Jeremy Varon (13 page)

Buoyed by their success in hiding, Baader and Ensslin went to West Berlin in search of comrades willing to join them in some form of clandestine struggle. Among those they sought out was Horst Mahler, a radical attorney who represented young protesters and had served as Baader’s lawyer in the arson trial. Ulrike Meinhof was another. Meinhof had come to know Baader and Ensslin while they worked with the Frankfurt teenagers, and she herself studied the world of Frankfurt’s troubled youth. She wrote a screenplay dramatizing the struggles of the young people she met, and in December, production began on the made-for-television movie.148

Baader had been just the kind of adolescent in whom Meinhof now took interest. Born in Munich in 1943, he was an incorrigibly rebellious youth with a seemingly innate contempt for authority. As a teenager, he stole cars, got into fights, and created trouble in school. As a young adult living in Frankfurt and West Berlin, he shunned “bourgeois” manners, work habits, and sexual norms. With his Brandoesque swagger, street-wise demeanor, and lack of inhibitions, he became a charismatic figure among some German leftists, who were drawn to his anti-authoritarian persona (though others thought him rather ridiculous). Baader also had dark good looks, quite unlike the archetypal blond German. His appearance, it would seem, enhanced his appeal as a quasi-outsider among Germans who represented an uncommon form of (non-“Aryan”) physical vitality. In political circles, and later in the RAF, Baader had little patience with theory; he preferred instead to act, providing a counterforce to what RAF members feared was their own potentially debilitating intellectualism.

Gudrun Ensslin, born in 1940 in southern Germany, embodied another kind of passion. During the early years of Nazi rule, her father, Helmut Ensslin, had been a member of the Wandervögeln, a nature-oriented youth group that offered an alternative to the highly nationalist forms of youth culture the Nazis sponsored.149 After the war, he became a pastor in a successor organization of the Confessional Church, which had 64

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formed in the mid 1930s to resist Nazi control of German Protestantism.

Its legacy was one of conscientious opposition to authoritarian conformity; Helmut, true to tradition, became a critic of the Federal Republic, especially its plans to rearm. Gudrun aspired to an even purer form of her family’s principles. Attending university in Tübingen and then West Berlin, she became active in the student movement, where she emerged as a voice of great moral intensity. Günter Grass, who came to know her in Berlin, recalled that “she was idealistic, with an inborn loathing of any compromise. She had a yearning for the Absolute, the perfect solution.”150 That yearning soon provided the ethical impetus that led the RAF to take a position of “no compromise” with the powers it opposed.

A couple since 1967, Baader and Ensslin adopted “Hans” and “Grete”

as nicknames during their underground travels in Europe.151 The names, drawn from the brother and sister in the famous Grimm fairy tale, conveyed an innocence that belied their lives together as fugitives. Yet reference to the fairy tale was also eerily fitting, because it evoked the vulnerability, fatalism, and anxiety—approaching narcissistic paranoia—felt by some among Germany’s postwar generation. In the macabre tale, Hans and Grete are left to die in the forest by their hateful stepmother and pliant father. Later, they are lured into a gingerbread house by a wicked old woman who intends to eat them. In a scenario plainly summoning up, to the postwar ear, the imagery of the Holocaust, the old woman plans to force Grete to assist in her brother’s murder, and she is to be roasted alive in an oven. Identifying with Hans and Grete (who are saved in the story by their cunning), Baader and Ensslin seemed to fear their society as willing to abandon and devour its young.

When back in West Germany, Baader and Ensslin sought weapons, whether simply to engage in robberies to fund their lives on the run or to begin some form of armed struggle. Meinhof helped house the fugitives; Mahler, part of a circle of Berlin radicals poised for clandestine action, promised the guns. In the early morning hours of April 3, 1970, Peter Urbach, a factory worker and friend of Mahler’s, led Baader, Mahler, and several others to a cemetery near the Berlin Wall, where he insisted weapons were buried. Hours of digging proved fruitless, so they returned the next night, again coming up empty. While driving away from the cemetery, Baader and the passengers in his car were pulled over by police and arrested; a second car carrying Mahler and Urbach—in fact a police informant—drove away.

No sooner was Baader back in jail than his comrades conspired to get

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him out. In the weeks following, Meinhof visited Baader in prison, as did Ensslin, who wore a disguise to conceal her identity. Mahler worked, successfully this time, to obtain firearms. Swayed by Ensslin’s pleading, Meinhof agreed to be the linchpin of the plot to free Baader. She arranged to meet him on May 14 at the “Institute for Social Issues” in a Berlin suburb, allegedly to discuss writing a book about German youth.

While Baader and Meinhof were in the library watched by a guard, two female accomplices wearing wigs helped Ensslin, masked and armed, and an armed male enter the building. They quickly freed Baader, in the process shooting the security guard and an Institute staff member, George Linke, who almost died from his wounds. The conspirators immediately went underground, and in late May, they published a communiqué in the Berlin anarchist weekly
833
announcing the formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), or RAF.152 The name itself was doubly provocative: RAF was, of course, the acronym for Britain’s Royal Air Force, which had bombed Germany during World War II, and the “Red Army” was the Soviet military, Germany’s great nemesis. Wanted posters went up throughout West Germany for Baader and Meinhof, now sought for attempted murder. Meinhof’s movie was promptly withdrawn from state-run TV, and the media quickly dubbed the group the “Baader-Meinhof Gang” (“Baader-Meinhof-Bande”).

The RAF did not issue its first ideological statement until eleven months later. By that point, RAF members had traveled to Jordan to train in a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrilla camp, established safe houses throughout West Germany, built a stockpile of arms, robbed banks of tens of thousands of marks, and had several of its two dozen or so members arrested, among them Mahler. Thereafter, the RAF rarely attempted systematically to articulate its ideology; from the start, its writings were fragmentary, sloganistic, and, on important points, contradictory. Analysts have concluded from the jumble of the RAF’s “theoretical” statements that its “ideology” amounted to little more than ex post facto justifications for actions not guided by a properly political agenda.

Some have even doubted whether Meinhof, Ensslin, and Mahler had intended to form a clandestine fighting force when they conspired to free Baader; the shootings added greatly to their criminal status, virtually requiring that they become an underground “army.”153 Others have concluded that action
as such
was the core of the RAF’s ideology, resulting in its pronounced
Theoriefeindlichkeit
(antipathy to theory), despite the many pages it wrote in defense of “guerrilla war.”154 Yet the RAF, as much 66

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as Weatherman, grew out of a political context and sought to legitimate its violence in political terms.

The fate of the West German New Left mirrored that of its American counterpart. As its revolutionary ambition increased and its conflict with the state intensified, unity broke down. Reeling from the passage of the Emergency Laws in late 1968, APO dissolved in the months following.

Germany’s SDS splintered into numerous factions and formally disbanded in March 1970, hopelessly divided over how to become a properly “revolutionary” group. A period of “dogmatization and resignation”

set in among the stalwarts of the student movement, while new forms of political expression and experimentation—from alternative schools, to communal homes, to feminist collectives—gained momentum.155

The shift in climate had been severe. For several years, anti-imperialism was the dominant ideological current of the West German New Left, providing young radicals with a robust sense of mission. Rudi Dutschke, the New Left’s leading theorist, promoted this new global vision. SDS’s Jürgen Horlemann summarized Dutschke’s position:

Imperialism, not the proletariat, constitutes the totality of the world; the counterrevolution, not the side of revolution, currently dictates the unity of world history. How can revolutionary forces assert themselves in this totality? The answer was: the subject of the worldwide revolutionary process is the poor, the oppressed, rendering the world’s principal contradiction that between imperialism and the Third World. In the metropoles, enlightened persons—and that meant above all the intelligentsia—must unite with the suffering masses of the Third World, support Third World liberation struggles, and themselves employ illegal, direct action against the state apparatus to weaken the imperialist powers.156

This worldview drove the 1968 “International Vietnam Congress” held in Berlin. Hosted by the German SDS and led by Dutschke (just prior to his being shot), it was the high point of the West German antiwar movement. Conference participants from throughout Europe and North America expressed their sense of the strength of anti-imperialist movements worldwide and the urgent need for militant protest. Peter Weiss proclaimed: “When we begin to destabilize the established political oli-garchy . . . we are no longer spectators, but participants in the liberation struggle. The NLF . . . has given us the task to organize resistance in the metropoles. . . . Our actions must . . . include sabotage, wherever this is possible. This demands personal decisions. This demands changes in our private, individual lives.”157 Dutschke framed the challenge facing young activists with even greater drama. Warning that a U.S. victory in Viet-

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nam might usher in a “new period of authoritarian world domination from Washington to Vladivostok,” he implored: “Comrades, we don’t have much time. . . . How this period of history ends depends primarily on our will.”158 The conference concluded with a march through West Berlin, during which “international solidarity” seemed at last a reality.

The reign of Dutschke’s brand of anti-imperialism proved short-lived.

Perhaps its mandate was too broad; perhaps it lacked a strategy for appealing to “the masses”; perhaps it paid insufficient attention to the concerns of emerging social movements like feminism and environmental-ism; perhaps it presented history as too dependent on political will.

Whatever the objections, Marxism-Leninism returned with a vengeance.

Distressed by their isolation and increasingly convinced that real revolutionary politics were necessarily class politics, young leftists flocked in droves between 1969 and 1973 into the rapidly proliferating Marxist-Leninist groups. Several were founded by students and encouraged their members to become proletarians by going to work in factories, where they organized cells to educate workers about class struggle. Meanwhile, on the streets, they relentlessly distributed party propaganda in fierce struggles for workers’ allegiances. Building on Germany’s tradition of militant socialist organizations, repressed since the early 1930s, the so-called

“K-groups”
(kommunistische Gruppen)
had reasonably large memberships and some influence in local and regional politics, including at the electoral level. There were in 1971 some one hundred and thirty ortho-dox communist organizations, twenty Maoist groups, and five Trotskyite parties, with a combined membership of 80,000.159 (By contrast, America’s student-led sectarian groups such as the PLP had tiny memberships and negligible influence outside the universities.) Yet the K-groups’

impact was conspicuously weak where it mattered most: among West German workers, who took little interest in their radical message. Frustrated in their organizing, the groups devoted much of their energy to arguing with one another over such issues as the role of the vanguard party in class struggle and the relative merits of the Chinese, Soviet, and East German “models.” Their popularity among young radicals in the early 1970s represented the retreat of the New Left into history (or its construction of history), where it hoped to find answers to contemporary challenges.160

Although also convinced of the limits of the student movement, the RAF advanced a very different understanding of revolution from that of the K-groups—one that reached back to the anti-imperialism of the Vietnam Congress, while transforming the imperative of militancy into a call 68

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to arms. As with Weatherman’s, the RAF’s ideology can be discerned both negatively, in the ways it criticized the mainstream Marxists of its day, and positively, as it articulated its own vision of revolution.

The RAF had no single position on class struggle. In one guise, it described itself as a communist organization and declared the working class to be a vital part of its revolutionary program. More often, however, it doubted the potential for revolutionary initiative among West German workers. In “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” Meinhof wrote cynically that the system “has pushed the masses so deeply into its dreck that they seem to have lost a sense of being exploited and oppressed.” In exchange for cars and houses, she said, they gladly “excuse[d] the crimes of the system.”161 Attempts to organize workers based on “material” interests amounted, in the RAF’s view, to “trade union economism,” which strengthened workers’ loyalty to the system.

Against the emphasis of the K-groups on building socialism in West Germany, the RAF advocated “proletarian internationalism” and “struggle in the metropoles,” whose main task was to challenge the imperial power of the United States. The RAF charged that the fact “that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act on a national level does not remove the fact that Capital thinks and acts on an international level.”162 The RAF denounced imperialism with unalloyed contempt, proclaiming: “Vietnam is the horrifying message to the people of the Third World that imperialism is determined to wage genocide against them when there is nothing more to extract from them as markets, military bases, natural resources, and cheap labor.”163