Noose

In 1979, the student representatives in the Grand Senate at Karlsruhe University pulled a grim joke on a member of the university’s administration using the object shown here. This provocation was triggered by the 1977 state law abolishing General Student Councils (AStA) as separate official boards at Baden-Württemberg’s universities. This resolution by the Filbinger administration was motivated by concerns that left-wing student councils were political activists and perhaps supported the terrorist group Red Army Faction. According to the new law, the Committee “for the Promotion of Social, Intellectual, Artistic, and Sporting Interests” of Students, in the Grand Senate, was the only remaining official student representation. The funds and assets of the abolished AStA had to be handed over to the university. The members of the reorganized “Senate’s AStA” took this as an opportunity for protest. They sent a letter to the employee responsible for the university inventory with a hangman’s rope knotted into a noose as AStA’s supposed official assets. The dating of the cover letter, according to a new era starting with the abolition of the constituted student government, underscores the degree of their discontent. The fact that the senders concealed their — otherwise known — identities by using a fingerprint as a signature perhaps indicates their awareness that sending such a noose was transgressing a boundary of acceptable behavior. The recipient of the letter responded with remarkable composure, mirroring the anonymous hide-and-seek approach by using copied fingerprints in the recipient address line and salutation, and likewise signing with his own fingerprint. The substance of this reply also proved him impervious to provocation by consistently staying within the realm of light humor. In 2012, thirty-five years after this intervention by the government, legislation was passed allowing the reintroduction of constituted student governments as organs of Baden-Württemberg’s state universities. Today, the General Student Council at KIT upholds the memory of the interim period, during which the Independent Student Council (UStA) existed outside of statutory university structures. kn