Fritz Teufel, German radical who helped to establish the 'fun guerrilla' movement

[Hoodoo]

Fritz Teufel: German radical who helped to establish the 'fun guerrilla'
movement

By Ken Hunt
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/fritz-teufel-german-radical-who-helped-to-establish-the-fun-guerrilla-movement-2042354.html

Fritz Teufel was a West Berlin-based radical who came to the fore during
the 1960s as part of the student movement. He helped establish the
concept of the Spass-Guerillero or "fun guerrilla" with the
manifesto-cum-motto of Witz als Waffe or "Joke as weapon". For all that,
he spent eight years in jail between 1970 and 1980, lived a life on the
lam for years using false papers to avoid the West German authorities
and baked bread for a London baking co-operative after his release from
prison.

Born into an anti-fascist family in 1943 in Swabia, like many of his
generation he gravitated to West Berlin in 1963. At this point during
the Cold War, West Berlin was something of a haven since the city's
legal status enabled young West Germans to avoid the draft. By way of
counter-balance, the West Berlin authorities were notorious for their
fondness for the water cannon when breaking up demonstrations. They used
more than water jets. In July 2010 in a Tagesspiegel interview, Teufel
called the death of "an innocent student" from a policeman's bullet in
June 1967 "more important" than his own imprisonment.

In Berlin he got to know Rudi Dutschke and a circle of young
revolutionaries. In January 1967 he co-founded Kommune K1 – a communal
living experience that became renowned for its so-called "grotesque
actions". These straddled outright provocation and street satire.
Bizarrely, Teufel was amongst 11 people arrested for attempting to
assassinate the American vice-president Hubert H Humphrey in April 1967.
Die Zeit called them the "eleven little Oswalds" but they actually went
in armed with puddings, flour and yogurt. The incident was dubbed the
Pudding-Attentat, literally "Pudding Assassination", though
"Assassination by pudding" captures its absurdist flavour better.

Teufel was a thorn in the side of the West German authorities whose
heavy-handed harassment was out of all proportion to what Teufel was
alleged to have done. In the authorities' defence, this was also another
age of extremists, typified by the Rote Armee Fraktion's murders and
kidnappings.

He was eventually imprisoned for arson in what was possibly a
miscarriage of justice. When he next went to prison, it was for carrying
a pistol. Which he was – in part probably brought on by paranoia,
heightened by assiduous Kiffen (dope-smoking). After emerging from jail,
he wrote occasionally for Die Tageszeitung and paid his rent working as
a bicycle courier in Berlin.

Fritz Teufel, political activist: born Ludwigsburg, Swabia, Germany 7
June 1943; died Berlin 5 July 2010.

[Hoodoo]

Fritz Teufel

Fritz Teufel, who died on July 6 aged 67, was a flamboyant Berlin
radical of the 1960s who sought to challenge the postwar West German
state with stunts and protests under the motto Witz als Waffe (“wit as
weapon”); the Germans failed to see the joke.

Published: 7:13PM BST 05 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/7929169/Fritz-Teufel.html

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Fritz Teufel


Sporting long hair, beard and steel-rimmed glasses, Teufel first rose to
prominence in April 1967 when he was one of 11 people arrested for
plotting to assassinate the American Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who
had come to West Berlin on an official visit. When it emerged that
Teufel’s weapons of choice consisted of flour bags and cake mixture, the
incident became known as the Pudding-Attentat (“Pudding Assassination”)
and Teufel as the Pudding Bomber.

Teufel was a prominent member of a notorious commune on Stuttgarter
Platz, called Kommune 1, established in 1967 as a radical attempt to
break the traditional bourgeois family structure (“the cell of fascism”)
by abolishing the “private sphere”. Bathroom and lavatory doors were
removed – on the principle that everyone could do what they wanted, so
long as it happened where everyone else could see it. On one occasion a
poster of the communards’ naked backsides appeared with the headline:
Das Privat ist politisch! (“The personal is political”). “We really felt
obliged to correct the historical, political development of a
Nazi-tainted federal republic,” Teufel explained.

K1 became infamous for organising elaborate staged happenings which
hovered in the grey zone between satire and provocation and made
headlines in the press. In one stunt commune members climbed the Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church to shower the unsuspecting citizenry with copies
of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao. But not all the trappings of bourgeois
society were taboo: journalists wanting interviews were greeted with the
sign: “First pay up, then speak.”

Teufel cultivated his public profile as a Spass-Guerillero or “fun
guerrilla” in the class struggle, but his regular run-ins with the law
came at some personal cost. In June 1967 he was arrested and accused of
throwing stones during a visit to West Berlin by the Shah of Iran. He
was held in custody for six months and released only after sympathisers
held demonstrations, chanting: “Freedom for Fritz Teufel” and “Drive the
devil out of Moabit!” (Moabit being Berlin’s prison and Teufel being
German for devil).

The youngest of six children, Fritz Teufel was born at Ludwigsburg,
Swabia, on June 7 1943 and, like many of his generation, gravitated to
Berlin in the early 1960s – ostensibly to study German Literature at the
Free University of Berlin, though the fact that the city’s legal status
enabled young West Germans to avoid the draft probably had more to do
with it. In Berlin he got to know Rudi Dutschke and other young radicals
and, in 1967, co-founded Kommune 1.

But the West German political establishment was not alone in
experiencing a sense of humour failure about Teufel. Earnest members of
the radical Left objected to the constant stream of female groupies who
came to visit him and he was eventually expelled from K1.

He then moved to Munich, where he lived in a commune with Irmgard
Möller, later a member of the Red Army Faction. In the early 1970s, he
was imprisoned for two years for attempting to firebomb a Munich court,
though as the prosecution provided no evidence of his participation, his
conviction was regarded by the press as a miscarriage of justice.

In 1975 Teufel was arrested again and charged with being a leading
member of the militant June 2 Movement, which had kidnapped Peter
Lorenz, chairman of the Berlin CDU. Teufel was held on remand for five
years before the case came to court, but only at the end of the trial
did Teufel present his alibi, which proved conclusively that at the time
of the abduction he had been working under a false name in a lavatory
seat factory in Essen. He had kept his silence, he explained, to expose
the flaws in West Germany’s justice system.

By the time of his release from prison in 1980, Teufel had broken with
the radical Left. For a time he moved to London, where he worked in a
co-operative bakery, but by the late 1980s he was back in Berlin,
working as a freelance journalist and bicycle courier and granting
interviews in exchange for a game of table tennis.

Fritz Teufel is survived by his partner, Helene Lollo.