In Europe

Arriving at 6 p.m., he found the entire community still fast asleep. The two televisions in the building were on all the time, albeit with the volume turned down. When the communards finallyleft their beds, they sat staring at the screens in silence. In his report, Berke said they were all high, despite their initial rejection of drugs as a ‘bourgeois distraction from the political revolution’.
    Commune I had been set up in March 1967 by Fritz Teufel. Teufel's notoriety began after he broke into the dean's office at the Freie Universität, took his cigars, toga and chain of office, then rode a bicycle through the corridors to the auditorium, where he allowed the cheering student body to appoint him the school's new dean. His first official act was to sack all of the unpopular professors. Teufel spent more time in jail than outside it. In imitation of the Dutch Provos, his Commune 1 used constant provocations to lure ‘the system’ into betraying its ‘true nature’ as aggressive, repressive and capitalistic.
    A former Amsterdam activist once told me how shocked he had been by the violent character of the Berlin demonstrations. Provo toted cap guns, carried banners with nothing written on them, but the members of Commune I had no such sense of humour. ‘In Holland, a nod was sufficient, as long as you observed a few rules. But in Berlin, that disciplined marching back and forth and then standing to attention … We thought it was scary, it wasn't our kind of thing.’
    When Rudi Dutschke, who lived in the commune for a time, refused to abandon the ‘bourgeois private relationship’ with ‘his’ Gretchen, the group took a vote and decided to go into collective psychoanalysis. Klaus Röhl, husband of the journalist Ulrike Meinhof and editor-in-chief of
Konkret
, said the commune seemed to him to be a group of neglected, over-privileged adolescents who had been given ‘too much pocket money and too little human affection’.
    ‘They lived,’ he said, ‘like Russian revolutionaries in the winter of 1917–18, wearing leather jackets and grubby trousers which they didn't bother to remove when they lay down to sleep somewhere. They ate and slept irregularly, sent their children to school irregularly, and only attended the university in order to hand out pamphlets and shout manifestos through their megaphones. When – despite this detailed replication of decor and lifestyle – the revolution failed to materialise, when it turned out (as Dutschke had predicted long before) that there was no way to avoid the long, grinding and rather unromantic march through the halls of the established order, they became disillusioned.’
    In spring 1967, 300 people were killed in a fire in a Brussels department store. Soon afterwards, Fritz Teufel and his fellow communards Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin began handing out pamphlets in which responsibility for the fire was attributed to Belgian ‘cells’ who actively opposed the war in Vietnam, and suggesting that their example might very well be followed in Germany. ‘300 fattened citizens and their exciting lives were snuffed out, and Brussels became Hanoi.’
    Teufel and an accomplice were arrested for inciting arson. That summer, during a violent demonstration against a visit to Germany by the Shah of Persia – ‘The new Hitler!’ – a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was killed by a police bullet. A few months later Dutschke was gunned down by a neo-Nazi. Students all over the country took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands.
    In April 1968, Baader and Ensslin made their first real attempt at burning down the Schneider department store in Munich. During their trial that October, rioting broke out. About 400 sympathisers were arrested. The demonstrators chanted: ‘What is civilisation? Is it a Mercedes? A nice house? Is it a soothed conscience? I ask you again, comrades, what is civilisation?’
    In late 1968, Ralph Blumenthal of the
New York Times
visited Commune 1 and found only one female member and a couple of men still living there. Ulrich Enzensberger, brother of the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, sat there ‘stoned, examining his painted fingernails’. The last communards lived largely from giving interviews on the subject of revolution and capitalism, and they demanded hefty sums for doing so.
    From the early 1970s, Baader, Ensslin, Horst Mahler and others banded together to form the Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF).