The following sentence was said by RAF member Gudrun Ensslin (in 1968, I believe1968):
Ich hab den Richtern gesagt, 'ich weiß, warum sie sagen, man kann nichts tun, weil sie nichts tun können wollen, aber ich will etwas getan haben dagegen'.
(For more context, see this page; the text I've quoted appears in the fifth paragraph.)
I'm surprised/puzzled by the fact that the sentence does not end with the verb (haben), and instead ends with dagegen.
Compounding my confusingconfusion is an uncertainty over what the da in dagegen (if I may parse it this way) is referring to. I can think of two very different possibilities:
- da = what "they" (sie) had said about not being able to act (i.e. Ensslin is contrasting her position/attitude towards the possibility of action against "theirs"); or
- da = whatever world condition/situation compelled Ensslin to take action.
Would it be ungrammatical to say
- "aber ich will dagegen etwas getan haben"?
- "aber ich will etwas dagegen getan haben"? Or
(I've keyed the last two options to correspond to the two alternative interpretations I gave just before.)