The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  It is the system that creates the relationship. One regresses and flounders about aimlessly amidst the ubiquitous mystifications of bourgeois socialization, because one is alone and can no longer see that these mystifications are utterly destructive.

  The moment one ceases to fight—can no longer fight—one becomes a blank slate, as we have said, a victim (and, in this way, maybe one becomes innocent as well).

  One’s misery is fundamentally connected to the fact that it could be foreseen for some time, and to the fact that one knows that spending years in isolation is the equivalent of being shot. It is just harder to comprehend—this is part of what it’s all about—and much more cruel.

  The human being is in the most literal sense a “zoon politikon” not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society—a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness—is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.

  Grundrisse1

  It took us quite some time in the special section to recognize the method and the goal of isolation. I would say that to make sense of isolation it must be considered as part of the system as a whole: the fact that the system must respond with extermination to the contradictions that it produces, because it sees in these contradictions the possibility of its own definitive extermination. One who is re-educated is effectively destroyed by the special section. While this isn’t the objective of forced socialization, even the problem that it exposes, social dissatisfaction, can only be addressed by the destruction of the prisoners.

  The attempt to clarify this and to justify the torture comes from Klug, who has since become Senator for Justice in Hamburg. This comes as no surprise, because he provides a corrupt liberal facade, disguising his filthy work with the pretence of morality—the need for re-education— although this society no longer has any morals.

  Its basic problem, even in this respect, lies in an antagonism, in that re-education or brainwashing, as a project, must be legitimized by the system. That is to say, to use it, the system must be able to create the subject. But the thing the repressive state apparatus shares with the revolutionary (the prisoner) is that both know very well that they are, in their irreconcilable antagonism (as in their relationship), the expression of the very process by which the bourgeois state’s legitimacy is disintegrating. The fact that the state has sensed the extent of this disintegration leads it to develop its extermination strategy against us.

  Posser, as a Social Democrat, knows this—(and acts accordingly, in spite of his ineffective and panicked denials). What he has foremost in his mind is not re-education, but the destruction of Ulrike and the propaganda value of presenting a destroyed prisoner in the trial, all of which would be made even more powerful if she confessed: the collapse. As an official in a party that props up the state, he is pragmatic: the smooth ritual of power is what he wants to orchestrate in order to plug the hole at the edge of the abyss his clique is hovering over. When problems arose—because the lawyers managed to mobilize people to break through the silence his plan required—he had a sick idea, typical of social democracy’s version of the truth: buy them off. After all, the entire leadership of the Brandt/Schumacher party was bought off in 1945 by American capital, turning against the German proletariat in the process, so why not buy a witness? The government faction, of course. (…“against”… is not precise enough. The strategic function of social democracy is to safeguard the initiative of capital during the crisis.)

  Witnesses for the crown, witnesses for the state: while this is an institution to guarantee overall ideological continuity and, above all, to affirm the constitutional state, it is also used to address our politics. Even if it is only a passing expression of the rupture on which we base our understanding of the state’s reaction to armed politics.

  Because the strategic necessity in this phase (the crisis of capital and the economic crisis of the state), of which each guerilla action is a political interpretation, is to finally transform the state’s political crisis into a rupture. This must be done through an ongoing offensive, in what will certainly be a long and contradictory process.

  We will return to this subject.

  I cannot talk about the person who has been tortured. What is proven with him, through what in the end constitutes the open liquidation of his fictional status as a subject—because he is the object of state repression—is simply the fact that from the moment they are no longer of use to capital, the values of bourgeois legal ideology appear as outdated fetters to the imperialist state.

  What should be talked about is the source of torture—the state—and the process by which the state’s entire counterrevolutionary strategy is reduced to torture, developing a new fascism within the state apparatus, its technology, its structures, and, always lagging a bit behind, its laws (and, finally, the structural and organizational means of mass communication, which dull the senses)—everything which torture presupposes at an institutional level.

  We repeat here: torture is not a concept of revolutionary struggle.

  Information about torture fulfils a protective function, but a mobilization based on such information must eventually turn against the very politics that the state is targeting with torture (and, in the final analysis, against the prisoners themselves). This will be the case as long as such a mobilization’s politics are based on the moral reflexes of those who still feel comfortable with this state—and this is because they want to address it as revisionists. This means the mobilization must eventually turn against us if it is not combined with propaganda for armed politics, if it doesn’t propagate the morals and strategy of armed struggle, which would mean that it hasn’t itself accepted armed action yet.

  Andreas Baader June 18, 1975

  8

  A Desperate Bid to Free the Prisoners: the Stockholm Action

  NOT ALL RAF MEMBERS HAD been arrested in 1972. Furthermore, there was no real evidence against many of those who had been captured, meaning they could only be charged with belonging to a “criminal organization” under §129. Even when found guilty of this crime, they could not be held for more than a maximum of six years, and in practice, often had to be released before that.

  These remnants of the RAF’s first wave did seem to carry on an underground existence of sorts, but failed to carry out any actions after May 1972. Still in the preparatory stages of acquiring documents and weapons, many of them were picked up on February 4, 1974 in simultaneous predawn raids in Frankfurt and Hamburg. Ilse Stachowiak, Margrit Schiller, Helmut Pohl, and Wolfgang Beer (who had all been active prior to 1972) were captured along with former SPK attorney Eberhard Becker, Christa Eckes (from RAF lawyer Kurt Groenewold’s legal office), and Kay-Werner Allnach.

  Police claimed that they had had these individuals under observation for months, bugging their phones and opening all mail before it was delivered without their being any the wiser. When they did move in, they claimed it was because they had recently learned of plans to rob a bank in the north German port city of Kiel.1

  Stachowiak had been sought in connection with the May Offensive, and, in 1977, received a life sentence for the Springer bombing. Pohl and Schiller each received five-year sentences; they were released in September 1979. Beer was released one year earlier, in 1978. Allnach was kept in isolation for two years after his arrest, during which time he broke with the RAF while still refusing to testify against anyone. He was convicted under §129 and sentenced to three years. The others, sentenced for possession of guns, explosives, and phony papers, similarly spent years behind bars.

  As we have seen, capture did not spell the end for the guerilla. Despite these ongoing setbacks, the intense confrontation between vulgar state brutality and the steadfast determination of the captured combatants enabled th
e latter to inspire a new militant support movement on the outside. In the face of the brutal prison conditions, the RAF prisoners did, at least initially, seem to succeed in exposing the violence inherent in the system, as the state’s actions lent credence in some circles to the accusation that the Federal Republic had an “extermination policy” regarding the revolutionary left.

  Indeed, according to one leading British news magazine in 1975:

  During the past year… there has been a discernible return of support—or at least sympathy—for imprisoned members of the group among politically uncommitted West Germans. It is founded upon growing concern at the apparent determination of the authorities not to put Meinhof and her comrades on trial until they have been softened up with long, arduous spells of solitary confinement.1

  In some cities, the RAF support scene that had developed around the Committees Against Torture overlapped with the sponti left, though the two were never coterminous. It was far less close to the K-groups, for these remained overwhelmingly hostile to any guerilla politics. Even the KPD/ML, which had provided such unprecedented support during the third hunger strike, remained dead set against the guerilla’s politics; its activity on behalf of the prisoners had simply been a case of nonsectarian solidarity with victims of state repression. As for people on the undogmatic left other than the spontis, they generally remained uneasy with the level of violence employed and hostile to much of the RAF’s politics, though this did not rule out their feeling outraged at how the prisoners were treated.

  It was horror at the way its prisoners were treated that was the main factor drawing people into the RAF’s support scene in this period, and the prisoners themselves became potent symbols, both of the violence of the system they were fighting against and of the possibility of resistance. Despite the risks and the human toll, the strategic use of hunger strikes had proven a useful tactic capable of rallying these supporters, as well as important sections of the liberal left.

  In some cases, concern with liberating or protecting the prisoners would serve as an impetus for further armed actions. From the very beginning, low-level attacks—smashed windows, slashed tires, even firebombings—were carried out by members of the support scene and others on the radical left without much fanfare and often on a one-off or ad hoc basis. Eventually, other guerilla groups also took action on behalf of the captured combatants.

  As we have seen, in 1974, the 2nd of June Movement had killed Judge von Drenkmann in an attempted kidnapping meant to support the RAF prisoners’ hunger strike. Most people considered the RAF to be operationally finished, and many assumed that the 2JM—which had always kept a much lower profile than the RAF—might be a successor organization.

  Then, much to the surprise of many, on February 2, 1975, a communiqué was released from the RAF outside of prison—the first such communiqué since the May Offensive almost three years previously. More surprisingly still, this “new” RAF was ordering the prisoners to call off their third hunger strike. It disparaged the “legal left”—a category which was clearly meant to include the spontis and other supporters who fell shy of carrying out guerilla-level actions—stating that this left,

  as a result of their defensiveness and helplessness in the face of the new fascism, has not developed the capacity to organize solidarity as a weapon, and has failed to develop in a way that corresponds to the construction of the guerilla and the politics of the RAF.2

  Finally, the new reconstituted guerilla promised to carry out its own action on behalf of the prisoners, announcing that “the prisoners’ struggle… is now something that we must settle with our weapons.”

  Barely three weeks later, on February 27, 1975, the 2nd of June Movement kidnapped prominent West Berlin Christian Democrat Peter Lorenz, a candidate for mayor in the upcoming West Berlin city elections. Given the timing, it is not surprising that some may have mistaken this for a RAF action, but in fact it was not.

  The 2JM commando demanded the release of six prisoners being held in West Berlin’s Moabit prison: Ingrid Siepmann, Verena Becker, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Rolf Pohle, Rolf Heissler, and Horst Mahler. They further demanded that each prisoner be given 20,000 DM1 and safe passage out of the country.

  All six prisoners on the 2JM’s list had been active in the APO, and all except Mahler could trace their roots to the antiauthoritarian scene. The women were all members of the 2nd of June Movement, and the men were all accused of being members of the RAF (a charge which Pohle denied, all the while expressing his solidarity with the other prisoners). There was, nevertheless, some criticism of this action, as the kidnappers did not demand the release of Meinhof, Ensslin, Raspe, or Baader, whom RAF supporters considered to be not only the heart of the resistance, but also those most likely to be targeted by the state.

  Horst Mahler let it be known that he would not go with the others and remained in prison. He used this opportunity to reaffirm his new anti-guerilla position, releasing a public statement to this effect:

  The kidnapping of the enemy of the people Peter Lorenz as a means of freeing political prisoners is an expression of politics disconnected from the struggle of the working class, and can only lead to a dead-end. The strategy of individual terror is not the strategy of the working class. During the show trial of Bäcker, Meinhof, and myself in September of last year, in an open critique, which was simultaneously a self-criticism, I clearly stated that my place is at the side of the working class. I am of the firm conviction that the prison gates will be thrown open for all political prisoners through the struggle of the working class and that the terror verdicts passed against me will be wiped away—for that reason, I decline to have myself removed from the country in this way… Onward with the KPD.2

  “Peter Lorenz—Prisoner of the 2nd of June Movement”: of his ordeal he would later recall, “I could always wash, was well fed, they didn’t harass me. I was afraid primarily of what the police might do… The food was simple food like everyone eats. They were intelligent people, and I was well treated.” According to 2JM’s Ronald Fritzsch and Ralf Reinders, upon his release Lorenz shook hands with his captors and expressed the hope that they would meet again under better circumstances, perhaps at one of his garden parties.

  In a stunning victory for the guerillas, the state chose to acquiesce. There was just one sticking point: one radical regime after another refused to accept the prisoners.3 Finally, it was decided that the FRG itself would try and entice the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen to offer them sanctuary.

  The only self-described Marxist-Leninist country in the Arab world at the time, the PDRY (or South Yemen) was a staunch opponent of western imperialism, and had earned the admiration of many progressive people for its far-reaching social and economic reforms.4 (Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, on the other hand, described it as a “satanic citadel of subversion,”5 while to the Associated Press it was “a radical Arab backwater regarded as the Cuba of the Red Sea.”)6 Nevertheless, in the real political world, the Cold War notwithstanding, even anti-American states would rather not be associated with guerilla actions in the First World—there was simply too much to lose and too little to gain.

  Yet, the West German establishment was adamant that it wanted this exchange to work, and so Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher promised that if South Yemen accepted the prisoners, the FRG would provide 10 million DM in development aid. The deal was sealed, and the PDRY agreed to accept the six prisoners.1

  On March 3, a Lufthansa plane left Frankfurt airport for Aden. On board were the five newly freed revolutionaries (Mahler having opted to remain behind), along with former West Berlin Mayor Albertz, whom the 2JM had stipulated must accompany the prisoners to confirm that all went as planned.

  On March 4, Peter Lorenz was released unharmed. Within minutes, the police sealed off sections of West Berlin, raiding left-wing hangouts and homes which had been identified as possible targets beforehand. Two hundred people were caught up in the police sweeps, but none of the guerillas coul
d be found, and all those detained had to be released with no charges laid.2

  The Lorenz kidnapping was a perfectly planned and executed action. While the 2nd of June Movement would be criticized for not demanding freedom for leading RAF cadre, most observers agreed that the exchange only worked because none of the prisoners requested had a particularly notorious profile. The 2JM timed its action well, abducting the mayoral candidate just seventy-two hours before the city elections.

  The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen. Note that in 1990, at a time of worldwide retreat for “real existing socialism,” the PDRY agreed to unification with North Yemen, creating the Republic of Yemen.

  Finally, the group managed to take control of the media, insisting that the government respond to its demands on television. As one television editor put it:

  For 72 hours we just lost control of the medium, it was theirs, not ours… We shifted shows in order to meet their timetable. Our cameras had to be in position to record each of the released prisoners as they boarded their plane to freedom, and our news coverage had to include prepared statements at their dictate… There is plenty of underworld crime on our screens but… now it was the real thing and it was the gangsters who wrote the script and programmed the mass media.3

  The successful liberation of political prisoners, with negotiations carried out through the media itself, constituted a serious blow to the government’s prestige. Going slightly over the top, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung waxed poetic as to how, “The humiliation of the state was completed in the nation’s electronic Valhalla.”4 CDU politician Alfred Dregger understood what was at stake:

  Citizens have the impression that alongside the legitimate civil power there now also exists an illegitimate power, which, at least on occasion, can make the power of the state submit to it, an illegitimate power which has become a negotiating partner of the state power in the full glare of television publicity. This means we must expect further attempts at kidnapping and blackmail.5