Textile texts: Two red flags

After Sonja died at the beginning of June, I found a brown jacket in my wardrobe that I had been carrying around with me for a long time. I borrowed it from her more than 20 years ago and never returned it. It happened like this: She knew where her jacket was and I knew it wasn’t mine. We just left it like that.

It would be too much to say that this jacket maintained a connection between us. During our studies of cultural studies at the University of Bremen, we were close friends and were active together in several left-wing groups. We demonstrated against German and Iranian fascists, read Marx, Freud and Adorno. When she later moved to Berlin, I had this one more object that triggered my memory of her whenever I happened to come across it. He wouldn’t have been necessary because there were enough memories as it was. Today the jacket remains with me as a kind of shed second skin, as a remnant of her. Due to Sonja’s absence, her jacket has changed and increased her presence so much that it could become the subject of this text, for example.

In 2001 we were in Amsterdam together. It was a cold and windy May, and of course I hadn’t packed enough warm clothes for the trip. She lent me this brown jacket, a parka from the Rodeo brand, the children’s line of the department store chain C & A. The logo includes the image of a small blue horse with a long mane, long ears and long tail. Sonja must have attached the other picture herself below the right outside pocket: an almost square Antifascist Action patch – white background, two red flags in a circle.

The jacket was a random purchase, perhaps from a flea market, perhaps from a thrift store. It wasn’t actually made for Sonja or me, but was aimed at parents of tall children who were looking for inexpensive clothing. The patch, on the other hand, was a conscious decision. She probably bought it in a left-wing information store. Anyway, it wasn’t a coincidence that she bought it, it wasn’t a coincidence that it ended up on that jacket, and it wasn’t a coincidence that I walked around with it by my side for a while.

The patch was a political self-location or reassurance. At the same time, he conveyed a political message to the outside world, which must have had primarily to do with demarcation: with his two red flags, he demonstrated a certain precision and severity, perhaps even dogmatism. Because two red flags do not demand a particularly broad, pluralistic front. Even if in their original form in 1932 they were supposed to symbolize a united front between communists and socialists.

Around the year 2000 you mostly saw the combination of a black, anarchist, and a red, communist, flag. A reminiscence not least of the Republican brigades of the Spanish Civil War. You could see them, for example, on the facades of autonomous centers that have to follow a pluralistic understanding in order to address as many radical leftists as possible and gather them in their rooms.

Such considerations were alien to us. Of course we would have liked to be more than we were, but not at the expense of true knowledge. The fetish chapter from the first volume of Capital was central to our reading of Marx. Starting from this text fragment, Marx’s theory could be read epistemologically. Bakunin or Kropotkin played no role for us. So there simply had to be two red flags on the jacket, because two red flags were simply truer than just one.

This parka is not beautiful in the true sense. It has a wide cut and the sleeves are also quite wide. The patch is not attached completely straight. Actually, it doesn’t really fit the jacket. You can see his hindsight. Antifa clothing was often homemade. You could easily attach patches yourself, and you could print t-shirts yourself in the screen printing workshops of the autonomous centers. You could see that these clothes were homemade.

Unfortunately, professionally made Antifa clothing, the kind that could be bought ready-made, wasn’t any nicer. On Manteuffelstrasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg, for example, there was a general store for revolutionary supplies. The shop is now located a few meters further on Falckensteinstrasse. Among other things, you could buy T-shirts with Antifa emblems there. The cuts initially resembled sacks.

It took a few more years until mail order catalogs like Mob Action from Leipzig offered clothes made of good materials, with firm, rubberized prints and body-hugging cuts. On its website, well-built Antifa fighters presented the clothing on offer, covered up with sunglasses, a face mask and a wig. Mob Action did not remain the only mail order catalog of its kind. This development perhaps did not mean the end of the DIY culture of the radical left. But “Do it Yourself” was no longer considered the standard, and there was an ironic look at it.

I’m not sure whether Sonja would still wear her jacket today, in her mid-40s, as an aspiring psychoanalyst. The two red flags would almost certainly be okay, it wouldn’t be homemade. I don’t remember when I last wore them. Most recently, I remember a class from the Leipzig Art Academy visiting my newly opened gallery ten years ago. In the entrance, the artist duo Reinecke & Wimmer had set up a flower pot made of concrete that looked like the Stammheim prison. Someone asked in a whisper whether this was actually a commercial left-wing program gallery. Someone else pointed to the patch on her parka, my parka.

The author runs the K Strich gallery in Bremen.