Years ago, I visited the famous “M99 Dry Goods and Revolution Supplies Store” in Berlin, a must on any tourist itinerary. The name is ironically-old fashioned. It’s a legendary store and meeting-place operated by a cantankerous old anarchist, and it’s filled with spray-paint, balaclavas, supplies for occupying houses and keeping the cops out, and of course, revolutionary literature. It’s been repeatedly searched by cops, and the owner threatened with eviction. Yet it enjoys the support of the Berlin left scene, and is still going, albeit not in its original location (Manteuffelstraße 99, hence ‘M99’)
While there, I bought a small pamphlet entitled: “Communist Child-Rearing:”
The contents are:
- Socialist work with education problems today
- Socialist child-rearing in the family
- Socialist education
- Communist children’s groups (Weimar)
- Toleration or encouragement of children’s sexuality
- A socialist children’s home
The inside cover:
Here we find a list of other pamphlets in the series, including a few writings by notorious quack Wilhelm Reich, and works on “The Sexual Revolution in Russia”; “Children’s Sexuality in Nature-Peoples”; and “Theses on Self-Help” by the “Patient Collective”.
A few pages in, we see this pronouncement:
This brochure must be and is: a slap in the face to anyone who believes they can win back a piece of their lost happiness by psychanalytic (sic) tinkering, who — sunk into a left-bourgeois subculture — now want to pull their children into it as well, to create a happy little garden colony on the margins of the repressive society.
Drive forward the organization of the working class by exposing the class character of modern education!
What we have here, obviously, is a mirror into the extreme-left subculture of Germany in the early 1970s.
I must say, it’s about as drab as this pamphlet makes it look.
German student leftists, true to stereotype, took things very seriously indeed, and — also true to stereotype — situated their rebellion within a logical, systematic intellectual superstructure — in this case, Marxism-Leninism. The most prominent student leader, Rudi Dutschke, wrote his graduate thesis on Marx and Engels, and his speeches are rather dull dissections of post-war German society along these lines. After the umbrella SDS group split up, most radical students joined one or another Marxist organization, which had fractured into so many sub-splinters that they’re now referred to collectively as the “K-Groups“, as in Kommunist.
Dipping into memoirs of old hippies, the main motif is discussions. Interminable, stultifying discussions. Discussions about which classes were ready to be ignited by the spark of revolution (Habermas’ correct answer: none), how children could be taught to avoid the straitjacket of repressive tolerance, how factories should be organized, how chores should be assigned in anarchist collectives, how to define ‘sanity’, how much violence is permissible and against whom, what to use instead of money, how to elect leaders — the list is endless. These smart, unworldly kids were trying — with German thoroughness — to draw up a blueprint for a completely different kind of society.
Of course, almost nobody else wanted to live in that society. So, the discussions involved the same people, discussing the same topics, ad infinitum. Which leads to small differences being exaggerated, resentment building, splinter groups forming, and, eventually, dissolution. As I see it, the reason leftist groups almost always splinter and deform is because of the kind of people who join them — a motley collection of drifters, artists, perfectionists, individualists, malcontents, cranks, geniuses, visionaries, misfits, and the occasional sociopath. Right-wing groups attract many of the same types, but are saved by their strong sense of hierarchy.
A necessary disclaimer: The 1968 generation did, in fact, force major ruptures in German society which were urgently necessary, and made the country the humane place it is today. But the hobbyhorses of the more extreme German left — all of which are present in this brochure — would come back to haunt hippies in later life. The critique of “mainstream” psychiatry led a lot of severely mentally ill people to avoid therapy, convinced society was crazy and they were the real “sane” ones. The very weird and insistent focus on children’s “sexuality” led the Green Party, in the early 1980s, to briefly embrace pedophilia (g) as just another liberation movement like gay or women’s rights. This turned out to be a disaster on every level: Creepy-looking men were invited to participate in “working groups” to formulate policies which would grant them access to children. Several Green and left politicians got in trouble for violence during demonstrations before they settled down in the late 1980s.
Worst of all, everyone smelled quite ripe, since daily bathing was considered a bourgeois compulsion to profit Big Soap and “natural human scents” were signs of honesty.
I’ll post a few more excerpts from this pamphlet as time permits. Join me as I explore the dogmas and delusions of the years of lead!
German Joys 