Jeremy Varon (4 page)

The RAF’s brutality, most pronounced in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, has been the object of intensive, if often highly speculative, analyses. Explanations range from the psychopathologies of the individual members, to the internal dynamics of the group, to the specter of Hitler returned in the RAF as his depraved children.17 The most promising interpretive framework highlights the influence of the fascist past on the political conflict of the West German 1960s and 1970s.

The RAF sought to punish Germany both for the sins of that past and for what it saw as their repetition in the present through such things as police repression and German support for American “genocide” in Vietnam. Here the RAF practiced a logic of vilification, in which it equated the political and judicial custodians of the Federal Republic with Nazi perpetrators. It thus felt an imperative to use any means available, including the murder of state agents, to bury finally the archenemy of political modernity. The RAF also employed, however unselfconsciously, a logic of vindication, in which armed rebellion now would compensate for the virtual absence of violent resistance in Germany to the Nazi regime. In this capacity, lethal violence promised to liberate RAF members from the psychological and political burdens of the past and break the chain of German guilt.

By practicing terror themselves, RAF members compounded their political failure with moral failure, while deepening their connection to the damage of the past from which they sought an escape. The RAF’s extreme violence also crystallizes the differences between the American and West German armed struggles. Weatherman’s violence was equally inef-14

fective in bringing about the kind of social change it imagined. But by observing limits, Weatherman contained the cost of its choices. In one of the few statements of comparison between the two movements, Hans-Joachim Klein of Germany’s Red Cells lamented in 1978 that “the members of the guerrilla [movement] are no longer capable of acting like the Weathermen in the States. Of saying now we stop.”18

The American and West German armed struggles differed, finally, in the reactions they elicited from their governments and societies. In the 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. security agencies employed invasive, illegal, and violent means in combating domestic dissidents, particularly the Black Panthers. The FBI aggressively pursued the Weathermen and other New Left fugitives. Yet its campaign against them was nothing in scale and intensity like the West German state’s assault on left-wing violence.

Partially, this was a consequence of Weatherman’s restraint. Avoiding injury to persons, Weatherman never inspired the diffuse public fear that would doubtless have prompted even greater governmental wrath. In part, the Weathermen were granted a kind of preferential treatment relative to black radicals, who remained objects of fierce pursuit. But the Weathermen also benefited from a broad shift in the national climate in the mid 1970s. In the wake of the strife of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, attention turned to the reestablishment of public trust in government and to reconciliation. Congress exposed abuses of power by the FBI in its pursuit of dissidents and acted to constrain its activities. Under this scrutiny, security agencies curtailed their campaign against the Weather Underground and generally let the group—now considered more a nuisance than a threat—fade into obscurity. Only a few underground Weathermen were ever captured, and those who surfaced voluntarily in the late 1970s and early 1980s served little or no time in prison.19

The RAF and other violent German groups were objects of relentless vilification and police action. As in the RAF’s excesses, the fascist past figured heavily in the state’s response. The government and its supporters insisted that the terrorists were the authentic heirs of fascism, who, like the Nazi SA during the Weimar Republic, threatened a fragile democracy. Fear of communist subversion enhanced the imperative the state felt to use extreme measures to preserve what it saw as the integrity of Germany’s postwar democratic experiment. The means the state chose had mixed results. Though effective in capturing the RAF’s early leaders, antiterrorist measures only deepened the RAF’s view of the West German state as fascist and its determination to attack it by violent means.

Students, intellectuals, and others extended sympathy to the RAF as victims of repression, fearing that antiterrorism threatened to turn West Germany into a police state, where the mantle of constitutionalism was used to mask an unreconstructed authoritarianism. In short, West German terrorism was a tortured form of
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
—a symptom of Germany’s difficulty in confronting and working through its Nazi past.

Rather than shedding light on the conflict, the antifascist rhetoric of the RAF and the government contributed to excesses on both sides, demanding a new process of reconciliation.

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A final index of the different impacts of Weatherman and the RAF on their respective societies is the degree and kind of commentary devoted to each group. Neither Weatherman nor the violence of the American New Left more broadly has generated a distinct historiography. Scholars most often discuss such violence as a small part of larger contexts and movements: antiwar protest, SDS, and the New Left as a whole. The dominant attitude toward Weatherman has been a highly critical or even dismissive one, reflecting both widespread antipathy to the group, then and now, and its limited resonance in American politics and culture. Many Americans who lived through the 1960s have few particular memories of the Weathermen, whose actions can easily fade into general recollections of turmoil.20 For small groups of mostly young rebels, the Weathermen have exerted an enduring fascination over the past two decades, though the group’s activities have typically been appreciated more as lore than as political history. Only with the recent release of the documentary
The Weather Underground
has the group emerged from the shadows of history into the light of public memory and popular culture.21

The RAF, in contrast, has been the object of persistent reflection in Germany. Works on German violence include a 1985 bestseller, several biographies, and other popular histories, memoirs by former members, voluminous studies by government agencies and security experts, and all manner of scholarly treatments from the disciplines of political science, history, sociology, and psychology. The RAF has also made a strong mark on popular culture, inspiring movies, plays, paintings, museum exhibits, musical compositions, photo-essays, and countless TV and print retrospectives on the anniversaries of key events in its history. For much of the RAF’s early existence, the group’s leaders were household names in West Germany, where their fate approached a national obsession. Every 16

West German who lived through the peak years of the terrorist drama seems to have some vivid “RAF memory,” whether seeing a wanted poster in a public place, hearing rumors that a fugitive was nearby, being stopped at a security checkpoint, or following harrowing moments in the conflict in the media.

The very different standing of Weatherman and the RAF in their nations’ consciousnesses demands different approaches to their presentation. I provide separate sections on them that complement, rather than mirror, each other. In the case of the Weathermen, I furnish a textured account of the group’s experience, drawing extensively on interviews with former members. In these, I have sought less a record of “the facts” of Weatherman’s history than the reflections of former members on the political meaning of their experiences, as well as what they thought and how they felt when they entered, engaged in, and withdrew from the armed struggle. I appeal to oral history, then, for representations of the past generated through the subjective work of memory—with its exclusions, contingent connections, and spontaneous eloquence—and not for the “objective” reconstruction of the past. Given Weatherman’s efforts to define itself through action, my analysis consists mostly of the close reading of events—of actions themselves as complex texts. I concentrate on the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Weatherman’s importance was at its peak.

In the case of the RAF, I provide condensed narratives of key episodes in the group’s existence until 1977, when the first era in its history came to an end. I am unable to use the methods of oral history with the RAF, many of whose members died in the 1970s; nonetheless, they achieved great notoriety, and ample material exists for conveying their experiences.

I favor juxtaposition over direct comparison of the two groups. Chapter 1, which explores the similarities in their origins, moves between discussions of the American and German settings. Thereafter, I treat Weatherman and the RAF more or less separately. This permits flexi-bility in stressing those issues and experiences most important to each group. All historical comparisons seek to have each “case” illuminate the other, and I hope to guide, but not rigidly control, that process of mutual illumination.

Some continuities of approach exist throughout. One is my effort to present both Weatherman and the RAF in competing and even contradictory ways. Analysts have commonly portrayed the groups in essentially pathological terms by describing their members as zealots, whose activism, beyond a certain point, had little to do with politics as such.

The groups’ “ideology,” within this framework, amounted to a delusional belief system built on an irrational contempt for their societies and the sense of themselves as a revolutionary elect, “chosen” to fulfill a world-historical mission. An observer of the American New Left who saw Weatherman as a “passionate aberration” concluded, “in a burst of almost religious enthusiasm, the Weathermen plunged beyond politics, which measures things in the here and now, to a higher realm where the student movement could not survive.”22 German analysts have similarly charged that the RAF suffered from an acute
Realitätsverlust,
or “loss of reality,” that doomed it to its destructive illusions.23 Understanding political violence then becomes largely an exercise in deconstructing su-perstitions and interpreting the behavior of what amount to cults.

A more layered perspective, developed largely by social scientists, sees violence like that of Weatherman and the RAF as an exotic form of political action that emerges at the far margins of legitimate politics and at very specific moments in the evolution of social movements. The agents of violence, in this view, retain a limited rationality, but their behavior remains on the whole pathological, driven by such structural factors as their isolation and the policing strategies deployed by the state. Issues of politics and morality generally recede in the effort to understand their actions.

I seek to restore a stronger measure of rationality and moral purpose to Weatherman and the RAF in order better to understand both their political histories and the complex nature of political violence more generally. Far from being simple zealots with more or less totally warped worldviews, members of both groups were driven by political conviction and a commitment to serve their ideals with radical action. In reconstructing their beliefs and the political cultures of which they were a part, I therefore do not confine myself to pointing out their flawed premises.

I also stress the coherence of their beliefs within the context of their times, as well as the pathos of their core longing for a radically different and better world.

At the same time, both Weatherman and the RAF did have a driven and even crazed quality, which makes their histories at once so fascinating, disturbing, and difficult to fully comprehend. At times, the views of both groups seem to have been far removed from political realities, and their behavior to have exceeded the rational pursuit of distinctly political goals. Their members strayed far beyond the realm of “normal”

politics into the rarefied world of the underground—a world of extraordinary danger, determination, fear, arrogance, trust, triumph, togeth-18

erness, suspicion, exhilaration, and despair. At their worst, both groups violated their stated morality and, whether in word or deed, showed streaks of cruelty. Doing justice to their histories—as well to the experiences of those whom they offended, attacked, injured, and killed—means also understanding the radical nature of their practice and their many errors in political and moral judgment. Gaining this understanding is not primarily a matter of deciding where politics ends and religion begins, where the rational and irrational or good and evil separate, or how conviction can be clouded by delusion. Rather, it requires appreciating how seemingly religious longings—for a transcendent future, for societal perfection, and for a sense of ultimate purpose—may infuse politics and culture; how the rational and the irrational may coexist with political conflicts; and how desires, dreams, and delusions may feed and confound one another.24

With both Weatherman and the RAF, my strongest accent is on the mutually informative relationship between research and theory. Though I draw on the insights of social movement theory—which provides elaborate models of how social movements and certain forms of protest emerge, evolve, and decline—I do not speak its distinctly sociological causal language. I work instead with other forms of theory, principally varieties of critical theory, ethics, and psychoanalysis. With these, I develop political, psychological, moral, and existential perspectives on forms of political behavior that may ultimately resist even the most carefully wrought explanations. Psychoanalysis is commonly used to interpret the psychology and behavior of individuals, and it could be fruit-fully applied in this way to Weatherman and the RAF. I use it, in a somewhat different fashion, to explore the often hidden logic of
collective
political and cultural processes.

The German-born Jewish Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who fled to America during the years of Nazi rule, holds special value for my study. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the great intellectual patron of New Left movements the world over. Addressing audiences in the United States and West Germany, he embodied the New Left’s internationalism and serves as a bridge between the two national experiences I consider. Marcuse, in addition, provided powerful insights into the structure of postwar societies, the promise and failings of the New Left, and ethical questions raised by its militancy, always informed by his analytical rigor and uncommon commitment to hope. I therefore both treat Marcuse as a historical actor and draw on his ideas to think through the tensions and conflicts of the era.