“From the life of a prisoner” – letter from the anarchist N. from the JVA Aichach

Everything in this society in which we are forced to live, that makes life hostile and inhospitable, becomes visible in the place that it invented in order to remind all people, nonconformist or conformist alike, what awaits them if they step outside of the boundaries: prison. A place that acts instead of or in addition to execution: the death of time. Buried alive in a tomb until the day of resurrection; cut off from loved ones, the living world and our bodies’ natural impulse to move through the world freely. Reduced to a number in the smooth functioning of a machine; administered, surveilled, educated.

The first time one is trapped in this machine, one wonders how familiar everything is. There are those who say: “it isn’t punishment, it’s education.” And they are right. However, what they overlook is that our first encounter with prison isn’t when we are imprisoned. But rather that it is a part of our life from the very beginning: in kindergarten, school, in the hospital; later in the office, the factory, the barracks, in the retirement home. Categorized and sorted; accustomed to the ticking of the clock and the rhythm of the machine since childhood. Squeezed into concrete caves, cut off from the pulsing rhythm of life and death. Reduced to a function in the system, trained to measure the earth and its inhabitants according to the monetary value that can be squeezed out of them. Filled with ignorance or even disdain for all forms of subsistence and self organization.

Prison is simply the most blatant coercive institution, intended to tame the occasionally recalcitrant human material. A place where any outliers that interfere with the rhythm of the machine can be stored and managed.

In order to justify the existence of prison, it is sold to us as a place of retribution, atonement, and prevention. Where people who have violated the rules of social interaction, those who have robbed, hurt, or killed others, are punished. It incorporates the conflicts, the assaults, the injuries that people inflict on one another, and claims to solve them. And thus in prison one will always encounter some people whom one honestly only wishes the worst. However, the judiciary, that condemns such a person, also clears the path for those who develop and finance ever more complex killing machines, train and deploy hundreds of thousands to kill, organize the control and surveillance of entire populations, extinguish whole cultures and ways of life, profit from and base their power off of the exploitation of humans and nature. Those who are backed by the judiciary loot and enslave the world and of course use their prisons to deal with their biggest rivals. Which is why in prison one finds primarily the poor, the useless and superfluous, the rebels and those who have failed to fit into this society. Prison functions as Ultima Ratio, to deal with these people or at least to clear them out of the way.

Now this man-made colossus quietly threatens discipline and order and creates a seldom overcome separation between the outside world and the unlucky ones it devours. More than ten weeks ago (May) these gates also closed behind me and made me a part of this man-made otherworld for indeterminate time. Now I, nr. 97/25, sit in my barely eight square meter tomb, cell 003, and wait. Wait until the nature of the storm that was unleashed around me and my companion M becomes clear. Only bit by bit does this or that information get through to me because in this otherworld time takes on other dimensions. Thus weeks and months pass and the calm to which I am condemned drones on, deafening to my ears.

Still today I have yet to receive access to the files of my case, neither about the Zündlumpen case, the basis for the warrant leading to my arrest, nor about the new case against me and my companion. Until today no one can visit or call me other than my parents. Letters addressed to me take two weeks to two months to arrive. Letters to the outside take just as long. If the wrong thing is written in these letters they are stopped. I am forbidden to speak about the case with anyone except for my lawyer. The cops listen to my conversations when I call, they sit next to me during visitation, and they read all of my letters. But I am thankful for one thing: at least now they do so openly. After years of sometime more, sometimes less effective secrecy, this is a pleasant change.

The pretext for this new tightening of the thumbscrew: flight risk. In a case that has been ongoing for three years. My companion M and I apparently went into hiding to avoid this case because we lived in a self-built hut in the forest right outside of the city limits of Munich.

That’s why a warrant for my and M’s arrest was issued on 04.02 and executed on 26.02. Like so many other unhoused people on a cold winter evening we were sitting in a warm Munich library with electricity and internet when we were ambushed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed by men and women in civilian clothes. Next I was brought into the stairwell. From that moment on I haven’t seen M.

They brought me to the Staatschutz (SS) for interrogation where for hours they tried to get me to make a statement by telling me defamatory lies about M. Around midnight a cop from the Hundestaffel (HS) took a small sample from me by rubbing a handkerchief in my neck. At two in the morning they delivered me to the Polizeipräsidium (PP), where I was allowed to spend the rest of the night in one of their comfortable holding cells. The next day I was presented to a pre-trial judge and after a four hour stop over in the Frauen-JVA of Stadelheim I was promptly brought to Aichach without further explanation.

A week later the cops picked me up again in order to bring me to a clinic in Munich and violently strip me naked and photograph every spot or abnormality on my skin in search of burn wounds. Aside from this I spent the first two weeks entirely cut off from the outside world. After two weeks my lawyer visited, at three weeks I was allowed to call my parents for the first time, and after four weeks I was given the first letters and postcards.

Thank you to all those who wrote to me. The letters and cards are a bright spot on the walls of the tobacco-stained cell and the grey monotony of every day life in prison. Keep it up! A separation was ordered between M and I, but we are allowed to write each other letters. I am in a single cell. The cells are unlocked four to six hours a day and my fellow prisoners and I can move freely on our floor. During this time we also get one hour of yard time. To this day (May) I don’t have any of my own clothes or books because both are forbidden to me. I am not allowed to give or receive anything from outside. Sometimes the days are long, but in principle I know how to keep myself busy and to use the abundance of time I suddenly have in a somewhat useful manner. Forced into the normality of every day life in prison, subjected to the dictates of time and daily routine, confronted with bureaucracy and petty rules, cut off almost entirely from my loved ones and mother earth, this experience strengthens my resolve every day to not take the monster that is this society for granted, but rather to fight for a different way of being, a different relationship to the living world.

And so I too want to remember the old Chinese proverb: whoever reads this, is stupid! With this in mind I wish us all, inside and outside, the strength to not be intimidated and to stand up for our ideas. And read “Zündlumpen,” there’s a few good things in there!

Your N

JVA Aichach, May 2025

Note:

After more than four months of imprisonment N was given her personal clothing at the beginning of July. Ordering books from book stores is still being delayed by the JVA.

If you want to write to N or M, send an email to:

solidaritaet-mit-n-und-m@riseup.net

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