Autonomous: What it was really like in the forest

In the latest publication by Valentin Groebner, the old autonomous horse from the 80s is saddled up again in West Germany. “Emotional Cinema” is the title of the book by the medieval historian who teaches in Lucerne. “This is not a book of confessions,” writes the author to draw a curtain over his depiction. But a lot of ego confessions tumble out of the treatise.

Groebner largely gives an account of his youthful involvement in the autonomous scene. If you read the “Intro,” it seems that he is anything but comfortable with his journey down memory lane, which he embarked on in the spirit of nostalgia. The treatise opens with a quote from the Polish writer Szezepan Twardoch: “We are all exactly as we see ourselves when we are ashamed.”

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The term “shame” sets the tone for the following considerations. Things are now getting “a bit embarrassing,” admits the author. Regarding his autonomous career, he claims that looking back, many things seem “foreign and somewhat bizarre” to him. With the formulation “Was it me, the one who was there, back then?” he even goes so far as to slide into the idiosyncrasy in which today’s historian Groebner opposes yesterday’s autonomist Valentine. With regard to his own past, which, according to him, “everyone who cleans up after the party, after the disaster” faces, he asks the question: “What were they actually thinking back then?” to put it briefly and answered succinctly with “Not much, I’m afraid.”

Now Groebner has written an entire book about a subject about which he now claims that he didn’t think anything significant at the time. Does anyone still remember the anger of Oskar Negt from a book from 1968? In it he complained that there are now some in his generational cohort “who call themselves ’68ers in order to be able to use a credible gesture to devalue everything for which they once allowed themselves to be beaten.” But where did Groebner get beaten?

For his book, the author uses a trick that consists in choosing the dazzling term “emotional cinema” in order to negotiate the matter itself. This makes it possible for him to repeatedly mix completely disparate events into the description of political events and actions. For example, he remembers a fight against the first shipments of nuclear waste in Gorleben in the mid-1980s. His group wanted to use the opportunity to disable abandoned riot police vehicles with “our stupid incendiary devices.” But then he runs into “a woman with short blonde hair” in the forest. »I found her radiantly beautiful – no, not just attractive, but much more than that, I was instantly in love with her, her short hair, her bright eyes. (…) I smiled at her and she smiled back, a little nervously. Just like me.” But then a few lines later “the beautiful woman with the blonde hair” is gone again, “she was with another group.” Then it was Daddeldu with the glamorous imaginary in the forest of Gorleben.

But Groebner was not beaten here. Even later – if you follow the anecdotes he tells about his commitment to Autonomous – that doesn’t seem to have been the case, although he was probably lucky once. In connection with his participation in the protests against US President Ronald Reagan’s visit to West Berlin in 1987, he had to flee a bar “from police officers who suddenly appeared (…) and at the last minute through the toilet window into the back yard because they were with them was fired at with tear gas and then stormed by helmeted SWAT teams.”

It remains unclear in the depiction whether those who couldn’t make it through the toilet window were beaten up by the cops. At least not him. Nevertheless, with regard to Negt’s quip, it can be stated more precisely that it is actually a little easier to devalue radical left-wing activism in your youth if you haven’t even been beaten for it.

In his characterization of autonomous people, the author also subtly incorporates motifs from the “horseshoe theory,” the extremism doctrine valid in the Federal Republic. In the chapter under the dubious heading “Pride of Victims,” he comes up with the idea of ​​relating his own position on the US’s imperialist foreign policy, which he remembers as “loudmouth,” with the composure of his “strictly conservative father,” which he describes as “benevolent.” set. He also lets the readers know: “Born in 1923, Wehrmacht officer and recipient of medals, which he kept in a drawer (…) in his office.”

Groebner assumes himself “in retrospect (…) the stylization of the USA as a murderous evil empire and the fight against a supposedly all-powerful ‘system’ in the name of one’s own chosenness and purity”, which was familiar to his predecessor in the spirit of “Nazi propaganda”. should have occurred. Are you reading correctly? If so, it shows that the emotional cinema between the Wehrmacht father and the autonomous son is slippery in a way that is not free of elements that relativize history. Compare the state-organized coercive and terrorist institution of the Wehrmacht with an exorbitant killing rate of deserters with the left-wing radical autonomists of the 80s?

Biographical authentication doesn’t make anything better. During their existence, autonomous people did not take part in the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation, but they still rejected imperialist US policy with good arguments even after the 1980s, and they never received medals for political commitment, which would then have had to be put away in office drawers .

Groebner’s portrayal at least deserves merit. It would have been easy for him to leave the autonomous people to the gnawing criticism of the mice in the basement and thus to oblivion. Instead, he made it much more difficult for himself: With the idea of ​​finally escaping the autonomous spirits of his youth, which he perceived as vague, he decided to resubmit the decision. This fails in long passages, but you can also work very well with that.

Valentin Groebner: Emotional cinema.
The good old days from a safe distance.
S. Fischer, 192 pages, hardcover, €24.

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