DIARY // anarcho comik-book
“wishing you happy holidays and a relaxing vacation from the hot summer of 1968”
Hiya--
First off, a quick programming note:
⮑ If you’re a fan of experimental CanCon, rejoice in the holy knowledge that I will be guest-hosting this week’s Christmas Eve episode of If You Got Ears, the long-running noise show on Montréal’s CKUT radio station which has come in for multiple mentions on this site. I love CKUT and freeform radio and the idea of ripping a two hour show for the first time in like fifteen years. Thank you Moskos! Anyway, if you’re into it, maybe tune in Wednesday, 12/24 at 12:00 noon eastern on ckut.ca, but don’t tune in too hard cuz the thing’ll also be archived.
Now:
Earlier this month, in advance of an upcoming project, I spent one of those really sick archival days at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library working through selections from its world-class collection of postwar counterculture holdings. Though I requested and checked out materials from across a wide swath of geographic and historical zones (you can too), most of what I gripped bore some relation to the themes and research proclivities already well in evidence on this site: Italian student protest, factionalisms and dickishness in the French avant-garde, and the German opposition’s turn from pranky careerism to political violence.
This week--and as a cozy auf Wiedersehen to our continuing coverage of the year that was--I’m highlighting a few really choice finds from that last category. Below, several of my fave selections from the Beinecke’s German counterculture archives, including another visit from our pals at Kommune I: a downpayment on future research, a useful reminder of just how fucking similar the story was last time, and maybe even some useful stuff for you to yell at your family this holiday season.
Enjoy, and catch you in January.
A page from 1973’s AF Comix, purportedly Germany’s first underground comix mag. Sez our hero holding the copy of Anarcho Comik-Book: “Ugly images and idiotic text!! Utopian objectives... Open terror! Cheap sex! Moronic, miserable plots... Filth!”
A page from the anarchist underground newspaper Hundert Blumen. One ass-kicked protester to the other: “I’m more revolutionary than you are!!!”
A page from Charlie Kaputt, featuring Daniel Cohn-Bendit as the superhero “Dany Marxman.” Here, our hero crashes the West German Parliament session to make a big speech on behalf of the East German–aligned Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin, turns the Siemens corporation’s Betriebsrat (a shop floor Social Democratic–style “works council”) into a council communist Arbeiterrat (“Worker’s Council”), and sends the cops hightailing at West Berlin’s May Day parade. Equal goes it loose, baby!!
Fragment from a June 21, 1968 letter, purportedly from the Kommune I residents, tucked into an old issue of Charlie Kaputt. The text appears to be a tongue-in-cheek attack on the student movement’s capitulations to authorities in the days of the restrictive Emergency Acts--one of the results of which was Kommunard Fritz Teufel’s being thrown in Moabit prison, a development which itself prompted widespread hunger strikes.
Get in touch if you know more of the specifics here! Meantime, translation below.
[…] Where they belong. Today they’re still at the criminal police station—but tomorrow they’ll be back in the university offices.
At last, semester certificates, discounted airfare applications, and other documents important for the term break are available again.
How did this happen?
We kept hearing from the AStA1 and APO2 that the average student couldn’t understand why they should have to suffer because of our political ambitions.
Just because we had something against bureaucracy, they couldn’t go on vacation. And that was difficult for the AStA and APO, since they represent the interests of the students.
This made us think, and we had to admit that we couldn’t simply sell out those people who just wanted to go on term break.
Therefore, we helped the police with the search.
To our delight, they are now back—and just in time!
Wishing you happy holidays and a relaxing vacation from the hot summer of 1968,
Your
Kommune I (June 21, 1968)
P.S. Summer jobs available at the Kommune Factory, Moabit, Stephanstraße 60, backyard.3
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'.____)The Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss, the parliamentarian student-union–type organization present at all large German universities.
The Außerparlamentarische Opposition, the catchall term for the era’s semi-organized West German protest movement, largely (though not entirely) comprising students. Kommune I’s onetime collaborator/lasting frenemy Rudi Dutschke was its acknowledged spokesman.
Anyone interested in what stands on the site of Kommune I today will be pleased to learn it’s a short-term vacation rental operated by a company called BERLINLOFTS UG.