Hamburgs "Baseballschlägerjahre" Lesung und Diskussion

In the organizer's words:

On Saturday, April 26 at 6 p.m., our strength training area will once again be transformed into an event salon. We warmly welcome Felix Krebs and Florian Schubert from Hamburg. They will be presenting their joint book: Hamburg's "Baseball bat years". Right-wing and racist violence in the 1980s: social conditions and reactions.

As a point of reference for a period of massive right-wing and racist violence, we often look to East Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. Debates, books and films dealing with this phase became known as the "baseball bat years". Today we know that right-wing violence neither began nor ended there and then.

The two authors of our reading, on the other hand, take on Hamburg, a decade earlier. In the 1980s, there were at least eight homicides in Hamburg and the surrounding area in which the perpetrators came from the right-wing scene and/or acted out of racist motives. There were at least 13 bomb and arson attacks and over 60 completed assaults. Alarming figures that have never been equaled before or since. It began with a bomb attack on a memorial site in April 1980 by the "German Action Groups", who also committed murders shortly afterwards, and ended in June 1989 with the confirmation of the right-wing trend with just under 8% for parties to the right of the CDU in the European elections.

Then as now, structural and societal racism as well as ignorance towards those affected accelerated and strengthened the right-wing extremist perpetrators of violence.