The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  A virtual war atmosphere was created in the country in mid-October: hundreds of thousands of motorists were pulled off the road and searched; constant appeals to the population were issued to encourage their reporting any suspicious types or activities to the police—such as sudden change of address, of hair cut or any other cosmetic changes, unusual mailings or publications.1

  That September and October, as Schleyer was being held in captivity, one hundred and fifty agents were on duty round the clock at the special headquarters set up in Cologne. Every day, over 15,000 phone calls were monitored, as 3,000 other police officers took part in the hunt.2

  Conservatives took advantage of the frenzied atmosphere to settle scores with the progressive intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom were firmly opposed to the guerilla and the revolutionary left. The Hessen CDU Chair Alfred Dregger accused the Frankfurt School academics of contributing to terrorism, a sentiment echoed by the CDU Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger.3 At the same time, in September 1977, CSU representative Dietrich Spranger issued a list of public figures whom he held responsible for “terrorism” in the Federal Republic, an unlikely collection which included Willy Brandt, Peter Brückner, Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, and authors Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.4 The fact that two of those on this list—Böll and Gollwitzer—had recently joined pastor Heinrich Albertz and Bishop Kurt Scharf in a public appeal for the release of Schleyer did not seem to make a difference.5

  Böll in particular remained tarred by the Springer Press as a “terrorist sympathizer” no matter what he did. This could have dramatic consequences; for instance, an anonymous call was received stating that armed men had been seen entering the home of the famous author’s son. As a result, forty heavily armed cops from the special antiterrorist unit raided the house; of course, there were no guerillas there. When the elder Böll complained of this in an interview the next day, Bavarian radio refused to broadcast it on the grounds that it was “inflammatory.”6

  Most people stood behind the government, not only in its hunt for the RAF, but also in its general crackdown on the radical left. In one poll, 62% of respondents stated that they were willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms through controls and house searches, while only 21% were opposed.7 At the same time, politicians and the press became ever more bloodthirsty. Years later, RAF member Christian Klar recounted that:

  On September 8, 1977, the Crisis Management Team allowed Die Welt to demand that Rebmann’s plan [that the prisoners be killed] be carried out. On September 10, the Suddeutsche Zeitung published the same thing as reflecting a discussion within the CSU Land group, which wanted a prisoner shot at half-hour intervals until Schleyer was released. A day later, Frühschoppen demanded the introduction of bloody torture, noting that the guerilla groups in Latin America had been defeated in that way. The next day, Spiegel provided a platform for the CSU’s Becher and Zimmermann to express their longing for the deaths of the Stammheim prisoners. On September 13, the same idea was put forward by the SPD through Heinz Kühn, but in a more delicate way: “The terrorists must be made to understand that the death of Hanns Martin Schleyer will have grave consequences for the fate of the violent prisoners they are hoping to free through their disgraceful actions.” 8

  Indeed, following the Stammheim deaths, even allowing Ensslin, Raspe, and Baader to be buried in a common grave in the Stuttgart cemetery was enough to earn one the sobriquet of being “soft on terrorism.” Stuttgart’s moderate CDU mayor, Manfred Rommel—the son of the famed Field Marshal—refused to forbid such a burial, insisting that “Death must end all animosity.” As a result, he found himself marginalized within the Land party organization, and telephone calls poured in from angry citizens demanding that the RAF dead be cremated and their ashes poured into the city sewers.1

  Little wonder that, commenting on the political climate that autumn, Heinrich Böll would remark:

  I am gradually beginning to wonder whether it’s even necessary to—to put it bluntly—do away with democracy. People are intimidated to such an extent—the media have become so cautious—that laws would hardly need to be changed. The whole thing occurs on a “fantastic” plane… Even the liberal newspapers are becoming extremely conformist and cautious—they hardly need to lift a finger.2

  While this reactionary atmosphere reached its crescendo in the days of autumn, the state clampdown had begun well before the Schleyer kidnapping.

  On April 25, 1977, just a few weeks after the RAF had killed Siegfried Buback, a student newspaper in the picturesque university town of GÖttingen published an article entitled Buback: In Memoriam, in which the anonymous author admitted his “secret joy” at the Attorney General’s assassination, while nevertheless condemning such armed attacks as counterproductive. Within the context of the split occurring in the sponti scene at the time, the article actually represented a move away from political violence:

  Our force cannot be Al Capone’s force, a copy of street terror, and constant terror; not authoritarian, but rather antiauthoritarian and therefore more effective. Leftists shouldn’t be killers, shouldn’t be ruthlessly brutal people, shouldn’t be rapists, but also not saints or innocent lambs. Our daily objective is to formulate a concept and modus operandi of force and militancy which are fun and have the blessings of the masses, so that the left doesn’t acquire the same face as the Bubacks.3

  Obviously the writer was hostile to the RAF’s politics, but such subtleties were lost on the state, and police seized upon the opportunity to clamp down on the undogmatic left and sympathetic academics. Buback: In Memoriam was banned under §88a and raids were carried out against student and alternative publishers suspected of knowing the author’s identity.4

  The women’s movement, which had no organic ties at all to the RAF, similarly found itself the target of the same antiterrorist hype. The Women’s Center in Frankfurt was raided by police, and members were charged under §129a—the antiterrorist subsection of §129—for having provided women with the names of doctors willing to perform abortions.5

  Male politicians and clergymen lost no time in sharing their opinions of the RAF’s female combatants. As an article in New German Critique explained:

  The fact that 60% of the terrorists sought by the police are women has not gone unnoticed by those conducting what has been referred to in the European press as the “witch-hunt” against dissenters. Blame for the predominance of women terrorists has been placed at the feet of the nascent German women’s movement. Former Director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution6 GÜnther Nollau sees in female terrorists “an excess in the liberation of women.” Conservative academic sectors speak of the “dark side of the movement for total equality.” The Christian Socialist newspaper Bayern Kurier claims, “Observers of the scene view the newly established feminism, which is preached by the left, as an essential reason for the recent change in sex roles on the terror front.” Women’s publishing houses have been invaded by police, assuming that the owners were aiding and abetting terrorism, and the Women’s Vacation House in Gaiganz was subject to such constant surveillance and so many raids by police looking for hidden persons, that the lease was revoked by intimidated landlords.7

  This was all the more galling, for in the years since the APO, the West German women’s movement had moved away from its socialist roots, to such a point that at the time it could be said that many women “would prefer no politics at all to leftist politics.”1 As Georgy Katsiaficas has written about feminism in the FRG in the late seventies:

  As many women turned further inward, limiting themselves to their private spheres of lovers and close friends, radicals felt that the slogan “The personal is political” had been turned on its head—to the point where the political was irrelevant.2

  On the other side of the equation, nothing but silence had ever emanated from the RAF and its support organizations on questions of feminism and women’s liberation. This was all the more remarkable given th
e large proportion of RAF members who were women, and the hackneyed sexist terms in which counterinsurgency writers often attacked their politics.

  This silence was certainly a consequence of the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialism, which zeroed in on this one contradiction as being primary to the exclusion of all others. One comrade who was active doing prisoner support work during this period remembers visiting a female political prisoner and asking her about this, only to be informed that, “If you carry a gun, it does not matter if you are a man or a woman.”

  A similar sentiment was expressed by Inge Viett, who would move from the 2nd of June Movement to the RAF in 1980:

  None of us came out of the feminist movement… We had no conscious need to live through that kind of process of women’s liberationæ We simply made a decision, and then we struggled, doing all the same things as the men. For us, there was no Man-Woman question. For us living in the underground, that old concept of roles didn’t exist.3

  Feminists might have objected that for most people—even some who do carry guns, and even some who do live in the underground—being a man or a woman does matter, both in terms of one’s relationship to imperialism and one’s perspectives for resisting it. During the 1970s, it seems not to have occurred to the women or men in the RAF that gender made a difference as to how imperialism was experienced by its victims, or that anti-imperialism might benefit from an explicit connection to women’s liberation.

  Despite this unpromising background, the Stammheim trauma sparked a process of change, both within the support scene and amongst a minority of feminists, too. The consensus against violence that existed in the women’s movement was by no means complete, and despite the loud protestations of those who insisted that all violence was “male,” others felt that nonviolence in a sexist society was of limited value. Referring specifically to the Stammheim deaths, French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne pointedly suggested that there was something positive to be learned from the women of the RAF, even when their choices had tragic consequences. Writing in 1978, in a text which was discussed both in France and in the Federal Republic, she asked:

  Is it not better for a woman to be beaten to death by a prison guard at Stammheim than to be humiliated by the blows of a husband’s fists? Is it not better to endure insults before a court of law which one can denounce as ‘Nazi pigs!’ than to endure in silence the insults of an employer? And is it not better, ultimately, to meet death having fought back than to die in resignation and defeat? If we must die, then better with weapon in hand.4

  Women Against Imperialist War: in the early eighties, as sections of the women’s movement attempted to bridge the distance that had separated them from the RAF support scene, this became one of the most important anti-imperialist groups in the FRG.

  The lurch to the right, the Stammheim deaths, the rampant police repression, and the terrorist-baiting of the women’s movement all worked to push certain women to explore the possibilities of renewed solidarity. A conference on women and repression was organized in Frankfurt in 1978 and a women’s solidarity committee was formed to support Irmgard MÖller. Slowly but surely, small groups took the first steps out of their isolation, and the reaction provoked by the anti-RAF repression would once again cause some to rally to the anti-imperialist camp.

  At the same time, the antiterrorist hysteria provided the state with an opportunity to move against the K-groups that had been reinforcing the increasingly militant antinuclear movement ever since 1976. After Schleyer was seized, the opposition CDU called for a ban against the three largest Maoist parties, the KBW, the KPD,1 and the KPD/ML, with ludicrous claims that they had some connection to “terrorism.” In response, all three organizations called for a joint demonstration in Bonn on October 8, 1977, under the slogan “Marxism-Leninism Cannot Be Outlawed!” Twenty thousand people marched under red flags in one of the very few common activities these three organizations would mount during the decade.

  Just as most of these Maoist K-groups imploded over the next few years, hemorrhaging members to the new Green Party, 1977 would also exacerbate divisions on the undogmatic left. The anti-guerilla positions that Joschka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and others had been pushing since 1976 now appeared to carry even more weight, and several important intellectuals, including Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse, made public declarations in the popular press denouncing the RAF’s struggle against the Federal Republic.2

  While much of the undogmatic left was retreating from militancy, this was by no means a homogenous phenomenon. In a very different vein, in January 1978, other radicals drew on the strengths of the counterculture to break through the crisis. The idea for a mass gathering originated with a dozen Berlin spontis who knew each other from playing soccer and from the bar scene.3 “Tunix”—a play on words meaning “Do Nothing”—created a rallying point for those who wished neither to return to the system nor to simply retreat into themselves.

  As three of the organizers (“Quinn the Eskimo,” “Frankie Lee,” and “Judas Priest”) explained in their call out:

  When our identity is under attack, like during the situation in the fall of 77, then we need to take the initiative and state openly what it is we want. Political taboos and appeals to the constitution won’t save us.4

  With thousands of people attending, the Tunix gathering marked the dawn of a new era for the antiauthoritarian left.5 Participants took to the streets in Berlin, throwing bricks and paint filled eggs at the courthouse, the America House, and the Women’s Prison, carrying banners which read “Free the prisoners!”, “Out With the Filth,” and “Stammheim is Everywhere.”6

  This renewed antiauthoritarian left expressed itself in diverse ways, including the birth of an autonomist scene which drew direct inspiration from the Italian Marxist current of the same name, remaining committed to radical politics. Another product of this period was the newspaper tageszeitung (Daily News), a national radical left daily. Radical weekly newspapers had existed in almost every city previously, but Info-BUG had been the only one with a truly national circulation. Even then, it had been focused on West Berlin, and had been banned the day of the Stammheim deaths. taz became the voice of the Tunix generation, establishing a national circulation dwarfing Info-BUG or any other publication in the scene.7 (However, like much of this “alternative” effervescence, taz accompanied the Greens back into the system over the next ten years.)8

  The first issue of tageszeitung appeared September 27, 1978.

  Basing itself both in the Tunix scene and in the Citizens Initiatives—ever more swollen by disaffected Social Democrats unhappy with Schmidt’s continuing march to the right—the Green Party was founded in 1980. In the same way that Willy Brandt’s “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” had spelled the end to the APO, the Greens eventually came to represent the end for many seventies radicals, and the avenue that more than one former militant would follow right into the establishment. As one snide Spiegel writer put it on their 25th anniversary, “It was not the 68ers and their Green offshoots who civilized Germany, but Germany which civilized them.”1 (But this is a story best left for our next volume.)

  The undogmatic left had been polarized by the RAF’s struggle, splitting to the left and to the right. This is unremarkable in itself, as is the fact that those who veered rightwards into the Greens were also those who found the RAF’s politics uninspirational, to say the least. What is noteworthy is that those who veered to the left, the autonomists, were often similarly unimpressed with the RAF and its legacy. Certainly, nobody would be inspired by 1977 to set up an armed group, in the way that the RAF’s early actions had inspired the RZ and others.

  Indeed, it is striking how much the RAF’s legacy and credibility were damaged by 1977; it took years to recover, even while most of the guerillas remained uncaptured. Most popular and even scholarly works about the group act as if it disbanded afterwards, while in fact it remained active until the 1990s.

  Compare this to 1972, when practically
the entire guerilla had been wiped out by arrests, and yet the actions of the May Offensive inspired renewed resistance throughout the spectrum of the revolutionary left.

  One part of the equation was the distance that had grown between the RAF and the rest of the left, both as a result of its own paradoxes and of the vicious state repression and psychological operations. The other factor, in its own way an expression of the first, was the level of confrontation in which the 1977 commandos had chosen to engage, well beyond the capacity of any other segment of the left to imitate or even support.

  While the RAF was in crisis, the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora continued to score successes, and carried out approximately eighty actions over the next decade, suffering hardly any arrests. There were also many low-level attacks carried out by one-off groups, most of which have left no record, yet which nevertheless contributed to an overall armed orientation remarkably different from that which existed in North America at the time.

  In a significant way, these developments indicate the degree to which the RAF’s armed strategy had marked revolutionary politics in West Germany, even while its ideology was rarely accepted.

  Not that the RAF itself had been removed from the battlefield.

  Though it looked broken by defeat and repression, the RAF would once again manage to regroup and draw in new members, establishing the basis for renewed campaigns of revolutionary violence in the 1980s.

  In a few years, events revealed that the tradition of armed resistance, and the legacy of the first guerillas to emerge from the APO, had beaten the odds and survived the devastating blows of the seventies.

  APPENDICES

  APPENDIX I

  Excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung