After his death in prison, I saw a picture of his body in a magazine. He had been on hunger strike and was wasted to the bones. It was hard to believe that this body could have been alive only a short time before; his death seemed to lie far in the past, and some special circumstance must have protected the body fromdecay. Encasement in eternal ice or in lava froma volcano – the face, however, belied this. While it bore the marks of the drawn-out death, which had distorted it, it was in no way strange. Not only was it familiar, it also expressed presence and was clearly from my lifetime and my world. The full head of hair still gleamed as well and did not go with a corpse. I read a blissful triumph in his face, as if he had taken death upon himself and was proclaiming it now as in a danse macabre. His picture drove me to ever-new flights of fancy. I felt like a child and I wanted to be told that what was important was the seriousness of the matter and not the distinctiveness of its appearance, and most definitely not the enjoyment of discussing it.

It was not until a few days later that the dead prisoners from the concentration camps came to my mind; it probably took so long because you hardly ever see pictures of individuals from the camps. Photos almost always show several people, sometimes countless numbers of people, and it seems incongruous to focus your attention on just one person. Those starved to skeletons and close to death from exhaustion were known as Muselmane, or Mussulmans. This clearly alludes to fakirs and dervishes, obliquely to the wars against the Turks and still more obliquely to the crusades. In the crusades, Muselmane were regarded as beings without rights; the absolute lack of rights of those dying in the camps was thus confirmed one last time. A further scandal is that this stupid comparison is intended to place the crimes in the camps within a historical context as if to justify them through this derivation.

I hope that Holger Meins had not planned for a connection to be made between his death and the deaths in the camps.