[3 articles] A History of the Red Army Faction
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs04102009.html By RON JACOBS April 10 / 12, 2009 Much has been written about the German leftist guerrilla group the Red Army Fraction (RAF). Naturally, most of what has been written is in German. Most of what has been written (or translated into) English has generally been of a sensationalist nature and composed mostly of information taken from the files of the German mainstream media and law enforcement bureaucracy. The reasons for this approach include, among others, the nature of the RAF's politics. Leftist in the extreme, they lay beyond the realm of what can be expressed in media that exists to support the capitalist state. Add to this the criminal nature of their actions and the way lay clear for media coverage that ignored the intrinsically political reasons for the group and its acts. We see a similar type of anti-political coverage today when the capitalist media covers the actions undertaken by anarchists and others at international meetings of the capitalist governments and imperial defense pacts like NATO. By deemphasizing the politics of the protesters, the actions of the State seem to be a rational response to the average reader. Although it is difficult to separate the RAF's theory from their actions--actions which included murder--if one does so they find an application of left theory that perceived the anti-imperialist resistance in the advanced industrial nations (First World, if you will) as just another part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. It was this conclusion that the RAF used to rationalize their attacks on US military installations in 1972 during their anti-imperialist offensive.. They did not believe the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be in a revolutionary situation, but justified their attacks via the argument that the US and other imperial forces (German and British) should be attacked wherever they were, not just in Vietnam or another country where they were engaged in overt warfare. This approach echoed the slogan popularized by the Weatherman organization in the US-Bring the War Home. I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during this period. I attended protests against the Vietnam War, in support of the burgeoning squatters movement (and against property speculation) in Frankfurt, against the Shah of Iran, in support of gastarbeiters rights and against the repressive regimes in Turkey and Greece. I also attended concerts and street festivals where the German counterculture mingled flamboyantly with the US servicemen and adolescents that abounded in the country then. When the IG Farben building and Officer's Club in Frankfurt am Main were attacked by the RAF, a serious security effort became part of our daily lives. School buses taking us to the American High School in Frankfurt were boarded by military police who checked out bags while other GIs used long-handled mirrors to check underneath the buses for explosive devices. German police and military set up shop at airports and train stations, holding automatic weapons. Autobahn exits were the site of roadblocks. Wanted posters featuring the faces of the RAF members appeared everywhere. The Goethe University in Frankfurt came under increased police surveillance, especially after the playing of a tape-recorded message from RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at a national conference there. A protest held against the US mining of northern Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of the Vietnamese people was patrolled by police armed with automatic weapons. Nonetheless, many of the protesters chanted "Fur den Sieg des VietCong, Bomben auf das Pentagon!" (For the victory of the NLF, bomb the Pentagon). The following day, the Pentagon was bombed by the Weather Underground. Recently, PM Press in California published the book The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People. This voluminous work includes virtually all of the communiques and theoretical pamphlets published by the RAF from 1970 to 1977. This period is considered the first period of the RAF--an organization that saw its original leadership imprisoned after the aforementioned bombing offensive against US military installations in Germany. These members were followed by another set of individuals drawn to the RAF mostly through support organizations that developed to protest the conditions of the RAF's imprisonment and their eventual deaths that many still believe were state-sanctioned murders. Over the next two decades , hundreds of others would join the organization to replace those imprisoned and killed. Besides the text written by the RAF, the editors have written an accompanying text that provides a take on the history of post World War Two West Germany that has been mostly unavailable to English readers. The RAF was an intensely sectarian organization. They saw most of the rest of the German Left as revisionist or opportunist, unwilling to make the commitment armed struggle required. Besides invalidating the gains won by the autonomist squatters' movement and other independent groupings, this analysis ignored the fact that other approaches might have been more effective in the long term. By positioning itself to the left of all other leftist groups in Germany, the RAF insured its limited effectiveness. Once the State was able to capture its primary membership and literally isolate them in prisons, the RAF's purpose moved away from challenging the imperialists to one of staying alive inside a draconian and psychologically debilitating prison environment. Indeed, as this book clearly demarcates, the bulk of the work of the RAF in the 1970s centered around the nature of their existence in prison. In what would become a harbinger of the future we live in, the German prison authority and its departmental ally the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) developed an architecture and series of mechanisms designed to destroy the minds of the RAF prisoners. Isolation cells painted completely in white where the neon light never went off. No contact with any human for months at a time. The use of informers and ultimately a trial held in a specially designed prison courthouse that took place without the defendants or their attorneys. In addition, laws were passed that criminalized not only the act taken by the attorneys to defend their clients but also the acts of any individuals who opposed the actions taken by the State against the RAF prisoners. Of course, this enabled the RAF to point out the unity of purpose between the right wing CDU-CSU West German government and the SPD (with obvious comparisons to the role played by the German Social Democrats after World War I when they used the rightwing militia known as the Freikorps to kill members of the revolutionary Spartacists). Indeed, the special laws enacted against the RAF and its supporters contained many elements of laws now in existence in the US, realized most fully in the Patriot Act. While the RAF was certainly successful in exposing the fundamental authoritarianism of the modern capitalist state through their hunger strikes and other actions, they did nothing towards rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement that the 1972 actions were conceived in. This created a situation where their developing analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it became essentially moribund. In other words, the repression by the German government and its allies was successful. The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Fraktion during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. Not only a historical document, the fact that it is history provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago. -- Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: [email protected] -------- At Least They Weren't Nazis http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041001086.html Review by Marc Fisher Sunday, April 12, 2009 BAADER-MEINHOF The Inside Story of the R.A.F. By Stefan Aust Translated from the German by Anthea Bell Oxford Univ. 457 pp. $29.95 Before 9/11, before terrorism took on a foreign face, there was terror chic: the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. This was intellectualized, secular terror of the sort that college radicals could embrace as others of their generation found thrills in rock music or fast cars. In West Germany in the 1960s and '70s, memories of the Nazi years were fresh enough that the rebellious children of academics, clerics and artists could win considerable sympathy by accusing their elders of being too authoritarian, too (gulp) Nazi-like. The Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction, was a bunch of young people enraptured with violence, eager to upset a society that longed for quiet stability, and profiting from a system in which politicians were afraid of taking forceful actions that might recall the Nazi past. German journalist Stefan Aust reflects that uneasy relationship with his country's traumatic past in his new history of the terrorist movement launched by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. Aust, for many years the editor of Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, has a long history with the RAF. He even played a bit part in one of the gang's exploits, helping to retrieve Meinhof's young twins from a Palestinian orphans' camp after she had abandoned the girls there. But the writer, who calls himself a "participating observer" in the leftist movement, never details his relationship with the gang members and gives only a few clues to his own take on the RAF's years of bank robberies, kidnappings, murders and bombings. The RAF killed 28 people during seven years of intense activity in the '70s; even after the suicides of its founding members in prison in 1977, remnants of the group kept up the bombings sporadically until 1991. In 1998, the gang's last communique declared its era "history," adding that "the end of this project shows that we cannot succeed." But the RAF's early actions -- as well as a 44-day ordeal in the autumn of 1977 that included the kidnapping of a prominent industrialist and the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet full of German tourists -- still loom larger in Germany today than the Weather Underground bombings of the early 1970s do in the United States. This is essentially the third time in three decades that Aust has written this book; each time, he updates with new reporting, focusing to a startling degree on whether and how German authorities bugged the gang's prison cells. Somehow, Aust and a still-ambivalent German populace continue to struggle with questions of purity: He seems shocked that his own government might have listened in on confidential conversations between the convicted terrorists and their lawyers, even though those lawyers were smuggling weapons, other contraband and information in and out of the prison. As appalled as many Germans were by the gang's violence, they found the terrorists fascinating, a weakness the terrorists exploited. After a dramatic escape from state custody in 1970, Baader and his comrades contacted a French journalist and put on a show for her over tea and strawberries before fleeing to a Palestinian terror training camp. The West German government coddled the gang for years; early on, a court found two members not guilty of arson, ruling that their leaflets calling for the burning of department stores were merely "satire." "If you throw a stone, it's a crime," Meinhof wrote in 1968. "If a thousand stones are thrown, that's political." She knew her audience. The gang's incoherent blend of liberation, rebellion, nihilism and suicide had some appeal in a country desperate to break with its past. In prison, the gang members gave each other code names taken from "Moby-Dick," fancying themselves as part of Ahab's pursuit of the Leviathan, in this case, the evil state. Aust seems to buy into that sense of romance, especially in a riveting, hour-by-hour account of the RAF's most dramatic crimes that takes up most of the book's second half. He acknowledges only briefly that what the gang really achieved was exactly what it claimed to oppose: a huge expansion of state power in the form of surveillance tactics, computerized policing, fortified courtrooms, high-security prisons and much tougher anti-terror laws. The truth is not at the heart of this telling of the gang's story, but it emerges nonetheless: Strip away the soap opera and the high school intellectualism, and what remains is a simple tale of thugs in love with violence. -- Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist and the paper's bureau chief in Germany from 1989 to 1993, is the author of "After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History." -------- A Few Questions For Stefan Aust http://blog.oup.com/2009/04/stefan-aust/ April 9, 2009 Richard Huffman is the editor of www.baader-meinhof.com and has been studying the Baader-Meinhof era for more than a decade. Huffman's father was targeted by left-wing German terrorists in the early 1970s for his role as the head of the US Army's Berlin Brigade Bomb Disposal Unit, and this personal history was the impetus inspiring Huffman's initial research. Huffman is working on "The Gun Speaks: The Baader-Meinhof Gang at the Dawn of Terror," due in 2010. In the Q&A below he talks with Stefan Aust, author of Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Aust is a journalist and editor living in Germany. In Aust's book, originally published in Germany in 1985, we learn the fascinating history of a few young, idealistic Vietnam War protestors who became the masterminds behind a decades-long "campaign of liberation" marked by bombings, kidnapping, and murder. -- Richard Huffman: Given your background as an editor of konkret and your previous friendship with Ulrike Meinhof, I've always wondered how the original version of your book was received by the left when it first came out. Though you did not explicitly state it at the time, your book very conclusively seemed to demonstrate that the strange deaths in Stammheim prison were in fact suicides; yet it seems to be an article of faith amongst leftists that Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were murdered. How was your book received by the left at the time? And has that changed with the new edition, especially now that you clearly state that their deaths were suicides? Stefan Aust: When the book first came out in 1985, a lot of copies were being bought by RAF members who were sitting in jail. Some of them learned about the first generation of the group mainly by reading the book. But that didn't stop them or their sympathizers from being very critical of it. On a talk show, Hans Christian Ströbele, who was a former RAF lawyer and later a member of parliament (The Green Party), said that Baader and Meinhof would roll over in their graves if they read the book. There were two major points against the book: First, I made it quite clear that all my research had led me to conclude that the strange deaths in Stammheim were suicides. Despite the skepticism surrounding the official investigation, there were no signs of involvement by anyone from the outside. The second critical point was that I humanized the revolutionaries. Critics called that an un-political approach. In fact, from a different angle, it was the same argument that came from the political right: I made human beings out of murderers. After more than 20 years I now have the feeling that even people from the left see the book as a rather fair and correct work of journalism. Now their main argument is that the book has the "Deutungshoheit" about the subject which means something like opinion leadership about the subject of RAF-Terrorism. Huffman: I'm often struck by the number of people who romanticize the leaders of the RAF, without understanding the devastation that they wrought. The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the Oscar-Nominee movie that you wrote last year, was accused of glorifying terrorism. What are your thoughts about those criticisms? Is there even a way to portray the Baader-Meinhof saga without being accused of glorifying or romanticizing terrorism? Aust: The moment you write or make films about groups like the RAF you support their "immorality." I wanted to portray this group as accurately as possible. It would be impossible for a book reader or film viewer to understand why so many people followed them if they were portrayed only as villains and criminals. It was their charisma that made them so dangerous. One of the reasons why we showed the group's bombings and killings in such detail was that we wanted to explain what terrorism really is: the terror and killing of people of human beings not of lifeless "character masks." The aim was to make viewers understand why people of such high moral standards turned into ruthless killers, how "hyper moral" turned into immorality. Huffman: Do you see any homegrown, leftwing terrorist movements taking root in Europe or America again? I've often felt that one of the reasons that the Baader-Meinhof Group was able to rise to prominence early in the 70s was partially because of ineffective police work. It seems to me that in the modern climate, particularly since 9/11, it would be extremely hard for any band of urban revolutionaries to wage a similar war without being quickly caught. Do you agree? What kind of left-wing radical movement COULD succeed? Aust: Any kind of terrorist activity is always a part of a bigger radical movement. A terrorist group can evolve only when a bigger radical movement of any kind exists left, right, nationalist or religious. Organizations like al Qaeda can only function from inside a global Islamist movement. Similarly the RAF was a part of the radical left in Germany, at least in the beginning. And only if this terrorist group is embedded in a major movement can it have enough supporters to operate for a longer period of time. The members of the RAF were mainly arrested because normal people even leftists called the police. The enormous buildup of the police and the security agencies in Germany could not have been as effective without the cooperation of the people. The only way for a left-wing radical movement to succeed is by using the power of convincing the people rather than employing violence of any kind. Huffman: I think the single hardest concept for mean American living in the early 21st centuryto understand is the notion that the members of the RAF felt that by attacking the state, and having the state respond with massive retaliation, that there would be an enormous number of German people who would then take up their cause and overthrow the state. It just seems utterly delusional, especially coming from clearly intelligent people. How could they get to the point where this seemed rational? Aust: I can only quote Ulrike Meinhof who often said, "wie kommt die Dummheit in die Intelligenz?," which means "how can stupidity invade intelligence?" The first mistake the RAF made was not seeing reality. For me the whole struggle from the very beginning of my research was to realizing that the RAF had a quasi-religious character more than a rational political character. To think that in Germany the masses would overthrow the capitalist system was completely irrational. I cannot believe that they really believed that. Rather, they acted like political or religious martyrs to show that the state was as brutal as they thought it was. It was an experiment with their own and others lives. Huffman: What was Ulrike Meinhof like as a person before going underground? Reading her konkret essays in chronological order, I am struck by how much more hardened, desperate, and humorless she became in her later columns. Was she like that in her personal life? Did she have fun and socialize? Did she seem like she had an internal conflict? Aust: Ulrike was a very impressive person. She was well-educated and could get her point across very convincingly. At the same time she was quite an intolerant individual who thought she knew things better than others. If someone did not agree with her views then this person was considered "unpolitisch", un-political. She also had a depressive personality. She suffered under the injustice of the world. And sometimes I had the feeling that she was kind of masochistic. Take a look at the letter she wrote in prison "A hypocritical bitch from the ruling class" (on page 203). However, people of the liberal movement adored her, and she socialized a lot during her time in Hamburg and with konkret, where at this time she wrote about the poor, about people in sweat shops and in prison. In the end she could not live in these two worlds. When she went to Berlin she grew more and more depressed. Ultimately, I think her involvement in the RAF was due to many personal and psychological reasons. Huffman: Tell me about having your work realized on the big screen. Were you a major part of the production of "the Baader-Meinhof Complex" during its filming? I was particularly struck by the production design; it seemed simply perfect, especially the Free University rally, and the Stammheim scenes (though I couldn't help but notice that the BMW 2002 used for the 1971 Petra Schelm shooting scene was a 1974 BMW!). Did the film come out the way you had hoped? What was it like to see someone playing yourself on screen? Aust: I wrote a first draft of the script that Bernd Eichinger subsequently finalized. We discussed every scene of the film and used a lot of photos and film footage in order to be as accurate as possible. For example, in the scene where Rudi Dutschke was at the Vietnam Congress, the actor wore the same exact shirt that the real Rudi had worn. We shot the scenes at the Technische Universität Berlin in the original Audimax. We shot the scenes for the visit of the Shah in front of the real Berlin Opera, the Stammheim scenes were shot in the original Stammheim court room, the dialogues in prison are from the original transcript, etc. So we tried to be as accurate as possible. But there are certainly mistakes. For example, I do not know whether the BMW is authentic or not but I have the impression the helicopter over Stammheim prison is a later model. It was funny to see an actor playing my part. Let my put it this way: I did not know that I was so attractive then. I'm also afraid that the actors are actually more attractive than the originals were. Huffman: A lingering question about the deaths in Stammheim: You make a definitive case for the likelihood that the prisoners committed suicide. I've never understood how the officers on duty failed to hear the three gunshots. Having seen the layout of the prison block in both of your Baader-Meinhof films ("Stammheim" and "The Baader-Meinhof Complex"), I can't understand how these shots could not have been heard. Am I missing something? Aust: That is one of the mysteries. Not even the prisoners on the sixth floor directly under the high security tract heard anything. It would be interesting to test out whether shots can be heard from below. Huffman: By my accounting, you've written (and revised twice) the definitive book about the Red Army Faction, you've written two major films about the group, produced a major TV documentary about the group, and have overseen dozens and dozens of retrospective articles in Der Spiegel about the group. Is this current revision of your book and the companion film the end of it for you? Do you see interest in the public or even your own interest in this subject continuing? Aust: If you open one door it leads to another. It is definitely not the end, and one of the mysteries that has not yet been solved is the question about whether the prisoners were wire-tapped in their cells. There is a lot of evidence that supports this but no definitive proof has been found so far. This would raise another question regarding whether there are any tapes of the suicide night, which is something that I am currently working on finding out. Huffman: I was struck by the reaction of Juergen Ponto's widow to the film. She was upset because she felt that the facts of her husband's murder were incorrectly presented in the film. It seemed to me that her real quarrel was that her husband's murderers were being brought up yet again in the popular culture without any acknowledgment of the devastation they created. It seems like the specific victims of the RAF are often completely forgotten about. Do you think the coverage of the RAF has focused too much on the romantic aspects of their story at the expense of the brutal violence that the utilized? Aust: The scenes about Ponto's murder were written and filmed according to the verdict against Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt. It was very close to reality, although the house and the interior looked different, and we did not shoot in the original Ponto villa. The more detailed the film would have been to the real scene, the more shocking it would have been to the family. Of course, it is always very hard for relatives to see the murder of loved ones represented and re-enacted onscreen. They always have a different memory of such a terrible experience, which is completely understandable and a natural problem of filmmaking. But this would mean that journalists and filmmakers would not be able to accurately portray the events as they really happened, so there really is no easy way out. If we would not have shown murder as murder and terror as terror the critics would have said that the film portrayed terrorism as harmless. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
