Authors: Bringing the War Home
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to meet the kidnappers’ demands. Facing an apparent stalemate, RAF raised the stakes five weeks later. On October 13, in alliance with the RAF, a Palestinian commando hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing 737 departing from Majorca for Frankfurt.
The hijackers took ninety-one hostages (including the crew), and demanded the release of the German prisoners, as well as of two Palestinians held in Turkey. After traveling to Italy, Dubai, and Bahrain, the plane went to Aden, Yemen, where, on October 16, the hijackers shot and killed the plane’s pilot, dumping his body on the tarmac. It then traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia.
Schmidt chose to end the standoff by force six weeks after the kidnapping of Schleyer. On the evening of October 17–18 a special security force, Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9), raided the plane in Mogadishu, killing three 198
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hijackers and wounding the fourth, with no loss of life to their captives.
In the wake of the raid, what would be called the “forty-four days in au-tumn” rushed toward a chilling crescendo. The evening after the raid, Baader and Raspe died of gunshot wounds in their Stammheim cells, Ensslin died by hanging, and a fourth RAF inmate, Irmgard Möller, was nearly killed by a stab wound to her chest.2 The government, as with Meinhof’s hanging, claimed their deaths were suicides and voiced indignation that guns had apparently been smuggled into the prison. And, again, RAF supporters and others charged the government with murder—a claim some maintain to this day.3 On October 19, Schleyer’s kidnappers announced that they had killed their hostage, whose body was later found in the town of Mulhouse along the French-German border. At Schleyer’s funeral, Bundespräsident Walter Scheel declared that the six weeks of the kidnapping
“have clearly been the worst in the history of the Federal Republic.”4
The events of the fall of 1977, however evidently dramatic, only begin to convey the bitterness of the conflict. Statistics of the dead and injured belie that intensity. By late 1978, forty-three people had been killed.
Of the dead, twenty-eight were victims of left-wing violence, including ten policemen and four members of the judiciary, and fifteen guerrillas had lost their lives.5 The number of people killed in a single year in auto accidents, a clichéd observation ran, dwarfed this seven-year tally of casualties.6 Nor did the intensity of the conflict derive from any military threat the RAF posed. Pleading publicly for mercy for Meinhof shortly before her arrest in June 1972, Heinrich Böll, the winner of the 1972
Nobel Prize in Literature, described the RAF’s struggle as that of “six against sixty million.”7 His estimate was not that far off. A year into its existence, fourteen of the group’s thirty or so members were incarcerated; by the end of 1972, only one person considered by police to be a member of the RAF’s “hard core”
(harte Kern)
was still at large.8 The RAF would rebuild itself several times during the next two and a half decades, but only a few dozen RAF guerrillas in all its “generations” participated directly in the most destructive of its armed actions.
The meaning and intensity of the West German conflict must be sought neither in its body count nor in the roster of destruction, but in its symbolic impact and how it functioned as a symptom of larger political, social, and historical tensions. To recognize that both the threat the RAF posed and the response to it were largely symbolic, “psychological and not physical,” in a common formulation, is to assert an interpretive axiom—one acknowledged by the guerrillas themselves, those charged with defeating them, countless German commentators, and scholars of “political violence”
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or “terrorism” in general. Determining just how the RAF’s violence functioned symbolically is a formidable task, however, because the conflict involved competing symbolic logics, articulated by a host of actors.
The RAF’s violence was
by design
symbolic, insofar as it meant primarily to convey a spirit of resistance, which the RAF hoped would spread; its bombs were to “detonate also in the consciousness of the masses.”9 More broadly, the RAF saw itself as a positive expression of the political situation, both globally and in West Germany. It attributed its own existence to what it saw as the weakness of imperialism, the discontent pervading German society, and the growing determination of the left to finally do what was necessary to seriously challenge state power.
The state, in sharp contrast, perceived the RAF not only as a threat to internal security, but also as a broader, largely figurative challenge to its legitimacy and to the democratic principles for which it stood. The RAF
represented a political poison—intolerable in any dose—that was reminiscent of the militarism and contempt for pluralism characterizing fascism. The state thus did battle with the RAF as “Hitler’s children,” haunt-ing postwar society.
Independent observers throughout the political spectrum assessed the symbolic stakes very differently. Though the RAF never remotely enjoyed broad public support for its “armed struggle,” its members did for a time elicit some sympathy as underdog outlaws persecuted by an overbear-ing state. In a widely publicized 1971 poll—taken during the first great hunt for RAF fugitives, but before the deadly 1972 “May offensive”—
40 percent of respondents described the RAF’s violence as political, not criminal, in motive; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent confessed that they were themselves willing to conceal a fugitive. Interpreting these data, Sebastian Scheerer explained that “the RAF became less a symbol of popular aspirations than of victimization by the state’s security apparatus and by authoritarian measures that were felt to be highly problematic.”10
In 1977, Walter Boehlich invoked a deeper sense of the symbolism inherent in the conflict:
Hitler’s children aren’t the political criminals, but rather Schleyer’s children. It isn’t what happened under Hitler that motivates them, but what the Schleyers of this world do today . . . : that they represent a democrati-cally organized society just as easily as they did a fascistic society; that they have remained in the new Germany where they were, namely, on top; that they are implicated in a continuity, which wouldn’t be the case if fascism had been apprehended as the horrendous crime that it was.11
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Rejecting the RAF’s charge of the thoroughgoing similarities between the Nazi state and the Federal Republic, Boelich nonetheless presented the RAF as a symptom of the confusion, shame, and outrage of a generation coming of age politically in a society that had too comfortably asserted its distance or even redemption from Nazism.
Horst Mahler broke with the RAF in 1974 and affiliated with traditional Marxism-Leninism. Following the events of 1977, he described the RAF as a symbol of the weakness of the socialist left, insofar as its violence made apparent the left’s failure to develop power through legitimate and politically constructive means. Mahler ultimately lumped terrorism with unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, and criminality as expressions of a society in crisis.12 Far from being the “cure” for capitalism’s pathologies, the RAF was
itself
one of capitalism’s pathologies.
(Mahler has since become a nationalist reactionary of the far right.) To the philosopher Günter Rohrmoser, speaking from the political center, terrorism was a disturbing manifestation of a different sort of estrangement: that of the German people from the state. That the RAF existed in a democratic society made it “a symptom of a profound loss of reality and a new, radical form of alienation.”13 At root, the Federal Republic had failed to establish or maintain the full, positive identification of the population with its authority and its founding principles. Terrorism was therefore “a signal, a sign . . . of the extent to which [West Germany’s]
collective ethos has eroded,” requiring, above all, the renewal of a near-spiritual sense of West German unity.14
Hitler’s children, Schleyer’s children, Lenin’s children, Nixon’s children, Guevara’s children: such were the labels that explicitly or implicitly attached to the RAF during its early history. Protecting or itself endangering democracy, repudiating or sustaining the fascism of the past: such were the competing views of the conduct of the state.
.
.
.
The question of what would have happened if . . .
is ambiguous, pacifistic, moralistic.
RAF, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla”
(“The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla”)
To capture their sense of the form that protest violence should take, West German militants of the late 1960s voiced the slogan: “Violence against things, yes; violence against people, no.” Honoring the slogan meant re-Deadly Abstraction
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stricting violence to small-scale destruction of property at street demonstrations and occasional attacks on buildings, such as Berlin’s Amerika Haus. When militants did appear to target people, their actions were often merely theatrical. In April 1967, members of Berlin’s Kommune 1 had planned to “attack” U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey while he was visiting West Germany. Uncovering the plot, police arrested several members of the radical collective with much fanfare. What the authorities had originally alleged were bombs, however, prompting the conservative media to denounce the plotters as “terrorists,” turned out to be harmless sacks of pudding.15 Commenting on the episode in
konkret,
Meinhof castigated the outraged reaction to the phantom assault: “Dropping napalm on women, children, and the elderly is not criminal, but protesting against it is. . . . It is considered impolite to aim pudding and oatmeal at politicians, but not to roll out the red carpet for politicians who have villages wiped out and cities destroyed. . . . Napalm yes, pudding no.”16
Kommune 1 soon added a sardonic twist to its provocative brand of political humor. On May 22, 1967, arson in a department store in Brussels killed 253 people. Two days later, two commune members, Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel—whose name, perfect for his role as troublemaker, means “devil”—issued a leaflet asking, “When will Berlin’s department stores burn?” It explained:
The Yanks have been dying for Berlin in Vietnam. We were sorry to see the poor souls shed their coca-cola blood in the jungles of Vietnam. So we started by marching, throwing the occasional egg at America House, and we would have liked to see HHH [Humphrey] die smothered in pudding. . . . A burning department store with burning people conveys for the first time in a major European city that crackling Vietnam-feeling . . . that we in Berlin up to now have missed. . . . Brussels has given us the only answer: Burn, Warehouse, Burn!17
Langhans and Teufel were arrested for their incendiary rhetoric. Ten months later, a Berlin judge found that the leaflet, however offensive, was a “literary statement designed to shock,” not a literal threat, and cleared the two of the charges.18
The department store arsons committed in Frankfurt by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin eight days after the acquittal of the communards may appear a chilling effort to answer the leaflet’s grim query—
to bridge the gap between imagination and action and make the militant metaphors of the New Left real. (Baader and Ensslin had, in fact, visited Kommune 1 just prior to the action to see if anyone wanted to join them; 202
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only Thorward Proll, a friend of the two, agreed.) The arson was partly that bridge. Meinhof praised the assailants for having broken both the law and internal restraints. Ensslin, in a perfect echo of American militants, defended the arson by proclaiming, “We have found words are useless without actions.”19 But the arson, examined in its specifics and the justifications provided for it, was much more an instance of “symbolic violence” rooted in the injunction against harming people than an attempt to act out the kind of genuine terror the communards had rudely envisioned.
At their trial, Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Söhnlein confessed to having committed the arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and contrasted their destruction of a few commodities in a small fire set after hours with the use of napalm against civilians. They also indicted, in ways both playful and defiant, what they charged was the wholesale corruption of the West German justice system and the society it defended. In court, they declared that they “would not defend themselves against a justice” that “in 1933 unapologetically threw itself into fascism and in 1945 equally unapologetically rose from fascism”; that “did not dis-mantle authoritarian structures, but instead built them anew”; that “protects property and wealth more than it does human beings”; and that
“speaks in the name of the people, but acts in the name of the ruling class.”20
Berward Vesper, Ensslin’s one-time fiancé and a budding counterculture author, issued his own diatribe following the announcement of sentences of three years’ imprisonment for the arsonists. To him, the prosecution defended commodities, while implicitly condoning violence in Vietnam against humans. “Commodities,” he asserted, “take on human traits, while the dead, once and for all destroyed and never interchange-able, are denigrated by being considered mere statistics.”21 Vesper also charged that indignation at the arson was evasive or disingenuous if it ignored the violence that was “permanently and everywhere manifest”
in West Germany. For him, the real threat was “the violence in the family, the violence in the schools, the violence in the factories, the violence in the home, the violence in the prisons, the violence of suicide, the violence of the violent criminals, the violence of the police, the pervasive violence that destroys countless lives and diminishes all lives.”22 The motive for the arson, in light of statements by the defendants and their supporters, appears to have been this: by eliciting outrage at a small act of destruction, it was meant to turn critical attention to truly damaging Deadly Abstraction
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forms of violence and, ideally, expose the hypocrisy of its denouncers. It sought, in short, to transform consciousness, while permitting leftists, in their minds, to take the moral high ground.