Naked they stood in a Berlin backyard, only the faces masked with ski masks. On a tree next to them someone had nailed a portrait of the former GDR Secretary General Erich Honecker. In front of them a table, accurately set, white blanket, white napkins.
The squatters from Mainz Street in Friedrichshain were photographed in the summer of 1990 to record their coup. Her stolen goods came from the "taz" editorial department. It was 5.50 meters long and 1.50 meters wide, made of light bark tassels, the edges littered with ballpoint scribbles: the most political table in German history.
The piece of furniture was more than any soulless Ikea mass product. Almost a sanctuary made of wood for many leftists of the '68 movement. And this sanctuary, which had once been in Commune 1, had now been stolen - of all things from leftists who accused leftists not to be real leftists anymore.
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A table and its story: scribbled, stolen, desecratedStröbele paid 800 marks
The story of this extraordinary table begins more than 20 years before its bizarre kidnapping: At that time, this table witnessed how the West Berlin student movement after 1968 partly radicalized, partly took drugs and partly began the march through the institutions. How leftist groups formed and quarreled again, settling the revolt in the revolt with the 68ers.
Nobody knows exactly where the table originally came from. Hans-Christian Ströbele and Klaus Esche from the "Socialist Lawyers Collective" bought it in 1969 at a clutter market in Berlin-Charlottenburg. They paid 800 marks for the monster, and they got a handful of plastic chairs. The lawyers planned in this time, among other things, how they defend the later RAF terrorist Andreas Baader - who had set fire in a Frankfurt department store.
The table turned out to be too big for the law office in Wilmersdorfer Meierottostraße. The collective invented a cable system to pull it to the ceiling. Before it put the plan into action, however, the table disappeared. He made a detour to Rainer Langhans, Dieter Kunzelmann and Fritz Teufel, who had settled in a factory building in Moabiter Stephanstraße.
Conspiracies at the table - until the state protection came
The municipality was already crumbling at this time - some were looking for drug addiction, the other the political upheaval. In November 1969, rockers attacked the WG, beat Langhans, his girlfriend Uschi Obermaier and the remaining Communards. It was the end of the K1.
The factory floor in Stephanstraße then took over the Proletarian Left / party initiative. The cadres of the workers' organization met in a fixed seating arrangement at the table. A little later, the PL / PI broke up again.
A spontaneous group moved into the building and had several meetings gathered around the table in the 1970s. One of them was the Rote Hilfe. The organization defended left-wing activists from alleged state persecution and placed itself in the tradition of the KPD-affiliated Red Aid Germany, which had been smashed in 1939 by the Gestapo.
The editorial board of the radical left-wing weekly magazine "Info BUG" (Berlin Undogmatic Groups) also conferred at the table. Later, the "U" in her name also stood for the "incomprehensible", "inevitable", "countless" and "uncorrupted" groups. In 1977, the police took charge of their printer and took four printers in custody; they should have supported a terrorist organization. The magazine was discontinued.
Bared breasts against misogynistic pornography
After the RAF terror in autumn 1977, many leftists turned away from militant currents. From then on, some tried to change society with the help of existing institutions. Hans-Christian Ströbele, for example, joined the Alternative List, a new party that won almost four percent of the Berlin House of Representatives election in 1979 and would later be absorbed into the Greens.
In parallel, the lawyer and his colleagues called the daily newspaper "taz" into being, which appeared regularly from 1979 onwards. At that time Ströbele remembered his old table again and took him to Weddinger Wattstraße, where the editorial office was built.
In 1980, a former "taz" editor wrote an article in which he described a woman as a "horny, young pig" and described in detail how he had satisfied her with his toes. The employees of the "taz" protested at the editorial table against what they considered to be misogynistic pornography. When a man cursed them as a prude, they bared their breasts. A little later, they went on strike. Thus, they achieved the first female quota in Germany: 52 percent of employees should now be female. By the way, they enforced a ban on smoking.
Then the hackers met at the table
A year later, the Hamburg Wau Holland called under the heading "TUWAT, TXT Version" all "Komputerfrieks" in the editorial office. The meeting brought together people who would later found the world's largest hacker association, the Chaos Computer Club.
The table remained with the "taz" for almost ten years, but was relegated from the conference rooms to the cafeteria after moving to Kreuzberg's Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. The "taz" cast off their apo-past and received Berlin's governing mayor Walter Momper and various federal ministers for an interview.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Berlin groups occupy several houses in the former East Berlin Friedrichshain, including Mainzer Straße. A "taz" editor, even from the GDR, criticized the process as an act of colonization, as left imperialism of Western Autonomous.
Raid at the time of going to press
This had consequences: In August 1990, the squatters revenged themselves. 20 people entered the "taz" building shortly before the editorial deadline, when all the editors were editing the texts there. The intruders broke the table into ten pieces, hoisted it over a fence in the courtyard, and drove it away with a pickup truck. When employees of the newspaper noticed the theft, they immediately alerted the police.
The officers pursued the van, but at Checkpoint Charlie they had to turn off: Berlin was then officially still divided and the West had no powers in the East.
The "taz" called the thieves an article "snob," the table a "relic" and himself "legitimate heirs of the student movement." The autonomists countered that these same students had become "established money sacks and pillars of the state". "This table is a social revolutionary relic and has lost nothing in your life for a long time," they wrote. Shortly thereafter, they mocked the "taz" with their nude photo in front of the laid table.
Ströbele wrote an open letter to the squatters in Mainzer Straße. "If you do not want to burn it or knock it over, but to add a new one to the stages of its tradition, let it be yours to trust." It was wrong that the "taz" regarded the table as her property, because even she had just been entrusted to him.
Furniture goes up in flames
For months nothing happened in the case of the quirky table robbery. Until the police in November 1990, shortly after reunification, tried to evacuate the houses in Mainzer Straße. The autonomists erected barricades and threw Molotov cocktails, the police advanced with water cannons. In the end, she expelled the occupants. The ruling SPD had not informed their coalition partner, the Alternative List, about the operation, so the coalition broke up after the street fight.
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But the police had not secured the captured table. Autonomists had previously taken him to a squat villa near King Wusterhausen. According to the left-wing magazine "telegraph", which emerged from a DDR opposition paper, apolitical artists lived here.
Soon, squatters from Potsdam stole the table from the villa. And in 1993, they made him a political piece of furniture for the last time - demonstratively burning him.