TX001 · Footnote 06 · route entry 5 of 26
Kommune Eins
The birthplace of West Berlin’s first political commune and the unfinished revolt against parental silence.
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Recorded in English · 2:11
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Transcript
Hang a right ahead and walk along Stuttgarter Platz.
After you’ve turned, stop for a moment by the building on your right.
This is the birthplace of Kommune Eins, West Berlin’s first political commune. They were part of a wider West German rebellion against their parents’ silence and the unresolved legacy of Nazism.
“If it were to serve the pursuit of truth,” became a rallying cry for every prankster with a political conscience.
Let's keep walking ahead as I tell you more.
Their ringleader was Dieter Kunzelmann, a mischievous visionary who had spent the early 60s in Munich with a group of artists called Spur. That circle had briefly joined Guy Debord and the Situationist International, a network of European radicals who thought modern life had become a spectacle, a giant theatre where nobody lived directly but only watched themselves being sold to. The Situationists wanted to sabotage that spectacle. They wandered cities on aimless drifts they called dérive, letting mood and chance replace reason. They twisted advertisements, posters and comic strips into jokes and weapons, a tactic called détournement.
When Kunzelmann moved to Berlin in 1967, he brought that spirit to Kommune Eins. In a flat right here at Stuttgarter Platz, with Fritz Teufel, Rainer Langhans and later model-activist Uschi Obermaier, everyday life became performance: mock press conferences, naked manifestos, and the notorious pudding attack on US Vice President Humphrey. It mixed absurdism with genuine politics. But Kunzelmann later slid into extremism, joining the militant Tupamaros West-Berlin and serving prison time. He re-emerged in the 80s as a provocateur in the early Green movement. He died in 2018, a self-made villain of postwar Berlin.