BY 1970, THE PHASE OF SPONTANEOUS action was giving way to more organised political formations, and the outlook was getting decidedly more ‘red’ – Marxist-Leninist. By then the flower in the snow had melted and Victor and I were a stable couple deciding together on where we might position ourselves politically.

When we joined one of these ML groups, our lives took on forms which, with the hindsight of today, appear utterly weird and quixotic. Our ML party did not send us into the schools as teachers but into the factories. Together with three others, Victor and I were sent from West Berlin to Ludwigshafen, to work in the huge chemical plant of BASF, which employed around 50 000 workers. In order to disguise our identities as students, we tweaked our CVs and made fake mistakes in the entrance tests. We all got jobs as unskilled labourers. I worked as a laboratory assistant, which I quite liked, while Victor had to handle heavy bags and heave them onto pallets day in and day out. While we were supposed to gain fellow workers for the revolution, we were also to join forces with the small group of old working-class communists based in Mannheim on the other side of Rhine. This was particularly ridiculous. If there was anything that I became ashamed of around my political involvement, it was this phase.

Nevertheless, I gained the confidence of the women I worked with, who, after some months, elected me as their shop steward (Vertrauensfrau), maybe also because I still looked so trustworthy. Following clandestine practices, and without revealing my partisanship for the Maoist Party, I had also been discussing general grievances with them. It did not take long, however, before I was removed from that position. Either the Verfassungsschutz (Secret Service) was starting to monitor the ‘K-groups’ or else it was the trade union that wanted to get rid of me (we accused all trade unionists of bamboozling the workers).

It is hard to imagine in retrospect our lives at that time. Our neverending energies were spent on goals that seem so completely unrealistic and out of the world today. We were working eight hours a day in the factory, then hammering calls for action into stencils at night and distributing the pamphlets in the early mornings at the factory doors.