They began a secret affair. They talked extensively about their personal histories and the historical architecture of Chicago. Kraus introduced Berliner to Debord and the Situationists and he learned quickly. Even while avoiding Dana and Raulson, the lovers found a way to see each other every day. Sometimes, after Berliner’s mother and grandmother had gone to sleep, Kraus snuck into Berliner’s basement and spent the night in his bed. She attended most of his baseball games, pretending to be the cousin of one of Berliner’s teammates, an outfielder whose parents never came to games. She sat in the bleachers, wearing black high-waist jeans, a white button-down shirt, and one of many colored scarves, heckling like she was at Comiskey Park. She drank beer from the bottle or whiskey from a flask and smoked clove cigarettes until the mothers asked her to stop.
The New Situationists were mostly supportive of Kraus’s relationship. Some of them had known her for many years and were amused that she’d finally become enamored of someone. They weren’t happy, though, when Kraus asked to bring Berliner into the group. Up to this point, Kraus had done a thorough job squashing any scrutiny of the NS and its members. Because of Kraus’s efforts, the group was invisible to the outside world and their identities were secret from her and from each other. Asking to bring Berliner in, the antithesis of her job, surprised the other New Situationists despite the depth of her feelings. But because the New Situationist higher-ups respected Kraus, they agreed to see Berliner. They all met in an empty office in a building in the middle of the Loop. Each member of the New Situationists who interviewed Berliner wore a full-face animal mask and used voice-modulating devices when they spoke. They quizzed Berliner about his school and political beliefs, but the thing that really struck them was Berliner’s story about his grandmother’s attempted exorcism. It convinced a few reluctant members that he was interesting enough to join. At the same time, Kraus staged a test of romantic fidelity, hiring an actress she knew to try seduce Berliner. He didn’t stray.
In early November 1999, Berliner was accepted into the New Situationists as a “junior” member and Kraus’s assistant, specializing in Negative Recruitment. They threw a party for him at the group’s headquarters; all the members attended in masks. Some wore wigs, long gloves, or cowls to hide the color of their hair or skin. Kraus wore a purple mask in the shape of a unicorn head and an elaborate horned headdress. Berliner’s mask was red. The loud and lavish party lasted all night. Kraus pulled Berliner into her personal rooms for a quick tryst, then they rejoined the party to dance and drink champagne.
At the party, Kraus introduced Berliner to David Wilson. Unconcerned about protecting his identity, and lacking Kraus and Berliner’s flair for the theatrical, he didn’t wear a mask. Physically, Wilson was an unimpressive man: short, slightly hunched from years of sitting in front of a computer, and graying early. He was nearsighted but had a face-shape that rejected nearly every style of glasses. Round glasses were too small, rectangular glasses were too long, and the square-ish Wayfarers that had recently come back into style made him look like he was trying too hard. He wore a pair of tortoise-shell Wayfarers anyway. He took a picture with masked Kraus and Berliner. Although the picture from the party doesn’t show it, the three of them oddly look like they could be related: big eyes, dark hair, pale skin, and big smiles with large teeth. Lay pictures of Wilson, Kraus, and Berliner side to side and it will look like you’re assembling a family photo album.
During these early days, the New Situationists focused on entertainment and aesthetics. Like the Situationists before them, they wanted to inject playfulness and fun into their droll, serious lives. Berliner immediately began participating in the New Situationists’ aesthetic activities as they attempted to interact with Chicago psychogeographically, in the style of Debord and the SI.
Because of their secrecy and their (possibly?) relatively small numbers, the New Situationists didn’t spark any musical or visual art movements, even on a local level. They either didn’t make much art or it burned in the fire that eventually destroyed their headquarters. They published a few pamphlets or zines without the words “Situationist” or “New Situationist” on them, with unsigned articles in a style both borrowed from the Situationists and helpful in protecting their identities. Some of the articles were reverent histories of Chicago architectural topics; some were personal essays about the L or a particular building in Chicago. They also wrote scathing diatribes against traffic and urban congestion, which they blamed for most of society’s ills. The contemporary urban architect’s tactics, they argued, hemmed people into capitalism-directed movements through an urban area, with pedestrians and drivers diverted to the routes that would pass the most billboards. This was essentially undiluted Situationist rhetoric. The unsigned, photocopied zines didn’t attract any attention, but were for a short time available for purchase at a local independent bookstore called Quimby’s.
Following the path the Situationists had paved, the New Situationists began focusing on politics rather than aesthetics after a few years of existence. In 2000, without revealing their identities, they helped organize and secretly fund a number of far-left political causes and candidates, mostly focusing on social issues, the politics of intellectual property, and creative freedom as it related to the Internet. However, after the events of September 11, 2001, their politics took a radical turn.
They planned what they believed would be a “low-risk, zero-casualty” act of domestic terrorism, to prove that “domestic terrorism was as much of a threat as foreign terrorism and that terrorism itself wasn’t an act of war between nations, but could be a zero-casualty act of social change within a nation.”a They decided to detonate bombs in eleven L stations across the city. The crippling of the L, which they called the “arms and hands of Chicago,” was intended to mimic the wound New York City received when the Twin Towers fell, to literally stop the city’s movements. In a declaration of intention sent to the Chicago Tribune the night of the bombings, the New Situationists insisted, “We revel in the beauty of this city and her infrastructure, and the destruction of this infrastructure, which we hold so dear, shows how absolutely necessary we believe this demonstration to be.”b
According to Kraus’s testimony, “sometime in May” she and ten other members of the New Situationists were separately informed their involvement was suspected. By the time her compatriots looped in Kraus, every detail had already been planned for 3:15 a.m. on Monday, June 18. The New Situationist leaders had chosen stations that would be closed at that time.
Sometime after 10 p.m. on June 17, Kraus and the ten other New Situationist bombers met with leaders in the New Situationist headquarters. During this meeting and for the rest of the long night, they all wore ski masks with holes for the eyes and mouth. Kraus’s ski mask was dark pink, which looked black enough in the dark. She hadn’t lost her Situationist instinct that play was as important as politics.