Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement

196 Pages·2012·5.755 MB·English

by  Geronimo, George Katsiaficas, Gabriel Kuhn

FIRE AND
FLAMES

FIRE AND
FLAMES
a history of the
german autonomist
movement
written by Geronimo
introduction by George Katsiaficas
translation and afterword
by Gabriel Kuhn
FIRE AND FLAMES:
A History of the German Autonomist Movement
c. 2012 the respective contributors.
This edition
c. 2012 PM Press
Originally published in Germany as:
Geronimo. Feuer und Flamme. Zur Geschichte der Autonomen.
Berlin/Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv, 1990. This translation is based
on the fourth and final, slightly revised edition of 1995.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-097-9
LCCN: 2010916482
Cover and interior design by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
Images provided by HKS 13 (http://plakat.nadir.org)
and other German archives.
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of
Thomson-Shore in Dexter, MI.
www.thomsonshore.com
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Translator’s Note and Glossary 9
Preface to the English-Language Edition 13
Background 17
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I. THE EMERGENCE OF
AUTONOMOUS POLITICS IN WEST GERMANY 23
A Taste of Revolution: 1968 25
The Student Revolt 26
The Student Revolt and the Extraparliamentary Opposition 28
The Politics of the SDS 34
The Demise of the SDS 35
Militant Grassroots Currents 37
What Did ’68 Mean? 38
La sola soluzione la rivoluzione:
Italy’s Autonomia Movement 39
What Happened in Italy in the 1960s? 39
From Marxism to Operaismo 40
From Operaio Massa to Operaio Sociale 42
The Autonomia Movement of 1977 43
Left Radicalism in the 1970s 47
“We Want Everything!”:
Grassroots Organizing in the Factories 48
The Housing Struggles 52
The Sponti Movement at the Universities 58
A Short History of the K-Groups 59
The Alternative Movement 61
The Journal Autonomie 63
The Urban Guerrilla and Other Armed Groups 66
The German Autumn of 1977 69
A Journey to TUNIX 71
II. THE MAKING OF THE
AUTONOMEN IN THE 1980S 77
The Antinuclear Movement: 1975-81 85
Brokdorf 86
Political and Social Composition of the
Antinuclear Movement in the 1970s 87
1978-80: Can You Close Drill Holes with Fences? 90
The Brokdorf Resistance, 1980-81 90
A Short Summary 97
The Squatters’ Movement
in West Berlin: 1980-83 99
The Concept of Autonomy and the Housing
Struggle in West Berlin 101
The End of the Housing Struggle 105
The Struggle Against the Startbahn-West 107
The Isolation of the Autonomen
in the German Peace Movement 111
III. A FEW SKETCHES OF THE AUTONOMOUS
MOVEMENT DURING THE FINAL YEARS OF
THE WEST GERMAN REPUBLIC 119
Class Movements and Mass Movements 123
Between Balaclavas and Birkenstocks:
The Autonomous Movement and the Greens 125
Autonomen, Anti-imperialists,
and the Urban Guerrilla 127
The Antinuclear Movement of the 1980s 131
Wackersdorf 132
The Nuclear Disaster of Chernobyl 134
In Hamburg There Is a Beautiful Hafenstraße 141
In West Berlin There Is a Wonderful Kreuzberg 147
The Kreuzberg Riot of May 1, 1987 148
The 1987 Reagan Visit 149
Autonomous Community Organizing 152
Revolutionary May 1 154
Wrong Shots at the Startbahn-West 157
Attacks on the Autonomous Women’s Movement 165
The IMF and World Bank Summit 167
1989 169
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Appendix: “Autonomous Theses 1981“ 173
Afterword 177

INTRODUCTION
BY GEORGE KATSIAFICAS
More than a decade before the Seattle protests against the
WTO, tens of thousands of people in Berlin confronted a global
gathering of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—
the most powerful wizards of high finance, and they compelled the
world’s bankers to adjourn hastily a day earlier than planned. Between
1981 and 1984, hundreds of thousands of Germans marched for
peace, and they helped bring an end to the nuclear arms race and
the Cold War between the United States and USSR. Among the par-
ticipants in these and many other actions were radical youth who had
occupied hundreds of abandoned buildings and challenged patriarchy
while also fighting against forms of domination in everyday life. Allied
with farmers and ecologists, they successfully stopped the attempt of
Germany’s nuclear power industry to produce weapons-grade urani-
um. Out of the crucible of all these struggles, the autonomous move-
ment, or Autonomen, was galvanized as a force resisting the corporate
system as a whole and seeking a thoroughgoing revolution of it.
Autonomous social movements do not subscribe to one ideol-
ogy—within their ranks, Marxist-Leninists fight the system along-
side anarchist feminists and anti-imperialist Turks. They do not seek
to capture nation-states but to destroy them. They want to abolish
politics as we know it—as the playground for generals, politicians, and
businessmen. They want to destroy the existing system because they
see it as the cause of war, starvation, poverty, and daily monotony.
Autonome do not have one central organization. As one group
acts, another is inspired to rise up, and they, in turn, galvanize yet