Left Behind
Romanticizing Germany's urban guerillasFor 44 days in the fall of 1977, West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF) held captive Hanns Martín Schleyer, a leading German industrialist. In exchange for letting Schleyer go, the RAF—a left-wing urban guerrilla organization—demanded the release of ten imprisoned members, including their leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.
From its founding in 1970 to its dissolution in the 1990s, the RAF robbed banks, assassinated prominent politicians, and bombed U.S. military bases, under-construction prisons, and the offices of the tabloid press. Its stated goal was to bring revolution from the third world to the first and overthrow the “fascist” Federal Republic in favor of an undefined socialist state. After the first wave of terror in the early 1970s, most of the RAF’s founding generation— including Baader, Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof—were behind bars, their successors acting on orders smuggled out through lawyers and paroled comrades.
Now called the German Autumn, the violent weeks in September and October of 1977 were the grim culmination of a decade-long battle between the Federal Republic’s homegrown terrorists and a panicked but resolute state. After Schleyer’s abduction, the Bonn government, headed by Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt, launched an unprecedented nationwide manhunt, tapping phones, shutting down train and bus terminals, erecting roadblocks. Suspected of providing a support network for the underground, the West German left—an assortment of New Leftists, militant anti-nuclear-energy activists, house squatters, and Marxist splinter groups—came under enormous pressure from the state’s security apparatus. Many of these leftists sympathized with the RAF, considering the militants as one of their own, even if they objected to the way the group employed violence. In mid-October the conflict escalated when a Palestinian group (friends of the RAF from Yemenese training camps) hijacked a Lufthansa airbus full of passengers, and flew the plane to Mogadishu, Somalia. The hijackers reiterated the RAF’s demands and, to prove they meant business, shot the pilot and pitched his body onto the tarmac. An elite West German commando unit stormed the plane the next morning, killing three hijackers and freeing all the hostages.
The following day, Baader, Ensslin, and another RAF inmate were found dead in their high-security cells—Baader from a pistol shot, Ensslin hanged with electrical wiring. The official cause of death was suicide; but according to much of the West German left, the RAF leaders had been “liquidated” by the state, their murders covered up with falsified evidence. Several days later, Schleyer’s corpse was found in a car trunk in France with three bullet holes in the back of his head, the same execution technique employed by the Nazis.
For anyone who lived through the German Autumn, the images remain vivid: Schmidt’s grave television addresses to the nation; the “wanted” handbills with blurry black-and-white photos of the fugitives; the public spaces crawling with police; and the eerie high-tech maximum security Stammheim prison near Stuttgart, its seventh floor constructed specially for these political prisoners. The violence—part of a broader pattern in West Germany in the ’70s—shook the state and terrified ordinary Germans who had overwhelmingly backed the Schmidt government’s efforts to crush the militants and their networks. With the administration accused of illegal surveillance, torture, and murder, Germany’s young democracy, created from the ruins of the Third Reich, faced the deepest crisis of its existence.
The government’s “drain the swamp” strategy was meant to deprive the underground of support. But in practice, it meant cracking down on the entire German left—searching squatted houses and co-ops, raiding private parties, questioning anyone in a train station with long hair or patched jeans, and detaining activists without charges. An increasingly paranoid left worried that the Sicherheitsstaat (security state) would stop at nothing to destroy it. West Germany’s independent-minded leftists, those who sided neither with the proponents of armed struggle (and their aggressive supporters) nor the state and society at large, were caught in the crossfire.
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Thirty years later the German Autumn remains remarkably present in contemporary German consciousness and culture. A dozen books have just appeared on the RAF, and there’s been a steady output of documentary and feature films and novels, as well as a play, a voluminous three-story exhibition, and even a T-shirt sporting the RAF logo (a machine gun against a red star). To mark the 30th anniversary of the German Autumn, newspapers carried pages of articles and reprinted the well-known photographs: Baader in leather jacket and sunglasses pinned to the asphalt by police officers; a poised twentysomething Ulrike Meinhof in a prim dress as editor of the radical monthly Konkret; and an array of smashed, bullet-riddled BMWs with sheet-covered corpses lying next to them. In addition, as the last of the currently imprisoned RAF members come up for parole, a fierce discussion is under way about the terms of their release, with victims’ relatives and former RAF members (already paroled) showing up on evening talk shows.
This interest is particularly curious because both the Federal Republic and the German left (past and present) have every reason to want to forget the German Autumn. The state’s overreaction and heavy-handed response brought out its worst. Rather than reach out to its radical critics, it criminalized them and treated the entire left as terrorist collaborators, which fueled suspicion, even among non-leftists, that the state had indeed murdered the RAF prisoners.
As for West German leftists, in retrospect their failure to distance themselves from the ultra-left RAF is embarrassing, as is their paranoia about a proto-fascist Federal Republic. The greater left waited far too long to criticize the underground, whose activities produced no progressive social change, but justified the state’s creation of an extensive high-tech security apparatus to spy upon, infiltrate, and harass left-of-center activists. Today almost no one believes that Meinhof, Baader, and Ensslin were murdered (numerous investigations have concluded that they took their own lives, though new evidence indicates that all of the cells were bugged, that officials knew of the prisoners’ plans to commit collective suicide, and that they did nothing to stop them.)
One of the few positive consequences of the German Autumn was that it prompted many radical leftists to revaluate their solidarity with the “comrades in the underground” and the cause of revolutionary Marxism in general. The German Autumn marked the end of an era for the radical German left, one that began with the demise of the student movement in 1970. Radical activists at the time—like the 30-year-old anarchist Joschka Fischer—understood the events of the German Autumn as incontrovertible proof of the senselessness of armed struggle as a political strategy in the Federal Republic. (Fischer’s personal epiphany came in the aftermath of the riots following the prison death of RAF-founder Ulrike Meinhof, a year before the German Autumn.) It was time, Fischer concluded, for the left to reconsider its relationship to violence and, implicitly, revolutionary socialism.
As difficult as it was to initiate this discussion about political violence, it began in earnest after the German Autumn and ultimately it—not the clampdown—was responsible for delegitimizing the guerrilla groups and draining their support. (A pivotal moment in this process was the founding of Die Tageszeitung, a left daily that is still being published.) The ideology of the 1970s underground, as well as its goals and means, is so discredited today that there aren’t even any tiny splinter groups willing to imitate them, as there had been throughout the 1980s and even into the 1990s.
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So why all the public attention? Most obviously, the topic is sexy, sensationalist, and commercially attractive: Germany is not that different from the United States, and on-the-run revolutionaries in leather jackets with pistols tucked into their jeans is good business for film, magazine features, and fashion. The darkly romantic, against-all-odds, ultra-authentic, everything-or-nothing guerrilla ethic remains alluring, and doesn’t require identification with armed struggle or Marxism of any sort. Some of these cultural products are worthwhile, like Volker Schl¯ðndorff’s fine film, The Legend of Rita, which explores the RAF’s affinity to Eastern Bloc communism, and Christian Petzold’s (unfortunately untranslated) Die innere Sicherheit, about life in the underground for the teenage daughter of a couple wanted by the law. Also, many of the new books constitute serious scholarship, like the prodigious work of Hamburg social historian Wolfgang Kraushaar. But while there are legitimate artistic and scholarly issues here, it is surprising how much attention the popular culture is paying to the events of the German Autumn and that it continues to fascinate.
The hype, however, isn’t entirely apolitical. Some German leftists (very often of a younger generation) are still attracted to the idea of effecting radical social change in a cataclysmic burst rather than through the tedium of grassroots organizing or gradual social movements—the processes that are essential to progressive social change in liberal democracies. As much as the German left has changed since the late ’70s and as critically as it has distanced itself from the RAF and its like, there persists a mythical aura around Baader-Meinhof as the true believers who fought the good fight in its purest form. Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin are still considered heroes in some left-wing circles, even though their unsuccessful assault on the state cost the lives of 57 people and ended in disaster for the German left.
This romantic fascination with RAF is unfortunately not without tangible implications for contemporary progressive politics in Germany. For one, the ever-present specter of the urban guerrilla movement effectively delegitimizes utopia-inspired, extraparliamentary projects—even nonviolent ones. Implicit in current discourse—and explicit in conservative argument—is the claim that ideal-driven causes in the name of domestic social justice, global justice, and alternative forms of democracy inevitably lead to political violence. The anti-globalization group Attac, for example, suffers from this stigma. Decidedly nonviolent, Attac is often mentioned in the same breath as the RAF or, still more absurdly, jihadist groups.
In 2001 Germany’s conservative opposition suggested exactly this connection between progressive idealism and political terror when it tried to force Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s resignation from the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. Photos from 1973 came to light in which Fischer, then an anarchist, attacked a Frankfurt cop. Moreover, one of the RAF fugitives apparently spent a night in Fischer’s co-op. More was at stake than Fischer’s political future. The bigger prize was to link the “radical” red-green government with violent radicalism. In the end, the charges linking Fischer to the RAF didn’t stick. Fischer apologized for the incident and kept his job—but the intimation remained that even moderate Green ideas can end in terror.
Secondly, the contemporary shadow cast by the RAF obscures the much more important work of the nonviolent extraparliamentary movements of the 1970s and ’80s—such as the women’s movement and the environmental, anti-nuclear-energy and peace campaigns. Known as the “new social movements,” these activists mobilized literally millions of German citizens and brought about genuine democratic and social change in the republic. Despite their enormous impact on the political culture of the Federal Republic, today these grassroots mobilizations, which took parliamentary form with the creation of the Green Party in 1980, are conspicuously underrepresented in public discourse. While just about any German who watches television could name five or six terrorists active in the 1970s, he or she would be hard pressed to name a single leading figure of the powerful new social movements other than the late icon of the peace movement, Petra Kelly, perhaps, or the feminist Alice Schwarzer.
This distortion of the collective memory works to the advantage of national conservatives. Preoccupation with the urban guerrillas effectively discredits idealistic extraparliamentary causes and marginalizes the legacy of the 1970s social movements. Ultimately this phenomenon is an extension of the post-1960s “culture wars,” which the left won. Although the 1967–1970 student revolt and its successors in the new social movements failed to alter the political and economic foundations of the Federal Republic, they permanently transformed attitudes toward gender relations, morality, sexual orientation, citizenship, work, and religion. Germany today is indebted to these movements for helping facilitate its liberal metamorphosis and making it a more open, worldly, and democratic place. Yet this debt is often overlooked. Conservatives, hoping to take back lost ground, gladly see the debt diminished in the country’s collective consciousness. The German-born Pope Benedict XVI explicitly blames the West German student movement for undermining Christian morality in the country.
At the heart of the issue is the contested terrain of the anti-establishment, countercultural uprising on West German campuses in the late 1960s. Both the urban guerrillas and the new social movements sprang from the student revolt. In its aftermath, the vast majority of activists joined Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats or moved on to an array of progressive projects, from squatting houses and founding rural communes to community-based projects concerned with the environment and women’s rights. When these initially local initiatives grew and then banded together countrywide, they became the new social movements. Only a tiny handful of former student-movement activists—several hundred in total—took to the underground. (Writer Heinrich Böll called the RAF “six against 60 million.”)
Yet it has become virtually axiomatic today to portray the German Autumn as the natural outcome of the student movement. This is the argument of one of the period’s most highly respected chroniclers, Gerd Koenen, himself a former student rebel. A recent two-part TV documentary directed by another RAF expert and former Konkret editor, Stefan Aust, does the same thing. They portray the student-movement leader Rudi Dutschke as the RAF’s intellectual father, with violence integral to his creed. Koenen and Aust are not alone. Even Kraushaar, the pre-eminent historian of postwar German social movements, often emphasizes the lines of continuity rather than the numerous discontinuities between the student uprising and the urban guerrilla movements. They read the ethic of the 1970s militancy—with its anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and fanaticism—back into the student movement.
This is unfair and historically inaccurate. There is plenty to criticize about the “68ers”: their revolutionary pretensions, their distance from the masses, their blinkered pro-Arab sympathies, and the macho ethic of its male leaders. But the sins of West Germany’s 1970s radical left were not theirs, even if the seeds of those excesses can be located in the student revolt. The seeds of the new social movements and the Green Party are there, too, and provided a genuine source of new political growth.
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About the Author
Paul Hockenos's most recent book is Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alernative History of Postwar Europe.
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in the Germany of Der Deutsche Herbst the agitation of the masses didn't really work. but what worked was exactly this, the state's axing of their liberties, which, on the other hand, not many took very seriously (and therewith into account) in the face of the violence that came from the RAF.
Germany still has a big problem with her dealing with this historic era. most of all that's a sad fact. here does indeed lie the greatest chance to come to terms with her after-war past. but that implies more than i can write here. to give you only an example: part of the revolt came from the country's handling the political survival of the many with a clean fashist past who were still in high positions (Filbinger et al., not to mention the once Austrian President and later head of the UN Waldheim). the daughter of Ulrike Meinhoff, Bettina Roehl, sees this chance missed in a desperate attempt for reconciliation which drowns itself in "Versoehnungsgesuelze" (reconciliation babble--or so) and Christian Stroebele, lawyer and MP of the green party, suspects, that it may be too early for Germany to deal with the topic (but then, when is the time???).
today, looking beyond the German nose, i found a stunning affinity to the same tactics (driving a country's administration into creating "fashist" measures) and it comes from: Usama Bin Ladin, who seems to have accomplished all of the RAF's (in this concern) wet dreams. it works perfectly and again, the people, Damokles' sword in the guise of a terror-fear-machine over them, takes all of it into the account.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Everyone who witnessed a demonstration of Anti-Fascists in Germany, with burning blockades on the streets, the chants with calls for the abolishment of the state and the frequent and violent battles with police forces (the representatives of a 'fascist state') will have no doubt that the discussion of the issues first raised in the 1970s is still up to date. In one point, though, Mr. Hockenos is right, the killings are condemned by virtually all those groups. But people still sympathise with the underlying ideology.
The article misrepresents the conservative movements, who nowadays acknowledge the contributions made by the movements, which resulted out of the student revolution in the 1960s (Those people are commonly called the 69s).
The discourse is not whether terrorism can be justified, but what means are allowed in the struggle against perceived injustice, as in the often cited question: Is it not a moral imperative to kill somebody like Hitler? This discourse differs significantly from the one on Islamic terrorism.
http://www.history.umd.edu/Faculty/JHerf/GHIterror4ms.pdf
What we tend to forget, is that in those days the notion of a coup d'état from the right was not nearly as far-fetched as it looks now. Italy was a clear case where it could have happened - the Bologna train station bombing, P2, Gladio - but even in peaceful Holland F16's flew over parlement in a clear sign of warning.
Remember that Gladio was not discovered until the early nineties, after the Berlin wall fell. In the seventies, abolishment of democracies with U.S. support - Chile, Argentina and so on - was happening on a regular basis. It could have happened in Europe as well.
That a fraction of the left engaged in misguided terrorism in Germany was a dramatic mistake, but remember that the right-wing dictatorships already ran NATO-countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal, and that NATO had various Gladio-branches in place to intervene in other European countries when the going would get too rough.
Today Europe has found a much more subtle way of neutralizing democracy in this age of free markets and globalization. It is called the European Union, in which old-fashioned souvereignty and trias politica have become obsolete concepts and most political power lies with unchecked bureaucrats.
The authorities cited are among the persons in the discourse, but not the central ones (at least better than Jeffrey Herf, who doesn't even speak German); there is no general tracking of the RAF to the student movement; the critique of the absence of grassroots movements overlooks that left grassroots movements in Germany transformed themselves into a political party (the Greens); hardly anyone from the left-liberal spectrum criticized "the state" for its too harsh actions against the RAF; much of the sympathy for the RAF simply comes from the charm of the underdog, no matter how criminally insane; and so on, and so on.
What's the point, then? What should have been done otherwise, and by whom? What should be otherwise? A non-article...
Further, one would think that an article giving us a revised look at 70s guerrillas from the standpoint of the alternative movements that were forming at the same time would look at the politics of the Western world for the past seven years and ask about the seeds of disaster in both movements. Obviously, something has gone wrong with the model of creating a grassroots movement to achieve social change. In the U.K., the largest demonstrations ever were held against invading Iraq, and had absolutely no effect. In the U.S., a majority for getting out of Iraq has long existed, and this year witnessed the U.S. sending more troops to Iraq. In both cases, those 'grassroots' movements of the eighties were channels for leaders like Blair and Clinton and Jospin to take over Leftist parties and eviscerate any trace of liberalism. The Democratic congress that hobbled Nixon's efforts in Vietnam, consistently condemned military expansion, investigated Watergate and the CIA, has been replaced by the Clinton/Lieberman party which claims the 'era of big government is over" - except, of course, when big government is involved in neo-colonialism.
So much the problem of Hockenos' perspective. As for the facts - it is odd that an article that claims that nobody now thinks Baader, Ensslin and Raspe omits one person's claim - Irmgard Möller - who just happened to be there that night, and was supposedly part of the suicide pact. Since that time she has claimed that her knife wounds were not part of an act of suicide, but evidence of an attack on her. Certainly they weren't the type of wounds consistent with suicide, unless for some reason you are suiciding by stabbing yourself deeply and randomly.
That's a small fact, but it points to the larger problem with this article: the way it presupposes the good, democratic intentions of established power. At least since the GWOT, we know a lot about how quickly the U.S. government can turn to abolishing habeas corpus, founding isolated prison camps, and using torture as an m.o. To think that the West German government fought with clean hands in 1977 strains credulity.
The RAF was nutty from the beginning, but not because they were making leftists vulnerable CDU slanders. They were nutty because they didn't have any strategy at all. As soon as they acted, they did have a strategy - rescue their buddies. This is the ideology of a gang, not a political group. Almost all RAF actions after 1971 were strictly about getting this or that RAF comrade out of jail. Thus, they quickly spiraled into inbred irrelevance. There's a vast difference between demanding, say, worker's councils, and demanding that Buffy Sue be released from stir.
Someday we may have the scientific and philosophical genius to create a better species. But this new creature will, per force, bear little resemblance to our own imbalanced, foolish, and self-ignorant selves.
Hopefully it will elevate kindness and self-mastery to their apical place in the heavens of a new order of things, in which the identity of all being, in space and time, is recognized as fundamental.
Your text sounds like it was researched by mostly German-Culture jokes off of "Family Guy" or "Sat. Nite Live".
68ers were rightfully engaged with an nation that needed check, and they are considered still today because of that belief it was their right to do so, not because of fashionwear. That they end up in some equivalence with other cultural types, is the story of pop-culture as well, not theirs.
After WWII, many of the people returned to power (under the Allies plan) were the same old Nazis, plain and simple. You mention some films and books, you get the idea I believe. In Adenauer's time the rebuilding meant these KINDS of capitalists who worked for the Reich, were given quite some tolerance. Just get on with the economic miracle and NATO hub position endorsed by the U.S. and Allies. It was a matter of time before all that was being repressed, would come back in triplicate - and the sentiment hit a younger generation. And it is all much more complex than what you lay out here.
One aspect of the fight was over history itself - who tells it, how, and with what reprecussions do they live in relation to it in Germany, and in relation to "the lies" of their parents generation, and so on. It was rich and complex, and as a social formation, it was a mess as well. So what? So was the American Civil Rights movement, but that got slimmed down to a few poses and photo ops nowadays too. Do you also make fun of the Malcolm X, Black Panthers, and Eldridge Cleavers, Angela Davis and on and on?
There is absolutely a generation who isn't just following a few fashionable avatars of 68, but can distinguish between what kind of pop culture sells them it back in that form, and knows that as well. JUST as in American Culture, exactly the same, when all the MTV videos had Black Power motifs.
As for a cynicism about throwing your life away to stand up against the State - everything was clear as to what the German State, and the connected military industry, and Deutsche Bank for example, were trying to do - it is no secret, one can read all that.
If there was a center left intellectual "paranoia" that you mention, it was valid not because new laws were invented to round up anyone, anytime, due to Baader et al, but because of the obvious, and ominous return to what their parent's generation brought in, a CONTROL, and that potential of a State power left unchecked.
It is incredible today to be in a country, that includes possible dialog when the word "terrorist" is brought up, rather than Dumbed-down Christian dogma that the U.S. has tied to it. A country that managed to even elect officials that once partook in revolutionary activities (imagine that in the U.S. of any generation?).
I think your text is just rewriting the 68ers and their "blinkered pro-Arab sympathies", as you conclude.
But German/France 68ers and Communist Mao is ok? But not Arabs --- wait, you mean, Palestinians - those silly other "terrorists". How obvious catering to neo-con drivel. Why don't you just say it: "they were against ISRAEL, our American ALLIES! You see! Already then, 68ers and their critiques! They were evil rather than radical!"
At least your text would have been shorter and more clearly to the point.