‘Burn, Baby! Burn!’: Paris, Watts, Brussels, Berlin and Vietnam in the Work of Kommune I, 1967

Abstract

This study explores through close reading the best-known works of West Berlin's subversive group Kommune I (KI), four flyers which triggered a prosecution for incitement to arson in 1967. These flyers allude to a recent, catastrophic fire in a department store in Brussels in order to comment satirically on the Vietnam conflict. This reading refers to the work of the Situationist International (SI) and Guy Debord, highlighting correspondences between the thought and practice of the SI and KI's flyers. Mobilising some of the SI's key concepts, like the spectacle and détournement, this study considers how KI's flyers exploit and challenge some of the era's most significant discourses about Vietnam, from both the political mainstream and the anti-war movement, at times moving them onto new, unsettling ground. The essay thus contributes to an analysis of the ways in which KI achieved its profoundly disturbing effects.