A world devoid of emotions: radical left-wingers’ critique of capitalist emotions

In numerous texts, radical left-wing authors developed a corpus of knowledge about the emotional self and the ways in which capitalism produced ‘damaged personalities’.Footnote ¹⁴ Three aspects are of particular interest for our article. First, radical left-wingers analysed the allegedly omnipresent sense of fear in capitalism; second, they focused on feelings of loneliness and the inability to engage in meaningful social relations; and third, perhaps seemingly in contradiction to the previous two claims, they argued that capitalism created an overly ‘rational’ world that left no space for the expression of feelings. It was exactly this impossibility of expressing feelings, both good and bad, that created feelings of fear and loneliness. People were, for example, lonely, precisely because they could, in the rational world of capitalism, not talk about this loneliness, nor about their fears. In this sense, the emotional void of capitalism and the predominance of fear and other negative feelings went hand in hand in radical left-wingers’ minds. Furthermore we argue that developing this knowledge was itself generative of emotional realities. Radical left-wingers, in other words, both created and enacted their ‘damaged personalities’ and in so doing set emotional norms. Those who acted and felt otherwise – by, for example, enjoying the vast riches offered by capitalist consumer culture or finding emotional fulfilment in work – were derided as having been duped by capitalist ideology. Such forms of pleasure, radical left-wingers argued, were not reflective of genuine feelings.Footnote ¹⁵

There were, according to radical left-wingers, multiple social and political problems that gave reason for fear: the danger of nuclear warfare, the destruction of the environment, but also the emergence of a computerised surveillance state. However, it would be misleading to analyse these distinct fears separately. More important was a ‘general precautionary sense of fear’ (vorbeugende Grundangsthaltung) in ‘this crackbrained society’ that could not be escaped.Footnote ¹⁶ This general sense of fear was, as Dieter Duhm argued in his widely read book Fear in Capitalism, intimately tied to the very structures of capitalism. In capitalism, people treated each other as commodities rather than human beings, were subjected to alienation and seemingly anonymous powers outside their control, and had to constantly compete with each other and perform well on the job. According to Duhm, these features created deep-seated anxiety. Even love relations were caught in the mire of capitalist sociality, since such relationships first required those involved to overcome their alienation and mutual fears.Footnote ¹⁷ Oftentimes, this discourse about fear was deeply gendered. Boys, for example, a brochure for men, Mannsbild, argued, were taught by their fathers that real men knew no fears, except one: ‘not being a real man’.Footnote ¹⁸ The Frankfurt-based student paper Diskus explicitly linked men's fear to capitalism, noting that men were forced to compete with one another due to their position as the main breadwinners of the family. Showing feelings in this situation would be impossible.Footnote ¹⁹

Such fears were, as the text discussed at the beginning of this article indicated, a source of loneliness and isolation. Time and again, radical left-wingers reported that they had gone to bars or parties and failed to engage in genuine communication due to their fear of revealing their true ‘damaged self’.Footnote ²⁰ Teenage boys described their attempts to escape loneliness through state-sanctioned forms of entertainment such as clubs and discos. But these forms of escape proved untenable because the loud music only further accentuated speechlessness.Footnote ²¹ To a large degree, radical left-wingers held the built environment responsible for this social isolation.Footnote ²² They claimed that modern cities and especially the monotonous high-rise buildings in the peripheries were constructed in such a way as to prevent any communication and hence solidarity between the residents. Throughout the 1970s, radical left-wingers and their allies constantly drew attention to these aspects of modern cities, bemoaning the lost feeling of wholeness which one could experience in traditional neighbourhood structures. In the Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, for example, Christian left-wing activists such as Klaus Duntze argued that modernist forms of architecture made it difficult to retain feelings of community and interpersonal warmth. For many of these activists, the answer lay in protecting or reviving older forms of neighbourliness and conviviality.Footnote ²³ Even work at factories, traditionally considered an alienating experience, gained a positive value in these circumstances, as it kept ‘[the] erotic alive’. While living in ‘modern housing complexes (Wohnsiedlungen)’ yielded only ‘isolation’, work in the factory both enabled people to ‘talk to each other without being cramped (ohne Verkrampfung)’, and brought their bodies closer. The alternative to this ‘sensuality stimulated by the factory’ was ‘frigidity and impotence.’Footnote ²⁴ As these examples indicate, radical left-wingers thought of emotions like fear, loneliness and frustration not as individual failures, but as deeply rooted social and political problems that affected wide segments of the population.

Beyond specific feelings, capitalist society was also held responsible for producing a general emotional void, since only profits, competition and numbers mattered for capitalist rationality. Children, whom many radical left-wingers believed to be inherently more emotional than rational adults, would only learn in this world ‘devoid of feelings’ how to work, use superficial consumer products, make money and feel ashamed about their body, but not how to talk about their feelings and sexuality, how to enjoy these and how to love each other.Footnote ²⁵ Adults, and once again especially men, who were seen as particularly emotionally deprived, were considered incapable of being ‘affectionate (zärtlich)’ with each other, meaning that they could neither talk about their feelings nor express their affection in a bodily way, for example, by cuddling.Footnote ²⁶ The monotony of cities contributed massively to this emotional void, not only because it prevented real communication, but also because it lacked sensual diversity. Living amidst ‘concrete, noise, exhaust fumes, smog, canteen food, phosphate sausages, rubber bread rolls’ crippled the senses complained Diskus.Footnote ²⁷ ‘Yawning boredom and a sterile lack of stimuli’, the Hamburg-based paper Revolte noted, produced feelings of ‘aggression that people could let out only within the family.’Footnote ²⁸

Importantly, radical left-wing authors did not merely analyse capitalist society in these terms, but considered themselves and, by extension, their audience – the entire ‘scene’ – to be deeply affected by these issues. It is these texts that most explicitly created an emotional regime by telling readers how they should feel as well as what feelings they should express. One key rhetorical device in this regard was the utilisation of the first person plural in discussing ‘our’ feelings. An article in the Berlin-based Info-BUG, presumably written by a man, cautioned left-wing men not to act like ‘softies’ only because it was fashionable. To really and not superficially change, ‘we first have to learn to accept our damaged behaviour, not because we like it, but in order to recognise it, and thus to deal with it.’Footnote ²⁹ Being able to express feelings, above all negative ones such as fear, was considered a crucial skill for both women and men. Such expressions of negative emotions facilitated a putatively objective form of self-knowledge and thus created the conditions for an emotional transformation. Writing in the Heidelberg Carlo Sponti, a certain Bea demanded that men should be able to communicate with her about their ‘fears and insecurities, about expectations, demands and disappointments. . . After all, you are still quite emotionally crippled and underdeveloped – but first, you have to realise this yourselves!’Footnote ³⁰ As personal ads in radical left-wing papers suggest, at least some men responded to such critiques, and began referring to themselves as ‘damaged’ or ‘frustrated’.Footnote ³¹ Such texts, as well as numerous first-person ‘confessions’ about fears, damaged behaviour and personal frustrations, suggest that the ‘emotional regime’ radical left-wingers created was in a way effective, as many seem to have conformed to its rules.Footnote ³²

Searching for emotions: alternative emotional practices

As the preceding discussion suggests, radical left-wingers construed their environment as overwhelmingly imbued with negative feelings such as fear, loneliness, frustration or a general emotional void. Talking about these feelings was a way of performing damaged personalities. Yet, this critical analysis of emotions under capitalism which linked specific features of capitalist society to negative feelings also created possibilities for engaging in practices that would yield different and better feelings and thus, in a sense, ‘cure’ them of their ailments. It would thus be misleading to depict the 1970s in West Germany as an overly fearful decade, as the omnipresent discourse of fear might suggest, because the production of fear in such discourses also created the possibility of self-consciously overcoming this fear.Footnote ³³ Indeed, these increasingly sophisticated forms of self-knowledge acted as a motivational force, driving radical left-wingers to work on what they perceived to be their own damaged personas. Such practices could take multiple forms. One key goal, as the example from the beginning suggested, was overcoming fear through definitive action. Some left-wing papers even defined the main goal of ‘Sponti’–politics in such terms. Herbert Röttgen writing in Das Blatt, noted that they engaged in politics ‘to overcome [their] fears, to liberate [themselves] in the act of revolting.’Footnote ³⁴ Engaging in violence was one means to achieve this end,Footnote ³⁵ but violence was by no means necessary. Nightly women's demonstrations, for example, were frequently described as moments when women would not feel afraid of being out at night.Footnote ³⁶ Others sought to overcome their fears in more private, therapeutic ways. Some activists, for example, joined consciousness-raising groups in which they would learn to talk about their fears and their feelings more generally.Footnote ³⁷

Given that radical left-wingers considered the built environment a key source for feelings of loneliness and frustration, it is not surprising that activists tried to forge different living conditions by escaping and, in some cases, transforming their environment. A ‘tribe’ (Sippe) of twenty people that had formed a ‘rural commune’ near Nuremberg, for example, declared that it was the only way for them to escape from the ‘aggressiveness of cities’. Living there would make them ‘happy’, which they considered inherently revolutionary. Crucial in this regard was that they could physically experience nature: ‘running barefoot over meadows, [drinking] fresh milk from healthy cows, [eating] food [they] had gathered themselves’.Footnote ³⁸ In urban environments, activists moved into communal apartments (Wohngemeinschaften, WGs) to escape from the ‘small private hells’ of ‘couple relations’ (Zweierbeziehung) and the family. The Blatt called for ‘collectives’ and communal living that would yield ‘cosiness, clarity and solidarity’ and thus combat the ‘Moloch’ city. ‘We have to establish our community centres (Stadtteilzentren) in the concrete deserts of suburbia’ and try to form some sort of community awareness among the lonely and isolated human beings.’Footnote ³⁹ Activists also enacted aesthetic interventions in public spaces, a practice which was to become central in the early 1980s. The alternative literature magazine Ulcus Molle from Bottrop, for example, approvingly reviewed a book that praised the power of wall paintings. ‘Trees and sun on concrete. . . children playing under the sun on the lawn, where no sun shines, where no grass grows’ should do away with the boredom of modern cities.Footnote ⁴⁰ Public gardens, community centres and even petting zoos were all attempts to re-emotionalise the city.

Faced with the depressing belief that they were emotionally stunted, radical left-wingers engaged in diverse practices designed to help them relearn their ability to feel and to express feelings for each other. Communicating about feelings was one key aspect in this regard.Footnote ⁴¹ But finding feelings also had a bodily component. On the one hand, activists expressed their desires for ‘feeling their [own] bodies’. On the other hand they considered ‘tenderness’ (Zärtlichkeit), touching each other, and physical closeness crucial for developing interpersonal sympathy and friendship. Men were especially eager to learn how to become emotional beings through mutual touching. Members of a men's group in Berlin, for example, cuddled with each other and slept together (without having sex) in a big bed.Footnote ⁴² At an exclusive ‘men's party’ (Männerfete) in Berlin, men hoped to overcome their ‘socially instilled’ and putatively rational repression of feelings by engaging in ‘affectionate’ behaviour with one another (though it remained open what that meant).Footnote ⁴³ Women also participated in such activities. For example, women attending a ‘feminist therapy congress’ in Cologne hoped to ‘feel their body’ and did so by ‘pantomimic dancing’, ‘wild yelling’, or ‘playing birth’.Footnote ⁴⁴ A ‘Leisure-Time Alternative for Communes’, open to both men and women, provided similar bodily-emotional experiences. They sat in a long row, ‘oiling the back of the man in front, which [increased] in intensity until it [turned] into a massage and [phased] out with petting.’ On other days, they played badminton naked, danced in the rain, and talked in big circles about their ‘social interaction’ (Umgang) – especially their ‘issues with sexuality’.Footnote ⁴⁵ All such practices – the discussions of feelings as well as the more active forms of physical intimacy – can be read as practical attempts to produce emotionally and physically intense situations in a world in which such feelings purportedly had little place. In this sense, we propose that the radical new left can be interpreted within the broader social shift towards therapeutic communities. Analysing emotional problems and their socio-economic contexts was both a way of performing the ‘damaged self’ and a necessary precondition for ‘healing’. Like members of the New Age movement, radical left-wingers engaged in practices of ‘self-healing’. In both milieus, bodies and emotions were critical for this process of self-healing.Footnote ⁴⁶

‘Towards new shores’: escaping the impasse of frustration

Interpreting the constant complaints in radical left-wing papers about a boring, dull and frustrating world as an indication that activists only felt about things that way would be misleading. Rather, radical left-wingers developed multiple practices that were meant to, and sometimes did, ‘cure’ them of their ailments by eliciting different and better feelings. Such attempts often failed, however, to produce the desired results. Radical left-wing papers are brimming with reports about problems in communal apartments, the failure of rural communes (Landkommunen), or the inadequacy of violence as a means to overcome fear.Footnote ⁴⁷ As the sense of frustration and hopelessness reached a climax after the violent battles in Brokdorf in 1976 and the German Autumn of 1977, radical left-wingers faced both emotional and political impasses. In the wake of these defeats, many activists turned to a variety of new therapeutic strategies to escape the emotional void of capitalism. Some stepped away from politics and looked for emotional fulfilment in New Age religions or in sexual communities like the Aktionsanalytische Organisation, led by Otto Mühl.Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps most prominent among them was Herbert Röttgen, author for Das Blatt in Munich and co-founder of the influential Trikont Verlag, which changed its name into Dianus Trikont Verlag in 1980 and henceforth published New Age books.Footnote ⁴⁹ Meanwhile, other radical left-wingers, notably Joschka Fischer, joined the emerging Green Party, and in so doing largely excised therapeutic considerations from political practices.Footnote ⁵⁰ During the late 1970s, we can thus observe a disentanglement of left-wing politics of societal transformation and the therapeutic project of self-transformation.

At the same time, activists sensed that something else, a new, more exciting form of politics, was on the horizon although they were unable to state precisely what this was. At least in part, the origins of this development in Germany can be traced to Italy, which had witnessed a year of massive protests in 1977.Footnote ⁵¹ Fascinated by a large congress in Bologna, which in fact marked the end of the Italian movement, activists from Berlin reported on the ‘buone vibrazioni nell’aria.’ [Good vibrations in the air.] They described the scene as a huge party, where men and women painted themselves with the ‘craziest colours’ as they ‘clowned about and played Indian throughout the city’.Footnote ⁵² Inspired by the ‘Indiani Metropolitani’, activists who dressed up as Native Americans and declared war against urban, industrial society, similar groups became more prominent in West German cities.Footnote ⁵³

The congress in Bologna was also an inspiration for the Tunix Congress in Berlin in February 1978.Footnote ⁵⁴ To everyone’s, including the organisers’, surprise, some 20,000 Spontis, alternative and other non-dogmatic left-wingers from all over West Germany gathered in Berlin to bid farewell to ‘model Germany’. Assessing the event's impact remains rather difficult. Many complained about overcrowded and often boring lectures, and few seemed to be interested in what celebrities like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had to say. And yet, despite multiple critiques, there was a sense among many of those who attended the congress that a new dynamic and new movement was emerging. One activist from Berlin, for example, noted after a demonstration that ended with (minor) riots that he had, for the first time in a long while, not felt frustrated at the end of a demonstration.Footnote ⁵⁵ Writing in the Frankfurt paper Pflasterstrand, Joschka Fischer aptly summarised the impact of Tunix. When he and his comrades in Frankfurt had considered organising a large European congress in Summer 1978, they ‘stood with [their] backs to the wall, isolated, looking for political perspectives, speechless and helpless in the light of the Schleyer abduction, Stammheim and Mogadishu. We felt individualised and powerless, exposed to the omnipresent state terrorism.’ Yet, then came Tunix, and a ‘new normality’ emerged, even though Fischer criticised this as an ‘illusion of warmer feet’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Illusion or not, Tunix suggested to activists that it was possible to escape not only from the depressing ‘model Germany’, but also from the equally depressing dynamics of terrorism and repression. ‘New shores at the beach of Tunix’ seemed in sight.

Tunix was the clearest indication that a major shift within the radical left was underway. After Tunix, numerous grass-roots projects came into being, most famously probably the German left-wing daily die tageszeitung (taz). More generally, the sense of despair and the focus on damaged personalities receded into the background. By separating the practices and discourses surrounding emotional exuberance from the therapeutic language of the self, Tunix represented a first step away from the ‘therapeutic community’ of the radical left. To significant segments of the radical left, which included both old and experienced and new activists, it became increasingly apparent that external rather than internal boundaries were the primary obstacles standing in the way of emotional fulfilment. This distancing prepared the stage for the wave of youth protests that raged throughout West Germany in 1980–81, during which activists found, albeit only for a brief moment, the euphoric feelings they had been looking for during the 1970s.

The glacier melts: cathartic emotions in the revolts of 1980/81

Over the course of 1980–81, youth revolts broke out in cities across West Germany as well as in Switzerland, thus indicating that the movement was not contained within the borders of the Federal Republic. In Bremen, massive riots erupted during a public military recruitment ceremony on 6 May 1980.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Switzerland, two nights of rioting in Zurich on 30–31 May 1980 followed in the aftermath of a demonstration against state subsidies for the municipal opera.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Freiburg, the residents of the squatted building commonly known as the ‘Dreisameck’ were evicted on 8 June 1980, an event which led to violent demonstrations and riots in the city.Footnote ⁵⁹ In West Berlin, the centre of the movement in West Germany and the location on which we will primarily focus for the remainder of the article, riots after the forced eviction of a squatted house on 12 December 1980, sparked a series of occupations and often violent street demonstrations during the following months.Footnote ⁶⁰

Compared to the forms of radical left-wing politics during the 1970s, these revolts constituted a significant change. While activists continued to argue that urban capitalism had emotionally crippling effects, engaging in practices that would yield ‘euphoric’ feelings now came to overshadow the sense of ‘preventive fear’ that had characterised the 1970s. Few of the emotional practices of this period were entirely new: activists still engaged in violence to overcome fear and lived communally in squatted houses to escape loneliness just as they had in the 1970s. And yet, the revolts of 1980–81 were qualitatively different. Activists in the 1970s constantly emphasised their ‘damaged’ personalities and tried to ‘fix’ them, most notably in the context of numerous self-help and self-experience groups. During these years, the search for (positive) emotions and the ephemeral moments of joy were intrinsically linked to the ‘preventive sense of general fear’ that dominated the left-wing scene. By the early 1980s, however, many activists jettisoned the manifold therapeutic strategies designed to ‘fix’ their ‘damaged’ personalities. Instead of painstakingly changing the world by changing their inner selves, the activists of 1980–81 celebrated the exuberant and intense emotions generated when transgressing external – though, still self-constructed – social boundaries. Two practices, squatting houses and rioting during demonstrations, allow us to gain a better understanding of these joyful emotions.

Squatting, that is the illegal occupation of empty buildings, was a defining feature of the revolts of 1980–81. Hundreds of houses were, for a more or less extended period of time, occupied in cities all over West Germany, with particular hotspots in West Berlin and Freiburg.Footnote ⁶¹ Scholars so far have interpreted these squats mostly from the perspective of a crisis in urban housing and urban renewal. While these are certainly important issues to consider, in this article we seek to highlight another aspect of the 1980–81 squatting movement, namely that intense emotional communities were formed in the reorganised and (re-)aestheticised domestic spaces of collectively inhabited squatted houses.

In many ways, both the critique of modern, urban life and the practical goals of communal living in squatted houses were reminiscent of the 1970s. As a text by the Netzwerk Selbsthilfe, a non-radical left-wing group that supported squatted houses, put it:

The very organisation of the built environment was believed to prevent genuine social interaction and communication that would overcome isolation and foster solidarity. Such modes of communicative and emotional engagement, squatters argued, could only emerge in relatively unstructured spaces, for example, ‘when talking at the grocery store, in the stairwell or in a bar.’ The authors went on to argue that ‘uncontrollable communication amongst affected populations is the basis of any resistance.’Footnote ⁶³ Such arguments for politicised communication were, of course, also a central element of radical left-wing politics during the 1970s. However, in the 1970s such forms of interpersonal communication were meant to cure damaged personalities, whereas in the revolts of 1980–81 they turned into a means of resistance. Creating and defending autonomous spaces was thus deemed to be essential for the development of intense emotions and novel forms of solidarity outside the constraints of capitalist society.

Squatted houses represented a space that would enable individuals to live communally and develop emotionally intense relations. Reducing the practice of squatting during these years to a mere struggle for ‘the preservation of living space (Wohnraum)’ is thus impossible. As the Besetzerrat Schöneberg declared:

Indeed, squatters and their allies often described a ‘genuine warmth’ that was attached to the squatted houses. In contrast to the anonymity that reigned in large apartment buildings, people knew each other in these houses – ‘a cool Turkish family, a nice communal apartment or some other nice (dufte) people – and these are all people you really know, people from whom you can borrow something to eat when the stores are closed, sit down with in the backyard and gab on a Saturday afternoon, and collectively accomplish something together in the house.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Squatted houses thus became spaces of genuine communication between diverse people. To a large degree these feelings of emotional warmth were understood as emerging from the architectural peculiarities of older houses and traditional neighbourhoods.Footnote ⁶⁶ At the same time, however, some squatters sought to further improve communication within the houses by rearranging the inner layout. They tore down walls and created ‘functional rooms’, such as big sleeping rooms, living rooms, etc., and abolished private spaces deemed to be isolating. In extreme cases privacy was only accessible in circumscribed areas such as ‘love rooms’ where people could have sex.Footnote ⁶⁷

Another key element of the squatting movement was the attempt to radically transform the outward appearance of the houses. Again, this had already been discussed and practised during the 1970s, yet, the sheer quantity of squats allowed activists to transform entire neighbourhoods into autonomous enclaves of emotional intensity. These ‘colours against the dull grey in the backyard’, as the Berlin magazine tip referred to them, ranged from idyllic scenes of life in nature to militant depictions of resistance.Footnote ⁶⁸ Colourful images both reflected the emotional values of the movement, and demarcated the borders of radical spaces, providing a stark contrast to the emotionally vacuous visual landscapes of normal urban life. According to the Stadtzeitung für Freiburg, ‘Graffiti’ acted as ‘tattoos of the city’, which ‘do not convey any meaning or messages. They uncover the waste and dullness of urban deserts with their emptiness and lack of meaning. Graffiti win their power through subversion, by making dead matter come to life – by pointing out destructive architecture and elevating life that had been imprisoned in concrete.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Writing in the twilight of the movement in 1983, another Freiburg activist pointed to the significance of these visual cues, expressing her hopes that ‘new graffiti will turn the concrete city into a jungle, everywhere fires will be fuelled, where the untameable will gather – and one day we will have banded together as a horde of barbarians that will again dare to storm the cities.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The visual transformations of the built environment, these authors suggested, disrupted the rationality of thoroughly planned capitalist urban life-worlds. Inscribed onto the landscape of the city, these disruptions were also understood as potential catalysts for the future radicalisation of society.Footnote ⁷¹

In contrast to the communes formed by activists during the 1970s, squatted houses were rarely (even though it did happen at times) ‘therapeutic communities’, meant to support squatters in repairing their damaged selves. Instead, they represented free spaces for the expression of genuine emotions and, as such, needed to be defended at all costs. It is no surprise that squatters developed deep emotional attachments to ‘their’ houses that came especially to the fore during forced evictions, which is certainly one aspect that contributes to an explanation of the massive violence during the revolts. An eviction was, one squatter said after ‘their’ house had been cleared and immediately afterwards destroyed, ‘perhaps comparable with the death of an acquaintance. It is the loss of something that has a key meaning for you, which only becomes clear later on.’Footnote ⁷² Another squatter stressed that forced evictions were not only significant for housing politics (wohnungspolitische Bedeutung), but that they also destroyed ‘relations between people. . . the state assaults people in their private spaces, brutally destroys their way of living – that can create an insane amount of rage.’Footnote ⁷³ Tellingly, the statement invokes a sense of ‘wholeness’ activists claimed to have found in their houses. There was no longer a sense of ‘damaged’ personalities that required work, but of a state that assaulted autonomous spaces populated by presumably undamaged people.

In squats, social feelings of sympathy, ‘warmth’ and intimacy were to become mainstays of emotional experience. Yet, any one-sided romanticisation of life in squats should be avoided. For many squatters, who often continued practising some form of collective living after the movement's heyday, it was certainly a momentous, life-changing experience. Others, however, soon developed different ideas about their preferred style of living. On the outskirts of Berlin, in places such as Spandau, some squats were even abandoned, because too many residents moved out.Footnote ⁷⁴ Young couples with children, especially, and single mothers came to long for the quietness of normal apartments or complained about the permanent dirt in squatted houses.Footnote ⁷⁵ In some squats, the good feelings, the cordial and open forms of interpersonal communication, all but vanished. In the beginning, a squatter remarked in March 1982, everything had been ‘prickling with adventures. Everything was, if possible, to be done at once, that's how much fun we had with everything we did. Getting to know each other was just as much fun. Yes, there was trouble, but that never lasted long and nobody sulked for long because of it.’ But then, people fell back to their old habits – ranging ‘from complete indifference with regard to anything happening in and around the house, to ‘chauvinism’ (Mackertum) that makes you want to puke’ – stopped listening to each other's problems, and used ‘actions’ to ‘paper over’ their problems and frustrations. ‘Honestly, I’m sick of being alone, even though I’m not [really alone]’, the article ambiguously concluded.Footnote ⁷⁶

In part, the wave of squatting in 1980–81 fulfilled radical left-wing dreams from the 1970s of overcoming loneliness and frustration. Yet, this was a short-lived success. On the one hand, increasing state pressure was certainly crucial in cracking the movement. While some squatted houses in West Berlin received legal contracts, others were forcibly evicted by the police. City authorities also erased the visual representations of the movement, most famously the painting over the walls of the squatted Kunst- und Kulturcentrum Kreuzberg, known as KuKuCK. On the other hand, however, the internal dynamics outlined above signalled an end of the emotionally exceptional situation of the oft-fetishised ‘Movement’. By late 1981, a widespread sense of ‘stagnation’ (Stillstand), as opposed to ‘Movement’, had taken hold.

The severity of the shift between the late 1970s and the youth revolts of 1980–81 is even more visible in the practices of street violence, a second defining feature of the revolts early on. Activists from different cities described the riots as a deeply liberating experience, which was inherently emotional. For ten years, an anonymous author in the Zurich-based paper Stilett wrote, the youth of Zurich ‘had been in hiding and thereby gained a nice package of rage and frustration as they incessantly ran up against walls.’ With ‘fearful eyes’ and ‘silenced voices’ Zurich's youth snuck through ‘soulless street canyons’. Then came the riots of 30 May, a ‘medicine for heart and soul’. ‘A joy, as if life had just started. . . One could see how good it was for totally ordinary people to let their normally caged inner animal run free. The long years of darkening and dulled life rhythms loosened, like a persistent cough that finally comes rumbling from the throat. One could breathe again. . . ’Footnote ⁷⁷ Writing in October 1981 and thus already looking back at nearly a year of often violent struggles, the Berlin paper radikal analysed the ‘liberating feeling’ of rioting, ‘when you get rid of your fear for the first time, when you hit back and the pigs [police] are running from you and not the other way round.’Footnote ⁷⁸

It would be a simplification to interpret such texts as evidence that activists were merely enjoying violence, an insight that would hardly be surprising. Instead, we propose to use these texts to interpret rioting as an emotional practice that yielded euphoric and intense emotions. The key question, then, is how, exactly, rioting facilitated these exuberant feelings. For participants, the riots created the sense of being in an exceptional situation in which the perceived ‘normal’ social power relations were reversed. An incident that occurred in Berlin in October 1980 provides an example. Normally, protestors ran way from the police during riots. But this time, a column of police vehicles was so heavily assaulted in the aftermath of a demonstration that it had to turn back. ‘This time, no panic, no paranoia, no arrests and the cops radioing for help. On the street an awesome [geiles] feeling, and the stones beat rhythmically’, the paper Akut und Praktisch wrote.Footnote ⁷⁹ It was this rather unexpected situation during a riot that the ‘other side’ was afraid and yearning for help that created the ‘awesome feeling’. In this case, the normality activists joyfully transgressed, that is the normality of usually being overpowered by the forces of order, was not merely a constructed normality, but a very real one.

A different and arguable more self-constructed set of norms was disrupted when activists succeeded, according to their own reports, in overcoming the isolation and loneliness that typically characterised urban capitalism. The riots in Berlin-Kreuzberg after the police forcibly prevented the occupation of a house on Fraenkelufer 48 on 12 December 1980 are a case in point. ‘This night, order has been turned head over heels in Kreuzberg. The streets are full of people, barricades are built, time and again groups of people engage in discussions with each other.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Along similar lines, an article in the taz noted the ‘liberating laughter of a freak in overalls’, ‘when a Turkish boy handed him box of gummy-bears, saying “This is fun, right?”’Footnote ⁸¹ At least that night, it seems, the social boundaries that separated the ‘scene’ from ‘ordinary’ residents collapsed. Former participants confirm this impression, stressing that ‘old ladies’ opened doors to help people fleeing from the police, or that Turkish pool halls offered their pool tables to treat wounded activists.Footnote ⁸² These social components of the riot – and it remains somewhat unclear if this was a unique feature of the riots on 12 December 1980 – are crucial to understanding why riots felt ‘liberating’ and joyful. Here, at last, radical left-wingers felt that they had truly overcome their (self-imposed) isolation and merged with ‘the people’ in their fight against capitalism and state violence.

This focus on breaking through a self-constructed normality had interesting consequences for the temporalities of politics. At least for some activists, the ‘moments of crossing boundaries, of movement, of change’, were the only situations in which freedom existed. Such freedom emerged, they argued, during riots, in ‘the short moment from picking up the stone until it hits’.Footnote ⁸³ Importantly, this also meant that the feeling of ‘breaking through’ itself became one of the central goals of radical politics. Suggesting that radical activists wanted only to ‘feel good’ but did not care about politics would thus be misleading. Instead, the feelings of liberation, of empowerment, of overcoming fear and frustration when rioting became inherently political.Footnote ⁸⁴ A problem, however, emerged when there were no new boundaries to be crossed, as activists writing in the paper radikal pointed out. Crossing boundaries and experiencing such ‘moments of liberation’ was tied to doing something for the first time: spraying, throwing a stone at a demonstration, or engaging in a ‘decentralised action’ (dezentrale Aktion). Yet, as most people did not want to take the next step and pick up a gun, they faced a conundrum. They tried to find other terrains, to overcome new boundaries, but in vain. Thus, the cycle of protests ‘which had first been articulated with the music of the Sex Pistols and which reached an apogee in 80–81’ arrived at an impasse.Footnote ⁸⁵

A key problem in this situation, and one that activists were very well aware of, was the ritualisation of rioting, as exemplified by the debates in the run-up to the demonstration against the visit of US President Ronald Reagan on 11 June 1982. For some, the ‘street pogo’ lost its attraction with ‘every warrant and every smashed skull’ as activists ceased feeling like ‘living actors of an unleashed force (lebendige Akteure einer Entfesselung)’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The riots at the demonstration against Secretary of State Alexander Haig in September 1981 were celebrated as the ‘biggest action (Äktschn) in the post-war era, [a moment] when the violence imposed on the city fell victim to the incalculable subversion of a Moloch-like movement’. But any attempt to reproduce these riots in a more organised way during the Reagan visit would, some activists predicted, only end in defeat because it lacked spontaneity.Footnote ⁸⁷ In fact, the demonstration against Reagan ended in heavy and quite unforeseen riots at Nollendorfplatz.Footnote ⁸⁸ Police forces attempted to cordon off the demonstration before it started, but protestors succeeded in breaking through police barriers. For some, the riot created a ‘a zone which was partially liberated of any control, of any power and any law, in which encounters developed, complicities, manifold games against a world that controls all wishes and diverts them into production and consumption.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Others, however, bemoaned the feeling ‘of being a planned, unpaid and unconscious statistic in a production whose logic was opposed to [their] own spontaneity, which was furthermore never so incalculable for us and so controlled for the opposing side.’Footnote ⁹⁰ Ultimately, those who proclaimed the end of the ‘movement’ as they knew it turned out to be right. Just as we have seen in the case of squatting, in late 1981 a sense of ‘stagnation’ emerged with regard to street action. While a more durable Autonomen movement emerged from the squatters’ scene, the revolt of 1980–81, with its focus on ephemeral moments of ecstatic transcendence, had come to a definitive end.