The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  In the already tense context of Meins’ death, this action raised the struggle to a whole new level. Electrifying the radical left, it also outraged all those who identified with the state.

  Security was immediately stepped up for prosecutors and judges throughout the country.4 The CDU mayor announced a demonstration against “Terror and Violence,”5 while the federal government offered a 50,000 DM reward for the killers.6 Meanwhile, Beate Sturm was trotted out to the media, whom she obligingly told about how Meins “had political ideas, but behind them lay the problems he had. He always wanted to be an authority figure. He was fascinated by Baader’s authority, but also intimidated by it—that’s why he always tagged along.” All of this led one major newspaper to opine that the fallen guerilla “perhaps did not only die as a result of his own irrationality, but as a result of manipulation by his associates as well.”7

  After having pointedly ignored the strike in the period prior to November 9, the media now engaged in disinformation like this in an attempt to undercut the widespread sympathy that this death had garnered the prisoners. For instance, it was claimed that Meins was offered contact with other prisoners, but declined, as he “did not feel he was a criminal.”8 While this claim was ludicrous considering that the demand of both the previous hunger strikes had been precisely such integration, it can also be viewed as a clever attempt to exploit divisions within the left regarding the strategies of association versus equality with social prisoners.

  Meanwhile, there was an explosion of actions and demonstrations in support of the prisoners. A bomb went off (harmlessly) outside the Hamburg residence of another judge, Geert Ziegler,9 and there were eight firebombings in the university town of Göttingen.10 Within days, protests had spread to cities across the Federal Republic. In Frankfurt and Mannheim, courthouse windows were smashed, while the KPD/ML handed out fliers stating what everyone felt: “Holger Meins Murdered.”11 In West Berlin, a November 11 Red Aid demonstration was banned by city authorities, which did not deter roughly one thousand people from taking to the streets, demanding that those responsible for Meins’ death be punished and that all political prisoners be freed, while fighting with stones and bottles against the cops’ clubs and teargas. Thirtytwo people were arrested.1

  As giant pictures of an emaciated Meins were carried through the cities of the FRG, more than one observer was reminded of the victims of the concentration camps.2 To some on the radical left, this was yet more evidence of the “fascist drift,” of the real and not rhetorical “extermination” that more and more people saw the prisoners facing.

  On November 13, there was an historic meeting at Frankfurt University, where several thousand people gathered in solidarity with the hunger strike. A leaflet supporting the RAF was distributed, signed by a number of sponti organizations—Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), the Häuserrat (Housing Coucil), and the Sozialistische Hochschulinitiative (Socialist Student Initiative)—as well as Red Aid and the Committees Against Torture, expressing unambiguous solidarity not only with the RAF, but also with the killing of Drenkmann:

  The Red Army Faction was a political group committed to struggling against oppression and exploitation, guns in hand. At a time when millions of people in Vietnam, South America and South Africa struggle against large landowners, factory owners, and their armies, they decided to call to account the ruling class in the FRG and to integrate themselves into this struggle against imperialism…

  A successor organization to the RAF understood the death of Holger Meins as a signal. They took control of their sorrow and their hatred and shot the President of the Berlin Supreme Court, Drenkmann. No threat of torture and imprisonment could deter them.3

  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who had yet to leave his street fighting days behind him and was at the time one of the leading members of the sponti organization Revolutionary Struggle, had this to say about the Drenkmann killing:

  Whether it was tactically correct is open to discussion. In any event, we’ll discuss it. We’ll make our newspapers and magazines available to the Berlin comrades if they want to use them to explain the reasoning behind their actions. We will not distance ourselves from them.

  “Danny the Red” went on to argue that the shooting had not split the left, but that it put the ruling class on notice that even in Germany there were groups prepared to take up arms.4 (Heinrich Böll, on the other hand, accused Cohn-Bendit of speaking irresponsibly, stating for himself that, “I hold the basic concept of the Red Army Faction to be nonsense.”)5

  While not many took as strong a position as those in Frankfurt, the rapid escalation also pushed liberal organizations to speak out. The PEN Centre held a forum regarding the use of torture by police and prison officials, and Amnesty International demanded an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Meins’ death, torture in the prisons and the conditions in which the RAF prisoners were being held.6 At the same time, prominent writers, including Gruppe 47 authors Ernst Bloch, Erich Fried, and Martin Walser, signed a statement protesting prison conditions.7

  Five thousand people attended Meins’ funeral in Mannheim a week later, including Rudi Dutschke. The former APO leader, standing over the grave as Meins’ casket was lowered, famously gave the clenched fist salute, crying, “Holger, the fight goes on!”

  The state, meanwhile, was busy trying to keep up with events. Almost immediately following Drenkmann’s killing, the eleven Länder Interior Ministers were summoned to Bonn for an emergency meeting to discuss ways to contain the growing rebellion.8 On November 13, Federal Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD) announced that charges were being brought against seventeen people, and thirty-five were being held in remand while investigations were conducted. Ominously, he also noted that seven lawyers would be investigated for supporting a criminal organization,1 and in short order, charges were laid against attorneys Croissant, Schily, Groenewold, and Haag for statements they had made describing Meins’ death as a premeditated murder.2

  But the real crackdown had yet to come.

  On November 26, the state moved into action, police and border guard units setting up checkpoints and carrying out predawn raids across the country.3 Dozens of left-wing publishers, bookstores, law firms, and activists’ homes were searched. Many victims were not even seriously suspected of any ties to the guerilla. Frankfurt police, for example, admitted that their targets “included general problem houses, where the occupants were organizing rent strikes or stirring up other sorts of trouble.”4 All in all, roughly forty people were arrested,5 several eventually facing charges of supporting a “criminal organization” under §129.6

  Despite their efforts, dubbed Aktion Winterreise (“Operation Winter Trip”), the police failed to apprehend a single guerilla fighter. Nevertheless, the raids gave the new Minister of the Interior, Werner Maihofer,7 the opportunity to shock the public with claims that police had uncovered radio transmitters, explosives, chemicals, narcotics, weapons, and ammunition, not to mention plans for kidnappings and jailbreaks.8

  The real targets of this crackdown were in fact the sympathizers and supporters: the goal of Winter Trip was to break the back of the growing movement while preparing public opinion for a new round of repressive legislation. As defense attorney Klaus Croissant wrote soon after:

  In the Attorney General’s own words, the action was aimed at what they call “the sympathizers”: that means the prisoners’ family members, the lawyers, the members of Red Aid, the writers who have publicly taken a stand against isolation torture, brainwashing and detention-extermination.

  By means of this police action, public opinion was prepared so as to allow special legislation to be passed in fifteen days, just before Christmas.9

  Most importantly in regards to the RAF’s legal team, the defense attorneys were now accused of organizing an illegal communication network to transmit messages between prisoners, as well as between prisoners and “active commandos” on the outside. The state supplemented evidence from Winter Trip with a s
eries of cell raids, the contents of letters and documents seized being manipulated in the media to present the image of a far-reaching “terrorist conspiracy.”

  Croissant was not alone in his belief that the real goal of this crackdown was to deprive the remaining four alleged ringleaders (Holger Meins now being dead) of any effective defense as their trial approached. This was a matter of some importance, for while the accused did not deny responsibility for the RAF’s attacks, their lawyers had marshaled compelling evidence that the isolation conditions in which they were held had rendered them unfit to stand trial. As SPD deputy Fritz-Joachim Gnädinger would later tell the Bundestag:

  It is clear to anyone in the know that without the changes in procedure already agreed the trial of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Stammheim would have got into even greater difficulties. It might even have had to be abandoned. Only a change in the law made last year… made the continuation of the trial possible. I therefore ask all the critics to consider for a moment what disastrous consequences for our citizens’ sense of law and order would have resulted if the trial in Stammheim had had to be abandoned without a verdict.10

  Indeed, these Winter Trip raids prepared the public for a barrage of new laws, “refinements” to existing legislation, and restrictions on defense attorneys. Through these, the state largely achieved a condition in which the upcoming trial in Stammheim prison could proceed with the prisoners ill- or undefended, often even without their personal participation.

  There was one final, and controversial, effect that Winter Trip had on the radical left: soon afterwards several key activists left the Committees Against Torture.1 While this could be interpreted as a retreat, the truth of the matter was more complex: many of those who had banded together to provide legal support now thought better of that strategy.

  With some prompting from the prisoners, they had decided to go underground, to take up arms themselves, and to renew the RAF.

  Right from the start, I did not speak to the guards; afterwards, I had even less to desire to. I couldn’t speak to them. I know all of the brilliant analyses—“their situation is also contradictory,” etc.—and those analyses are correct. But they have their limit: these analyses don’t take into account that their contradictions amount to being instruments of terror—at least in some situations. They disarm you. It is obvious: contradictions which are institutionalized, set up to weaken the institution’s victim, to disarm her, to take away her hatred. And hatred of the pigs is the only form that life takes in jail.

  You realize how important it is to not speak when you see how they celebrate every one of your words like a victory—in reality something to ease their conscience, their knowledge that they are torturers and assassins. You help them to carry the burden of their responsibility, you make yourself into their accomplice. You are supposed to show them that you consent to the torture you are being subjected to. They want a total victory—and in this way they will have it. And in this way, perhaps for the first time, you know and you understand exactly what the brilliant analyses do not.

  a RAF prisoner’s letter to her lawyer

  “Témoignages de Prisonniers” in Croissant, 135-6.

  Ulrike Meinhof

  Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing

  From the period between June 16, 1972 and February 9, 1973:

  The feeling, one’s head explodes (the feeling, the top of the skull will simply split, burst open)—

  the feeling, one’s spinal column presses into one’s brain

  the feeling, one’s brain gradually shrivels up like, like dried fruit, for example—

  the feeling, one is constantly, imperceptibly, flooded, one is remotecontrolled—

  the feeling, one’s associations are hacked away—

  the feeling, one pisses the soul out of one’s body, like when one cannot hold water—

  the feeling, the cell moves. One wakes up, opens one’s eyes: the cell moves; afternoon, if the sun shines in, it is suddenly still. One cannot get rid of the feeling of motion. One cannot tell whether one shivers from fever or from cold—

  one cannot tell why one shivers—one freezes.

  To speak at a normal volume requires an effort like that necessary to speak loudly, almost like that necessary to shout—

  the feeling, one falls silent—

  one can no longer identify the meaning of words, one can only guess—

  the use of sibilants—s, ß, tz, z, sch is absolutely unbearable guards, visits, the yard seems to be made of celluloid—

  headaches—

  flashes—

  sentence construction, grammar, syntax—can no longer be controlled.

  When writing: two lines—by the end of the second line, one cannot remember the beginning of the first—

  The feeling, internal burnout—

  the feeling, if one must say what’s wrong, if one wants to let it out, it’s like a rush of boiling water in the face, like, for example, boiling water that scalds forever, that disfigures—

  Raging aggressiveness, for which no outlet exists. That’s the worst.

  Keen awareness that one cannot survive; a complete breakdown of the capacity to deal with this;

  Visits leave no trace. A half an hour later one can only mechanically reconstruct whether the visit was today or last week.

  Compared to this, bathing once a week means: a momentary thaw, a moment of rest—to stop for a couple of hours—

  The feeling, time and space reconnect—

  the feeling of finding oneself in a house of mirrors, like in an amusement park—to stagger—

  Afterwards: incredible euphoria, that one heard something—

  beyond the acoustic day and night differentiation—

  The feeling, time now flows, the brain expands again, the spinal column sinks down after some weeks.

  The feeling, as if one’s skin is thickening.

  The second time (December 12, 1973 until January 3, 1974):

  Ears buzzing. Waking up, one feels as if one has been beaten.

  The feeling, one moves in slow motion.

  The feeling, finding yourself in a vacuum, as if you’re encased in lead.

  Afterwards: Shock. As if an iron plate had fallen on your head.

  Comparisons, concepts that invade one’s mind:

  (Psycho) shredding—

  The feeling of traveling through space packed into a barrel so that the acceleration causes your skin to flatten—

  Kafka’s penal colony—The version with a bed of nails—

  A non-stop rollercoaster ride.

  The radio: it offers minimal stress reduction, like when one, for example, reduces one’s speed from 240 to 190.

  That everything exists in a cell that makes it in no obvious way different from any other cell—radio, furniture, plus newspapers, books—is actually by its implication rather aggravating: making any understanding between the prisoners and people who do not know what silent isolation is impossible.

  Also disorienting to the prisoner. (That it is white like a hospital cell, for example, only increases the terror, but mainly it is the silence. If one lived there, one would paint the walls.) Clearly, one who is in there would rather be dead.

  Peter Milberg, who was in one of these things in Frankfurt-Preungesheim (“an empty medical wing”) subsequently accused his judge of “attempting” to kill him. This indicates that what is going on in these places is simply a type of “execution.”

  That is to say: A process of inner disintegration occurs—like something being dissolved in acid, which one attempts to slow down by concentrating on resistance, but nothing can stop it

  The complete destruction of the personality is insidious. Nobody exists outside of oneself in these completely extraordinary circumstances.

  As means/method, it can quite clearly be compared, for instance, to that which they use against the Tupamaros: to create in them a state of nervous agitation and agony, shortly before administering pentothal—which suddenly creates a
feeling of relaxation and euphoria. One expects the prisoner to lose self-control.

  To babble.

  Second Hunger Strike

  Our January/February hunger strike was unsuccessful. The BAW’s promise to end our isolation was bullshit. We are again on hunger strike.

  We demand:

  THAT POLITICAL PRISONERS BE PLACED WITH ALL OF THE OTHER PRISONERS!

  and

  FREE ACCESS TO POLITICAL INFORMATION FOR ALL PRISONERS—INCLUDING FROM THE MEDIA OF THE APO.

  No more, no less. Now.

  Enough of the dirty dealing—time is on your side; we won’t be duped.

  Eat shit or die! That’s the law of the system. There’s profit to be made. Every child, every woman, every man must be threatened, intimidated, and terrified into submission. Every option in this system ends in evil.

  Either be integrated into the existing capitalist system—

  the assembly line chews up people and spits out profits—

  the office chews up people and spits out bosses—

  the schools chew up people and spit out a labor force—

  the universities chew up people and spit out robots—

  or face starvation, marginalization, suicide.

  Whoever doesn’t accept the available options, doesn’t internalize them; whoever, after 10, 15, 20 years of being socialized to conform to the capitalist system of exploitation, still has dreams, still speaks up to protest, still has the strength to resist—can no longer keep up with the tempo of work—cracks—is sick—beats his boss instead of his wife and kids—would rather himself rob and beat, then let himself be subjected to the laws of thieves and murderers—(really people, Springer makes 100 million in profits ever year!)—or develops ideas about workers’ power—counterviolence—organizes revolutionary politics and resistance—will be criminalized or declared insane.

  It’s been like that since your great-grandfather’s time, since the beginning of bourgeois society: workhouses, poorhouses, prisons, reform schools, judges, cops, doctors, psychiatrists, priests.