Jeremy Varon (38 page)

To Meinhof, the protests following the May 11, 1968, attack on Dutschke were of a piece with the arson. Supporting the transition from

“protest to resistance,” evident in the injury of scores of police in street battles, she wrote: “Those who from their positions of political power condemn the throwing of stones and acts of arson . . . but not the bombing of Vietnam, terror in Iran, or torture in South Africa . . . [are] hypocritical.”23 Meinhof held fast to the basic formula of her response to the “pudding attack,” even if pudding had since given way to stones, fists, and fire.

Determining what drove some radicals to cross the line from “violence against things” to forms of “armed struggle”—whether arsons, bombings, or armed robberies—that intended or held a great risk of injury is an imposing challenge. Frustration with peaceful protest, the escalating conflict with police, the attraction to Third World struggles, and perceptions of the Federal Republic as quasi-fascist—all these played roles in that transformation. These “causes” did not, however, render armed actions simply a next step in a linear progression toward “terrorism.”

Rather, armed struggle represented a radical leap—a fundamental shift in one’s politics and sense of self—taken as the pressure of events, beliefs, and feelings built to a breaking point. An article in the West Berlin anarchist paper
833,
printed just a week before the freeing of Baader, conveys how radicals experienced that pressure.

In mid April of 1970,
833
ran a lengthy piece on the American movement, highlighting the early history of Weatherman. Mirroring the rhetoric and imagery of America’s underground press, the article was headlined in English “Blow Up Amerika, Blow Up Berlin!” and surrounded by pictures of Weathermen fighting police and drawings of dynamite.24

From the rash of bombings in America, the authors concluded that the Weathermen and other radicals there had succeeded in threatening “the capitalist establishment where it is most vulnerable—at its center.” Unaware of Weatherman’s efforts to rethink its approach following the townhouse explosion, the authors insisted: “The political debate over the Weathermen will continue. But their commitment and devotion force every American revolutionary to examine his own relationship between who he is, what he thinks, and what he does.” In chiding and even aggressive tones, the article put the challenge to German radicals: 204

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Remember the good old days of the movement, when we talked up Mao, Che, the Viet Cong, and Revolution, without ourselves being Mao, Che, the Viet Cong, or revolutionaries? . . . Do you remember the nice, comfortable, bourgeois, hippieish, counterrevolutionary, anticommunist, boring, empty, deadly, disgusting days? Those days are, thank God, over. For us “movement people” there are only two possibilities. Either we press on to become fighters in the global revolution or we slink back into our bourgeois holes and become anticommunist swine.

This passage is striking in the assumptions it makes and the urgency it conveys. The movement and the world had moved rapidly through whole phases, such that what had made sense even a few months before was no longer adequate. Some fateful hour had been reached at which revolutionaries faced the stark duty to fight. The alternative, presented with self-disgust approaching self-hatred, was to lapse into the misery of counterrevolutionary complacency. Salvation from this wretched condition ultimately meant one thing: to “pick up the gun.” The choice was no real choice at all, but an act of political and existential necessity.

The decision to move from resistance to “armed struggle” brought new, more destructive forms of violence, and with them the sharper challenge of arguing their legitimacy. The RAF faced this challenge in its founding act, the freeing of Baader on May 14, 1970, from a Berlin research institute, during which two security guards were shot and an elderly staff member, George Linke, was nearly killed. The shooting of Linke, though clearly not analogous to the violence in Vietnam, was nonetheless an injury to a “civilian,” making the RAF vulnerable to the charge that it had engaged in the same kind of callous victimization of “ordinary people” of which the left accused capitalism.

For Baader and his comrades, the sense of triumph at pulling off the audacious act overshadowed the problems raised by the shooting. In its founding communiqué, printed in the May 22 issue of
833,
the RAF

lauded Baader’s “liberation” as the first crucial step in the building of a bona fide “Red Army” and made no direct mention of the injury to Linke.25 The statement, printed under an image of a black panther taken from the Black Panther Party logo, ran:

Did the pigs really believe that we would let comrade Baader sit in jail for two to three years? Did the pigs really believe that we would forever fight with paintballs against bullets . . . ? Did any pig really believe we would talk about the development of class struggle . . . without arming ourselves at the same time? Did the pigs who shot first believe that we would allow Deadly Abstraction

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ourselves to be gunned down like slaughter-cattle? Gandhi and Martin Luther King are dead. The bullets that killed them, the bullets that hit Rudi

[Dutschke] . . . have ended the dream of nonviolence. Whoever does not defend himself will die. Whoever does not die will be buried alive: in prisons, in reformatories, in the hovels of Kreuzberg, Wedding, Neuköln, in the stony wastelands of the new housing developments, in the overcrowded kindergartens and schools, in the perfectly furnished, newly built kitchens, in the mortgaged bedroom palaces. . . . START THE ARMED STRUGGLE! BUILD UP THE RED ARMY!

In a tape-recorded message printed in
Der Spiegel
on June 5, Meinhof brazenly defended the RAF’s conduct during the escape: “Those in uniforms are pigs, not human beings . . . there is no use in talking to them, and naturally they can be shot.”26 In a second communiqué, which appeared two weeks later in
833,
the group confronted its critics: It makes no sense to tell the wrong people what is right. We have been doing that for too long. We do not have to explain the Baader Liberation Action to the intellectual windbags, nervous Nellies, and second-guessers but only to the potentially revolutionary portions of the population—those who understand the action immediately because they understand themselves to be prisoners as well. . . . [It is to them]—not the petit-bourgeois intellectuals—[that] you owe the explanation that enough is enough, that the time for action has come. . . . Behind the supervisors stand the shop foremen, the personnel office, the security force, public relief, the police.

Behind the janitor stand the building manager, the owner, the marshal, the eviction notice, the police. . . . Without a buildup of the RAF, the bastards and pigs can do what they want and go on doing it: incarcerate, fire, fine, take kids away from parents, intimidate, shoot, rule. To bring the conflict to a head means stopping them from doing what they want and making them do what we want.27

It is hard to know quite how to assess these statements. Whatever their claims, the authors were certainly conscious that they were speaking to multiple audiences and that what they said about their acts was integral to the acts themselves and to how the group was perceived. But if the statements were composed with some care, they also seem born of the heat of the violent moment, suffused with an associative mixture of defiance, exhilaration, and foreboding.

The communiqués reverse the logic of earlier militancy. If, for example, the moral substance of the department store arson lay in the gaping distance between it and the violence the arsonists protested, the value of Baader’s freeing lay precisely in the use of equivalent force against the enemy—bullets, and not “paintballs,” against bullets. The RAF piles up 206

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the justifications, as if it is at once explaining itself to the world and convincing itself of the virtue of its act. The “liberation action,” it insists, conveys the depth of its commitment to revolution and its loyalty to its

“comrades.” Aimed at a “subhuman” adversary who seeks the annihilation of all who resist, it is also an act of self-preservation and a way of claiming dignity. In an echo of Weathermen’s slogan “Kill or be killed”

following the Days of Rage, the RAF declared that the choice now was to fight or die. The indictment of German society, finally, is total, mandating its destruction. Wherever the RAF looks—whether at prisons, schools, bureaucracies, or workplaces—it sees only coercion, violence, and living death.

The statements’ aggressive tone counts for more than braggadocio.

According to Mark Juergensmeyer in his study of religious terrorism, virtually all terrorist violence, especially that which is horribly destructive, is at root “symbolic.”28 That is, it offers its assailants primarily forms of symbolic empowerment in the place of more tangible political gains; this grant of the “illusion of power” defines terrorism, even when it does achieve some limited strategic purpose or temporarily changes the political and psychological landscape by exposing the vulnerability of the power it attacks. Juergensmeyer’s model suggests that there was a symbolic or compensatory aspect to the RAF’s actions, no matter the group’s stated goals and self-understanding. The RAF’s language oozes with self-aggrandizement, from the gloating over the action to the taunting of the police and the claim that the system must now bend to
its
will. The intent behind the RAF’s call to build a literal guerrilla army may well have been to transcend symbolism and turn the illusion of power into “real”

power by waging a popular campaign of violence. Yet the great danger the RAF faced was that this “symbolic empowerment,” far easier to achieve than a genuinely popular revolt, would become an end in itself.

In the absence of such a revolt, violence of an increasingly destructive sort would be required to sustain the
illusion
of power.

The RAF did not issue its first extensive manifesto, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla” (“The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla”), until nearly a year after its formation. Meinhof had privately confessed regret for having said, following the freeing of Baader, that the police were mere “pigs, not human beings,” and the RAF sought with the new statement both to clarify its position and to improve its image.29 Written by Meinhof, working day and night in a Hamburg apartment, the lengthy tract finally addressed the shooting of Linke:

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As for the question, asked often enough, whether we would have liberated Baader if we knew that Linke would be wounded—the answer to this question can only be no. The question of what would have happened if . . .

[ellipses in original] is ambiguous, pacifistic, moralistic, and whoever asks it is just sitting on the fence. . . . It is an attempt to trivialize the question of revolutionary violence and give [it] and bourgeois morality a common denominator, which isn’t possible. . . . There was no reason to believe that a civilian would intervene. The idea that one can perform an unarmed prison liberation is suicidal. . . . We shoot only when someone shoots at us; the pig who lets us go, we let him go as well.30

Meinhof’s statement is grossly ambivalent. On the one hand, it articulates limits to violence, such as a prohibition against needlessly endangering civilians. Had the RAF known it would violate this limit, it would not have tried to free Baader. On the other hand, Meinhof obscures the fact that in the action, the RAF had violated its own creed: even if the security guard had shot first, the unarmed Linke—hardly a “pig”—had
not
shot at them. In addition, the statement denounces any inquiry by

“outsiders” into the legitimacy of the act as an expression of a “bourgeois” worldview that has no right to judge the group’s conduct. The RAF thus declared itself to be the sole arbiter of the morality of its actions, accountable only to itself. Finally, Meinhof suggests that concern with the ethics of violence is a sign of indecisiveness about the validity of armed struggle. In the RAF’s unforgiving judgment, indecisiveness on this question virtually amounted to complicity with oppression. By equating scrutiny of the morality of violence with betrayal of the struggle, the RAF further invalidated the reservations of its critics and pushed aside ethical questions.

.

.

.

For capitalists, profit is everything and the people who

produce it for them are no better than dirt.

RAF communiqué,

“Erklärung vom 20. Mai 1972, Kommando 2. Juni”

In its first two years of existence, the RAF, along with other “urban guerrilla” groups in West Germany, appears to have broadly adhered to the principles Meinhof had laid out. In a series of bank robberies in the fall of 1970, the RAF stole more than 220,000 marks without firing a shot.

From late 1969 on, radicals committed dozens of bombings and arsons 208

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of banks, police stations, administrative buildings, and U.S. military facilities. Some were carried out by established groups like the “Tupamaros–

West Berlin” (which soon became the June 2 Movement), but others were committed by anonymous ad hoc collectives. In virtually all these attacks, the damage was limited to property.31

The early serious injuries and deaths associated with the armed struggle occurred in shoot-outs between police and suspected terrorists, with the guerrillas claiming that they had fired only in self-defense. A gunfight in Berlin in February 1971 prompted the first nationwide hunt for RAF

fugitives. A second security operation six months later, in which 3,000

heavily armed police patrolled cities in northern Germany, produced the armed struggle’s first martyr. On July 15, in Hamburg, police shot and killed the RAF’s Petra Schelm, a twenty-year-old hairdresser from Berlin.

Her death, captured in a newspaper photo of blood pouring down her face, outraged the left and led some among the broader public to question the aggressive tactics used in pursuing suspected terrorists. In October, the RAF killed its first policeman, thirty-three-year-old Norbert Schmid, in a shoot-out in Hamburg from which the gunman, Gerhard Müller, and Meinhof narrowly escaped. Margrit Schiller was captured, quickly becoming a lightening rod for the public’s growing hostility to the RAF.32 In the next six months, police shot and killed two more radicals, twenty-four-year-old George von Rauch in Berlin and Thomas Weisbecker, aged twenty-three, in Augsburg. Both had been leading figures in the rebel youth scenes in their cities, and their deaths spurred small protests throughout West Germany. In Hamburg, on the day of Weisbecker’s shooting, the RAF and police exchanged gunfire, during which the RAF’s Manfred Grashof and Police Commissioner Hans Eckhardt were severely wounded. Both soon died from their injuries.