.

Greg Guma’s new novel, Dons of Time, which looks at the dangers of the surveillance state, was released in October 2013 by Fomite Press. In the next chapter of this story: Kunstler comes to court, Berster takes the stand

Searching for Peace in Cold War Germany

This is the twelfth chapter of a series excerpted from “Maverick Chronicles,” a memoir-in-progress. Previous stories can be found at VTDigger.  By Greg Guma

The interpreter warned us about getting into East Berlin. "They'll probably hold you an hour,” he predicted. “Normally, it would be a half hour but they're in a bad mood because of Brezhnev."

     The Soviet leader had died two days before and bleak predictions circulated about how the shock, along with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's fall from power earlier in the year, would affect East-West relations. None of this changed our minds. A peace meeting would be starting at an obscure church on the other side of the Berlin Wall in a little more than an hour. We didn't have the exact address and knew only a few German phrases. But the journey was worth the risk.

     Harro, the lanky blonde interpreter who was squiring us around, gently discouraged the idea. The East Germans would scalp us each for 25 marks, force us to exchange them at par for Eastern marks worth only a quarter as much. Once we returned the money would be worthless. And if we didn't make it back across the border by midnight, we could be thrown in jail.

     Quite a way to spend our second night in in the country.

     

West Berlin squatters reclaimed abandoned buildings.

     In November 1982, at the height of the Reagan era, in what felt like Cold War II, Robin Lloyd and I joined a delegation organized by The Nation. Despite a prediction by Sid Lens, one fellow traveler and senior editor of The Progressive at the time, that we would never even find our destination, crossing east seemed better than watching a transvestite nightclub act. That was the entertainment choice offered by our hotel. We set out for the train carrying only some money, passports, a map and a phrase book.

     An East German journalist had brought up the meeting earlier that day. "You can only see the peace movement when people assemble," he explained. The meeting was one of about 2,000 being held during a ten-day period called the annual "Peace Decade." All the events were being held in churches, institutions that had become the motor for a new movement.

     In response to a renewed militarization of daily life, thousands of East Germans were gathering. Some had signed the Berliner Appeal, a letter calling for an end to military training and a peace curriculum in the schools. Others wore pacifist armbands -- even after they were banned by the state and replaced with government-circulated anti-NATO emblems.

     The East German government showed open disdain for the pacifist drift of the activities, according to the journalist who gave us the tip. "In the GDR," he said, "the official meaning of peace is 'peace must be armed'." Yet after the 1979 NATO decision to deploy more than 100 Pershing missiles in West Germany, both East and West Germans saw the threat.

     "People felt that war was a real possibility," explained the writer. And so, reaction in the East grew within the only autonomous organizations in the country – churches.

With the border minutes away I reviewed what I’d heard over the last 24 hours. West Berliners were worried about the "tough words from the White House," Alex Langolios said. Alex was deputy speaker of the Berlin Parliament and a Social Democrat. "We're nervous when we hear about winning a nuclear war."

     He talked up East-West cooperation, a guarded interdependence in relation to trade, and the need to fight fear on both sides of the Wall. This Social Democrat sounded very much like an American Democrat. Echoing their warnings about the Reagan agenda, he suggested that relations could deteriorate further with the Christian Democrats taking the reins.

     In West Berlin, the Christian Democratic Party had been in control since the recent local elections. Here and elsewhere, the attraction of Social Democratic liberalism had faded with the failure of Germany's "economic miracle." The economy had stopped growing, national unemployment was over two million, and the government was resorting to debt financing. In Berlin, unemployment was over 8 percent, and up to 15 percent among the young. There were over 10,000 vacant apartments in the city, a result of both speculation and years of neglect. Yet 50,000 people were looking for homes.

     In recent years, the city's population had dropped by about 300,000 to 1.9 million, despite aggressive attempts to lure new industry, subsidies from the national government, and even a legal loophole that allowed young people to defer military service as long as they lived in West Berlin. On the other hand, what had grown was the number of squatters and Turkish guest workers, the latter exacerbating the unemployment situation.

     "Berliners think this city is the center of the world," Langolios confided. Still, he had to admit that social stress was bringing the viability of the center into question.

     The story was similar across the country. After 15 years with Social Democrats in charge, the consensus had cracked. Economic stagnation, combined with the cumulative strain of being a front line state in the struggle between East and West, became too much for Chancellor Schmidt. In late September, his coalition partners, the Free Democrats, had called for severe budget cutting. Before the issue was resolved, the small party -- representing less than ten percent of the national vote, with support mainly from entrepreneurs and professionals – deserted the Social Democrats and joined with the Christian Democrats to topple the government.

     The center split and the fate of the nation was up for grabs.

Getting through customs turned out to be no problem. The East Berlin officials barely glanced at our passports before issuing temporary visas and collecting a five mark entry fee. Minutes later we were on a windy street looking for directions to Auferstehung Kirchengemeinde, the Church of the Resurrection, where one of the peace meetings was already underway. About 55 similar gatherings had already taken place during the last week in East Berlin alone.

     Flags were at half-mast in honor of Brezhnev. Otherwise it felt like a “normal” night as we hailed a cab. For five marks the driver took us out of the neon-lit central district, past a 20-foot portrait of Lenin, to a dark street, and pointed to a barely visible building across the wide road.

     

Banned peace symbol

Inside the church, in a modest chapel, about 70 people were listening to a dialogue between a young pacifist churchman and a burly spokesman for the Christian Democratic Party – in this case an East German satellite of the Communist Party hoping to appeal to the religious. After a while Robin stood up to deliver a short speech in German. She offered good wishes, a peace button and a photo collection chronicling the massive disarmament march and rally in New York the previous June.

     "Speak English," someone yelled.

     When we explained that we couldn't follow the discussion, a young man volunteered to translate. Ret was a garrulous, worldly rebel, a self-described "anarchist not a terrorist," and admirer of the guru Rajneesh. His main complaint about life under socialism was the inability to obtain books about his favorite topics.

     After chiding the speakers for talking too long, members of the audience addressed the need to incorporate an ecological perspective in the peace movement and break down "ideological blocks." One voice urged a "revolution of Christians, without weapons, a non-aggressive approach to break the circle."

     The churchman at the head table offered support. "There are many ways to the goal," he said. "We must try to see every possibility. There are many faces of pacifism in this city." But the Party spokesman objected that "the situation is too dangerous. We must work together, for there will be no weeping after a nuclear war."

     The dialogue expanded, gradually revealing frustration with official resistance to the peace movement. Most people were in their twenties and thirties, sober-looking men and women dressed in work clothes. Sitting directly across from us, however, was a young woman who looked as if she had been airlifted in from downtown West Berlin. Chains and safety-pins adorned her blue jeans, going well with her orange hairdo. Her jacket featured a handmade version of the banned symbol of the pacifist peace movement, a man hammering a sword into a plowshare.

     She and her boyfriend, wearing denim and a collection of Western buttons, were reminders of the influence of Western media on the East. Their wardrobes were statements of revolt that could easily provoke police persecution. There was no youth culture on this side of the Wall to provide cover for such defiance.

     The group in the church wasn't anti-socialist, but there were serious complaints about the government's approach to peace. "We want one peace movement in all the world," said one man, "but we want it to be creative." Another challenged the party spokesman to explain, "Why are there lessons for war and not for peace?" This was a reference to the military curriculum in schools and the military camps youngsters had to attend during holidays.

     The party man tried to steer discussion back to what he called "objective" issues, urging mutual respect and obedience to the law. It just isn't possible for anyone to simply make a placard and parade in the streets, he advised. This increased the anger growing in the audience. In response, the church spokesman urged that his institution become “a forum for the whole society to discuss these issues."

     Sensing that things were careening out of control, the moderator called for a ten-minute recess.

     As we headed for the hall, a silent observer at the back of the chapel handed me a calling card. It read: Lynn J. Turk, Second Secretary and Vice Consul, American Embassy. He was a diplomat, he said, assigned to study the East German peace movement, and offered to fill us in before providing an escort us back across the border.

     At a comfortable apartment, with his South Korean wife listening, Turk traced the emergence of the East German peace movement to the 1979 NATO "double track" decision. The two "tracks" were a) negotiations for nuclear arms reductions, and b) deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles if those negotiations fell through. After the announcement, the churches had geared up to protest.

     But the movement hadn't blossomed until 1981, when about 6,000 people met across the street from a bombed out church ruin in Dresden on the anniversary of the devastating 1945 US attack on that city. West German television recorded the ‘81 event, beaming it back east. At about the same time Pastor Rainer Eppelmann initiated what became known as the Berliner Appeal.

     The Appeal called for the prohibiting of military toy sales, the outlawing of military training, peace information in the schools -- including study of peaceful solutions to conflict, ecology and psychology, no retaliation against those who refused military service, and no more military demonstrations at festivals or national holidays.

     According to Turk, the Appeal campaign was being eroded by government repression. The plowshares symbol had been banned and replaced by the state, and non-Christian activists were being pressured into exile or silence. But the crackdown still stopped at the doors of the church. The reason for this tolerance, he theorized, was that "repression here would damage the West German peace movement, confirming the West's view of the East."

     Though claiming he opposed first strike weapons, Turk viewed the East as a serious military threat and East Germany as a totalitarian society whose rulers only allowed peaceniks to meet for the most cynical of reasons. He meanwhile claimed that the Soviets had stationed tactical nuclear weapons in East Germany, a piece of likely disinformation I was unable to confirm in any with any government official or activist.

     Minutes before midnight we arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. From Turk's car I could see the eight-foot corrugated fence, and beyond it the cement-covered no man's land known as the Wall. To make certain no one escaped, rumor had it, the East Germans even checked under the cars with mirrors.

     Turk urged us to ask East German officials why the Wall was still up. "They'll say it's an anti-fascist wall," he predicted, implying that the real reason was that most people would race across the border if given the chance. When I finally did question an East German bureaucrat about this, he said the wall had been erected – and was maintained – to prevent black market destabilization of the economy, along with an exodus of East German professionals lured by higher pay on the other side.

     After 15 minutes the border guard returned our passports, but chided us for not returning by the same route we’d used to enter. On the other hand, he barely looked inside the vehicle before lifting the metal gate to let us pass and I could see no evidence of mirrors on the ground.

A New Political Culture

When an old West Berlin factory complex in Kreuzberg was slated for demolition in 1979, squatters moved into the empty front apartments to save it and an alternative community was born. Over the next few years the Kerngehause squatters held a consortium of speculators at bay and launched a variety of collective projects. By 1982, groups living and working out of the address were running food and taxi coops, a metal shop, language and alternative energy groups, a self-help health project, as well as a theater and a rock group.

     The squatters, who paid rent into an escrow account used for renovations, were part of a citywide alternative culture. Kerngehause was one of many attempts to deal with unemployment and emotional alienation by developing a dual economic and social structure. Although not all squatter houses were as evolved, most shared a tradition of open revolt against conventional lifestyles and exploitive relations.

     Berlin's alternative movement developed in the '70s as many college-educated young people realized that "over industrialized" Germany provided too few jobs while restricting personal choice. They formed collectives, started an alternative daily newspaper, set up their own bank, and gradually entered electoral politics. The squatters, about 2,000 clustered at more than 130 locations, dramatically illustrated the style of the movement. While police squads swooped down on some houses, groups liberated new locations, remodeling and improving their dwellings. When electricity was cut off, they surreptitiously tied into cables. 

     The links between groups were informal, yet an attitude of solidarity brought them together for demonstrations, cultural happenings and mutual aid. They were part of a broad alliance of peace, anti-nuclear, women's and cultural groups.

     The movement's center was Kreuzberg, a crumbling neighborhood that still showed scars of wartime bombing. It had since become a haven for the young and many of the city's 120,000 Turkish guest workers, as well as a stronghold for the Alternative Liste, a new political movement with representation in the local parliament.

     An enormous chasm separated the values of the Alternatives from the lifestyles of mainstream Berlin. The collectivist ethics, the desire to reintegrate life and work, the dedication to a no-growth, small scale economy were foreign to most Berliners. In some respects, in fact, West Berlin was more American than some US cities, a neon wonderland, a pumped-up conspicuous consumption society, and a high-tech haven where conservative feathers were ruffled mainly by the sex shops along the main drags.

     The Alternatives had nevertheless made a dent, here and elsewhere in Germany. Expressing its agenda mainly through the Green Party, the movement had effectively raised a variety of environmental issues, winning representation in a half dozen regions. It had begun with massive protests against nuclear power plants and unnecessary demolitions, mushrooming into a nationwide political alliance which aimed at halting nuclear weapons deployment and unlimited economic growth.

     I’d seen some of the most visible signs -- painted buildings in squatter zones. Before leaving the city I wanted to get behind the walls. A theater production at Kerngehause provided the opportunity; the Ratibor Theater was presenting "Banal," a punk-rock collection of satirical skits about the foibles of middle class life.

     A youthful four-person cast played the instruments, performed pantomime, used high-tech toys as props, and displayed various symbols of mass society to demonstrate their apparent contempt for consumerism and the sexual games of the straight world. The music sounded a bit like Elvis Costello. After two hours the performance ended with a dreamy swimming sequence, possibly symbolizing a freer lifestyle. The actors glided in slow motion as the audience waved an enormous plastic canopy overhead.

     A few days and hundreds of miles later, in the industrial city of Dortmund, a Green Party member put the alternative movement into perspective. "We're trying to develop a new political culture," said Lucas Lucasik. "Some of us say we can do something inside the existing system; others speak for fundamental opposition."

     Lucas said that neither the peace movement nor the Green Party had yet developed clear solutions to the economic and foreign policy problems confronting the country. But he reminded me that the party itself, only three years old at the time, was being forced to deal with issues that were often beyond the resources and expertise of such a young movement.

     "We have problems explaining what we want to voters," he admitted candidly, "especially when Christian Democrats say we aren't democratic, that we don't want to take responsibility, and would make the country ungovernable. We're not running to make a coalition with any party, we are developing our own strong positions. We would lose our supporters if we changed. We don't want to rule. We want to change the whole society."

From Sachsenhausen to Bonn

On a cloudy day we bussed into East Germany for a tour arranged by the Communist government's US Friendship Committee. At Sachsenhausen, a World War II concentration camp about 30 miles outside Berlin, we were greeted by former inmate Werner Handler, a news editor who recounted the horrors of Hitler fascism.

     The camp's grounds were crowded with German tourists, but not to take in the museum's memorabilia. They had come instead for army induction ceremonies. Russian troops stood at attention beside German recruits in an open park where the barracks once stood. Handler explained how he had managed, at age 18, to get out of the camp alive, reach Britain, and join the Communist Party.

     After the war he was expelled from West Germany for his political leanings and, taking a job at the Voice of the GDR radion station, became a true believer in socialism. When I pressed him about the government crackdown on peace activists and the banning of the Plowshares emblem, he evaded the issue but offered a ride back to town. In his private car, Handler admitted that the government may have been too heavy-handed. 
     Pacifists are naive, he argued, but argument is preferable to police action.

     

A Russian soldier observed ceremonies at Sachsenhausen,
a concentration camp that became a memorial park.

At a public gathering two hours later, he reverted to the official line. "For us this pacifist position is an opening for morally disarming education," he charged. The Americans touted the virtues of dissent, while the East Germans saw no need for an independent peace movement. Pointing out that many East German leaders were once in Nazi camps, Handler asserted that, "These men need no pushing to work for peace."

     After an exhausting day we piled onto an overnight train bound for the West. By morning we were in Dortmund, a cross between Detroit and Pittsburgh in the industrial heartland. At a nuclear power plant, public relations men treated us to meals, generous portions of statistics, and bureaucratese about the safety of the technology.

    "We have plenty of salt caverns for the waste," one expert said.

    "Will you take ours then?"

     "Sure."

     Later, I talked with Greens about the need for nukes and other baseload power sources. The answer wasn't reassuring. "Too much energy is on the market," said Siggie Kock, a chimney sweep. As he saw it, the real problem was the production of too many unnecessary items. Not the type of response geared to inspiring confidence among industrial workers.

     Asking the radicals about economics was almost as frustrating as discussing pacifism with the East German authorities. With strong convictions but little more, most Greens argued simply that "neither the capitalist nor the socialist way will work." They were searching for a "third way." What was it? They weren't quite sure yet.

     In Koln, after a church/Communist Party peace rally held in front of the cathedral, I pursued the issue with some of the organizers. One of them, a Communist named Christine, offered a thumbnail critique of the Greens. "In ten years they may not exist," she predicted. "They don't relate to the workers. The women's and other movements are strong, but you can't change anything without the workers."

     Christine’s vision was that the peace movement would continue to transcend party lines, bringing on a "new moment in history." But she also feared that the rightward drift of the nation might be too much to overcome.

     Other Germans expressed doubts about the Greens. "They're very green," Werner Handler joked. "They're very conservative," said a PR man at the power plant. Maybe the critics were correct. Still, they’d managed to build significant local bases of power, define a fresh and revolutionary ecological perspective, and catalyze the nation. Blacklisting was clearly part of the reason that the Communist Party had been marginalized, despite its union ties. The Greens were different; their decentralized, holistic approach was both radical and conservative.

     They wanted a fundamental change from a "profit-oriented to a life-oriented order," explained Roland Vogt, a Party co-chair. Using electoral means, fusing the theories of E.F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich with the nonviolence of Gandhi, their goal was to influence the existing system while simultaneously swaying people with their ideas.

     During a meeting at the Party's Bonn headquarters, Vogt outlined the strategy: "Our main purpose is to get out of the vicious cycle of nuclear energy and prevent the deployment of Pershing 2 missiles. Representation in the Bundestag would help, but we wouldn't form a coalition. As the weaker partner, I wouldn't propose marriage."

     But would the party compromise?

     "The base on which you make compromises is when something can be divided. But growth is no longer divisible. It's an all or nothing thing."

     The time had come to hear from the other side. At the Konrad Adenauer House, home of the Christian Democratic Party, Deputy Speaker Walter Bruckmann was ready to oblige. The Social Democrats had failed, he said, because their state-oriented solutions were too socialistic. His party was ready to let the market work and free people to solve their own problems.

    It sounded very Reagan-esque. "The best social security against a Soviet invasion is a strong military," he said. Willing to pay lip service to the overall good intentions of peace activists at first, he was soon criticizing their "illusions" and pointing out some subversive tendencies -- pacifism and communism --that undermined national security.

     He ultimately defended the blacklisting of radicals. "We have to protect democracy against our enemies," he explained.

     A generation gap was clearly haunting the country. There wasn’t much room for dialogue between eco-radicals and Christian conservatives. Not even the peace movement transcended the barrier between older Germans, trapped in a fortress mentality, and a younger generation for whom power was part of the problem.

     After listening to Bruckmann I could see the fractures growing, along with more demonstrations, civil disobedience, and perhaps even violence. Millions were coming to grips with the possibility that the birthplace of the last war also could be the flashpoint for the next.

     In East Germany Werner Handler had warned, "Unimaginable things can happen." The same realization was making the peace movement more than a single issue campaign. For many people it was becoming a matter of survival.

Next: Nicaragua and the Contra War

The Ultimate Reality of Karl Marx

Part 17 of Prisoners of the Real

Born as Europe moved from a time of crowded change into a period of lethargy, descended from Rabbis, and abandoning his Protestant upbringing early in life, Karl Marx was a student during a time of intense intellectual development in Germany. The neo-Hegelian group he joined, led by Ludwig Feuerback, had rejected Hegel's notion of providence behind the cosmic process. Although Marx managed to avoid rational skepticism, he concluded, under Feuerback's influence, that religion, like all products of the mind, was derived from material conditions, and that these conditions determined the life of the community. In The German Ideology, he wrote:

"The phantoms formed in the human brain are also necessarily sublimates of their material life-processes, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology, and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development….Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

After a year of frustrating work as a journalist in Cologne, which ended in his censorship by the Prussian government, Marx moved to Paris – to socialism, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Engels. But under Prussian prodding, Paris also became unfriendly after two years. Marx next moved to Brussels, and it was there that the "communist league" was born in 1847. The vision described in The Communist Manifesto was a classless society in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange were owned by the community, and from which the State had disappeared:

"If the proletariat during its contact with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

"In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

But the highway to the abolition of capitalism, said Marx and Engels, has an extended detour known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, sometimes described as state socialism or, when the means of production are administered for the community by the state, state capitalism. Critics of Marxism have long argued that the State's ultimate disappearance and the birth of the communal association were never more than mythology; the reality of communism, they say, is illustrated best by Russia from Lenin to Gorbachev.

Marx, of course, didn't have the benefit of hindsight. And although he felt strongly that the philosopher should be an agent of change, he was less concerned about the potential dangers of a communist State than the process of dialectical materialism. Retaining Hegelian concepts, he rejected Idealist philosophy and claimed that his dialectical method was not only different than Hegel's but its direct opposite:

"To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.' With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."

Thus, Marx stripped dialectic of its remaining mystical form, making the material world the ultimate reality. For Hegel, the Absolute contained both mind and nature. Marx applied the idea solely to the material world,. Mind was merely a by-product. In his essentially scientific philosophy, the material world was the only relevant matter.

Nevertheless, Marx did oppose the older materialists who suggested that sensations from the external world provide immediate knowledge. Perception of the environment, he argued, was only part of the process of acting upon it. Knowledge was bound up with action; together they created Praxis. Only through practice could the truth of theory be ascertained:

"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.... Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."

Marx assumed that sensations give us accurate copies of external reality, "mirror reflections of things." Once again skeptical observation and an orientation toward mastery of nature are prescribed as appropriate corollaries to the search for knowledge, which now took on the character of a revolutionary doctrine.

Marxism had several elements: dialectical philosophy, with its laws of transformation, unity of opposites and negation of the negation; the system of political economy, including the labor theory of value; and the theory of the State and revolution. The cornerstone of Marx' philosophical system was his theory of value: that labor alone creates it. Competition, he wrote, forces capitalists to accumulate private property, and to use technology to produce more goods. But an increase in the proportion of constant to variable capital reduces profits, and the number of capitalists decreases under competition as "one capitalist always kills many."

Weaker capitalists are progressively driven into the ranks of the wage-earners; the "misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation" of workers at capitalist hands escalates as more are driven into the industrial reserve army, where they must work for lower wages: "The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capital packaging. This packaging is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

According to Marx, the combination of workers in a "cooperative form of labor-process" for their own protection will eventually create a force to destroy the capitalist system, strained to the limit largely through the replacement of humans by machines. Nevertheless, he favored increases in production tied to technological improvements, what he called "conscious technical application of science," and had no sympathy for inefficiency. Changes in the mode of production were for him the central determinants of social change, a force he assumed to be beyond human control. The value of humanity was therefore the net effect of its labor upon the economic system, an unfortunate capitulation to practice and betrayal of ongoing praxis. Since cultural change relied only on outer factors, a denigration of subjective life was clearly implied. The individual was the object and victim of external forces and institutions that could only be affected by "objective" experience and labor.

Materialism and dialectics compelled Marxists to attack idealist philosophy, demeaning its non-scientific basis, its so-called roots in ignorance, and its relation to religion, which he defined as mere quackery. Knowledge of the world, he was certain, isn’t conditioned by the senses, but rather is a jigsaw puzzle with a core of absolute truth that becomes more visible as knowledge increases. A crucial assumption of classic Marxism and its later variations was ultimate control by external "productive forces," leading to productive relations between human beings within an efficient and finally cooperative society.

In a classless society, mechanisms that have increased misery will eventually serve humanity. In relying on the destruction of past institutions to create a virtuous world, Marx also embraced the principle of "improvement through movement."

In the final years of the 19th century, unexamined faith in the promise of technology became a common theme. Scientific discovery was transforming the natural world into a machine-based environment. Scientific management basically restated renaissance rationalism, an old idea re-tailored for the new managers of the western world. Humanity was becoming the servant of forces it had unleashed.

Ironically, Karl Marx added his voice to this unfolding thesis. He assured the world that a technical cure could be applied to the spreading disease of mechanism.

Next: Conditional Ascension & Factual Fetishism

To read other chapters, go to Prisoners of the Real: An Odyssey