Peter-Paul Zahl
In the late 1960s, he became known in West Berlin as the printer of the underground magazine Agit 883 and as a publisher and author of subcultural writings from the radical leftist social environment, which brought him into the focus of law enforcement.
Towards the end of the war, the family moved back to their hometown of Feldberg in Mecklenburg with their one-year-old child, where the father founded the children's book publishing house Peter-Paul, named after his son, in 1947.
[3] He first attended high school in Velbert, then in Ratingen until he graduated from Mittlere Reife, before completing his apprenticeship as a small offset printer in Düsseldorf from 1961 to 1964, passing his journeyman's examination with a grade of "very good".
[4] In 1964 Zahl moved his primary residence to West Berlin to avoid conscription, which was not implemented due to the Allied reservation of rights for citizens in the western sectors of the city.
In 1966, he became a member of the Dortmunder Gruppe 61, a literary group initiated by Max von der Grün, whose aim was to create a link between writers and industrial workers.
After the formation of the Grand Coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD under Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1966/67 and the discussion about the Emergency Laws, the APO became a socially relevant opposition to the system with revolutionary aspirations.
In numerous articles, it addressed the controversial question of the transition from protest to armed resistance, which had arisen in parts of the movement after the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke the previous year.
Further searches followed as part of a criminal investigation into Agit 883, including the anti-Vietnam War texts in issue 61 of May 1970, which the commander of the American sector in Berlin had reported to the police.
The image consisted of a sunflower stylized by a grenade and shell casings, with the names of international guerrilla and liberation movements such as the "Vietcong" in what was then South Vietnam, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, and the Black Panther Party in the U.S. inscribed on the petals.
[20] In an article on later efforts to reopen the case in February 1980, Der Spiegel concluded, based on the expert reconstruction of the events, that the intent to kill was doubtful and Zahl's testimony was credible.
The characteristics of murder under§ 211 StGB (in German) were to be seen in the fact that the defendant sought to conceal the crimes of forgery, unauthorized possession of weapons and dangerous bodily harm.
Many of his publications are "shrill, aggressive, almost unbearably poster-like [...] with pointed lances," as the columnist Fritz J. Raddatz wrote in 1977, but they speak of a "disappointment disguised as laconicism, a shrug of the shoulders.
[25] Because of his biography and the contexts in which his work was created, Zahl has been compared to François Villon, Blaise Cendrars, and Miguel de Cervantes, with a clear reference to his literary activities during imprisonment and detention.
The first work found its way into the literary criticism of the news magazine Der Spiegel, which emphasized that the literarily neglected theme of wage labor could also be treated with new stylistic devices, contrary to the outdated concept of realism.
He considered the social-revolutionary significance of Büchner's pamphlet to be as important as that of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, published in 1848; moreover, these "eloquent documents of German revolutionaries" were "glaringly topical" for the oppressed classes.
The heroes of the story live in the milieu of a Kreuzberg gangster family, the narrative perspective takes the side of a marginalized and socially underprivileged class imagined by Zahl.
[52] Thirty years after its publication, Die Glücklichen was classified as a work of Culture of Remembrance; according to the literary scholar Jan Henschen, Peter-Paul Zahl had "staged a myth of origin, he had tried to make history accessible to himself and his generation.
He took up the story of Georg Elser (1903–1945), a carpenter who had received little public attention until then, but who on November 8, 1939, bombed Adolf Hitler in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller and was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp shortly before the end of the war.
In it, the author created the character of Jamaican private detective Aubrey Fraser, known as Ruffneck or Ruff, who is portrayed as a fun-loving bon vivant, modeled on Dashiell Hammett.
[40] In addition to the plot, it describes "the beautiful country with its people, customs and peculiarities, the taste and smell of the local cuisine," but it also denounces its dark side, the entanglements of violence, politics and corruption.
Set in Germany, it tells the story of a Belgrade-born art thief in the role of a small, likable crook who is persuaded by shady agents to rob the treasury of Cologne Cathedral.
After the announcement of the controversial second verdict against Zahl, the FAZ printed his poem mittel der obrigkeit in the Frankfurter Anthologie series founded by Reich-Ranicki: "you have to have seen them those faces under the Tschako during the beatings [...] don't say: these pigs say: who made them do it"[61] The publication was accompanied by a commentary by the poet Erich Fried.
In a letter dated May 26, 1976, Golo Mann asked, "How could you spoil the hitherto so successful 'Frankfurt Anthology' and publish the wretched stuff of this policeman's murderer, together with the corresponding commentary by Mr. Fried?
Reich-Ranicki's answer of May 31, 1976 was: "As far as the poem by the policeman's murderer is concerned, I think the sentence comes from Wilde that the fact that someone does not pay his bill does not prove that he plays the violin badly.
[64] Beck addresses the novel's detailed descriptions of the political development of the radical left; the protagonists locate themselves in a shared past with the RAF and conduct the discussion of the legitimacy of violence in direct confrontation with quoted, "publicly banned writings.
[72] In an essay published posthumously in 1980, Rudi Dutschke, one of the most prominent spokespersons of the APO, compared some aspects of the work of the Vormärz writer Georg Büchner with that of Peter-Paul Zahl.
[...] and a decree will be issued that anyone who forms calluses on his hands will be placed under curatorship; anyone who works himself sick will be criminally punished; anyone who prides himself on eating his bread by the sweat of his brow will be declared insane and dangerous to human society.
[82] In October 1978, musicians from the Viennese band Schmetterlinge and the Hamburg political rock group Oktober set texts from Zahl's 1977 poetry collection All Doors Open to music and recorded an album.
In addition to six songs, flamenco guitarist Miguel Iven recorded the twenty-minute piece Ninguneo, a musical text about the assassination of poet Federico García Lorca.
The building of the Department of German Studies, which was occupied during a lecture strike at the Free University of Berlin in the winter semester of 1976/77, was temporarily renamed the Peter-Paul-Zahl-Institut as part of this action.
