Prisoners of the World Unite: The Internationalism of the 2 June Movement from Berlin Moabit Prison

Abstract

Abstract When, in February 1975, the 2 June Movement kidnapped Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of West Berlin, it framed the act in terms of global solidarity. Lorenz was held in a ‘people’s prison’ (Volksgefängnis) on account of his symbolic responsibility for injustices taking place not only in West Berlin but also across the world, including Pinochet’s Chile and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Once in pretrial detention for the kidnapping, members of the group in Moabit prison continued to draw on this internationalist rhetoric, albeit as a means of connecting their own struggles in prison with those of liberation movements abroad. This article explores why this group—associated far more with local West Berlin initiatives than the Red Army Faction ever was—nevertheless deployed globalized rhetoric. It provides a new perspective on the 2 June Movement through targeted analysis of its written sources, which were central to how the group’s actions were perceived by outsiders. Clearly inflected by Marcuse’s theory of marginalized groups, the 2 June Movement narrated the ‘imprisonment’ of Peter Lorenz and its own prison experiences in later years in similar terms. In both cases, local experiences and actions on the ground in West Berlin were envisaged as having the potential to counter injustices taking place abroad. While there were limitations to this world-view, the 2 June Movement is representative of a form of revolutionary optimism capable of connecting the global with the local which was specific to West Berlin’s unique geohistorical circumstances.