A Leftist Student Martyr Murdered by the Left

A Leftist Student Martyr Murdered by the Left

Almost 41 years ago on June 2, 1967, a German university student protestor named Benno Ohnesorg (photo above) was brutally gunned down in West Berlin by a plain clothes police officer, Karl Heinz Kurras. There are new juicy revelations about the Ohnesorg murder, which radically galvanized 1968 student hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit, German politicians of the period, and left-wing activists and terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. The 2 June Movement, a left-wing student movement, was named after the day in which Ohnesorg was killed. The new revelations are worthy of a spy novel, conspiracy legend, and the realpolitik intrigue of Cold War politics.

German newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have recently reported that Ohnesorg was murdered by no mere West German police officer, but a Stasi East German government spy:

http://www.faz.net/s/RubFC06D389EE76479E9E76425072B196C3/Doc~E254C1CCAF2444DE9909C2BA756B19170~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

I thank my German artist friend, a profound man named Georg Muhleck, for alerting me to this exceptional story.

Kurras, the police officer, was an unusual fellow, to say the least. He was originally from East Germany (including membership in the East German Communist Party), moved to West Germany, and became disillusioned by materialistic, alienated life in the West. He became a police officer in West Germany, but longed to return to former socialist East Germany. He applied to return to East Germany, but the Stasi proposed that he stay to become an East German spy.

The questions remain: What motivated the Ohnesorg murder? Why would a leftist kill a leftist student demonstrator? Did he have Stasi orders to shoot demonstrators? And why? Incredible revelations and difficult questions.

What we know is that in the aftermath of Ohnesorg's death there was a radicalization of German students and political movements on the left. German terrorism of the left-wing variety increased. And the German state, like its counterpart in Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s, used dubious tactics to increase the repressive apparatus of the state in the context of the anti-communist Cold War struggle.

It is clear that the East German socialist state had an interest in weakening the liberal democratic and capitalist West German state. So it hired Kurras and others as agents in the West. Western spies operated in the East. How many others like Kurras were working in the West German police force? And government? And did they contribute to a "strategy of tension" that caused so much terrorism in West Germany in the 1970s? Was the terrorism also in the interest of the West because it identified clear communist foes?

My conclusion: If a so-called leftist state can assist in killing a leftist activist (even if indirectly perhaps), then is there a left left? If the right, which represents the West German state and law and order, can justify the murder, then to what degree do right and left collude in maintaining a hierarchical, stratified system of inequality? Are left and right fictions? Is there agreement on maintaining just enough conflict, tension, and division so that the left and right appear like radically different political forces?

The Ohnesorg political murder raises hundreds of questions. It is indeed sobering that the most noble, idealistic, and honourable of youth are subject to paths of political manipulation. This is why, in the end, no political project can legitimize the blood of even one martyr. Benno Ohnesorg lives in my heart not because he was on the left, but because he was Benno Ohnesorg, a fellow man struggling with the courage of a lion for a better world.

Tamir Bar-On