Radical Left: Ingrid Strobl and the alarm clock: If you don’t get dropped

“6457” shouldn’t be a lucky number for her. This was the serial number of what is probably the most famous alarm clock of the German post-war period. In 1986, the then 34-year-old Ingrid Strobl, a journalist and author, bought it in a store – for an acquaintance who had asked her for it, as she explained at the time. However, this alarm clock was used as a timer in an explosive attack by the “Revolutionary Cells” (RZ) on an administrative building of the Lufthansa Group, which caused material damage. With the attack, the social-revolutionary RZ, the third armed group in the Federal Republic of Germany alongside the RAF and the June 2nd Movement, protested against the deportation of asylum seekers and the practice of sex tourism made possible by Lufthansa flights.

In 1987, a year after purchasing the alarm clock, which had been prepared by the Federal Criminal Police Office, a BKA officer recognized Strobl on a video during the purchase. She was then arrested in her Cologne apartment and charged with “supporting a terrorist organization” under Section 129a of the Criminal Code.

Strobl refused to give the name of the acquaintance and remained in custody. There she continued to write a book about the resistance of women in Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, which she had already been working on before her arrest, and drew strength from it. In “Never say, you’re going the last way” (1989) she compiled the life stories of numerous partisans, Jews and communists in the militant resistance against National Socialism. These played almost no role in the historiography of the time. Today her study is considered a central reference in this regard.

In June 1989 she was sentenced to five years in prison and remained in solitary confinement until May 1990. After the Federal Court of Justice initially overturned the verdict, she was finally sentenced to three years in prison at the appeal hearing in 1990 for aiding and abetting an explosive attack.

At that time, Ingrid Strobl was known nationwide as a former editor of the magazine “Emma” and as a freelance author. This led to a broad campaign for her release, initiated by Alice Schwarzer. Numerous celebrities signed the appeal “Freedom for Ingrid Strobl”. At the start of the trial, demonstrations with 10,000 participants each took place in Cologne and Essen.

In an interview I did with Strobl in 2020, she talked about how important it is for people in prison not to be forgotten: »You won’t be left alone. Solidarity is not “only” shown in wonderful demonstrations and events, but above all in the long-term: the visits, the letters and books that are sent to your cell, the money that is paid into the donation account.«

Born in Innsbruck in 1952, she studied German and art history in Innsbruck and Vienna. Her dissertation “Rhetoric in the Third Reich,” completed in 1978, already indicated a focus of her future work. Active in the women’s movement, she first worked at ORF and then moved to Cologne in 1979. She worked there at “Emma” until 1986 and then worked as a freelance journalist and author, including for WDR.

It was clear that Strobl had bought the alarm clock. However, it wasn’t until 30 years later that she admitted that she knew what it would be used for. In her book “The Measured Time. She talks about it and about her time in prison. In prison she was confronted with a world completely unknown to her: a world full of pain and addiction, of anger and submission. The stories of women in prison – both prisoners and guards – make her book very vivid. She also repeatedly dealt with women’s stories in her other works.

Another important topic in “Presumptuous Time” was anti-Semitism in the radical left, from the RAF and RZ – and also their own. Strobl was one of the few protagonists who actively dealt with and reflected on this story.

Above all, it is her literary-historical research “Anna and Anderle” (1995), in which she deals with her own history as a left-wing anti-Zionist – she was someone who “could not guarantee the safety of the people in Israel and still fight justly who supported the Palestinians” and thereby also accepted “the possible destruction of Israel,” as she writes in the foreword to “Presumptuous Time.” She is also concerned with the “national community of the left” and the “abyss of our stupidity”.

These considerations remain relevant when one considers the anti-Semitic tendencies in parts of the German left when the Gaza war is discussed. Ingrid Strobl’s reflections are now missing. As has only now become known, she died on January 25th at the age of 72.