The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

by J. Smith

  On September 8, 1977, the Crisis Management Team allowed Die Welt to demand that Rebmann’s plan be carried out. On September 10, the Süddeutsche 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, Frühschoppen3 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 Becher4 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,5 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.” Next, there was a debate regarding the pros and cons of the death penalty, which ranged from the Catholic Church to Stern. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Strauß demanded a pogrom against the prisoners, because “then the police and the justice system wouldn’t have to bother with this anymore.” On October 16, throughout the media the BKA psychological warfare line was once again advanced, laying the groundwork for the operation on the seventh floor. The following day, using state security material, Spiegel claimed Andreas was the mastermind behind our action. Any journalist could easily see that this material had been manipulated. That same evening, on Panorama,6 Golo Mann7 demanded that the prisoners be treated as hostages and shot. This was all part of the Crisis Management Team’s public show, the preparatory propaganda. Rebmann served to connect this public line to the operational possibilities arising from the vacuum created by the Contact Ban.

  The Federal Republic’s decision to adopt the hard line is best understood in light of the role this operation played in the global reconstruction of imperialist politics for counterrevolutionary revival. The FRG’s function was to take the lead in the reactionary restructuring of Western Europe, in order to establish a continental police state. Part of the price the Federal Republic had to pay to prevent any resurgence of revolutionary politics in Western Europe’s power center was the collapse of the old social democratic ideology and policies. All of this was connected to the question of the prisoner exchange. At the state funeral, Scheel said that if the flame wasn’t immediately snuffed out then it would spread like wildfire all around the world, and freeing the prisoners would have been its starting point. Because of this setback, over the next years we had to develop new ways to struggle alongside the prisoners.

  The Federal Republic’s decision to refuse the exchange was only made possible by mobilizing every conceivable form of institutional fascism, and by the BKA’s political putsch—in short, by transforming the political situation into a military situation. Partly this was accomplished through the manipulation of parliament and the Federal Constitutional Court, partly by turning the media into official public organs, and partly by the news ban, supposedly necessary for Schleyer’s safety. Regarding this, in the September 14 video, Schleyer himself said that for his own protection he wanted contact with the public. After that, the Crisis Management Team made decisions that were contrary to his interests, they acted primarily to prevent negotiations and to prevent any public debate that could have interfered with their preferred solution. In any case, after five weeks of nonstop rabble-rousing, a public opinion poll showed that as many people supported the exchange as opposed it. But there was only one possible way to quickly resolve the crisis, given that the federal government had lost its capacity to act: the NATO solution. The Contact Ban was the means by which the Crisis Management Team gained control of the situation—as well as giving Rebmann all of the options he required. This was never meant to protect Schleyer, but rather to protect the Crisis Management Team’s plan.

  With ‘77, the form and the content of the FRG state became one and the same. Its political content: a post-Nazi state and an anticommunist bulwark within the NATO structure. Its form: the dictatorial heart of NATO democracy, the national security state, the state that exterminates people to protect them from themselves. Given its raw unmediated structure, right from the beginning it was obvious that in the FRG proletarian politics would require autonomous struggle, which is to say, illegally organized armed struggle. However, it was not just the old structures and forms that had been renewed, but fascism itself. The SPD had already proceeded so far with its process of institutionalization that the officially declared state of emergency had been made redundant. Just as in Stammheim in ‘75, it wasn’t presented as an issue of high treason, because that charge contained too much political substance. In ‘74, Brandt said, “Since the Social-Liberal Coalition has been in power, basic precautions have been taken to secure the state internally.” Beyond legalizing counterinsurgency, he was referring to the program that party partisan Herold had already envisioned in ‘68: fascism in an historical era of automation and data processing, and the institutional penetration of society, so as to paralyze it—fascism that no longer requires mass mobilization or ideologically motivated fascists, but only bureaucrats and technocrats in the service of the imperialist state. In the emergency situation of ‘77, its entire potential was mobilized. Behind the fictional separation of powers and parliamentary procedure lies the Maßnahmestaat,8 the real power structure where police and military bodies control the analysis—given their “privileged access to information” (Herold)—and in so doing shape policy.

  The extraordinary part of the crisis structure—the Crisis Cabinet, etc.—was disbanded following the military solution. Yet this was no mere ad hoc repressive deployment on the part of the state in response to a particularly intense guerilla offensive. Rather, it is the unfolding of a process that Marighella already identified in the experience of the Latin American urban guerilla: when faced with resistance that calls its very existence into question, the state transforms the political situation into a military situation. That is what is happening today on an international level. Imperialism is everywhere losing its capacity to resolve problems politically, so it is militarizing its strategy. From imperialism’s point of view, for society overall, this means that state security—with its centers, its special sections, its psychological campaigns, etc.—provides significant structural support for its rule. In this way, it also modifies the state’s ideology and carries out the projects for “domestic peace” that were developed primarily by the Social Democrats, in order to go on the offensive to destroy all political expressions of social antagonism. The state acknowledges the rupture that the guerilla here originally struggled to create. At the end of ‘77, Vogel bemoaned the “irreparable rupture.” This was the defeat they had suffered, which tarnished the image they had cultivated with their domestic and foreign policies, and which also brought about the degradation of their ideology, opening up possibilities for the left to act.

  These changes were not the result of ‘77 alone. They were the result of a process set in motion by the first RAF attacks and the prisoners’ hunger strikes, as well as in response to those who opted to continue the struggle after ‘77. In this regard, the actions in the autumn of ‘81 were particularly important. Following ‘77 and continuing to this very day, there have been attempts to reverse the rupture. Following the neutralization of liberalism and antifascism by the events of ‘77, this position is today occupied by a new left that situates itself somewhere between “the guerilla and the state” and attempts to lay its own claim on parliamentary action. However, this left is of no importance. Not only because the political-economic crisis leaves reformism with objectively even less room to maneuver than in the seventies, but also because what is required here is a left that is beyond their reach, that has been politicized to grasp the meaning of ‘77, and that can find its bearings in a situation where the state targets any fundamental opposition. This resistance must be grounded in an understanding that reformism here is not limited by the economy but by politics, which must in turn be targeted
by revolutionary activity.

  The rupture in the metropole remains irreversible. Kissinger also speaks about this shift in relationships, which occurred in less than a decade, characterizing the SPD as still pursuing the “idea of domestic peace” in ‘76, but noting that by ‘84, “On both sides of the Atlantic we are threatened by domestic politics overshadowing the worldwide strategy.” That is his automatic response to the fact that imperialism, with its global project to perpetuate the capitalist system, is not only limited by the liberation struggles in the South, but is also held back by the front within.

  Christian Klar

  Stammheim, December 4, 1984

  _____________

  1 On June 10, 1944, the Waffen-SS destroyed the French village of Oradour-sur Glane, killing all 642 of its inhabitants.

  2 Herbert Wehner was a prominent SPD politician.

  3 Frühschoppen (Brunch) is a German TV news show.

  4 Walter Becher, a former Nazi, worked his way through a number of extreme right-wing parties in the postwar period before settling into the CSU.

  5 Heinz Kühn (SPD) was, in 1977, the president of North Rhine-Westphalia.

  6 Panorama is a German TV news program.

  7 Golo Mann was a German historian and philosopher.

  8 The Maßnahmestaat (literally: state of measures) is a term usually applied to the Nazi state. It has no adequate translation into English and is commonly used in its German form. See William Treharne Jones, “Germany: Prospects for a Nationalist Revival,” in International Affairs, Royal Institute of International Affairs 46, no. 2 (April 1970): 316-322.

  Strategic Thoughts

  In the Front Paper we state that the revolutionary strategy is the strategy against their strategy. With this we have proceeded forcefully, basing ourselves on our own situation, and on that which has characterized it since ‘77: the military offensive from which imperialism hopes to emerge as a world system.

  It is a definition of fundamental importance, because war—the concept upon which our reality is based—is a concept that every revolutionary movement requires in order to be able to struggle. “War is the key,” Andreas once said in this regard—the key to arriving at a practical perspective, as is the case now—yes, historically, we really are at the highest stage of imperialism—the key to finding a path to social revolution. As such, it is the way we can struggle against the conditions we face.

  We say that proletarian internationalism—the subjective connection between existing combatants and the strategy for those who collectively and consciously take up the goal of worldwide liberation and who oppose the imperialist project to establish global fascism—is the way those who desire a final fundamental revolution and prefigure this and make it concrete through attacks, advance to destroy and wear down the system in every sector, together in a front. That is the strategic goal and the political objective that determines our practice; internationally and authentically, on the basis of the specific experience and function of the metropolitan guerilla.

  The RAF’s struggle was always based on both the global balance of power and the conflict in the metropole. The war is not just about escalating things in the most developed sectors; rather it is the reality of the entire imperialist system, and will be until victory. For us it is a question of revolutionary warfare and how we can bring it to a level that is powerful enough to actually bring this system to its breaking point: as international class war in the form of a protracted struggle.

  The goal determines the brutality with which imperialism conducts its war on every level and all fronts. They see it as the decisive battle, because, following the breach opened by Vietnam, they felt that the only way to secure their power would be to completely eliminate all sources of antagonism—the guerilla, the liberation movements, the states that have achieved national liberation, and eventually the socialist states in the East. We are now midway through that phase. They are launching attacks everywhere: stationing missiles and waging war against the guerilla in Western Europe, attempting to stamp out the Palestinian revolution, Grenada, El Salvador, the bloody wars against Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, and Cambodia.

  They have not yet completed their unification into a homogenous counterrevolutionary bloc—as they must if they are to politically survive the military offensive—nor is there any guarantee that they will. However, it is also true that the revolutionary struggles, facing different conditions and having achieved different levels of development, have already felt the effects of the offensive meant to prevent them from achieving their goals. The New Jersey1 carried out the heaviest bombing since the Vietnam War in an effort to secure an American victory. Following this attack, an American official said the objective was to make Lebanon look like a lunar landscape. To do this, they withdrew from El Salvador, where they had recently set up base with the objective of crushing the civilian population and isolating the guerilla. The entire machine, which is constantly attempting to perfect this extermination policy, reaches its limit at the boundary established by simultaneous struggles and a balance of power that, as a result, is constantly shifting. The smooth unfolding of their power project is shattered by this dialectical reality.

  The conditions of struggle in each sector have a direct impact on all of the other sectors, because the conflict has fundamentally changed. Vietnam won. The guerilla has politically implanted itself in Western Europe. Developments in the Middle East have taken on new and more powerful dimensions as part of the broader Arab revolution. In Latin America—where for ten years they installed military dictators everywhere, because the guerilla had a mass base—they are now confronted with new struggles and with people who will no longer accept easy solutions, who show no fear in the face of fascism, because the experience of fascism has shaped their resistance. And the Nicaraguan revolution broke the grip of reaction throughout the continent. Nothing is dead and gone. Fifteen years ago the Tupamaros explained how they had drawn on Che’s experience to develop the urban guerilla concept, and now two years ago Salvador Carpio2 made it clear that the FMLN had learned from the Tupamaros’ struggle and built upon what they had learned. There is no single international strategy, but there is a learning process based on the different experiences and political developments, and it is clear that in their perspectives and relationships the combatants see every attack as a practical building block in a strategy to open up new possibilities.

  The military strategy is now the unifying factor and the basis for imperialist restructuring. They are pushing Western Europe and Japan to the forefront, because they need a unified system for their global offensive. That was a lesson they learned from Vietnam, and they are now making the connection: wars of aggression and intervention have ramifications for their own society—they serve to mobilize people. There is no place left where they have any hope of legitimacy or support. The formation of the unified system depends on their keeping the “political costs” under control, creating legitimacy based solely on the military strength of the bloc as a whole, and confronting their own society with this power. That is why the invasion of Grenada followed a request from the Caribbean states, why the NATO intervention in Lebanon took place under the rubric of “multinational peacekeeping,” and why right to the end Weinberger3 tried to involve ten different states in order to avoid a troop withdrawal. What they hope to achieve is a flexible structure of military commandos in the core imperialist states—the United States, the FRG, Great Britain, France, and Japan—that can tailor its response to the style and requirements of the regional states concerned. The German Association for Foreign Policy,4 which produces studies in association with the Office of the Federal Chancellor,5 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense, demanded this at the beginning of ‘81. Board members range from Stoltenberg, Weizsäcker, and Schmidt6 to Zahn, Beitz, and Vetter,7 all of whom—industry, political parties, and trade unions—are concerned with making the necessary internal preparations. With the stationing of missiles, the formation of the Fren
ch and British RDF8 units, and the integration of Japan into NATO’s military strategy, the military core has come together.

  For them, the offensive has thus become a decisive battle, and the reformist version—social democracy and covert warfare—is unfolding on all levels. The SPD’s ambitious project to institutionally bury all antagonism has not succeeded in any way; not internally between the state and society, and not internationally. Having promised to guarantee the internal stability of Model Germany by nationalizing the conflict between capital and labor (concerted action, intergroup mediation, the trade unions as equal members of economic associations), they found themselves confronted not only with an economic crisis, but also with the politics of class struggle—a result of the effects the national liberation struggles had on the metropole. In June ‘68, Schiller9 congratulated the government and business for the collaboration between the state, industry, and the trade unions that had prevented “any social conflict from spreading to the workforce in the FRG, as occurred in France.” They thought that with Brandt and the amnesty they had succeeded in depoliticizing the working class and reintegrating the students who had been criminalized, bringing them back into the orbit of the state.10 But the politicization achieved by the front’s struggle was stronger than that.