LETTER FROM BERLIN:A new documentary charts the careers of a legal triumvirate who emerged during Berlin's protest movement
IN FEBRUARY 2002, Germany’s then interior minister, Otto Schily, went to the country’s highest court seeking to ban the neo-Nazi NPD party.
Facing him across the wood-panelled chamber was NPD legal counsel Horst Mahler.
Some 30 years earlier, Schily and Mahler were on the same side, friends and allies who, together with colleague Hans-Christian Ströbele, were the legal brains behind Germany’s 1968 student revolution.
A compelling new documentary, Die Anwälte (The Lawyers), reflects on this triumvirate that emerged in West Berlin in the late 1960s, then, as elsewhere in Europe, in the grip of the student protest movement.
In Germany, widespread anger at the Vietnam War was aggravated further by the unresolved guilt of their parents’ generation, viewed by students as an unreconstructed bloc of Nazi-era perpetrators.
The bespectacled, burly lawyer Horst Mahler rose to prominence in June 1967 after attending the postmortem of Benno Ohnesorg, a student shot in the back of the head by a police officer at a West Berlin riot. The killing had a radicalising effect on the German protest movement and gave rise to the extreme-left splinter group, the Red Army Faction (RAF).
In the early 1970s, the RAF launched a “six against 60 million” guerrilla campaign of bombings and kidnappings. West Germany, the RAF felt, was a morally bankrupt state controlled by ageing Nazis, military-industrial lobbyists and the Vietnam War-tainted US.
So convinced was Mahler by the RAF’s mission that he joined up and went underground. Eventually arrested, he was put on trial and defended by two colleagues from West Berlin’s Socialist Lawyers’ Collective, Hans-Christian Ströbele and Otto Schily. At the time, Schily was a rising star who had led a prosecution case against the policeman who shot Ohnesorg.
When Mahler went to prison, Ströbele and Schily went on to defend the captured RAF ringleaders Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in the notorious “Stammheim trials”.
The two lawyers worked inside a political pressure cooker, battling the trial judges and the Bonn authorities who bugged their consultations with clients. They battled, too, in the court of public opinion, where they were dubbed terrorists for defending the RAF.
Schily and Ströbele hit back with a provocative argument: that the conservative West German state, in its dogged pursuit of the RAF, had bent the law and gambled away its moral authority to become the very proto-fascist monster the 1968 student generation had feared was rising.
“I place great store on the rule of law,” shouts Schily to the trial judge in one Stammheim audio tape, “and when one permits breaches of the rule of law, it will end in catastrophe.”
They were removed from the trial before it ended in 1977 with the apparent suicide of RAF leaders in circumstances Schily and Ströbele still doubt.
The two went on to become leading members of the Green Party, still Ströbele’s political home. Aged 70, the directly elected MP is a familiar and popular figure cycling around his Berlin Kreuzberg constituency.
Schily, today 77, switched to the Social Democrats in 1989 and served as Gerhard Schröder’s federal interior minister for seven years.
After September 11th, 2001, for the second time in his career, Schily became a deeply divisive character, pushing through anti-terrorism and electronic surveillance legislation some said was as heavy-handed as the anti-terrorism laws Schily so detested in the RAF era.
Schily says he sees no rupture with his own past, but the filmmakers appear to disagree, showing images of a smiling Schily as interior minister trying on police riot gear and waving a baton for television cameras.
Images of 1968 protesters – including Schily – being dragged away by police sit uncomfortably with contemporary footage of police, on Schily’s watch as interior minister, battling anti-globalisation protesters and seizing computers from left-wing groups.
“I try to avoid direct personal conflict with [Schily],” says Ströbele, “but I have the distinct impression that terrorism was being used as a cover to push through many old ambitions of the state. Things have come full circle from the RAF time.”
Mahler has come full circle, too: behind bars again, no longer as a left-wing radical but as an NPD member and convicted Holocaust denier. Like Schily, Mahler sees no radical shift in his own views, just what he calls a “political progression”.
Then he recalls reading in prison in the 1970s the collected works of Hegel presented to him by Schily. “Hegel says that what doesn’t lead to contradiction is untrue,” says Mahler. “It is contradiction that is a sign of truth.”
It’s an interesting final point of consideration for these three former friends and allies from 1968: in a changing world, Ströbele appears to have remained constant, Schily has changed radically, while the third, Mahler, has gone off the chart.
