Natalie Reinsch (Hannover): “… the merciful veil of oblivion …”. The censorship dispute between Horst Brandstätter and the city of Stuttgart in 1987 as a negotiation process around the legacy of left-wing terrorism and National Socialism intertwined with the person of Hanns Martin Schleyer

On the occasion of the opening of a room installation on Napoleon Bonaparte and Georg Kerner in 1987, the Stuttgart author Horst Brandstätter (1950-2006) criticized the naming of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Hall: “Swabian Jacobins are not given a monument in this country. Recently, monuments have even been created more as an expression of hysteria. (…) For example, Stuttgart’s hall bears a name that – for all its tragedy – would be better served by the merciful veil of oblivion.”
Brandstätter was alluding here to the Nazi past of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the murdered president of the German employers’ association. The director of the Gallery of the City of Stuttgart, Dr. Johann-Karl Schmidt, shortened the contribution for the catalog by the passage in question, to which Brandstätter objected and appealed to Mayor Rommel’s “sovereign liberality.” Rommel decided that the catalog would be published without Brandstätter’s contribution, whereupon Brandstätter made the incident public, coupled with accusations of censorship.
In the censorship controversy that followed, the media discussed the accusation of censorship on the one hand, and passages from Brandstätter’s speech on the other. Politicians from the Green Party and the SPD, as well as the Association of Writers, criticized the city’s actions as censorship, while Rommel invoked the city’s right to publish. Journalists identified the legacy of National Socialism as a controversial topic, which, however, seemed “secondary” next to the “push against the tabooing of Hanns Martin Schleyer”. Brandstätter’s accusation of censorship, an author who was targeted by the investigating authorities as a sympathizer during the “German Autumn” was not legally tangible. In the Stuttgart censorship dispute, the conflictual interweaving of the legacy of left-wing terrorism with the legacy of the Nazi past is demonstrated by the person of Schleyer and sheds light on the culture of remembrance in the city of Stuttgart.