The soft vengeance of a freedom fighter on the Constitutional Court

Abstract

On 11 April 1968, one week after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis, Tennessee, Josef Bachmann, a 24 year old house painter, travelled from Munich to Berlin. Under his jacket he carried a pistol in a shoulder holster. In his bag were a second pistol and a newspaper cutting from the rightwing Deutsche Nationalzeitung, in which the newspaper demanded that the left-radical revolution should be stopped. Over a row of five pictures of student activist Rudi Dutschke, the newspaper’s banner heading proclaimed that the student uprising, and specifically ‘Red Rudi’, had to be stopped.