The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  Debus died on the Thursday before the long Easter weekend—often an occasion for political protest in the FRG—and that evening people came together in spontaneous demonstrations in several cities. As detailed in one movement history of the West Berlin squatting scene:

  In Kreuzberg a loudspeaker van toured the streets announcing the news. The reaction was swift and once again caught the police off guard. A thousand people made their way immediately to the Kurfürstendamm and, rushing through the Easter tourist crowds, smashed 80% of the windows… When the police arrived in force a half an hour later most of the damage was already done and there was nobody around to arrest. From then on the troop carriers and the paramilitary uniforms of the riot police became part of the sights of the city centre. It was becoming blatantly obvious that a large and militant minority had rejected the West German state and the consumer society.35

  The following days witnessed dozens of bomb threats across the country, accompanied by dozens of actual firebomb attacks on government buildings. The Saarbrücken offices of the Ministry of the Interior were hit, as was the Lübeck Employment Office, and the Psychology Institute at Hamburg University.36 The Max Planck Institute’s West Berlin offices were also bombed, a communiqué explaining that the institute was being targeted for its research into torture,37 and antinuclear activists blew up a power mast at a nuclear power plant near Bremen, drawing a clear connection to the hunger strike in their communiqué.38 At the same time, over a thousand people marched in Hamburg with banners that read “We Mourn Sigurd Debus,”39 and various SPD offices were firebombed in the port city.40

  Spiegel magazine asked, “Who were those hundreds of masked people who wrecked cars, smashed windows, hoisted banners, and occupied churches across the land?” Journalists wrote ominously about the resistance in the streets, referring to “black blocs” and Chaoten. The BKA described the weekend’s events as a “people’s storm of solidarity.”41

  Although the high-security wings remained, the wall of political isolation that the state had erected around the prisoners had been breached.

  Sigurd Debus, 1942-1981

  Sigurd Debus had never been a member of the RAF but had gravitated toward armed struggle after leaving the KPD/ML in the early seventies. He helped to bring together a small group which made contact with the RAF, but opted to remain separate, preferring to act on their own. In 1973 they bombed the Cologne Federal Association of German Industrialists building and planted a bomb (which failed to detonate) at a Hamburg municipal government office. Then on February 28, 1974, Debus was captured in Hamburg along with Karl-Heinz Ludwig and Wolfgang Stahl when a bystander blocked their escape following a bank robbery. (A fourth comrade, Gert Wieland, was arrested soon after.)

  Debus conducted a political trial, praising the recent Lorenz kidnapping, and when the RAF’s Holger Meins Commando seized the West German embassy in Stockholm on April 24, 1975, he and Stahl were among those whose freedom was being demanded. The Stockholm action failed, and his trial statements were deemed to constitute aggravating circumstances—one month later Debus received a twelve-year sentence for the two bombings and three counts of robbery. He spent the next three years in strict isolation, subjected to daily cell and strip searches before and after his solitary yard time.1

  When Debus was finally transferred out of isolation, it was as part of an ambitious police gambit to infiltrate the RAF. At the prompting of the secret police, the Celle prison warden had him transferred next to two social prisoners—Klaus Dieter Loudil and Manfred Berger—who had been secretly recruited by the Verfassungsschutz. Pretending to befriend Debus, Loudil and Berger began discussing the possibility of escape, and also helped “smuggle” messages and a radio in for him. In September 1977, Berger was released, and then in May 1978 Loudil pretended to escape from a work furlough—in actual fact, he had been secretly pardoned by Holger Börner, the Hessian president.2

  On July 25, 1978, with the help of the GSG-9, the Verfassungsschutz detonated a bomb outside Celle, hoping to breach the prison wall. The idea was that Debus would escape and meet up with Loudil and Berger, leading them into the underground, and hopefully to the RAF. Comrades in Amsterdam had already been approached by undercover Dutch agents, and asked if they would be able to provide Debus with shelter, as an escape plan was in the works.3 A multinational penetration of the underground was what was intended.

  The plan failed due to a technical error: the Verfassungsschutz agents’ bomb was too weak to break through the prison wall, and Debus never escaped. Instead, this “attempted breakout” was used as justification to send him back to isolation, and for the Hannover police authority to float the story that the RAF’s “Holger Meins Commando” had attempted the breakout.4 (That all members of the actual Holger Meins Commando had been killed or captured in 1975 seemed not to bother anyone.) The entire plot was only exposed years later, in 1986, as part of a parliamentary inquiry into the activities of secret agent Werner Mauss.

  Over the next years, Debus’s conditions would be slowly relaxed, and in February 1980 he was transferred into general population at Fuhlsbüttel. According to konkret magazine, Debus joined the ‘81 hunger strike because he felt that with the liberal Gerhart Baum as minister of the interior, there was a chance to improve prison conditions for everybody, and because he personally hoped to win association with other political prisoners.

  _____________

  1 Juhnke “Tod durch Ernährung.”

  2 Hinrich Lührssen, “‘Feuerzauber’ mit dunklen Figuren,” Die Zeit, June 12, 1988.

  3 de Graaf (2009), 34.

  4 Hans Schueler, “Feuerzauber am Allerufer,” Die Zeit, May 2, 1986.

  ANTI-IMPS, AUTONOMEN, MILITANT WOMEN: FROM THE SQUATS TO THE ANTI-NATO MOVEMENT

  Change has never come from the elderly…. It’s a question of mobility and power, because no stiffness, impairment, or fatigue has begun to set in yet. When you’re younger, you have a lot more energy. One just has to accept that. But you cannot expect them to continue all the same things or to be just like you.

  Irmgard Möller42

  Throughout the FRG, the prisoners emerged as an important, but complicated, reference point for the new generation of rebels.

  As we have seen, the Autonomen had developed out of the antinuclear struggles of the previous decade, establishing their wider perspective in the antimilitary resistance in Bremen in May 1980. Since then, material conditions, exacerbated as youth unemployment hit a postwar high, had provided a promising new theatre of struggle: the squatters’ movement.

  For years, landlords had allowed buildings to fall into disrepair and go empty in what has been referred to as an “informal capital strike” against rent controls that had been passed in the mid-1970s. Once these properties became run down, their owners became eligible for low-interest city loans to build condominiums for the upwardly mobile. The result was tens of thousands of people without affordable housing, while thousands of houses and apartments, oftentimes entire city blocks, stood empty.43 Things were especially bad in West Berlin, where the political mood was aggravated by the news that members of the Senate had broken their own rules to make 160 million DM in loans to Dietrich Garski, a well-connected architect, who had invested the money in bankrupt housing projects abroad.

  Immigrant “guest workers” from Italy and Turkey had pioneered the first housing occupations at the start of the 1970s, but within a few years the Spontis and members of the guerilla support scene had come to dominate the growing number of overtly political squats.44 This provided a history that the Autonomen could identify with, and they soon renewed a tradition that combined practical concerns with a vision of a better society to come. Like the antinuclear occupations, the squats pushed people to become more radical, both by virtue of the fact that they were deciding to live collectively in new ways, and also by the illegal nature of the exercise itself.

  On December 12, 1980, police confronted some people trying to occupy a house in the Kreuzberg area of
West Berlin, a neighborhood that had become a stronghold for the alternative movement and the center of the city’s squatter scene. News of the showdown quickly spread, sparking rumors that a house had been cleared and that a second eviction was imminent; barricades went up and hundreds of people spent hours fighting with cops and looting nearby stores. Over one hundred were arrested, and over twice that many injured, in what became known as the 12-12 riot.45

  As a local social worker explained to the New York Times:

  I saw people take up rocks who never would have had a stone in their hand in a million years. You have a situation where the softer ones see their interests defended by the “no future people” who are ready to take any kind of risk.

  There’s a tremendous potential there, because everything is so poorly defined, for everyone to attach their grievance to the movement and feel linked together through their disillusionment. Among the young people I know, the Social Democrats, who used to have strong contacts with youth, are completely discredited now.46

  In the months that followed, squatters repeatedly squared off against police, clashes leading to riots in cities across the Federal Republic, as hundreds of buildings were occupied. In West Berlin, night patrols, a telephone chain, and a radio system were set up in order to guard against attacks by police and right-wing groups. Independent medics were also trained in order to provide first aid to those injured in street confrontations.47

  The West Berlin Social Democrats were put on the defensive. Already tarnished by the Garski scandal, with the Senators for Finance and the Economy being forced to resign,48 they now lost support to the right for their inability to stamp out the squats, and to the newcomer Alternative Liste for even attempting to do so. When voters went to the polls on May 10, 1981, the SPD lost control of the Berlin Senate for the first time in twenty-five years, and power passed to a CDU-FDP coalition. Far more significant, though, was the rise of the AL, which, benefiting from a resurgence of the far left, doubled its support from 1979 and won seats in government for the first time ever.49

  In this polarized municipal arena, the new CDU Senator of the Interior, Heinrich Lummer, threw down the gauntlet, declaring that ten of the largest squats would be cleared by the end of August.

  The summer was set for a serious showdown. Squatters responded to Lummer’s threats by calling for a month of resistance dubbed “Tuwat,”50 initially expected to attract hundreds to West Berlin. The callout itself was banned, and organizers had to go underground to avoid arrest, but the repression and media fearmongering worked to spread the news.51 In the end, three thousand people gathered to resist the promised police offensive.52

  At the same time, the Autonomen remained active in the antinuclear movement—they would be present at new mobilizations against the power plants at Gorleben (1980, 1982), Brokdorf (1980, 1981), Kalkar (1982), and beyond53—as well as in other struggles, many of which had ecological and antimilitarist overtones. Perhaps the most famous of these was the resistance to the expansion of Frankfurt’s airport, the so-called Startbahn West, which would require significant logging in an area of untouched forest. Despite local opposition, this expansion had been approved by the courts in 1978.54 As Freia Anders recounts, while the local Citizens Initiatives appealed the decision, “in 1980 the Hessian Minister for Economic Affairs Heinz Herbert Karry (FDP) confronted the public with a fait accompli and ordered an immediate start of construction without waiting for the decision of the Hessian Superior Administrative Court.” There followed “the construction of tree-houses and wooden huts in the neighboring Flörsheim forest, a hut village that developed into a popular place for outings and a symbol of resistance.”55

  Demonstrations and gatherings held in the hut-village regularly attracted thousands of people, bringing together hippies, locals, and Autonomen. It lasted for over a year, until police carried out a violent early-morning raid on November 2, 1981. People resisted, and even as police drove some off, others moved in, attempting to reoccupy the site. It took not hours or days, but two weeks for the police to gain control, and even then they were constantly being challenged. Although the hut-village had been cleared, the projected runway site would become the scene of weekly “Sunday strolls” attracting hundreds or even thousands of protesters, for years to come. The Autonomen were a regular feature at these “strolls,” and introduced a useful element of low-level violence and clashes, in what has been dubbed the “war of the fences.” This rise in tactical militancy was accompanied by a deepening of analysis, as people began to recognize how the new runway would fit into NATO’s war plans, extending its reach further into the Middle East.56

  Whether in the antinuclear demonstrations, at Startbahn West, or in the squats, the Autonomen attracted young people who felt both culturally and economically alienated from the system. Whereas the sixties generation had grown up at a time of increasing material wealth, fighting against former Nazis and inflexible conservatives, this new generation had come of age in a period of economic decline, facing repression that often wore a social democratic mask. The result was less hope, more angst, and a different kind of anger. This was reflected in the movement’s embrace of punk rock and its slogan “No Future.” As Spiegel observed in its special issue on youth riots, the eighties generation would have simply laughed at anything like Rudi Dutschke’s famous long march through the institutions.57 Or as Sabine Lenk of the Liste aktiver unorganisierter Studenten put it, “What was previously an extra-parliamentary opposition has become an anti-parliamentary opposition.”58

  Oskar Lafontaine, at the time mayor of Saarbrücken, feared the youth revolt was “spreading like a wildfire across the Federal Republic,” while North Rhine-Westphalia Labor Minister Friedhelm Farthamm bemoaned the fact that it had reached “even the most secluded provincial areas”—evidence that their less middle-class and student base, as well as their antireformist (or even antipolitical) ethos, allowed the Autonomen to reach further afield than the more famous APO ever had.59 One poll conducted by Stern magazine in early 1981 found that 64 percent of West Germans between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one viewed the squatters with approval.60 The squats in turn provided a base for all manner of progressive projects: solidarity with Third World liberation struggles, women’s liberation, gay and lesbian rights, anti-militarism, and, of course, support for the prisoners.

  Despite the RAF prisoners’ having reminded people of their situation through the 1981 hunger strike, it was the RZ that enjoyed the most popularity among the Autonomen. The Cells’ fluid strategy and structure appeared better suited to this scene, while the RAF was viewed in a much less favorable light (see sidebar on next page).

  As for that minority who did identify with the RAF’s struggle, they developed a separate identity, becoming known as anti-imps (short for “anti-imperialists”). Not for the first time, a major part of the RAF’s appeal to these new supporters was the impression that theirs was an uncompromising, “fundamental” struggle; their willingness to go head-to-head with the state described as “posing the question of power.”

  This distinction, between anti-imps and Autonomen, was further complicated by the militant women’s movement, sections of which remained hostile to the RAF, while others were finding inspiration in its struggle.

  Radical women’s blocs had begun to appear at demonstrations, and both anti-imperialist and Autonomen women’s groups now appeared in various cities, trying to connect questions of violence against women, reproductive freedom, and patriarchy with the new wave of antimilitarism, youth revolt, and prisoners’ struggles.61 This was part of a broader phenomenon, as those who had been marginalized by the trends toward professionalization and mysticism in late-seventies feminism created new spaces to struggle as women (and often in women only groups) around a wide range of issues. A leaflet distributed in Heidelberg in 1980 was typical of this trend; in it, the authors explained,

  We want to finally put an end to the split between work in women’s groups and centers against oppression
specific to women, such as rape, and political work against prisons, nuclear arms, and nuclear power plants in mixed groups. For us, this split is alienating. As women/lesbians, we are oppressed, despised and hated from morning to night. From morning to night, we struggle to break through all forms of oppression, whether their source is the police, state security jerk-offs, the media, Helmut Schmidt and his big brother Jimmy Carter, or tediously typical men.62

  RZ vs. RAF?

  The bourgeois press loved to play up conflicts—real, exaggerated, or imaginary—between the various tendencies of the radical left. Yet it was no media fabrication that there were indeed real differences between the politics of the Autonomen and the RAF. It is undeniable that the new youth movement felt much more at ease with the strategy and methods of the Revolutionary Cells.

  In 1983 Spiegel magazine interviewed several Autonomen on this subject.1 While their comments were somewhat simplistic, they do provide a good sense of how some radicals, rightly or wrongly, saw the different guerilla groups at the time.

  As one put it, “It is important to express solidarity with the people in the high-security units, but the RAF’s strategy and concept is a failure.” Another explained, “The way the RAF did it, isolating themselves from the people and making a political strategy out of that, I simply couldn’t do that.”