On June 2, 1967, student, husband, and nearly father Benno Ohnesorg joined a protest in West Berlin and was shot in the back of his head for his civic trouble. He died. The policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, claimed he had been threatened by knife wielding protestors, which did not quite explain why he shot Mr. Ohnesorg in, again, the back of the head. It was enough to win Kurras acquittal at his trial. The exoneration drove many to despair; Gudrun Ensslin, for instance, announced, "The fascist state wants to kill us all" and went on to become head of the Red Army terrorist faction. She died in prison in 1997. Another terrorist group, the Second of June, obviously took inspiration from the killing.
The murder was photographed and the pictures, dare I say it, became iconic in German history. You can see one version here and numerous others here. To the 21st century American eye, they bear a striking resemblance to the most famous images of Robert Kennedy's assassination and the Kent State massacre. I do not mean to trespass on the ground of First Efforts or BagNewsNotes or No Caption Needed, but it's pretty easy to see why this image had such terrible power. Pretty easy to see that soldiers are gunning us down.
Only they weren't. It was not an agent of the fascist state that shot Ohnesorg. It was an East German spy. Historians have found 17 volumes in Stasi files detailing Mr. Kurras's career. There's no evidence Stasi ordered him to shoot the student, but he could have shot the boy thinking it would be helpful to his primary employer and, indeed, the East Germans were pleased. Kurras, still alive, is not talking.
The NYT article on the killing noted the verdict of Germany's collective history: It was the "shot that changed the republic.'" The left protest movements that emerged from this moment, although long in gestation, changed the conservative, postwar regime into a social democratic republic. It would be as if we learned that Sam Adams colluded with the British to open fire on Lexington Green so that the war might start or that the Democratic National Committee somehow inveigled the National Guard to open fire at Kent State in order to discredit Nixon.
I have no real answers here, but the story has intrigued my professional self for two reasons.
First, it causes me to think about the relationship between image and word. Do we now view this image differently? What does it say to us? During innumerable comprehensive exam meetings at my old employer, I heard one colleague repeatedly assert that meaning was meaningless, that only the "force" of an image mattered, and that images stood purely alone, absent any words, in conveying that force. This story makes such a perspective problematic to me. It changes as the words around it change.
Second, it also causes me to think carefully about collective memory. As rhetoricians, we tend to exalt the notion that collective memory is a purely discursive action; people make of the past what they want. That suits us because it puts rhetoric in the foreground. Yet history corrects collective memory on occasion, and this appears to be one of those moments. How does this story and picture help us to think about those issues?
I can't quite explain why the story intrigues me, but it does. The legendary moment that inspired the German left to rally against a fascist murder and a right political order was, in fact, the moment that an evil Communist spy shot a peaceful community activist. Wrap your head around those two polemical renderings.
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