The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History
Page 36
41. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 254-257, 288-291.
42. German Law Journal, “Federal Constitutional Court Issues Temporary Injunction in the NPD Party Ban Case,” German Law Journal [online] 2, no. 13, (August 1, 2001).
43. Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 161.
44. Der Minister und der Terrorist: Gespräche zwischen Gerhart Baum und Horst Mahler, or, “The Minister and the Terrorist: Talks between Gerhart Baum and Horst Mahler.” See Jeschke and Malanowski.
45. Not all guerilla supporters remained sanguine in the face of this—when Mahler tried to speak at a Stuttgart memorial for Rudi Dutschke, he was shouted down by anti-imps who accused him of attempting “to channel the resistance against the extermination of the prisoners into a rehabilitation program.” See “Bericht über die Störung der Staatsschutzveranstaltung in Stuttgart: Horst Mahler, eine Staatsschutzfigur,” in Marat, 41.
46. Gerhart Baum and Virginio Rognoni, interviewed by Spiegel, “Gespräch: Der Staat darf nicht unversöhnlich sein,” Spiegel, October 19, 1981.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Die Zeit, “Mitgefangen, mitgehangen.”
51. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, “Gnade statt Rache: Einsicht in den Irrsinn des Terrors ist die beste Garantie gegen Wiederholung,” Die Zeit, June 24, 1988.
52. Hans Wolfgang Sternsdorff, “Im Schützengraben für die falsche Sache.”
53. Gerhard Mauz, “Was wir verstrickten Menschen schulden…” Spiegel, June 6, 1983.
54. Kaupa, 20.
55. Spiegel, “Falsche Signale an den Untergrund,” August 21, 1981.
56. Ibid.
57. Hans-Joachim Klein, The German Guerilla: Terror, Reaction, Resistance (Sanday, UK: Cienfuegos Press, 1981).
58. Hans-Joachim Klein, “Sind wir denn nicht auch Mensch?” Spiegel, Dec. 7, 1981.
59. Associated Press, “German Terrorist Convicted of Murder,” European Stars and Stripes May 8, 1984.
60. Die Zeit, “Ein Abgrund von Informationslücken,” March 2, 1984.
61. Marion Gräfin Doenhoff, “Gnade statt Rache: Einsicht in den Irrsinn des Terrors ist die beste Garantie gegen Wiederholung,” Die Zeit, June 24, 1988.
62. Die Zeit, “Mitgefangen, mitgehangen.”
63. Spiegel, “Falsche Signale an den Untergrund.”
64. It has been suggested that Boock’s initial attitude and evasion of responsibility had indicated that just a little more pressure might do the trick and turn him into a major propaganda asset, and that independent of any changes in government this is what determined his treatment.
65. Klaus Jünschke, interviewed by Spiegel, “Angst vor mancherlei Rachegeschrei,” Spiegel, July 18, 1988.
66. Discussing the amnesty campaign during his 1982 trial, Rolf Heißler noted that “[the] initiative is the chorus of the authorities, the warmongers, and their auxiliary clique in their struggle against fundamental opposition,” but at the same time, “The demand for ‘amnesty’ for the political prisoners is also an expression of the sense of powerlessness and resignation that the ‘German Autumn’ created for broad sections of the left.” (“Ich hatte so ein Gefühl, das von den Dächern schreien zu müssen,” taz, January 11, 1982.)
67. Christof Wackernagel, “Die Mythen knacken,” January 1984, in Linke Liste (ed.), Die Mythen knacken: Materialien wider ein Tabu (Frankfurt: Linke Liste, 1987), 378.
68. See for instance, Michael Von Tangen Page, Prisons, Peace, and Terrorism: Penal Policy in the Reduction of Political Violence in Northern Ireland, Italy, and the Spanish Basque Country, 1968-97 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).
69. taz editorialized that as the newspaper went to print, they could already imagine their windows being smashed. As it happened their entire offices were trashed by anti-imps outraged that they would sit down to discuss the guerilla with a cop. taz, “Das Gespenst des ‘Euroterrorismus’ geht um,” April 11, 1985.
70. Gerhard Mauzy, “In der Toilette eines Eil- oder eines D-Zugs?” Spiegel, October 27, 1986.
71. taz, “Die Fehlschlüsse der Bundesanwaltschaft,” July 25, 1991.
72. Geronimo, 162.
9
Knockout Punch?
The front will not emerge automatically from common struggles and a proclamation. Such a proclamation and any mobilization that accompanied it would come to nothing if the practical aspects of this strategy—how it can be undertaken and how it can be effective—are not tackled more seriously. And not by us alone.
The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front
NOTHING WAS HEARD FROM THE RAF for a long time after the November 1982 arrests of Klar, Mohnhaupt, and Schulz. While most of the guerillas remained at large, clearly the loss of these three, and of a number of the guerilla’s supply depots, constituted a serious blow.
At the same time, the Revolutionary Cells continued to strike almost every month, and Rote Zora—which until this point had carried out only a few attacks—stepped up its activity, carrying out a number of low-level actions in 1983 (against a porn store, doctors involved in sterilization campaigns in the Third World, and a company involved in the international sex trade).
Then, on March 1, 1983, RAF member Gisela Dutzi was captured, surrounded by police at the Darmstadt train station. She had been recognized by a citizen who had phoned the police tip line, subsequently receiving a 50,000 DM reward.1 Dutzi had worked as a graphic artist at a U.S. military installation before joining the guerilla in 1980, and prosecutors claimed that she had been acting as an “aboveground member” of the RAF at the time, passing on information about U.S. military vehicles in nearby Heidelberg.2 She was carrying a gun and fake ID when captured, and so charges of forgery and possession of arms were laid, along with bank robbery and membership in a terrorist organization under §129a.3
The combination of §129a and the bogey of the “aboveground RAF” continued to give the state a very large stick to wield against the radical left. Anti-imps were, of course, at particular risk. As part of this process, on May 2, Helga Roos, who had been arrested in 1981, received a sentence of four years and nine months for supporting a terrorist organization. Accusations that aboveground anti-imps were members of the guerilla had been made more plausible by the RAF’s own muddying of the waters with its front concept. When Brigitte Mohnhaupt was called to testify at Roos’s trial, she insisted that it was the commando that attacked Kroesen that had bought both the tent and the cocoa in Mannheim the day before the action. But in regard to the front, and contact with those aboveground, her explanation was not so cut and dried:
[The front] is the unity developed between armed politics and the aboveground struggle, a common resistance that aims to develop a genuine and relevant strategy for opposing the imperialist state—that is to say, a struggle that has a real impact, that hits on both the political and the military level. And calling that a common strategy has nothing to do with people being in contact with us, but rather arises on the basis of each person’s own perspective, on the basis of each person’s own reflections about how we can frame the question of power here and organize around it. Obviously, we discuss this with those whom we know—that’s clear.4
Anti-imps responded to Roos’s sentence by spraypainting the outer wall of the former death camp at Dachau. As was explained in a subsequent communiqué:
Dachau was the first Nazi research station. Experiments were conducted there toward the development of physical and psychological extermination programs against people who engaged in resistance. For us, Dachau doesn’t only stand for the filthy deeds of the Nazi pigs, but is also a symbol of resistance on the part of people who struggled in the death camps and attempted to organize resistance… From this, we can learn that it is possible to struggle even in death camps. That is also the strength of the struggle waged by the prisoners, who themselves, in the state security extermination machinery, embody resist
ance for many people.5
Arrests continued throughout the year. In October, eight houses in Mannheim, Stuttgart, and Heidelberg were raided, the inhabitants accused of conducting surveillance of munitions transports on behalf of the RAF.6 That same month, the magazine radikal was targeted with prosecution. Although produced anonymously, police had decided that Michael Klöckner and Benny Härlin were the editors of what had become the most important movement publication since the suppression of Info-BUG in 1977. They would be sentenced to two and a half years for supporting a terrorist organization, a prison term they would not end up serving.7 This was payback for radikal’s policy of publishing communiqués from the different guerilla groups; the fact that this was done from a highly critical perspective was deemed irrelevant.8 This was followed in December by the arrest of four anti-Startbahn West activists in Frankfurt, charged with forming a terrorist organization.
§129a was even used against people who were already serving time: on March 8, 1983, raids were conducted against thirty-one prisoners, the Hamburg Info-Büro, and five people on the outside (including former 2JM political prisoner Anne Reiche) in an effort to prove the existence of an illegal information system. As a result, thirteen RAF prisoners found themselves charged for a second time under §129a.9 As the support group Bunte Hilfe Nürnberg explained:
According to the BAW this refers to letters mailed back and forth between prisoners and people on the outside, which had passed through the normal supervisory authority. The subject matter of the “illegal discussion” engaged in through these letters was the prisoners’ demand for association in large groups, which served “to maintain organizational integrity and the continuation of the armed struggle.”
These preliminary investigations… are primarily meant as propaganda. They are meant to support the claim that the association [demand] is intended to support the armed struggle, which is directed from within the prison cells, and that the description of the prison conditions as identity-destroying isolation torture is only a tactic…
Preliminary proceedings in connection with support were also launched against two of the relatives with regard to the aforementioned “illegal information network.”… §129a preliminary proceedings against the very active relatives’ groups are extremely common, but to the best of our knowledge, none have ever resulted in charges. The BAW’s objective is not terribly hard to decipher; intimidation and occupying/tying up energy.10
As anti-imps were being locked up for solidarity activities, the conditions in the cells remained harrowing. During this period, the case of Bernd Rössner was considered particularly egregious. Rössner had engaged in a four-month dirt strike, demanding association with the RAF prisoners held at Celle; for the duration of his protest he was held in an acoustically sealed windowless cell. When his health began to suffer and he could no longer keep food down, he was transferred to a psychiatric ward.11
In the fall of 1983, supporters responded to all this with a campaign to mail as many letters as possible to the prisoners, the goal being to break through their isolation and include them in the movement’s discussions. As Irmgard Möller would recall years later:
They told us about their work and about the projects they were developing. They sent us information and books and campaigned for others to do so as well, and in a very short period of time an enormous amount of mail arrived. Of course, a lot of it was withheld by the prison censor, but at least we had to be informed about that, so that we knew something was going on anyway. It was something different from the squatting movement, because this time it wasn’t just that we could see that something was happening, but we ourselves were included. Of course, from the inside, we could only get a faint sense of how substantial the new commitment was and what its prospects were. That aside, it created a sense of a new vitality—and that meant a lot to us.12
Known as the Grußaktion an die politischen Gefangenen (Greetings Action to the Political Prisoners), the campaign immediately drew fire from the attorney general’s office, which recognized that it might breach the isolation that had been so painstakingly erected. At a December press conference, Rebmann denounced the campaign as an attempt to bypass the Contact Ban law—a tacit admission that the law’s purpose was not to safeguard prison security, but to cut the prisoners off from the movement. Bookstores and newspapers that publicized the action were raided under §129a.13
While the campaign focused on the RAF prisoners, they had not initiated it, and some questioned its overall orientation. Andreas Vogel, who had shifted from the 2JM to the RAF by this point, was somewhat critical, arguing that mere communication was insufficient, that the state would have to be made to understand that people wouldn’t quietly stand by and accept the situation. He pointed out that the government had made it clear that it would not be influenced by mere protests or information campaigns, that what was necessary was resistance at a level that would force the state to retreat. Vogel argued that the Grußaktion’s claim that public attention provided the only protection was incorrect, as only revolutionary politics and attacks on the state, imperialism, and oppression provide such protection, and even that was not enough as long as imperialism and prisons continued to exist.14
Nevertheless, as Möller and others experienced it at the time, the campaign was a welcome initiative:
It is much more than moral support—although that is also important when you are in isolation. We also got some insight into what was happening on the outside from the reports about specific actions, the alliances, whether they were cohesive or not, and people’s thoughts about the RAF. For political prisoners that is essential.
Everything interested us, every approach that people on the outside found for organizing their resistance. We wanted to know: What are your disagreements with us? What do you mobilize around? How do you educate yourselves? What steps do you take and what experiences do you have as a result? It was difficult to say anything about this from inside prison—which the people who wrote us often wanted us to do. For example, I had already been inside for ten years, which meant that the reality outside was completely foreign to me. That inclines a person to overestimate things and to be overly optimistic. However, this feeling of no longer being completely cut off meant a lot to me at the time. It creates a new strength and makes you more alive.15
Möller attempted to take things further, and plans were made for some of these new correspondents to visit her. However, she found that, “Visits under these conditions don’t lead to lasting relationships. At the time, I just couldn’t write letters.” Suddenly she would find herself sitting in front of someone she had never seen before, and who was totally uncomfortable, not least because of the rigmarole visitors to political prisoners were put through. Only to meet separated by a glass partition with an LKA agent there all the time, taking notes about everything said. As Möller experienced it, by the time people got over their discomfort, there would only be a few minutes left.16 Furthermore, visitors from the anti-imperialist movement were often barred after two or three visits, on the grounds that they were not helping the “resocialization” process;17 in some cases, activists were simply barred from visiting any political prisoners.18 Nevertheless, it was an invaluable experience for her: “Not much remains as a result of it—but at the time, it was a very important initiative for us.”19
KREFELD AND THE DECLINE OF “PEACE”
For two years, anti-imps had been busy discussing and implementing the May Paper. The RAF had not only acknowledged the importance of the semi-legal movement, it had charged it with building the still-abstract “front,” reaching out to the radical left. Following this lead, many now redoubled their efforts to work with the Autonomen.
As they worked in uneasy tension with the anti-imps, the Autonomen were simultaneously finding themselves shunned within the peace movement which was bracing itself for the mobilization against the new NATO missiles being deployed that fall. Yet another Coordinating Committee had been established in April 1983, and while
the more conservative actors failed to squelch plans for decentralized civil disobedience actions, they had no trouble pushing through the line that these should remain nonviolent, and that an “open relationship” with the state should be pursued.20 The process of isolating and marginalizing radicals intensified, the demand for “nonviolence” in the face of nuclear war being intrinsic to this process. As detailed elsewhere:
Between 1980 and 1982, the radical anti-war movement was marginalized by many organizations and initiatives, including the DKP,21 the Greens, the Jusos, and most pacifist and church groups. This allowed the peace movement to replace the antiwar movement. Church groups and social democrats became dominant and cemented their role by establishing a central coordination committee in Bonn. Some of these activists took their “leadership role” and the demand to “keep the peace” so seriously that they collaborated with the police when it came to undermine the politics and tactics of the Autonomen.22
This process crossed an important threshold on June 25, 1983, the day U.S. Vice President Bush Sr. visited Krefeld, in North Rhine-Westphalia, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the town’s first emigrants to the United States. Over twenty-five thousand people formed a human “wall of life” under the auspices of the official peace movement, while roughly a thousand Autonomen and anti-imps gathered separately in the town center.23 Isolated in this way, the radicals were attacked by the SEK (similar to a North American SWAT unit); despite defending themselves with molotov cocktails and two by fours,24 at least sixty of their number were badly injured and one hundred and thirty-four were arrested.25 While a few hundred did manage to regroup to lob rocks and paint bombs at Bush’s motorcade later that afternoon,26 the day was considered a defeat. (As for the vice president, he gloated that “All this reminds me of Chicago in 1968. It makes me feel at home.”)27