Observations Among German Hosts

Roman Brodmann’s 1967 documentary Der Polizeistaatsbesuch (‘The Police-State Visit’) is a fascinating contemporary document of German police violence as well as the policing of migrant activists and their share of official German memory culture of 1968.

Don’t open the door if it rings, my love, my father would say whenever he went for groceries or take-out. It almost never rang, just once or twice, as far as I remember, it did. With a mixture of fear and curiosity, I would hide behind the cream-coloured cotton curtains, trying not to make them move so they might give me away. I did not have a fixed image in my mind, who the person downstairs before the front door could be. I expected either police men in uniforms or maybe a single agent in a grey suit, looking like one of the Men in Grey in Michael Ende’s Momo. This must have been when I was between five and ten years old. Whom my father actually suspected as a potential intruder, I don’t know. I never asked him when I got older.

Alertness is a very common state for children of immigrants to grow up in Germany and most of the Western world.

With my years lived, my own unpleasant experiences with the police and other officials grew and so did my knowledge about my father’s biography and his reasons for this enduring state of alertness. I know that this alertness is a very common state for children of immigrants to grow up in Germany and most of the Western world. If you don’t have German citizenship, a simple traffic control can put your and your family’s existence in serious danger. However, it’s probably safe to say that my father’s caution went beyond this ‘normal’ feeling of insecurity. The older I get and the more complete my picture of his little place in history becomes, the clearer I see the constant insecurity he must have lived in until maybe ten years ago. Imagine you escape from an oppressive regime in your home country to a different part of the world just to find out that this supposedly democratic country entertains close ties with the very regime you have just fled.

Opposition Against the Regime

I come from a dissident family. The years of relative peace and normalcy for my grandmother, grandfather and their children lasted from 1951 until 1953, the two years the government of Mohammad Mossadegh and his Foreign Secretary Hossein Fatemi ruled Iran as the executive power of a still constitutional monarchy. After the 1953 coup d’état by royalist generals, MI6 and CIA that re-established the absolute reign of the second Pahlavi Shah in Iran, nothing was ever normal again. It has not been since. Hossein Fatemi, the original architect of Iran’s oil nationalisation legislation, was executed after being convicted by a military court. Mossadegh himself imprisoned – first for three years during a political show trial, then in his home in Ahmadabad until his death in 1967.

Watching Der Polizeistaatsbesuch today, the organizing work of CISNU seems to be the elephant in the room to me.

Political opposition runs in my family. Of course, my father knew about Germany’s ties to 'Persia', as not only the German yellow press preferred to orientalise Iran until it turned into Khomeini’s ‘Islamic Republic’. He had been a member of Mossadegh’s youth organization as an early teenager. As a consequence, my father was not completely shocked about the mess the Iranian secret service informant left his Munich student dorm in after he had searched it thoroughly. He and his friends of the local group of the Confederation of Iranian Students / National Union (CISNU) knew who this informant was anyway. He had been to meetings now and then, sometimes disappearing for weeks without any word. ‘We made sure he was never present when we had something sensitive to discuss’, my father told me. But the raided dorm left a lasting impression, added to the feeling of insecurity. This must have been around 1966, maybe a year before the infamous state visit by the Shah from the 27th of May to the 4th of June 1967 that was to change German history irreversibly. The protests on the 2nd of June were mainly organized by the Confederation of Iranian Students, the central umbrella organisation of opposition against the Shah regime outside (and, to a lesser extent, inside) of Iran. It had been formed in Heidelberg in 1960 as an exile opposition group by liberal to radical leftist student organisations. My father joined them as soon as he arrived in Munich.

Historical Momentum

Watching the documentary film Der Polizeistaatsbesuch (‘The Police State Visit’) by Swiss director Roman Brodmann today, the organizing work of CISNU seems to be the elephant in the room to me. They are not mentioned directly (only once in a speech by a German student activist). But still, the 45-minute film is an invaluable historical document. Knowingly, it tells the story of a police state in the making. Unknowingly, it tells us whose activism was going to make German history and whose wasn’t.

The 45-minute film for Süddeutscher Rundfunk about the Germany trip of Mohmmad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah Diba was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek documentation and commentary on the unfathomable expenditures that used to be put into state visits in those days. This state visit, however, turned out to be different: not only was it by far the most expensive and extensively prepared official visit by the head of state of a ‘developing country’ in terms of intelligence and police operations, it also went down in history books as the kick-off for the German 1968 student movement. The film that Brodmann had envisioned as ‘The State Visit’ turned out as ‘The Police State Visit’, retrospectively also signifying the momentum the 2nd of June 1967, the day of the Shah’s visit to the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin, continues to occupy in German history.

The German documentary tells the story of a police state in the making.

Benno Ohnesorg, whose death on the 2nd of June 1967 was part of the beacon that sparked the German ‘68er’ Left, was not the first victim of police violence in post-war West Germany. Philipp Müller, a 21-year-old member of the Communist Party (KPD) was shot by police officers during a demonstration against German rearmament in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia in 1952. It was the rigid anti-communist policies of the Adenauer Era (1949-63) that held back potential street protests of the new student movement to-be until the mid-1960s. The KPD had been legally banned in 1954 and with the party, many former members or individuals that were politically associated with it, were prosecuted and those of them employed as civil servants (especially teachers) dismissed and banned from teaching. This atmosphere of fear and stagnation was ruptured by the activism of the Confederation of Iranian Students. I recently discussed the erasure of CISNU’s activism and organizing work from the historiography of the protests on the 2nd of June in West Berlin as it is forebodingly narrated in Der Polizeistaatsbesuch in my essay ‘68, ein deutsches Unschuldsmoment’ (‘68 – a Momentum of German Innocence’), published in COLLATERAL. In Brodmann’s film the involvement of Iranians in the history-making demonstrations against the Shah are only present in the mob of reactionary monarchist claqueurs (‘Jubelperser’) who beat up the allegedly German-only student protestors in front of the Deutsche Oper.

The film’s subtitle Beobachtungen unter deutschen Gastgebern (‘Observations Among German Hosts’) is, therefore, telling in two ways: First, it gives a critical self-positioning of the filmmaker and his perception of the state visit’s proceedings. Secondly, it unintentionally establishes a white German-only discourse that already excludes all other(ed) perspectives from the event of the state visit and the narrative of 67/68 that evolved around it. In fact, the protests on the 2nd of June 1967 had mainly been organised by CISNU and the artists of Kommune 1. It was only later on that Rudi Dutschke and the SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund) joined forces with the initial organisers. The SDS had been afraid that activism against the Shah regime would distract attention and energy from their anti-Vietnam War focus.

The film unintentionally establishes a white German-only discourse that already excludes all other(ed) perspectives.

While the official estimations of the Confederation’s members list about 2.500 active or associated Iranian students in Germany, the lists of activists’ names that the Iranian Secret Service SAVAK gave to the German government only comprises of 600 members in Germany and Austria that were to be put under special surveillance and travel restrictions. 115 students living outside of Germany were to be prohibited from crossing German borders. In his book Schahbesuch 1967 – Fanal für die Studentenbewegung, historian Eckard Michels reconstructs some of the many meetings of Iranian and German intelligence staff of the extra created ‘Meldekopf’ (provisional head department) prior to the state visit. However intense their preparations, the main security concern was that of an actual attack or assassination attempt on the Shah by former royalists or ethnic separatist groups. Public protests organised by students, especially by Iranian students of that scale were not expected according to neither Iranian nor German intelligence. Considering the intense precautions that both sides took and the personnel and financial capacities of their secret services, this dilettantism seems astonishing. While reading about the numerous meetings of Iranian and German intelligence exchange, I am reminded again of my father’s anecdote of the searched student dorm and the supposed comrade (my father has forgotten his name by now, so let’s call him Ahmad), who was never to be seen again afterwards. Considering how half-heartedly Ahmad had tried to blend in, it doesn’t come as such a surprise that neither the Iranian nor the German side were properly prepared for the public protests that were to take place on the 2nd of June in West Berlin.

Liverwurst Tactics

Roman Brodmann’s footage of the protests is very graphic. In bright day light in front of Schöneberger Rathaus, we see police standing by while the royalist claqueurs in their neat suits attack the students with clubs and latches that previously served as holders for their pro-Shah signs. Then, in the evening, while the Shah and his wife listen to Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper, the images show targeted and skilfully implemented police violence. Encircling of protestors, pushing around, isolating and pulling out of individuals who are beaten up collectively by policemen. This moment would repeat itself in German history: the so-called ‘liverwurst tactics’ (Leberwursttaktik), developed by Berlin police commissioner Erich Duensing, was to become the standard close combat strategy against demonstrations and civil disobedience for decades. This was the zero hour, the initiation rite of that very materialized state power. On the night of the 2nd of June, it all ended with the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. Duensing, Berlin’s Mayor Heinrich Albertz and Senator of the Interior Wolfgang Büsch had to resign later. The militarisation of the post-war German police force had been initiated nevertheless. Born almost two decades later, I have watched it countless times, on- and off-screen. My father was not there on the 2nd of June in front of the Deutsche Oper, but many of his friends from CISNU were. Their erasure from the memory and the mythmaking of what was to become 1968 can be seen as the metaphorical policing in Brodmann’s historical film.