In accordance with regulations, the baroque flourishes in the former residential city of Ludwigsburg, and spring can hardly keep up. Far and wide no more dangerous weapon than the leaf blower, with which a fellow citizen shoots the last magnolia petal that has fallen off in the storm from the joints of her fully paved garage entrance. The police state has to show itself from its best side: the two officers (male and female) took a woman off her bike who had illegally ventured onto the sidewalk. But the confrontation with state power goes off lightly, there are worse things.
The exhibits in the Ludwigsburg Prison Museum are reminiscent of completely different times. There is the guillotine with which a man was executed in 1949, a few days before the Basic Law came into force. A number of curiosities from the world of prisoners are also shown here, such as the work that the prisoner Jan-Carl Raspe secretly made: A small pizza oven based on biscuit tins, hidden from the guards, where else, in an “Illustrated History of the German Revolution”. ; an immersion heater made of felt-tipped pens; an alcohol distillery from on-board equipment, namely the tube intended for the artificial feeding of prisoners who had gone on hunger strike.
The Red Army Faction (RAF) has been history since its declaration of dissolution in 1998 and has long been ready for the museum. More is coming to the evidence room this Monday: delegates from the prison museum, from the Baden-Württemberg House of History in Stuttgart and from the House of History in Bonn are traveling to Stammheim to clear out a historic building there and get the best pieces out for themselves.
The building was constructed from asbestos, PCP and any other toxic waste that was on the market at the time
The fear of the RAF terrorists, who attacked US institutions, police officers, judges and the Springer publishing house in a series of bomb attacks in May 1972, killing four people and injuring 74, some seriously, was so great that after had to be isolated after their rapid arrest in a high-security wing in Stuttgart’s Stammheim prison. For the upcoming trial, within a few months, a low-rise building was erected right next to the prison, made of prefabricated reinforced concrete parts, asbestos, PCP and any other toxic waste that was on the market at the time – to this day called “multi-purpose building” in the best technocratic German and dutifully abbreviated MZG by the authorities – which became a none purpose other than to make short work of the terrorist threat to the Federal Republic.
It was an agonizingly long process, the longest before the NSU trial. Procedural questions, complaints, objections, requests for bias, and consultations cost endless amounts of time. The prisoners went on hunger strikes several times, fell ill or were excluded from the trial. The procedure was to be conducted in an audit-proof manner, but this was not possible. When the accused Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Raspe committed suicide in the fall of 1977, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, as expected, but the lawyers had already appealed this sentence. It never became law.
Films such as Reinhard Hauff’s highly agitational “Stammheim” (1986), in which the young Ulrich Tukur plays Baader, who is also not very old, have handed down the procedure in this building as a sometimes brutal screaming drama. Very late, tapes appeared on which a driven Gudrun Ensslin can be heard, a stuttering Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, who speaks with a surprisingly calm voice and quite calmly.
The police state showed what it could do and drove up to Stammheim in an armored car
The presiding judge Theodor Prinzing, almost fifty years old when the trial began on May 21, 1975, had of course been in the Second World War. Decades after the trial, from which he ingloriously left after 85 complaints about bias, because he had passed on files to the next authority without justification, which even less justified them to the then editor-in-chief of the World decades after the death of the accused, Prinzing sent his opponent Baader a compliment typical of his generation: “If he had been born before the war, he would have been a very useful soldier.”
In 2007 that sounded like something out of the ordinary, but it corresponded exactly to the confrontational thinking of the 1970s. The RAF had declared the armed struggle against the state, the state took it as a declaration of war and rearmed. The police state showed what it could do, drove up to Stammheim in an armored car, the semi-automatic weapon dangled under its arm, headlights made the night bright as day, and the helicopter circled overhead. Stammheim was the symbol of repression, a prison fortress with an adjoining courtroom, state power that had become concrete.
The law prohibits trials in prison for good reasons, but does not prohibit trials in an outbuilding. It was no accident that the talk was of “special courts” and “special laws” with echoes of the Nazi judiciary. It was the Bundestag, however, that had bent the law, knitting together special laws at lightning speed to limit the rights of defense lawyers and their clients as best they could. Otto Schily spoke of “Stammheim Landrecht”.
So that no one got to see the prisoners, they were transported the hundred and fifty meters between the prison and the court in a VW bus and, for safety reasons, were taken to the demonstration clamps. Because Meinhof and Ensslin had become so thin as a result of the hunger strike, it had to be bent over in order to really close. Contact with the outside world was strictly monitored, insofar as it could not be completely prevented. Relatives, lawyers and also the journalists were body searched. The court reporter Ulf Stuberger, who was the only journalist to attend all 192 days of the trial, reported that a colleague had to remove her sanitary napkin in front of the examining officer. Nevertheless, material got into the cells, Raspe was able to experiment with glow wires, and finally pistols; after the prisoners committed suicide, sticks of dynamite were even found under the floorboard.
The 90-year-old Otto Schily has little desire to talk about Stammheim, where he became a star, but he then gives an art judgemental and also correct verdict: “You should tear it down, the building is not in a good spirit anyway, and architecturally it’s hideous.”
The courtroom? Like a movie set, dead in a way only the most modern architecture of the time could do
The impression on the last tour of the house, which was just listed, is not much better. It is top-notch prison architecture: the entire building is well-fortified on the outside and everything is concentrated on the inside, offices, meeting rooms, surveillance rooms arranged like coral around the courtroom. As if to at least spread some spirit, an unknown outfitter has laid out penal codes everywhere. The judges should be safe from the prisoners, and the prisoners should not be taken out under any circumstances. The RAF, no one would forget, began in 1970 with the violent liberation of prisoner Andreas Baader.
The courtroom in the middle is as unreal and realistic as a movie set, dead in a way that only the most modern architecture of the time could do. The hard-shell chairs are in the orange that the SPD temporarily chose as its guiding color in the early 1970s when it promised to create modern Germany, and incidentally created an abyss of brutalism in construction.
It’s not all dead though, there’s dripping somewhere up on the roof and between the utility lines. Wasn’t the building perfectly safe? Otherwise it’s quiet, no helicopter circling there.
So in this room, where no one would think of the word aura, the federal prosecutor’s office and the defendant sat opposite each other for almost two years in the “criminal case against Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan-Carl Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin for murder, etc.” from 1975, how on a Roman trireme with the three tiered benches: in front the defenders, in the middle the accused, behind them, ready for any eventuality, policemen. Behind the judge’s table were about two hundred files with files lined up, above them, in the simplest version, the national emblem of Baden-Württemberg, the three striding lions.
The witness Jünschke threw the stunned judge and yelled: “For Ulrike, you swine!”
It was here, on the 41st day of the trial, that Ulrike Meinhof said that the prisoner in isolation could only change his mind through betrayal. That is exactly what “torture” is, she said in the most cutting voice and repeated, chopping the syllables, “this is torture, exactly torture”. The judge Prinzing cut her off, saying that there was no torture in the Federal Republic. She hanged herself seven months later.
It was here that the witness Klaus Jünschke used his appearance a few weeks after Ulrike Meinhof’s death to take revenge in his own way. Jünschke had already taken an extra week of detention for calling the judges “filthy fascists” when he suddenly jumped, leapt over the judge’s table, knocked the stunned Prinzing over and yelled while he was already being torn away from his victim: “For Ulrike, you pig!” There was no longer a fine for this, but in his own trial the following year, this paralegal event was included in the reasoning of the judgment and in the sentence of life imprisonment as evidence of his “fanatic hatred of the state”.
The defendants from that time did not survive in Stammheim. For them as well as for their lawyers, the hall in the multi-purpose building was a stage on which they could shine in front of the press and a few spectators. Some lawyers became famous through the process: Rupert von Plottnitz, who once said “Heil, Dr. Prinzing!” had called, brought it to the Hessian Minister of Justice. Hans-Christian Ströbele, who died last year, regularly won the Berlin direct mandate in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg as a Green MP for his party. Schily became a co-founder of the Greens, headed the Flick investigative committee and, having since switched to the SPD, showed completely new qualities as interior minister in the Schröder government.
The demolition of the multi-purpose building should take at least a year, after all, not only pollutants have to be disposed of, but the breeding protection of the birds has to be taken into account. It’s a bit inhuman that the walls in which they have settled without aesthetic or political concerns are taken away from them.