[TURNING POINT TOWARD THE ’68 MOVEMENT AND LEFT-WING TERRORISM] Eleven vintage gelatin silver prints depicting the demonstrations during the Shah’s visit to West Berlin on June 2, 1967.
Berlin, 1967. Vintage gelatin silver prints measuring from 20 × 15 to 30 × 19 cm. Six photographs with Farsi inscriptions in ballpoint pen to verso; two prints with press stamps to verso, one bearing the stamp of "Liberale Zeitung" and printing instructions; one print identifiable as a copy photograph (inscribed adhesive labels are also reproduced in the image); two prints with traces of creasing; on one print, the eyes and mouths of two faces have been obscured with ballpoint pen; else very good. Item #55923
The photographs document a decisive turning point in the history of West Germany and, ultimately, of Western Europe as a whole: a moment when the left-wing student movement became politically radicalized and, a few years later, left-wing terrorism also found its legitimation for the concept of the ‘urban guerrilla.’ Ulrike Meinhof, the later co-founder and leading voice of the "Red Army Faction" (RAF), was still working as a journalist at the time. She commented on the events in the following words: "The protests against a police-state chief exposed our own state as a police state. Police and press terror reached its peak in Berlin on June 2. That was when we understood that freedom in this state is freedom for the police truncheon (…)." (Trans. after: Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof. Die Biographie. Berlin 2007, p. 210.) The demonstration against the visit of the Persian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to Berlin was historically significant not only because of the massive escalation of violence, in which Iranian secret-service agents and Berlin police officers used truncheons against the protesters, but above all because of the shooting of the 26-year-old German-studies student Benno Ohnesorg by the plainclothes police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras, who was later acquitted despite incriminating witness testimony. The date "June 2" subsequently became a symbol repeatedly invoked by the RAF to justify killings and attacks; it also gave its name to another terrorist organization, the "Bewegung 2. Juni" (2 June Movement).
The photographs were taken at the demonstration approximately eight hours before the fatal shots were fired and document, among other things, the escalation of violence in front of West Berlin’s Schöneberg City Hall as the Shah of Persia signed the city’s Golden Book. Some photographs show only the demonstrators, with their banners and, above all, the distinctive Shah masks that the “Kommune 1” distributed among the students. In the characteristic manner of the “Subversive Aktion,” which grew out of Situationism, the “Kommune 1” understood political action as an avant-garde happening and, conversely, the happening as political action. The activists affixed to shopping bags caricatures of the Persian imperial couple that the left-wing stage designer, animator, and caricaturist Rainer Hachfeld had created for this purpose. Other photographs show employees of the Iranian secret service (SAVAK), soon dubbed “Jubelperser” (“cheering Persians”) and “Prügelperser” (“beating Persians”) by the media, beating demonstrators with wooden slats and steel truncheons. The police did not intervene and allowed the violence to escalate unchecked. Accounts indicate, moreover, that mounted police officers themselves struck the demonstrators with batons. As one of the photographs shows, the Iranians, dressed in suits and ties and armed with their truncheons, were by no means unwelcome. At the edge of the scene, nurses from the German Red Cross, some smiling, can be seen serving tea to the men.
Price: €2,500.00