by J. Smith
Urban guerilla groups—in spite of the inevitable romance, mystique, and 007 fantasies—are fundamentally political organizations. Despite the superficial similarities, they are neither special operations units nor are they commandos in the usual military sense. As has been belabored in almost every single RAF document, the point of the guerilla’s attacks was always political, aimed at people’s consciousness, not at a target’s actual material value. In Gramscian terms, the urban guerilla was involved in a war of position, not a war of maneuver, all the guns and bombs notwithstanding.
Though it is not clear that the state knew it at the time, by the RAF’s own account, the Frankfurt arrests in 1984 swept up all the group’s remaining members.1 It is here that the difference between the urban guerilla and a military unit is most clear, for such a blow would have wiped out the latter. As to the RAF, though, before the year was out new militants had gone underground, the group was reestablished, and indeed was able to quickly launch its most ambitious, and arguably most successful, offensive to date.
Zusammen Kämpfen, Newspaper of the Anti-Imperialist Front in Western Europe.
The first signal came on December 4, 1984, as Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt appeared in the special courtroom-bunker at Stammheim prison. The two started by reading lengthy statements going over some of the same points addressed by the May Paper, namely the RAF’s ‘77 offensive and the changes in the world since. After these statements had been delivered, Mohnhaupt announced the start of the prisoners’ ninth collective hunger strike.2 That day, over thirty prisoners in seventeen prisons simultaneously began refusing food.3
On the outside, just one month earlier, two men had robbed a gun store in Maxdorf, near Ludwigshafen, netting twenty-two pistols, two repeating rifles, and 2,800 rounds of ammunition.4 There were no arrests or casualties in the robbery, which had come as the first sign that the RAF was once again active.
That the RAF had been renewed so quickly after the disastrous July arrests speaks to the strength of its base, and of the anti-imperialist politics it had implanted over the previous fourteen years. It also spoke to the promise of the front strategy as outlined in the May Paper. This strategy, which called for greater coordination between above- and underground militants, took further form in December, as the first issue of the Zusammen Kdmpfen (Struggling Together) newsletter was released, with the tagline “Newspaper for the Anti-Imperialist Front in Western Europe.” As the introduction to this first issue explained:
We are producing this newspaper, because we want a way to communicate about the reality and orientation of revolutionary politics in the West European metropole. Communication and discussion are a prerequisite if we are to advance. We intend to provide a starting point for such communication.
For the development of the communist perspective in the metro-pole, a revolutionary, antagonistic practice is both a means and an end. We intend to use this newspaper to address this practice and to provide a preliminary analysis of the existing conditions. To that end, the contents of the newspaper are primarily:
the actions of the West European guerilla
the struggle of the revolutionary prisoners
the actions of the groups from the anti-imperialist and social revolutionary resistance
the political initiatives and campaigns occurring in this context
analyses addressing this practice
We are organizing the newspaper illegally from the outset, because that’s the only way it’ll work. As we don’t know everyone who will want to read the newspaper, those who receive it should copy it and distribute in their milieu.
Just as the RZ and Rote Zora had their newspaper Revolutionärer Zorn, the anti-imps now had their own publication. The first issue included the hunger strike statement, prisoners’ statements, news reports of anti-imp attacks, as well as an interview with a member of the IRA, communiqués from the French guerilla group Action Directe and the Belgian guerilla group the Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Fighting Communist Cells), which had launched its own offensive in October. Needless to say, Zusammen Kämpfen was illegal under §88a; nonetheless, over the years to come twelve issues would be released, the publishers never apprehended.
On December 18, the RAF itself went into action at Oberammergau, an idyllic Alpine village an hour’s drive south of Munich. The target: NATO’s SHAPE officers’ training school. A car, with stolen license plates identifying it as American-registered, had been left in the school’s parking area by a guerilla with a stolen U.S. Marine uniform and forged U.S. government identification papers. Its trunk was packed with over fifty pounds of explosives and three propane gas tanks connected to a timing device.
Demonstration in support of the prisoners during the ninth collective hunger strike.
The attack, however, was thwarted, for the RAF member who drove the car in was spotted walking away, which raised suspicions—although nobody was captured, the car was identified and the bomb defused. Regardless: politically the action “worked,” and a wave of attacks broke out across the FRG, more intense than during any previous hunger strike; over seventy bomb and arson attacks were registered in the weeks following.5
This was the front heralded in the May Paper, in the first sense of the term, bringing the guerilla together with the aboveground resistance.
In January, in the midst of this anti-imp offensive, the RAF released a joint statement with Action Directe, in which the two guerilla groups explained:
We think it is now possible to launch a new phase in the development of revolutionary strategy in the imperialist centers and to create the politico-military nucleus required for this qualitative leap forward in the international organization of proletarian struggle in the metropole: the West European guerilla.6
On January 25, 1985, General René; Audran, a high-level official in the French Ministry of Defense, was assassinated as he was parking his car outside his suburban Paris home. An anonymous caller contacted Agence France-Presse, explaining that Action Directe had carried out the assassination with a commando named for Elisabeth von Dyck, the RAF member killed by police in 1979.7
This was the front’s second dimension, uniting different European guerilla groups.
On February 1, 1985, a RAF commando forced their way into the suburban Munich home of Ernst Zimmermann, president of the Federation of German Aviation, Space and Equipment Industry (BDLI) and CEO of the MUT corporation that produced engines for combat vehicles, including the FRG’s new Leopard tank and Tornado aircraft. Zimmermann’s wife Ingrid was tied up and left lying on the floor while her husband was brought to their bedroom, handcuffed to a chair, and shot execution style.
A call was placed to the Gautinger Anzeiger, a local newspaper: “The commando Patrick O’Hara takes responsibility for the attack on Ernst Zimmermann. The West European guerillas will shake the imperialistic system.”8 The RAF had taken the name of the martyred INLA prisoner, another example of its placing its struggle firmly in the West European context.9
Almost immediately following this second assassination, prisoners began calling off their hunger strike. A document was soon released, explaining that, “The politics of the guerilla in the metropole have achieved the breakthrough anticipated by the past five years of struggle.”10
This is just a bare outline of the beginnings of what would be a two-year-long offensive, putting the ideas outlined in May Paper to the test, and involving hundreds of attacks carried out by anti-imps “in the context of the guerilla’s struggle,” as called for in the May Paper. Indeed, there were more attacks from 1985 to 1987 than in any other three years in the history of West Germany.11
We end our second volume at this point with some misgivings. On the one hand, the attacks in 1985 and 1986 were the fruit of the May Paper, and of the years of discussion and action that had allowed the RAF to put itself back on its feet after the disaster of ‘77. A strong argument could be made for including this offensive before we close.
Yet we have chosen
to leave this offensive, and the years of assassinations and then de-escalation and disarray that would follow, for our third volume. While this decision was far less obvious than our ending our first volume in ‘77—most other histories of the RAF simply end the entire story there—it was the arrests of 1984 that swayed us. Those who were now underground in the RAF had perhaps been consulted in the discussions leading up to the May Paper, but they were not the architects of this strategy. Yet this “last generation” would make the RAF their own, putting their stamp on the organization, doing their best to ride the momentum of the project they had joined, as many of the worst possible consequences of the global imperialist counteroffensive outlined in the May Paper came to pass.
As such, to do them justice, the successes and failures of the front’s offensive, and the ordeals of those who chose to join the RAF in 1984, will have to wait for our final volume.
_____________
1. RAF, “Wir mussen das Neue suchen,” August 1992. This document will be included in our third volume as “We Must Search for Something New.”
2. Libération “Le troisième visage de la RAF,” February 2-3, 1985.
3. Spiegel, “Front draußen,” January 28, 1985. It should be noted that accounts differ as to the precise number of hunger strikers, between 30 and 39.
4. Peters, 600.
5. Peters, 603.
6. RAF, Für die Einheit der Revolutionäre in Westeuropa, 1985. This document has been translated as “For the Unity of Revolutionaries in Western Europe” and is available at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/85_01. html; it will also be included in our next volume.
7. Veronique Brocard and Laurent Gally, “Action Directe: Une execution en coproduction,” Liberation, January 28, 1985.
8. Winnipeg Free Press, “Red Army Terrorists Kill Industrialist,” February 2, 1985.
9. Sinn Fein reacted to this attack by accusing the RAF of sullying O’Hara’s name. This was part of a process that had been going on for several years, whereby the Republican leadership had been distancing itself from the communist and anti-imperialist guerilla in the hopes of currying support with Green and Social Democratic parties on the continent.
10. Hungerstreikabbruchs-Erklärung der Gefangenen aus der RAF und aus dem Widerstand February 1985. This document has been translated as “Calling Off the Hunger Strike: A Statement from the Prisoners of the RAF and the Resistance” and is available at http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/ documents/85_02b.html; it will also be included in our next volume.
11. Koopmans, 643.
A Statement Regarding ‘77
We have to talk about ‘77 again here, specifically about the political strategy behind the first phase of armed struggle in which the attacks occurred and how new conditions for revolutionary politics developed out of this conflict. We also have to say a few things about what happened when we took Schleyer captive and demanded the prisoners in exchange for him.
Following the arrests in ‘72 and the Stockholm action, the social democratic state hoped for a realignment that would put an end to the guerilla’s complete negation of the capitalist system and the rupture it represents. The guerilla was to remain an incident involving a couple of guys, historically connected to the situation around the Vietnam War, and perhaps to a critique of the old sterile antifascism—as if it was intended to be the latest form of treason—to prevent the possibility of revolutionary struggle here from serving as a reference point. In ‘76, we had arrived at the goal of deepening the guerilla project and further developing an understanding of the rupture in the metropole by resuming the struggle—setting the revolutionary process in motion and making the rupture irreversible. The goal of restructuring the guerilla in ‘77 was connected to the prisoners’ struggle.
The ongoing social democracy was an external condition under which we struggled in the ‘70s; against the strategy of the SPD, which had broken the back of proletarian revolution many times since 1914—which had disarmed the working class in the face of fascism—which after ‘45, guided by U.S. capital, was again inserted into the class as a pillar of support for capital—which, as the modern form of imperialist rule, institutionalized all social contradictions, political struggles, and autonomous movements. It was against these political conditions that we carried out the first RAF attacks. These actions were part of a practice that destroyed the “objective unity of the bourgeoisie,” that recreated the conditions for class consciousness, and developed the strategic political-military struggle.
The other condition: after the consolidation of the October Revolution, the national class struggle failed to develop anything that correctly clarified the current conflict between the proletariat and the capitalist system or showed how to overthrow it. Capital had further internationalized itself.
And regarding the different forms of colonization of people in the south and in the metropole, different realities were shaped to separate them socially and politically. So the relationship to oppression in the metropole was stabilized for decades through the internationalization of production, and was politically sealed by social democracy and the unions limiting the labor movement to purely economic struggles. This relative stability was disrupted by the Vietnamese liberation struggle. First of all, because this successful struggle for national self-determination and social development was connected to worldwide change, it created barriers to capital. But more importantly, the Vietnamese liberation struggle changed political conditions. An aspect of this decolonization was that it simultaneously involved confronting U.S. imperialism, and for that reason this war revealed the totality and the unity of the entire imperialist system, for the first time since the consolidation of the October Revolution. That facilitated a break with the long history of revisionism here. Vietnam transformed the worldwide revolutionary process from one of separate national class struggles into an increasingly unified international class struggle, uniting the struggles on all fronts. Since then this has been the context within which all of the struggles confronting the capitalist system occur. They differ only as to the level of the concrete conditions in which and under which they are conducted.
At the beginning of ‘77, the question here was whether things could continue to advance or whether they would suffer further reversals. Following the military solution to the guerilla struggle that was used against the commando in Stockholm, all those who chose not to leave were also choosing to not allow the revolutionary strategy to once again be pissed away in the states of the metropole. It was a decision to oppose the Social Democrats’ strategic intent, which was to annihilate the guerilla with depoliticization, rabble-rousing, and repressive normality, using mass control and modern fascism to their full potential. Brandt said that the counterstrategy must redevelop “society’s immune system,” something that social democracy represents more than almost anything else. As such, the most important recommendation the U.S. counterstrategy could offer the SPD was that they bury the Stammheim prisoners as deep as possible. With this goal, the state’s openly liquidationist line determined the speed and intensity with which the guerilla had to reorganize itself and develop its offensive.
The prisoners’ struggle had a political objective of its own. It arose from a contradiction which clarified both the political preconditions for the rupture as well as the depth it could achieve here. At the same time, ‘77 was the point where the first phase of the guerilla struggle ended and where the political objective of this phase, the rupture in the metropole, was thereby established.
By taking Schleyer prisoner, we confronted the FRG state with its problem of legitimacy—using this bureaucrat from the Third Reich and its successor state, a state which was entirely shaped from the outside and imposed internally. The action confronted the FRG with this problem of legitimacy—the historical conditions for the overthrow of this system were ripe and its back was to the wall—because the negotiations forced it to acknowledge its adversaries. And the action confronted the fe
deral government with the antifascism that to some degree already existed in Western Europe, and which was not just a historical factor, but was being produced anew as a reaction to the FRG’s new and pervasive claims to power. Schmidt said in parliament, “The hope that memories of Auschwitz and Oradour1 would begin to fade in countries outside of Germany will not be fulfilled. If a terrorist is shot by us… we will face questions that other nations don’t have to deal with.”
In fact, the old antifascism here collapsed without resistance, because it was propped up by a left that had waited thirty years for Strauß so they could scream about fascism, but have not to this very day caught on to the fact that everything that the CDU tried to do they learned from the SPD. And in Western Europe outside of Germany, it lost its strength to the degree that it oriented itself toward an impending revolution in one country and treated this as typical of Western Europe. This relationship to power consisted of the weakness of the old antifascism at a point when the new antifascism emerging from the anti-imperialist struggle was not yet adequately developed. This allowed the state to achieve its goal of waging war against the enemy within—”civilization or barbarism,” hyper-criminality—and to resolve the situation militarily, in keeping with Schmidt’s imposed dictum, at least during those weeks: society could not be permitted to debate the guerilla’s politics.
Because social democracy has its historical roots in the betrayal of the working class, they are particularly sensitive to the problem of legitimacy faced by the capitalist system. This was illustrated by the conflicts within the Crisis Management Team. The SPD wanted to handle it as a state of emergency, without actually declaring such a thing. Wehner2 insisted that people stop talking openly about a state crisis. The CDU/CSU was prepared to drop this line—for example, the CSU proposed allowing the prisoners to go free and then declaring a state of emergency to smash the mobilization that the situation had provoked. Or Rebmann’s idea to institute martial law and shoot the imprisoned guerillas. Schmidt relied on the effectiveness not of traditional fascism, but of the institutional variety. He too wanted to use the prisoners as hostages, but legally, with the Contact Ban law. He too wanted a military solution, but with the police waging the war, accompanied by the construction of the necessary ideological superstructure. The goal was the same. As a result, everything was focused on the prisoners, because they couldn’t get at the commando.
