Linkeck

This is the second issue of the underground Berlin newspaper Linkeck published by Bernhard Fleischer, Karin and Bernd Kramer, co-founders of the Karin Kramer Press and the bookseller Hartmut Sander, co-founder of the underground Oberbaumpresse, between 1968 and 1969. The editorial board consisted of members of the Linkeck commune in Berlin. The paper got much popularity due its first issue being officially confiscated on charges of obscenity, public offensiveness, advocating violence and infringement of trademark laws.  This second issue was thus even more provocative and a response to the oppressive forces thwarting the first issue, deliberately targeting the officials involved in the legal case of the first issue. The school principal Bethge who had alerted the authorities of the paper’s inappropriateness when he saw it being sold outside his school and the judge who ordered the confiscation of the paper, Dr. Filzinger were both lampooned. In both cases, in addition to cartoons of the characters, sexually explicit content, both in the form of images and texts, was used to not just contrast the frigidity and oppressiveness of the authorities but as an additional challenge to the system that shunned and prosecuted the first issue.[1] In using these as well as ironic statements like ‘gas the commune’, the editors attempted to expose the continuities they observed between the Nazi dictatorship and the postwar West German government. Linkeck was one of the earliest of the underground papers, preceded by Oberbaum blatt, and set the standards and in some sense, the limits of using provocative content and themes of sex and violence, to challenge and inflame authorities.