ISebastian Lotzer
„It’s an illusion to hope that it’s enough, that it can’t get any worse.
Christian Geissler: Kamalatta
It was only a few hours ago that Dellwo – you always thatspoke of ‚Dellwo‘ and not Karl-Heinz, even though you were so close (the kind of details that always come to mind…) – called me and told me they found you dead in your apartment today. I don’t know if it was your soul that didn’t want anymore, or your body, it doesn’t really matter. I know that you’ve been in a pretty bad shape lately, Karl-Heinz and I talked about it the other day at the history of armed struggle event in Kreuzberg. I haven’t seen you for years, we just wrote to each other more often and spoke on the phone every now and then. How surprisingly soft your voice always sounded, I think very few people had any idea how sensitive you were. And we both know, my dear, that the sensitive ones are the ones who despair the most about the misery in this world and what people do to each other.
So now I won’t be able to publish more articles on your blog, and there were a hell of a lot of texts and translations that I was able to spread thanks to your help. And no one will explain the story regarding Marxism to me anymore…I remember telling you not too long ago that I was simply too stupid for it and you told me that it wasn’t all that difficult and that you would explain it to me when the time was right. But that opportunity won’t come any more, and I was really looking forward to the event with you as part of our ‚event offensive‘ in Berlin this summer. To finally be able to look each other in the eyes again, to reassure each other of the things we have in common, the anger and all the love. And, of course, a few beers. It would probably have been quite a few beers and a few shots. But you had to tell me shortly beforehand that you wouldn’t be able to come to Berlin because of health issues, so we improvised and did a Zoom video and to my surprise it worked well and the whole venue was listening to everything you said and you even managed to express yourself in a way that I was able to understand everything. And I know how difficult that was for you with all your meandering thoughts and associations. And it would have done you so much good to have experienced in person what your words meant to people, how important you were (and will remain) for that small number of people who are still seriously searching for a new social antagonism in this wretched country. I know how (rightly!) hurt and offended you were by all the malice and disrespect in recent years. How it has struck you that your last book was not even seriously reviewed in this country, while in faraway China some important intellectual minds of state capitalism gathered for the presentation of the Chinese translation of ‚The ecstasy of speculation‘.
Well, Achim, you will no longer excitedly write to me in the early hours of New Year’s morning about whether and how violently the migrant surplus proletariat kicked ass on the streets of Berlin. You will no longer write me messages while you are drunk in the middle of the night about your solidarity with the (former) ‚brothers and sisters in arms‘. You will never write me again…
We still have so much to do, Achim. We are far from finished with this insidious capitalist system. But how are we supposed to manage to finally get back up to speed, at least theoretically, if you are no longer with us? All those first steps towards re-establishing a new truly materialist critique in this country would probably not have happened without you, or at least not in this form. You played a major role in getting Clover’s epochal work ‚Riot.Strike.Riot‘ published in German, you made sure that we started talking about the ‚NON‘, that people understood what role the surplus proletariat plays today in the worldwide class struggles in the midst of the omnipresent crisis of valorization (you would be able to express that much more smoothly and substantially, I know, my friend). I don’t think you had the slightest idea of how important you were to us, even if this ‚us‘, this ‚we‘, comes across so blurred in the present state of confusion. You didn’t know all this, my dear, and I didn’t really tell you often and firmly enough, my friend. Karl-Heinz quoted you the other day at the event in Berlin and that was something else I wanted to tell you when I tried to call you last week. Because I knew how lonely and ostracized you often felt.
But you didn’t answer the phone and you only wrote Karl-Heinz briefly to say that “everything was okay”. But nothing was and nothing is ‚okay‘. Not in your life, dear Achim, not in our lives. We’re all floating in a vacuum, so much history, oh Achim, so much history. I wished you could have been there that evening at Jockel in Kreuzberg, I haven’t seen so many excited, lively, warm faces for a long time. And so much history… floating through the place. Yes, so much history. We have plenty of it. But what do we do with it? How can we extract theoretical tools from it to return back to the attack? And how are we supposed to do all this without you, Achim? No, nothing is okay. We are (almost) all so tired and many of us are also far too often far too lonely and lost. In one of his clever essays, a French companion (also a connection that, strangely enough, feels so unreal and real despite the physical separation) recently wrote: “You can only build a real collective power with those who are no longer afraid of being alone.” And of course he is referring, at least I think so, to the political loneliness that ‚we‘ have all deeply experienced in the era of the Corona state of emergency. And which makes the (overdue) break with the failed historical left irreversible. And yet we are all subjects, with our wounds, desires, longings, we are everything and nothing without the others, the other. Martin Buber: “ Man becomes the I through the Thou.”
And so I left you alone too much, my dear Achim, I didn’t tell you often enough how important and valuable you are. How irreplaceable. And so I sit here with my tears and your loneliness is mine and your desperation is mine. And there is nothing that will bring you back to us, the living dead, who are still dancing and hoping and fighting. But it’s really hard without people like you. I still remember this little cold apartment of a comrade in Lilienthalstraße in Kreuzberg, we only had candles to heat in the middle of winter, but we were so incredibly rich in those days. A poster with the famous photo of Gudrun and Andreas, taken in a Parisian café, hung on the walls, with a quote from Brecht underneath: “There are people who fight for a day and they do well. – There are others who fight for a year and are better. – There are people who fight for many years and they’re very good. But there are also people who fight their whole life: these are the irreplaceable ones.” And you were such an irreplaceable person, my dear Achim. That’s what I wanted to tell you, even if you can’t hear me anymore.
With love
Berlin, September 24, 2024
Your Thomas (alias Sebastian Lotzer)
This piece was originally published in German at Bonustracks on https://bonustracks.blackblogs.org/2024/09/24/in-erinnerung-an-meinen-freund-und-genossen-achim-szepanski/
Translated by Riot Turtle (@riotturtle.bsky.social – https://bsky.app/profile/riotturtle.bsky.social)