Socialist Patients' Collective - History

History

The group was officially founded on March 2, 1970 at Heidelberg University by Wolfgang Huber, his wife Ursula Schaefer, two colleagues and 40 ex-patients from the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic. The group were opposed to the backlash which followed the new left revolts of 1968 and sought to expel revolutionary leftist factions from the university.

The SPK established a "free space" for political therapy", re-framing illness as a contradiction created by capitalism which could be embraced to bring an end to the system which gave it life. They believed that the sick formed a revolutionary class of dispossessed people who could be radicalized to struggle against oppression. Organizing by sickness instead of socio-economic class allowed middle-class student leftists to articulate their own feelings of psychic and political oppression and to struggle against the status quo in their own right in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Additionally, according to the SPK sickness had the advantage of being familiar to everyone, hence everyone was a potential revolutionary so long as they disavowed the medical establishment. Like other anti-psychiatry experiments, such as Kingsley Hall and Villa 21, SPK questioned the patient/doctor paradigm and ultimately called for an overthrow of the "doctor's class".

The SPK collective produced information leaflets, held teach-ins and Heidelberg University studied to recognize SPK as a part of the University. SPK conducted "agitations", called "single" (individual actions) and "group agitations" (collective actions), working from 9 am to 10 pm or later.

However, the SPK experiment was criticized by many within Heidelberg's university and psychiatric clinic and the SPK's funding, salaries and meeting space were threatened. Despite opposition to the SPK, in the autumn of 1970 the university convened an advisory panel of 3 experts who recommended that the SPK should be institutionalized in Heidelberg university. To counter this suggestion, Heidelberg university's faculty of medicine supported the establishment of a counter-panel consisting of 3 critics of the SPK who were mandated to campaign against the group. The Minister overseeing both panels ultimately sided with the 3 SPK critics and decided against implementing any of the recommendations from the pro-SPK panel. SPK's funding was subsequently cut and the group was evicted from the university campus.

The decision provoked a confrontation between the SPK and the university, which led to a sit-in and attracted the attention of a wider audience, including the police, in a climate of hypervigilance brought about by radical left-wing extrajudicial actions. Ultimately, the collective moved out of the university and into the homes of its members. On 24 June 1971, a mysterious shooting at Heidelberg police station was attributed to the Baader-Meinhof group, and based on that unrelated pretext, the police began conducting raids on SPK members' houses. Three hundred fifty officers were charged with finding the shooter. At its peak, the SPK counted about 500 members; of these, 7 were arrested in the raids, including Huber and Schaefer on 21 July 1971. Firstly SPK was falsely linked to the Baader-Meinhof group but none of the SPK patients arrested was ever condemned due any relation with the Baader-Meinhof group. and neither was ever proved any relation within SPK and RAF. Accounts notice the brutality, legal irregularities and other sort of abuses which surrounded the case, and they also notice this was part of a disinformation campaign against SPK due their revolutionary positions, and thus SPK was criminalized as part of a political persecution.

The rhetoric denouncing the SPK as engaged in terrorist activity and a precursor to the RAF re-emerged after the arrest of Kristina Berster, who crossed the US border illegally seeking asylum from West German counterterrorism operations. Berster was acquitted of all conspiracy charges, and the disinformation campaign was exposed by Greg Guma.

A West German embassy spokesman stated, "By all accounts the SPC was fairly harmless." Kristina Berster explained that "the purpose of the Socialist Patients Collective was to find out the reasons why people feel lonely, isolated and depressed and the circumstances which caused these problems."