Few Germans grasp this. Few German journalists ever chat about this. Few German politicians want to engage in chat forums on the topic. So, this is one of those oddball historical essays that I occasionally tell.
On the evening of the 2nd of June, 1967....the Red Army Faction, or the Baader-Meinhof Gang episode started up.
No one ever says why this decision was made, but the Shah of Iran decided to make a trip to West Berlin. It was publicized and known at least a week or two prior to the visit. If you'd asked most working class Germans to even identify Mohammad Reza Pahlavi....I doubt if more than one-percent could have picked out his picture and suggested his significance in the world. With the intellectual crowd via the German university system? I would take a guess that fifty-percent of them could identify him and his position in the world.
His folks decided that making attending a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute at the Deutsche Opera House in West-Berlin was a safe bet. This attendance was also publicized ahead of time. You can go back and ask why....but today, no says much over this.
So, there's this university student there as part of this protest group. The guy....Benno Ohnesorg.
At the time, Benno was 26 years old. His studies area Oddly, German language and 'romance' writing. He would have been a writer at the end of this educational experience.
A protest was organized there at the Opera House, and Benno was to attend as a protester. It should be noted, this was the first ever protest that he'd ever attended.
At some point in the Flute opera deal....the Shah's secret police bodyguards got into some tirade with the anti-Shah folks, and some pro-Shah folks were in the mix as well. How many pro-Shah Iranians lived in West Berlin? Well, no one has ever picked up this topic and it's hard to say if these were real Iranian pro-Shah people or fake Iranian pro-Shah people.
The anti-Shah people? Video of the protest that night is almost impossible to find. Images suggest some folks looking Arab-like, but most of the anti-Shah people....were German university students. Why were they anti-Shah? They appear to have gotten some message that the Shah was 'evil', and if you asked them to detail their anti-Shah stance....I doubt if you would have gotten more than a 3x5 card of info on this necessity for the demonstration.
So, things got violent at this protest....fairly quick. German cops show up.....in force.
Somewhere in a sidestreet area, along Krumme Strasse (66)....this kid Ohnesorg was exiting the mess. Had he turned west on Bismark Strasse....a one-minute walk would have put you at the subway station, and he would have escaped off into the night, and none of this Red Army thing would have mattered.
But there on Krumme Strasse....Ohnesorg got shot by a plain-clothing cop...Karl-Heinz Kurras. The ambulance got called....taking a dead Ohnesorg down to the hospital....there was nothing much that they could do for him.
Authorities investigate Kurras....there's a trial....and an acquittal (roughly five months later).
Who was Kurras? For 30 years....just a cop.
Around 2009, it was figured out via document studies from the East German secret police (Stasi)....that he was a paid collaborator with them. There's nothing in the files to say that he was ordered to shoot someone....just that he had connections to the Stasi.
The odds of this being a planned objective of the Stasi? It's just one of those odd events that surprises you years later, and you have to wonder if Ohnesorg was just selected at random to be shot and this triggers massive anger among the university crowd of Germany.
What happens in the next six months after this event is a massive show of frustration among university students and martyr status given to Ohnesorg ends up with statue, next to the Opera House.
Without the Shah's attendance of the opera, there is no dead Ohnesorg, no suggested involvement of the Stasi, and potentially no start up of the Baader Meinhof Gang.
No comments:
Post a Comment