Authors: Bringing the War Home
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helps to conceal the class character of this repression and encourages the isolation of communists.”48 In making the response of the masses the ultimate measure of the RAF’s credibility, communists judged the RAF a grievous failure.
The “Angela Davis Conference” held on June 3–4 at the University of Frankfurt featured less dogmatic but no less forceful indictments of the RAF. As in the United States, New Leftists in West Germany saw radical African Americans as a vanguard of the global movement. Angela Davis, on trial at the time for the Marin County courtroom takeover, was a hero among German leftists as well. The purpose of the conference was to express support for Davis and the black movement, but also to explore the meaning of solidarity.
Oskar Negt, one of several prominent left-wing intellectuals at the conference, used part of his address to denounce the RAF. Describing its actions as “unpolitical,” he warned: “Whoever turn politics into a test of individual courage, without being able to specify its goals and program for change, becomes more and more a victim of his own illusions. . . .
Whoever believes that he can, with exemplary action, spectacular prison breaks, bank robberies, and bombings, create a revolutionary situation . . . erects an impenetrable wall between himself and social experience.”49 According to Negt, the RAF had committed the May bombings on the basis of horribly mistaken premises: that the current situation in West Germany was one of “open fascism,” that violence against individual policemen or Springer executives could weaken capitalism, and that the group’s violence expressed the popular will. At root, the RAF
had lost touch with the “lived experience of human beings” and therefore had no “objective corrective for the evaluation of the political effectiveness of its actions.”50 Negt concluded by voicing the essence of socialist criticism of the RAF: that “without the active support of the working class, there can be no fundamental change in our society.”51 In the wake of the May actions, the RAF suffered a double marginalization: first, from the mainstream of German society and, second, from the very movement to which it looked for support.
The “May Offensive” ultimately spelled the doom of the RAF’s founding generation. The bombings prompted a massive hunt for RAF
fugitives, in which more than 130,000 police patrolled West Germany’s highways, checked its borders, and combed key quarters of its cities.
Up to this point, the public had experienced the terrorist conflict almost exclusively through the media. As citizens now encountered roadblocks and checkpoints, endured searches, and responded to pleas for infor-Deadly Abstraction
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mation to aid state investigators, they became direct participants in the drama.
The police generally enjoyed the public’s cooperation. Baumann, underground at the time, reports that after the injury to the Springer workers, even “liberal sympathizers” withheld support from fugitives, and some threatened to turn them in.52 In late May, a Frankfurt resident became suspicious of three male neighbors as they mixed some unknown materials outside their house. He alerted police to what turned out to be the hiding place of Baader, Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, who had been preparing explosives. The three were arrested on June 1, following a firefight during which Baader was shot in the leg. On June 7, a clerk in a Hamburg boutique grew suspicious of a nervous-looking young customer who had what appeared to be a heavy object—in fact, a gun—in her bag. The clerk called the police, who arrested fugitive Gudrun Ensslin. Two days later, police captured the RAF’s Brigitte Monhaupt and Bernhard Braun in Berlin.
Shortly after midnight on June 14, a young woman knocked on the door of a left-wing teacher and trade union member and asked if two people could stay with him. Though he agreed, he suspected that the vis-itors were RAF fugitives. He called the police, who lay in wait at his house and on the 15th captured two suspects, Gerhard Müller and a woman whom they believed was Ulrike Meinhof. Unable to verify initially the suspect’s identity, investigators took an X-ray of her skull and compared it to an X-ray of Meinhof’s skull—tucked in a
Stern
magazine article about the RAF found in the apartment—showing evidence of a brain surgery she had undergone years earlier. The X-rays matched. When the police captured Irmgard Möller and Klaus Jünschke three weeks later, virtually everyone in RAF’s “hard core” was now in custody. The
“people” had spoken by rejecting their self-appointed leaders, and the career of the RAF’s first generation as a clandestine armed struggle group was over.
.
.
.
Clear awareness that your chances of surviving are none.
Ulrike Meinhof, “Brief einer Gefangenen aus dem
Toten Trakt” (“Letter of a Prisoner from the Dead Tract”) The incarceration of the RAF’s founding members brought about the formation of new underground cells and a decisive shift in the means and 216
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ends of the guerrilla movement. In one commentator’s description, the
“‘anti-imperialist struggle’ transformed into a battle against the Federal Prosecutors’ Office and Federal Police.”53 The scene shifted accordingly from the networks of the underground to the prisons and the courtroom.
Virtually all the major acts of violence of the mid and late 1970s had one main goal, the freeing of imprisoned guerrillas. These actions were frequently brutal, signaling another escalation in the intensity of left-wing violence.
The immediate cause of this escalation was RAF and other political inmates’ insistence that they were being subjected to systematic mistreatment in prison. Though often ignored or minimized in histories of the RAF, the controversy over prison conditions was among the most important aspects of the conflict. The charge of abuse, which the state resolutely denied, dominated the RAF’s politics for much of the 1970s and 1980s. The issue of the prisoners’ treatment was also among the most vexing dimensions of the conflict. The RAF and the state made wildly different claims of fact and interpreted the same facts very differently. So divergent were their perceptions that it seemed as if they were describing fundamentally different realities, with no mediating force able to settle which version was truer. The prison controversy thus serves as a mi-crocosm of the ambiguities and even inscrutability characterizing the conflict more broadly.
The overarching complaint of RAF prisoners was that they were subject to special, highly punitive handling
(Sonderbehandlung)
on account of their politics. Their chief objection was to being held for months or even years in isolation both from one another and from the general prison populations in the various facilities in which they sat. These conditions could apply even while they were in pretrial detention
(Untersuchung-shaft).
Contact with lawyers and relatives was also severely restricted.
At an extreme, some prisoners languished in “dead tracts”
(tote Trakte),
prison floors almost entirely lacking in stimuli and on which they were the only inmates. The RAF decried a host of other measures: the denial or heavy censorship of reading materials, the inspection of personal and legal correspondence, “acoustic isolation” from external sounds, fluores-cent lights left continually burning in the cells, frequent cell and body searches, and meticulous, around-the-clock surveillance of their actions, including by cameras (
Spione,
or “spies”) peering into their cells. To the RAF, these practices amounted to deliberate, modern, and “hygienic”
forms of physical and psychological torture.54 To buttress their claims, the RAF and its support groups cited the findings of American and Ger-Deadly Abstraction
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man researchers concluding that isolation was in fact an effective method of manipulating and seriously degrading the psyche, the emotions, and the will.55
Though the accusation of “isolation torture”
(Isolationsfolter)
was intentionally provocative and hotly contested, the toll of isolation on some prisoners appears to have been very real. The RAF’s Astrid Proll was arrested in May 1971 on charges (from which she was later cleared) stemming from a shoot-out with police. In 1971–72, she spent a total of more than five months of near-complete isolation in the Women’s Psychiatric Section of the Köln-Ossendorf prison. The attorney Ulrich Preuß, who represented Proll and her fellow inmate Ulrike Meinhof, complained that his clients “lived practically 24 hours a day in a completely undifferentiated environment.”56 Utterly silent, nearly all white, and entirely unadorned, it was “acoustically and visually desolate,” with the inmates “totally bereft of social contact,” save brief encounters with corrections officers at mealtimes.57 He likened their treatment to shock ther-apy used on psychiatric patients. The attorney Henning Spangenberg described Proll’s ordeal in more sadly poetic terms, insisting that “the only contact [she] had was with her torment.”58 The conditions proved so debilitating to Proll that a judge ordered her release from prison altogether and suspended her trial. For years thereafter, confined spaces and perfect silence brought back terrifying memories of her cell.59
Meinhof, kept for eight months in 1972–73 under similar conditions in the same facility, wrote from her cell a poem, “Aus dem Toten Trakt”
(“From the Dead Tract”), that conveyed the sensory confusion, demen-tia, and consuming rage that isolation wrought: “You can no longer identify the meanings of words, only guess. . . . Guards, visits, the yard seem as if they are on celluloid. . . . Raw aggression, for which there is no out-let. That is the worst. Clear awareness that your chances of surviving are none. . . . Visits leave behind no trace. . . . The feeling that time and space are interlocked . . . that you move in a time loop.”60 Meinhof’s poem, widely circulated by the RAF, induced other inmates to fear extreme isolation. Margrit Schiller, incarcerated in Lübeck prison in 1974, came to the horrifying conclusion that she too was on a “dead tract” as the other inmates were removed, one by one, from her floor. Surrounded only by a “vast emptiness,” she, like Meinhof, became unable to “distinguish internal perceptions from external reality.”61
In a 1973 report widely cited by the RAF and its advocates, the Dutch psychiatrist Sjef Teuns asserted in scientific language what the inmates’
testimony intimated: that isolation and sensory deprivation induced the 218
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“progressive disorientation,” the “deformation of the personality,” and, ultimately, the “destruction of the sense-deprived individual.” His report concluded ominously: “Sensory deprivation—because it can only be produced through human manipulation—is at once the most human and inhuman method for the protracted degradation of life. Applied for months or years, [it] is the proverbial ‘perfect murder’ for which no one—or everyone, except the victim—is responsible.”62 An even more damning perspective came from Heinz Brandt, an Auschwitz survivor who had also suffered extended periods of solitary confinement in an East German prison. In a 1973 interview, he asserted,
As crass and paradoxical as it may sound, my experiences with strict, radical isolation were worse than my time . . . in a Nazi concentration camp
[KZ]
. . . . [I]n the camp, I still had the bases for human life, namely, communication with my fellow inmates. . . . We were able in the camps to see, not only outrageously fascistic and sadistic mistreatment, but also the possibilities for resistance and collective life among the prisoners, and, with this, for the fulfillment of the fundamental need of a human being: social existence.63
The self-described “political prisoners” charged that the practical intent of their mistreatment was to induce confessions, force betrayal within their ranks, and, in keeping with Dr. Teuns’s research and Brandt’s testimony, literally destroy individual prisoners. The state’s larger purpose, as they saw it, was to dispirit and destroy anti-imperialist resistance. The inmates protested by engaging in a series of well-coordinated hunger strikes, starting in January 1973. Dozens of prisoners from the RAF and other groups participated in the first three major strikes, carried out over a twenty-month period. The strikers were supported by their attorneys, legal aid organizations such as Rote Hilfe, and the “Committees against Isolation Torture in the Prisons of the FRG,” which formed in 1973–74
in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and other cities.
The hunger strikes sought most immediately to improve prison conditions, chiefly by ending the isolation of inmates and related depriva-tions. Though they gained considerable attention and some public support, they generally failed to win the inmates any of their core demands.
With each new strike, the resolve of both the inmates and the government grew, as did the stakes. The first strike had forty participants and lasted a month. In the second, running nearly seven weeks in the spring of 1973, officials introduced the controversial practice of force-feeding the inmates in an effort to break the strike. The strike ended with isolation being lifted for only two inmates. That winter, responding to their Deadly Abstraction
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clients’ enduring despair and the media’s skepticism about their complaints, the RAF’s attorneys organized a controversial teach-in at the Technische Universität Berlin titled “Torture in the Prisons of the FRG.”
Family members of the inmates spoke out as well, holding press conferences in which they blasted the government for the inhumane treatment of their loved ones.
The third strike, beginning in September 1974, involved eighty inmates and lasted a grueling 140 days (some inmates suspended their strikes as others joined). Determined to win their demands, but anticipating the state’s intransigence, the inmates squarely faced the prospect of their deaths. A month into the strike, thirty-five mostly young activists occupied the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood as an act of solidarity with the inmates. Marathon discussions took place, yielding a resolution, signed by twenty-seven pastors, that described the occupation as an act of conscience and called for an impartial inquiry into prison conditions.64 Berlin’s
Justizsenator
Horst Korber dismissed RAF’s reports of torture in Berlin’s Moabit prison as “fairy tales”