THIS TEXT IS BUT A BEGINNING ...

 

III    Development of SPK-history

6.    The University’s Psychiatric Policlinic at the service of the ruling science

During the last years the University's Psychiatric Policlinic Heidelberg had received a change of its tasks and of its getting along with work, the impulses of this change coming from some doctors there and were brought to an end by casting out of this department about 60 patients and their psychiatric and psychoanalytic doctor who treated them at those times. In February 1970 there were also about 180 more patients.*

* Note from January 24, 1995: In fact, it was about the following: expulsion of 180 patients and of their doctor, Dr. med. W. Huber, from the Psychiatric Polyclinic. Ban of entering the clinic and No-go zone [Bannmeile] for 180 patients, practically all of them treated by Huber. Around 60 patients heard of this coup during the weekend. The others still didn't know about the shock (the bad news). Rector Rendtorff had been informed by the patients about the impending disaster. Even today, he pretends to have learned about all of this only afterwards.

All doctors, as far as they were involved in this department until this moment, had experienced by their practice from day to day that the traditional manner of working had become more and more insufficient, regarding the permanently increasing and growing psychiatric mass alienation [Massenverelendung]. The main function of a policlinic was and is still one that might be compared to a transshipment-place, a distribution station for "sick-commodities", meanwhile coupled to its secondary function as a training school and as a stage of career for specialists. The "cases" that resident doctors and privatly practising specialists cannot cope with and which, in spite of that, they hesitate to put behind the bars of a "State Hospital" ["Heilanstalt", "HEIL-Anstalt", note Heil-Hitler-Anstalt], are transferred by those doctors to the Policlinic in order to be investigated and labelled, and from there the patients are then transferred in turn to the wards in the psychiatric-bed-clinic [Hauptklinik] – or, because there is mostly a lack of beds for panel patients – those patients finally are just committed to the so called HEIL-Anstalt and closed up behind bars. Therapies are only done if the patients seem to be qualified enough to merit a treatment. The respective rating depends on the doctor's interest regarding the patient's purse or the "scientific" exploitability of the patient's illness. The selection criteria for a psychotherapy are orientated to the age of the patients and to their educational standard. This goes even so far that patients who are over 35 years or who lack a matriculation are to be rejected. The Policlinic work, therefore, is in no way oriented to the needs of the greatest possible number of ill people, but to the profit- and career-interests of a few doctors and following the strictly hierarchic system of the so-called public health. This hostility against patients, far from being only confined to the Psychiatric Policlinic, is also a mark of the whole "health" apparatus from the resident doctor to the loony bin. In the Policlinic, as a selection-ramp (Selektionsrampe like for example at the concentration camp of Auschwitz) for the manifold institutions of this apparatus, the inhumanity of the capitalist system is clearly shown as in a focal point.

7.    The Policlinic as patient care service

This function of the Policlinic became clear to those who were willing to face and confront this problem and who noticed the hostility against patients that is involved in the research of a Policlinic doctor and that consists in violating what should actually have the highest priority for each physician: the medical dictum "primum nil nocere" ("first, avoid doing any harm") (Note 19).

In the course of the struggle between the patients and the clinical establishment it became also quite clear that those who were responsible were neither blind nor uninformed regarding the problems named above. But that they are quite on the contrary always well prepared and ready to sacrifice patients on the altar of their "science". And so we were able to take down, what the medical assistant director Blankenburg (Note 20), supported by the clinic director von Baeyer, told the patients in February 1970 quite frankly: "Of course, science demands victims. If there is emerging a conflict between research and the treatment of illness, there can be no question at all that heads must roll". "The heads of the patients in this case!" was what we replied, and both clinic-lords, instead of an answer, showed only a cold smile.

The conflict between the top management of the clinic and some of its doctors who were no longer willing to obey to the patient-hostile dictatorship of their chiefs, but who had taken the needs of the ill people as the starting point of their therapy, this conflict was exploited by some "fellow-doctors" for their egoistic profit interests. Those psychiatric doctors who were on the side of the patients instead of being on the side of profit, were fired.

So in May 1969, the medical director of the Policlinic, Dr. Spazier, lost the possibility of habilitation, already promised to him. The medical assistant Dr. Rauch*, who was also under the threat of measures of repression**, could only be rescued by means of negotiations, done by Dr. Huber, who finally achieved that his colleague came under the protection of an infamous but nevertheless undoubtable chief of another clinic department.

* Additional note of 2016:

Not to be confused with Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Joachim Rauch who, together with Carl Schneider, both acting from the Heidelberg University Psychiatry, was responsible for the murder of children for the study of their brains in the context of the children’s euthanasia in the "Third Reich". Until 1978 Head of the Department for Forensic Psychiatry of the University of Heidelberg.

** Additional note of 1997
Another was Dr. Pfisterer. The doctors Pfisterer and Rauch had been saved thanks to the negations conducted by Dr. Huber, with the result that they got a job in other departments of the clinic. Otherwise, they would have lost their jobs, which means that they would have remained involved in the open confrontation, in which they had taken up a position in favour of the patients and of Dr. Huber.

And Huber himself, second medical director and successor to Dr. Spazier, was last but not least fired in February 1970, together with his hundreds of patients, not to forget the putting him under prohibition and off limits concerning the Policlinic in the Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Heidelberg, where up to this moment he had also been engaged in philosophic research in psychiatry under the psychiatric Assistant-Director Prof. Tellenbach and with night-duty several times a week and of course very often on weekends – a measure of the clinic management, aiming to stop his political activities against capitalism and Righties at the University and elsewhere.

The ruling relations do not provide for doctor and patient a coming together, for, quite on the contrary, the relation between doctor and patient is determined by distance and by a great deal of indirectness devised for the purpose of separating them from each other [Mittelbarkeit]. The doctor being accustomed to consider his patients only as a case, as nothing but a thing, has to learn to stop classifying the ill population and their forms of expression by diagnostics and labellings, and rather to understand [begreifen] these expressions as being quite equal to what they live as their reality, that's to say their suffering under repression. To develop a proletarian consciousness as a principle and as a tool and instrument for a progressive therapy on a mass-scale is only possible under the one condition that the doctor as a person is willing to abolish his therapeutic leadership. Therefore, he has to realize that the supposed subject doctor is itself an object of the ruling relations! The requisite know-how for a therapy orientated to the needs of patients cannot be learned by a doctor neither during education nor during conferences, seminars and congresses, but only in the daily struggle side by side with the patients and their reality, taking part in their misery and their repression. What is situated opposite to this reality is a – self-righteous – system, consisting of a petrified hierarchy in the form of public health for which the patient is forced to pay by social contributions being imposed to him.

Academic conferences with colleagues who know and treat the ill people only after their being labelled by diagnoses, are by no means useful, make  only the waiting list grow as well as the waiting time of the patients. And so Dr. Huber was fired on the pretext that sometimes he directly refused to leave his patients and to let them wait instead of walking five or ten minutes to this kind of conferences in the morning, which lasted sometimes only a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, and the chiefs, fishing for a pretext, had also forgotten that Dr. Huber always had been well informed about all results of those conferences, if there ever had resulted anything, informed by other colleagues who had taken part and by telephone. For what actually was the cause of his being fired had been his therapeutic work for and together with the patients, and this work had been constituting a critique by practice against the institutions of the health care apparatus and its expropriation of illness.

In the hospitals of the University public care health involves, and if it were only by tendency, the possibility of becoming socialized in a progressive sense. This means also that for all doctors, being occupied there, exists the mere duty to offer those privileges to the population (by whom they are paid, last not least).

University hospitals enjoy certain privileges in which they differ from all common physicians and from hospitals which belong to a State or to a community:

  1. The doctors who work in a University don't depend directly on a fee or on the health insurance certificate of the patients; they earn a salary, let it be small sometimes. The management and the equipment with all medical tools and instruments is provided by the hospital's government.

  2. The prescription is free and that means that it is not controlled or restricted in any way by sick-funds or by some unit of panel-doctors. This "freedom of prescription" is based on and mediated by the research tasks in University Hospitals: pharmaceutic research in order to ensure the profits of the pharmaceutic industry, which is funded by the state through the money of the patients.

8.    Organization by the patients themselves

Consequently, the patients were not willing any more to be administrated, transferred and fobbed off worse than beasts. They claimed their right to therapy and they began to organize themselves. So the first patients' plenum in the history of medicine took place in the Psychiatric Policlinic at the University of Heidelberg on February 5, 1970. All patients who had come together there voted to demand the dismissal of the new director of the Policlinic, Dr. Kretz (Note 21), for the named doctor, since his coming there in October 1969, had ordered to abolish several therapeutic groups, especially those groups which had been formed by invalid and very old patients, most of them having moved from far away to Heidelberg in order to get help and protection in the Policlinic against being menaced day and night and again and again and finally forever by some "therapeutic" imprisonment, provided for them by other doctors. Furthermore, regarding the few doctors who quite in contrast to Dr. Kretz really worked in the Policlinic, Dr. Kretz started substituting them one by one by his own "team", especially Dr. Huber whom he substituted at last. The patients of the latter meanwhile had done day after day, and during several weeks, statistic investigations in the waiting room of the Policlinic unnoticed by the new director, and from those investigations resulted that Dr. Huber in the average worked together with 12 patients, while Dr. Kretz, being absent most of the time, cared for nothing or sometimes for only 1 patient. Furthermore, the patients resolved to found committees in order to give a constitution to the Policlinic that would meet their needs. In the entrance-hall there was an information board attached to the wall with messages from and about the patients, but only a few days later the new boss, Dr. Kretz, who happened to pass by, ran an assault against this board, tore it down while hurting a sick woman who was occupied in reading the patients' messages and who burst out into a crying fit.

For the clinic management the patients who had begun to emancipate and to organize themselves could not be tolerated any longer. Those patients who had finished to be handy for each purpose had become quite useless for "science". Once more the patients had organized a teach-in, which took place in the auditory of the University's Psychiatric Hospital, amongst some hundreds of people, including newspapers, broadcast and television, also the medical director of the University's Hospital Prof.Dr. Walter Ritter von Baeyer, Prof. Braeutigam (Note 22) and also medical assistant directors and scientific assistant doctors like Dr. Huber took part, and this was the teach-in on which some hundred persons out of the ill population called once more for the taking back of the dismissal against Dr. Huber and for the resignation of Dr. Kretz. Only half a day later there followed the cast-out of Dr. Huber combined with the off-limits, mentioned before.

After having occupied the office-rooms of the management director of the University's Hospitals in Heidelberg by hunger-strike, which lasted 1 1/2 day – and it were the patients and Dr. Huber who together made this hunger-strike –, the Rector of the University, Prof. Rendtorff felt obliged to provide means and measures in order to enable the continuation of the therapy and the self-organization of the patients: rooms in the University, money and unrestricted prescription, necessary yet to be advanced regularly. In that consisted the so-called compromise which happened on February 28,1970, and to achieve this compromise leading members of the Faculty of Medicine (the Deans Schnyder and Quadbeck) (Note 23), the Psychiatric Director von Baeyer and also students of the project-group medicine took part. This compromise was made between the patients and Rendtorff, Rector of the University of Heidelberg. From the beginning, Dr. Huber had refused to recognize this compromise. But he declared, face to face only to the patients, to continue his working together only with them, excluding explicitly any collaboration with anybody else.

By this act, which meant for the patients and also for Dr. Huber becoming an autonomous work-group with own rooms within the University, there was achieved that the whole University, represented by the University's Rector, confirmed the incompetence of the entire Faculty of Medicine for patient care. But also the University in total had shipwrecked from the beginning in fulfilling the compromise:

  1. The working-rooms being unused since half a year at the expense of the taxpayers, firstly had to be done up from ground to top and there was nobody to care about, except the patients themselves.

  2. The free prescription which also had been assured by the compromise-contract was sabotaged by the Psychiatric Director von Baeyer and by his Assistant Medical Director Oesterreich in a criminal way (Oesterreich: "Nobody can be willing to allow Huber to prescribe medicaments, for we have to assume that Huber might prescribe dynamite!"): Some patients went to von Baeyer and tried to speak with him about how to resolve the problem of prescription. But this Psychiatric Director, instead of free prescription, called the police and ordered them to cast the patients out of the University's Psychiatric Hospital by violence and later on, as Dr. Huber before, they were also banned from entering the Psychiatric Hospital campus all around. Assistant Medical Director Oesterreich continued the common strategy by ordering a prescription-blockade to all chemists' shops and pharmacies of Heidelberg and so all patients were rejected in each chemist's shop if they presented a prescription with the signature of Dr. Huber. One of the patients, invalid from the last war, whose prescription was rejected by a pharmacist, had this pharmacist call up Dr. Oesterreich, in order to ask what to do, because his case, as it was obvious even to the pharmacist, was very urgent. But the assistant medical director Oesterreich, looking down to the patient and to the pharmacist, did nothing else except recommending the pharmacist to send the invalid to the juridical Prorector of the University, Prof. Podlech (it is of some interest in this context to note that the psychiatric doctor Oesterreich at those times was preparing a scientific piece for his habilitation about war-invalids and senile people). The same patient who was very heavily damaged yet had to suffer another injury by Dr. Oesterreich, the latter addressing Dr. Huber in the mentioned teach-in: "This illness is only the result of your work, Dr. Huber".

  3. From March to July the University's Rector never paid a penny of the lump-sum which he had assured by contract to the patients. Quite on the contrary, he did not cease to menace the patients by the blockade of telephone and by requesting them to leave their ("his") University's work-rooms. More and more it became clear for the patients that the University's top management despite all contract, compromise and negotiation secretly had resolved to catapult the patients' collective out until September 30, even by force and violence, be it necessary or not, but to make an example for all coming times. To achieve their purpose, they turned again to Dr. Huber requesting him to sign that after September 30th none of the patients should need qualified therapy any longer. The Rector and his management, a pressure group now, also used the means of a hunger-blockade against the patients' self-organization: they refused to pay the money promised to the patients by the compromise-contract. Well, it got also quite clear for all patients that the named "compromise" had been nothing but a measure of dictatorship directed against the self-organization; that the treatment of ill people in form of the "compromise" unmasked itself as a further step of the annihilation-strategy directed against the patients.

9.    The Socialist Patients’ Collective

Meanwhile, after the patients had struggled for four months against repression, starving-out, both those abuses permanently inflicted on them by the University's Rectorship, it finally was too much for them. On July 6,1970 they occupied the University's office of the Headmaster Rendtorff.

The challenges and demands of the Socialist Patients' Collective, directed to the Headmaster of the University, were:

  1. Control of all treatment of patients by the patients themselves; abolition of all alien determination as it is exercised in the health sector by industry and the army etc.

  2. The domiciliary authority in the hospitals has to be controlled by the patients.

  3. All clinic funds are taken possession of by the organized patients. As a transitional solution, the clinic funds are transferred to the general University fund.

First measure to fulfil these demands is:

  1. Leaving a house to the patients unlimited and for free, in which they are protected against all attacks of persons who don't belong to them. There have to be at least 10 rooms in this house. All instruments as far as necessary for the patients and all current costs are to be provided by the University. Two persons, able to fulfil medical functions [Traeger aerztlicher Funktionen] and to cope with illness in the patients' collective are to be paid by the University. Also the financial means for clerk work and activities in case-working are to be provided.

  2. One house more with at least 10 rooms has to be left to the patients instantly, unlimited and free of charge, destined to those patients who are, caused by the ruling repression, in danger in a specific manner and this demand is a necessary one in order to protect those patients against more damages, rising from the established psychiatry, its mere existence being a permanent menace against those patients.

  3. Until the new rooms can be used, the SOCIALIST PATIENTS’ COLLECTIVE remains where it is until now, that is at the Rohrbacherstraße 12.

All the costs that incurred until March, prospectively up to our moving into the new rooms are to be paid by the University – less the costs already paid by the University resulting from the compromise-contract. All outstanding debts are to be remitted instantly (Note 24). Since the patients are the respective producers they now demand the power of control and disposal over the means of production, they demand all material and basic prerequisites [die materiellen Voraussetzungen] necessary to turn this university of capitalism into a university of the people. This demand was for the rest in congruence with the constitution of this university, for in § 2 of this constitution the university is defined as a place where "science for the human beings" ["Wissenschaft fuer den Menschen"] has to be produced. As a first step towards the fulfilment of such a comprehensive program, the patients also demanded to institute the SPK technically at the university and to provide rooms in the university being apt to this purpose and respectively all other means necessary for the patients' self-organization.

On July 9,1970 the management council [Verwaltungsrat] of the University decided to institute the SPK as a part of the University and ordered three well-reputed scientists to make a report about the work and the function of the SPK (Note 25). These scientists voted in favour of the SPK as to become an institution of the University.

Until this moment, the defamation of the patients and the causation of discord (incitement of the public) against the patients and their relatives was mainly done by the Faculty of Medicine (Assistant Dean Dr. Kretz) and the Psychiatry / Psychosomatics Section (acting head Dr. Kretz) by means of press releases to the print media and radio stations. The latter also published every kind of letter to the editor and every public correspondence of these doctors as desired by them. But now the defaming of the patients and the causation of discord against them and their relatives were followed, strengthened and reinforced by publications of the Ministry of Culture (Ministry of Education and the Arts) of the government of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. These christian rightists (CDU) behaved in the same style and manner as the mostly social democratic doctors and the leaders of the University, and every kind of former dissent between the members of those two opposite political parties disappeared as if it had never existed, since the instigation against the patients became a common enterprise for those doctors of the Faculty of Medicine and for the ministers of government. They allied themselves in order to counteract the short victory of the patients' group that resulted from their having occupied the University for more than a week and that was favoured by the decision of the University's council which, in view of the three reports with their good result for the patients, couldn't but decide in that way. This in spite of the fact that Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hahn of the Ministry of Culture of Baden-Wuerttemberg now joined the enemies of the patients, supporting their campaign in press and on the radio by all means of his governing party CDU (Christian democratic underground, as the patients called it, CDU = Christlich Demokratische Union). For them the reactionary press of the bourgeoisie was diligently open every time for all inciting pamphlets of those who usurped quite arrogantly competence in the name and on behalf of the patients, while the same so-called free press refused to accept any kind of publication if it was done by the patients themselves (corrections, declarations and so on) except those which the press editors themselves had tried to rewrite either adding them up to mere nonsense or undertaking to shorten and to abbreviate them to common places, thus preventing them from taking effect.

On July 20, 1970 the Minister of Culture of Baden-Wuerttemberg announced in the press and on the radio that the decision of the University's top-management was in his opinion "in the highest measure a criminal one" and in his speech on the radio he added that all patients of the SPK "urgently have to be submitted to that kind of treatment, which they have deserved and which they need bitterly" and finally he prohibited by his decree of September 18, 1970 the University to realize and execute the decision of its management council, the aforementioned decision which favoured the patients. All those instigation tirades from the doctors, favoured and supported by the Minister of Culture, were also able to influence the work of the patients: on the one hand they made quite clear the enmity of all medical and academic institutions against patients; on the other hand the patients, who worked in the SPK also had to suffer from the reproaches at their homes and families and at their jobs, reproaches of bosses, wives and husbands or children, who now believed to realize what the SPK actually was, raising from the doctors' and from the politicians' hate and enmity against the SPK as published by press and broadcast. Sometimes those family-members and those bosses were successful against one or the other of the patients who then dared no longer to join the SPK, which those bosses and family-members knew only by press, resulting in more repression against those patients by threatening them with internment, thereby the bosses in family and job tried to regain their secretly or openly expressed most comfortable way of life. But the patients, in misery, were suffering the risk of death permanently before their eyes, being poisoned and tortured by forced treatment in a hospital, especially under the label of being a security risk everywhere, imposed on them by the press and radio, invented by doctors and cast against them.

This experience shows in a manner, you can grasp by hands, the connection that is active between the bourgeois consciousness, that is the so-called good human common sense, and the rationale of capitalism and its efficiency.

10.    The eviction sentence and the Senate’s order

Another attempt to annihilate the SPK was the eviction sentence against the patients (technically against Dr. Huber) of November 4, 1970. On November 9, 1970 the Minister of Culture Hahn declared directly (with the eviction sentence in his pocket) that the patients of the SPK were "a wild growing, which was no longer to be borne and has to be weeded out as soon as possible by all means being at hand".

Just in the same evening of this day, Rendtorff, the top master of the University, bound himself by a written document to the SPK to withdraw the eviction action which had been initiated by the University automatically and by the ministerial decree of the Ministry of Culture of September 18, 1970 as well, on which this action was based, and to prepare steps against the attacks from the Ministry of Culture by challenging it before the administrative court, and further Rendtorff declared by his signature that he was willing to refer the question of the formal establishing of the SPK as an independent institution of the University to the Senate of the University by calling on his three experts, Richter, Brueckner and Spazier.

But the first step of this University's Rector, after having done his declaration, was that he turned to the Senate of which he was the president, and caused the senate to make his signature invalid (putting himself under tutelage). Therefore, the patients turned to the administrative court and applied for an interim disjunction against the pogrom-incitement of the Minister of Culture Hahn and they also filed a suit against the decree of November 18, 1970, by both means appealing to fundamental rights, especially the right of every person to physical integrity and the right of freedom of research and education. But the court achieved to delay this complaint until January 1972 and then rejected it, combined with the order that it were the patients who had to pay all costs.

Finally, on November 24,1970, in a secret assembly to which the experts named above were not invited, but instead of them Prof. Dr. Dr. Heinz Häfner, expert in money-making by exploiting the ill population, the Senate resolved, based on the request of the Faculty of Medicine (Schnyder, Kretz) "that the SPK was not to be established as an institution at and by the University". This resolution, put in the hands of the Dean of the Faculty of Law, a former Nazi named Prof. Dr. Leferenz, and instigated by the members of the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, was to be executed by the chancellor of the University "as an act of management with the use of the executive forces of the State", and all this as urgent as possible. Nevertheless Dr. Huber, believing evidently, if not in delusion, in the signature of the theologian Rendtorff, had submitted an appeal by means of his lawyer against the eviction sentence which was in force and could be executed since November 4, 1970. On May 13, 1971, another eviction sentence was issued executable at once and at any time against the patients (resp. against Dr. Huber). And the court, appealed for protection against the execution of this sentence (stay of execution), not even took notice of this petition aiming at the mere survival of the patients.

11.    The eviction

And as a matter of fact, as we may conclude from above, the eviction took place on June 24, 25 and 26, 1971, combined with a sudden and arbitrary detention of SPK-patients, subjecting them to examination, applying violence against bodies, search of their domiciles (without any permission of a judge, of course), menace and taking hostages (Note 26) during an armed operation. This military action, performed by police, supported by helicopters, police-dogs, submachine guns and several hundreds of police officials, some of them in uniform, others disguised, came to performance in the context of ideas and constructions prepared by the persecutors and the police in a manner which in psychopathology of systematized delusions is called "fishing for self-invented relations" [Beziehungssetzung ohne Anlass], one of the best applied methods of doctors in psychiatry, used day and night against patients in order to get them prepared for forced therapy by means of labelling them in a manner which nobody else can give any effect or credibility as a proof unless he is a psychiatrist among other psychiatrists. And this construct was tied to – in order to gain be it only the chance of credibility – a shooting out caused by the police on June 24, 1971 and two until now unknown persons parking in the street in front of a pub in a little village, an event, which had taken place about half a mile from the house in which Dr. Huber was living, available round the clock to be visited by all SPK-patients who wanted to see him.

All of a dozen patients who were detained in those days got free again within about 48 hours except of two more patients. Against those two SPK-patients, who were forced to remain in prison, finally two warrants of arrest were bungled, which were based on the suspicion that they could be taken for being members of a criminal conspiracy. All demands to visit them (even if they were asked by husbands, for the time being) were refused by the judges who took every request for a visit permission for the clear proof that the demanding person also belonged to the "criminal" SPK. The persecutors and the judges also until today refused to even read a medical report in which was exposed the urgent necessity for about 40 patients more of the SPK to get visit permissions, 40 patients, who had worked together in personal and group agitation with the two SPK patients and who needed very urgently to continue the proceeding of this relation, which had worked as a very efficient therapy for them just as it was usual for newcomers in the SPK.

And just one day before the announced eviction of the SPK rooms, prospected by the judges who had worked out this eviction order, on July 21, 1971 in the early morning another assault took place, performed by several hundreds of policemen who rushed up with submachine guns and dogs against the SPK work-rooms which we had strategically left one week before on July 13 while spreading messages to press, broadcast and television and also to every kind of administration, announcing that the SPK-rooms as work-rooms for the patients since that time were closed for everybody, because the danger to the patients, starting from terror and violence executed by the police, instigated by the doctors and supported by the government, had reached a level which was outside of every responsibility and no longer compatible regarding the security of any patient who ever had been in any way connected to the SPK and be it only by suspicion of somebody else ready for denunciation. Meantime 10 more dwellings of patients were searched by the police once more, most of them not for the first and not for the last time, casted again and again in chaos and disorder. Nine more SPK-patients came into prison, each of them in another prison, each prison far away from the other one, and dragged from one end to the other of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and inside each prison every SPK-patient was strictly isolated from all the other imprisoned inmates, thus always and permanently exposed to police examination, medical interrogation and every kind of nasty trick and repression. And also the persecutors had ensured that 9 of the 11 prisoners had lost their lawyers: a lawyer of the imprisoned SPK-patients was charged to have favoured his clients, disregarding that against those clients until this moment didn't exist any charge at all. The lawyer was denied access every time he tried to enter the prison in which any of the SPK patients were held, or was prohibited to establish a contact to them in any other way. The proceedings of the persecutors were totally determined by their fear of being confronted with extraordinary prisoners although these prisoners were kept in distance behind strong walls. This bar on any defence [Verteidigungsverbot] was practised permanently and in every case of SPK for one month.

Up to the moment this book was published, 9 of the 11 patients got free, all of them on conditions, some on bail. It is quite significant that the two SPK patients wanted for ring-leaders since the beginning of the SPK are still in prison, the two Dr. Huber, physician and physiologist the wife and mother of three children, and physician in clinic and research and psychiatrist Dr. Huber himself (Note 27).

12.    The dominating illegality, the lack of rights and the patients

Dropped out of all civil rights, patients we are, and all power we got consists only in this mere fact. All civil society consists basically of the connection between possession and law, for being a person means nothing but the right to dispose of the things you possess. The only possession of which the worker disposes is his capacity of work.

Those are defined as ill persons by the Public Health System who are incapable of disposing of their capacity to work, which is a commodity, be it for some time or for ever. Having lost their commodity of working capacity (labour force) they also lose all the rights, they had before as possessors of an average commodity of workcapacity, be it only in a formal manner, and in any case all their rights are of no use for them, because they are practically suspended. The persons who have lost their ultimate possession – the commodity capacity of work (labour force) – have ceased to be "within their rights" ["Rechtssubjekte"]. But from this it follows that, if the right is used against us, and this is in fact happening all the time, this right doesn't concern persons but hits only outlaws! This right has only to do with ruins of human beings [Menschenwracks] who in a common sense possess no kind of power, even not over themselves, much less over others. But a right against somebody who is outside the sphere of right [gegen Rechtlose] is an absurdity [Un-Ding], is an illegality [Un-Recht] which we are in no way allowed to comply with, for it isn't made for us at all.

To deprive us of the rooms necessary for the self-organization, to deprive us of all tools and instruments, to take away from us the financial crutch and last not least to deprive us of our lives, in our eyes, can mean nothing but the challenge to self-defence. And because the deprivation of the means of production and the destruction of life concerns everyone who possesses nothing but the commodity of labour force, all those who are expropriated can realize their right to life only in a practical manner by the means of collective self-defence.

Only as persons subjected to criminal law, we are at all gaining relevance in rights. Our "rehabilitation" consists exactly in having passed from the status of patients to the status of convicts resp. to the status of prisoners on remand, and from the status of having no rights we objectively have passed to the status of being relevant within the existing system of rights.

Fortunately, the violent and criminal rulers of the University never did enter in a struggle of competition to contest the privilege of the patients to have no rights. Quite on the contrary. Rector Rendtorff and his appendage persistently reminded the patients again and again of their status of rightlessness, in which the Rector and his appendage saw not only their legitimation for the use of weapons against the ill people, but also an eyesore. However, as to the fact that the patients belong to the University and that they are a part of it, there can be no doubt in any case. If this were not the case, what on earth would become of the clinic directors and their income of millions and their being as fond as possible to remain what they are, and what would become of those who aspire to succeed them, both not stopping at nothing and walking over the dead bodies of the patients?

The law, protecting only the interests of capitalism, for the patients is just the same law, no matter whether before or after the becoming effective of the new University's constitution [Grundordnung], the University's law [Hochschulgesetz] in Heidelberg. In so far as they are patients they are not allowed to ask for anything. Everybody knows – and in that consists also the proudness of every kind of democracy – that in the eye of the law all persons should be equal. This means, for example, that everybody and indeed everybody within the frame of the formal right is allowed to take liberty of acting out as does, let’s say Mr. Axel Springer (German newspaper-king of the Rightists, the so-called Zeitungszar); for concerning the laws they must obey, there has to be no difference between Mr. Nobody and Mr. Springer. But the reality is quite another one. Certainly not everybody is allowed to incite the people to hatred, as does Mr. Axel Springer to the best of his ability, regardless of the fact that by law of the free-democratic state under the rule of law everybody is turned into an Axel Springer, whether he wants or not, though only potentially. For in reality all nobodies remain mere objects of those Axel Springers as long as they live. Or take the right of "freedom of education and research"; also a right for everybody. Even some students occasionally could make use of it, if they could pay the costs. But meanwhile, as everybody knows, this right can only be used by the clique of professors who have joined the "League for Scientific Freedom" ("Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft", an association of reactionary professors and intellectuals, some of them known for their Nazi past), directed against the mass of all other persons who are interested and involved in this context.

Quite evident: everybody and be it only formally is situated within the laws. This is not so for patients. Neither at the University nor somewhere else they have got a right to treatment. Quite on the contrary, in some cases they are subject to the violence of being treated by force (vaccination, check up in a health center etc.), without any possibility constituted by a law to exercise any influence on the contents, circumstances and so on. Everybody can suddenly get ill, all are patients by possibility; you easily can realize that, if you cast a glance on the social security taxes you are obliged to pay.

This free-democratic state based on the rule of law [Rechtsstaat], whose necessity the capitalist management again and again tries to justify by the argument that each person as such needs it as bitterly as nothing else for his/her/their protection – in fact doesn't provide any protection for those who are forced to sustain it. From a state that answers the claims of those who need protection by using means of laws against them, if, they dare to express their claims nevertheless, from a state that reacts in such a way against those whom it alleges to protect, from such a state you need to be on your guard!

On the rightlessness of the patients as it became manifest for the SPK in a concrete manner:

  1. Who is ill has as of right no business being in the University's clinic. The ill people, in the same way as somewhere else, are at best nothing but tolerated there. And even that only by restriction and only on the condition that they don’t cause any trouble to their expropriators and profiteers and only in so far as they are willing and even yet grateful to bear all that the profiteers will do to them and that seems to be useful for the purposes and the plans of the expropriators.

  2. For the doctors in the University applies that they are allowed by their chiefs in the University's management to kick the patients out of the clinic. This valorization of "sick commodities" and other waste products is, concerning the law in this state, completely correct.

  3. The University's rector is allowed to kick the doctor out of the University. If this is requested by other doctors who have kicked patients out of the clinic, it does not diminish the Rector’s legal standpoint.

  4. If the doctor brings an action against his dismissal before the Administrative Court claiming what is guaranteed to him by the constitution, the viewpoints above 1), 2) and 3) shall not be affected.

  5. If patients bring an action before the Administrative Court claiming what is guaranteed to them by the constitution in order to protect them against the assaults against their lives and physical safety, the viewpoints above 1), 2) and 3), of course, shall not be affected as well.

But, in spite of the fact that the juridical situation was all clear, the governmental administration (Ministry of Culture) was compelled to file one more action of eviction via the Rectorate: The patients, after having been kicked out of the University, had successfully struggled to gain the domiciliary authority for other rooms in the University. In order to break the resistance of the patients, the responsible managers around the Rector resorted to a private property lawsuit for eviction, which was formally directed only against Dr. Huber, who had never been willing to accept those University's rooms as his civil property. In this behaviour of the University's top-management you can see the accumulated amount of cowardice: they are not willing to reveal their trickery measures to the eye of the public; and this certainly has no psychological causes. Because the expropriated population – who is insulted by those means, the ill people of course – could not do anything but shake their heads. May be some of them would lose their inhibitions and then ask themselves: "That’s all of it, nothing more to our rights than that?" – "Whose right is that anyway? To whom belongs this right at all?... To whom is it useful, this, our right?" and at last: "How can we protect ourselves in the most effective way against such a right?"

Everyone knows that the people are constantly being ruled against. But the class struggle of all ill people has begun already. That the political power of the reactionary class has to hide behind the mask of a private property lawsuit for eviction, that is a fact in which those circumstances find their nevertheless true expression, be it only in a transitory manner. The proletarian dictatorship aims to do away with all capitalist relations of production and to abolish all deformation, stunting and crippling performed against human beings. This proletarian dictatorship therefore aims at things that are of public interest. And what this public interest needs least of all are the legal titles of the reactionary class. What it urgently needs instead are all available means of self-defence. The way of those means of self-defence is determined by the violence potentials of the enemies including all its gaps and breaches.

Concerning the University: There is no need of any special effort to now clearly outline the form of the conflict:

More and more politically conscious patients have organized themselves in the SPK in order to direct the University towards its most elementary purpose, the content of which are the interests of the population, of proletarian people, determined by illness [unter der Bestimmung Krankheit], that means to actually do science: that is to make nature and science work for everybody. This attempt represents a breach of law in a double sense: firstly, because following exactly the University's constitution and the University's law, patients have no business being in the University.

Secondly, because the Ministry of Culture as supervisory authority has to take care that scientific efforts that aim to put science and nature at the service of everybody are to be stopped, if necessary: and, obviously, for the Ministry such a necessity had emerged, which can be seen by the withdrawing of money and rooms.

Therefore, in every case the University was obliged to deploy bailiffs and the police against the demands of the patients – however well founded these demands might have been – in the interest of the University's autonomy, of course. According to the provisions of the University's law and the University's constitution patients, regardless of their notorious status of being set outside the law, existing anyhow, less than ever had anything to demand from the University. Imagine if you can! – the Minister of Culture would have called for the establishing of the SPK instead of its removal, then the University's rector would have been obliged, maybe against his will and with a bleeding heart, to take juridical action against the Minister of Culture because of the law demanding the University's autonomy. For the University is obliged by right and law to defend its autonomy against the population, especially if it is a population under the determination of illness. Thanks to the eviction-notice we were spared this moment of glory, for the University's rector was on his guard and never sent a self-denunciation to the court for having abused the University for the good purpose, to get better living conditions for all by the means of the University or to intend something like this. Shall the University serve the plebs? For heaven's sake! It’s exactly the other way around: the plebs is welcome, if it serves the economy, and if it submits itself to the natural violence of the state machinery which acts quite charitably by pistols, cudgels, by drug-poisons and electroshocks! This way of problem-solving, the way of the expropriators, pure extract (quintessence) of all their laws, is made in a generally accepted way and is generally applicable.

The given situation, as it developed from the survival-struggle of the patients, thanks to the violence – apparently coming to light – applied against the patients by medicine, University's management, state government and law, made it possible to unmask a quite absurd system because of the "fortunate" coming together of all those power-components, against which everyone needs to preserve and to protect himself using every kind of means being at hands. A highly organized form of society with all possibilities it can dispose of is faced with a structure of violence historically outdated, a violence which has the appearance of right at its side.

This false appearance is of essential importance for violence so that violence can easily be confused with "nature" and applied against everybody in a reckless manner. Therefore, violence takes the mask of right and justice, namely the mask of a right and of a justice, this violence itself has created, being based only on its efficiency. Revolutionary violence quite on the contrary is useful only if it serves to protect those who apply it. Revolutionary violence is applied by a human being, while reactionary violence stands behind an only so-called right [Hier steht hinter der Gewalt ein Mensch, dort steht hinter dem Recht die Gewalt]. Right and violence don't originate from the heads of human beings, but they originate from the capitalist relations of production. Revolutionary violence, however, originates from suffering which has turned into consciousness and which now takes the place formerly occupied by crippling, patiently suffered because of being excluded from consciousness, but now being turned into relations, knowledge and tools, useful to protect its owner and useful to pull forward the necessary evolution of collective practice.

What is right in the capitalist system is only what fills the abyss between the population and the University with the dead corpses of those who, without a clear consciousness, did express their passive resistance against capitalist labour, and who the University is unable to patch up in order to get them adapted to their being killed and overkilled in one way or another in the capitalist final solution (kapitalistische Endloesung; not long ago Auschwitz-gas chambers e.g.).

In the history of the SPK, the violence imposed as right by those in power [das herrschende Recht] became manifest as follows: in order to destroy the self-organization of the patients, mainly the managers of the health-system used and abused the judicial authorities by masking their purposes with the juridical formula: "Dismissal without notice from his civil servant status concerning the scientic assistant Dr. Huber and off limits as a member of the clinic", and brought the following acts of coercion and violence into action against the sick persons:

  1. Deception and exploitation of the patients regardless of their being human ruins without any rights in the view of their enemies, based on capitalist forms of production by means of a "free" private doctor’s practice with its possibilities of common profit-maximization useful only for the involved physician, meantime depriving the patients of all the advantages they had gained and defended by their struggle in the privileged Policlinic such as: unconstrained prescription, no forced liquidation, use or refusal of modern medical methods by all patients (e.g. X-rays, electrical diagnostics of brain as electro-encephalograms, laboratory methods and so on); all these advantages being now again off limits for the patients by means of the above mentioned pseudo-juridical formula concerning Dr. Huber; and instead of all these advantages now the "offer" of a "free" private medical practice, which, in order to make it more attractive – according to the suggestions of Rector Rendtorff – should be controlled by a "Kuratorium" (board of trustees) composed of University members, that is some kind of club which, for the rest never had come together to constitute itself, a "Kuratorium" which is even as a juridical matter of fact a complete nonsense, for being in no way provided for in the basic law of the University.
    Right from the beginning, the University's bureaucracy aimed at the marginalization of the self-organization of the patients forcing it out of the University as a disturbing factor in order to expose and to deliver it directly to the executive violence of the Public Health Department (health-police), guardianship-courts and to every kind of police violence. All these measures of the University's bureaucracy being seconded by diffamation campaigns of the practising neurologists, who, on the one hand, aimed at instigating the Public Health Department to make some more attacks against the SPK and, on the other hand, aimed at snatching single patients in order to get them again under their "private" power of control.
    Dismissal without notice and ban on entering the house, therefore, aimed at creating a situation against the patients, in which there remained for them only the two possibilities, either to become crushed by the millstones of a "free" private medical practice or by those of the University's Psychiatry.

  2. By the sudden breaking off of the empoisoning treatment with psychotropic drugs, unobjectionable only with regard to the ruling relations, the most important entrance-doors were opened to death widely, for since most ancient times blood-circulation and respiratory functions are commonly taken for the "atria mortis" (entrance-doors for death) and they are defined as such ones; and the sudden withdrawal of medicaments is always closely related to the danger of a so-called withdrawal-delirium, a menace by death in the form of a break-down of circulation and respiration (Note 28).

  3. Von Baeyer, Haefner etc., who set themselves up as judges about the crimes of physicians during the Nazi-regime (Note 29) handled "those past times" in such a way, that they sent he most sick and war-damaged patients, who had asked them for medicaments, prescribed by Dr. Huber, from institution to office and from office to institution, exposing those patients by this to bodily most dangerous strain.

  4. Starving out (March until July 1970 and December 1970 until July 1971 the necessary money was withheld from the patients) and for years (1970 till 1971) permanently repeated menace of forced lock out (Note 30)

  5. Suicide = murder: Internal bleeding to death by crash from the top of a tower (Note 31), the more "humane" murder by poisoning with pills being blocked by the situation created from the enemy's side.
    Thursday before Easter (Holy Thursday) in the year 1971, in a forest near Heidelberg the dead body of a female SPK-patient was found at the pedestal of a tower. From the autopsy resulted: death by internal bleeding. From the police-report resulted that on the scene of crime quite a lot of pills had been distributed, nevertheless neither the post-mortem examination nor special forensic examinations could achieve to approve only the vestige of using pills. And from that it became quite clear that the pills by the now dead female SPK-patient had not been taken, but quite on the contrary had been rejected before dying. The labour force, which is a commodity (K. Marx) that had ceased to be sold, had been brought to an end by being shattered.
    (The criminal investigation department at the end of their report had taken down as a conclusion that the death of the girl never and in no way could have been caused by any other person else).

  6. The organized patients had to suffer heaviest loads caused by encroachments from enemy's side as there were open terror, defamation against patients, police-spies, threat of murder, supported by secret as well as powerful forces (Note 32) – the police almost didn't care about a threat of murder against the main carrier of medical functions in the SPK (Dr. Huber), which the parents of a SPK-patient, who were namely known to the police, casted by telephone or by letters, murder threats which, surprisingly and unusually, in the eyes of the police were not even worthy to be registered in their "files", for none of the lawyers later on could find only a trace of them in those "files". And the same happened with those documents of Ministries, of corrupt doctors and so on, which had served to prepare the here mentioned murder threat and defamatory campaigns.

In summary, based on the analysis of the power interaction in the context described above, there results and there remains the following:

Behind the facade of our enemies, behind their front, which seems to be in reality quite perfect and unassailable in juridical as well as in economic regard, there is nothing else but destruction, destruction of the tissues and of the sticking together of human beings, destruction which can be measured in volt, toxical units, meterkiloponds and calories or joules. This reality of economy and law got to be proved in a twofold respect. On the one hand by its effects, as they are listed above point by point in the upper section, even if far away from completeness. On the other hand, the proof of our conclusion is situated in the fact that we had asserted our claim to basic necessary support in order to fulfil our scientifically assured, urgently necessary and useful tasks and our claims to rights towards all relevant addressees quite urgently and again and again. The apparatus of violence, which they have directed against us, has shown us only one face, precisely that consisting of nothing but of destructive violence against human life, destructive violence apt to be measured in volt, toxical units, meterkilopond and calories and joules. After having attacked this violence, no longer under the sign of right but with the claim to life, so e.g. by means of the hunger-strike in February 1970 and with the occupation of the University Rector’s office in July 1970, we have earned not only our right, but also and in the same way nearly without any trouble else the money from which they had deprived us up to that moment.

Thus there exists neither a right for nor a right against ill people. Rather there exists only violence against but just as well also violence for sick people. What is called right is nothing but the destructive violence, if we leave it to our enemy. Revolutionary violence is the right for one's protection of life against destruction. Ill people got no rights. Therefore it is intolerable, from the standpoint of law, that they organize in plenums, that they, being struck, start a control against slow murder (reactionary illness) or even form a mass-organization with the objective to abolish illness as a productive power (force of production) for capitalism, for it is only illness which on the isles of prosperity pulls forward production and consumption and therefore, and that is the same, also the profit business by mass murder (wholesale murder) in each part of the world.

Chapter IV