By the time the pilgrims came from Germany, he had already lost his faith: Enzensberger, Henze, Reiche, half the SDS had to go to Cuba to take part in Bacardi socialism, but Günter Maschke was already intoxicated. Cuba was his last resort in 1967 because the Austrian police wanted to deport him to Germany, where the military police were waiting for the deserter. Maschke didn’t want to join the Bundeswehr at first, but an old fighter from the illegal KPD had advised him to let the soldiers teach him how to shoot for the upcoming uprising. Then he was off to Vienna, where he met the beloved Adorno and was hugged by Günther Anders.
Maschke was the most unpredictable of the so-called sixty-eighters, some will say: the craziest, and certainly a literary figure in his self-confident insanity, another Meursault, the “stranger” in Albert Camus’ novel, which he read again and again.
Ever since Maschke was sixteen he had been looking for someone to adore and adore. Without a high school diploma, he studied in Stuttgart with Max Bense, sat at Ernst Bloch’s feet in Tübingen, read day and night, let Frank Böckelmann advertise the Subversive Action and babbled gibberish against the Catholic Day about the “new salvation of man in the relentless struggle against the rule of production that has become an end in itself”. He married Johanna Ensslin, her father painted him. Bernward Vespers wanted to publish his poems, they got lost in the permanent flight that was his life too.
After the Cuba phase, Maschke, a good fundamentalist, stormed in the opposite direction
Cuba granted the rebel political asylum, Maschke went diligently to the sugar cane harvest, learned Spanish and was disappointed by socialism for all time. Fidel Castro persecuted the homosexuals, the secret police monitored all foreigners, Maschke was deported because he had fallen out of favor with the poet Heberto Padilla was friends. Upon arrival in Germany, he was imprisoned and taken to Landsberg, where he oversaw the prison library. The Tupamaros Munich carried out an arson attack on the home of the judge who sentenced him.
But that was not just a crime, but a grandiose misunderstanding. Maschke had long been someone else and, as a good fundamentalist, stormed in the opposite direction. He settled accounts with socialism, what he meant for them Frankfurter Allgemeine interesting, where the editor Joachim Fest warmly welcomed renegades from the left. Years later, Maschke still boasted that he had given Fest, who had written a biography of Hitler, the same greeting in the editorial office. Maschke lived up to it: “You feel more comfortable in a fight.”
Meanwhile, it was his temporary sister-in-law, Gudrun Ensslin, who fought, gun in hand, while he only dabbled in the guerrillas in theory. That was how he found Schmitt, the former chief jurist of the Third Reich, who his followers considered a partisan of thought. Maschke praised him as a National Socialist and made the pilgrimage to him as faithfully as he had to Castro. He brought out Schmitt’s “Leviathan” in a publishing house financed by German doctors and then, again encouraged by his master, devoted himself as a private scholar to the work of the Spanish fascist thinker Donoso Cortés for years. His own work remained narrow; one collection bears the inevitable title “The Armed Word”.
“We could lead the whole Third World against America,” he lamented
When his longtime bookseller Joschka Fischer was to become foreign minister in 1998, Maschke was appalled; for him it was treason when a revolutionary swore an oath to the constitution. He remained unperturbed, anti-democratic and anti-American, refused to drink Coke and missed the fighting spirit in Germany: “We could lead the whole Third World against America.” His greatest sorrow was not being able to go permanently to South America, where he was once happy. In 1990 he received a teaching position at the La Punta Naval Academy in Peru. There he was supposed to teach philosophy and Schmitt, but it wasn’t just theory. Finally he was allowed to shoot himself and breathe the “smell of the archaic”. In the military he fought the guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso, and Maschke no longer needed the word and raved, again intoxicated, about a man’s world with “command and obedience and brotherhood”.
At home in Frankfurt, a small, decidedly reactionary group has rallied around him in recent years young freedom offered him a last political asylum. The fight ended on Monday. Günter Maschke was 79 years old.