Jeremy Varon (41 page)

(Märchen),
prompting bitter demonstrations against him.65 As the strike wore on, several dozen people engaged in brief “solidarity hunger strikes,” among them the author Peter Schneider and the renowned German-Swedish prison advocate Brigitta Wolff, while many others publicly endorsed the strikers’ demands.

On the fifty-fourth day of the strike, the seemingly inevitable happened: an inmate, the RAF’s Holger Meins, producer of a notorious 1968 film showing how to make a Molotov cocktail, died of starvation in Wittlich Prison Hospital. His death prompted a level of outrage on the left not hitherto seen during the RAF’s existence. Meins had been something of an exception in the RAF. As a student in Berlin, he had shown considerable promise as a filmmaker, and as the youth movement grew, he was drawn most strongly to its graphic expressions. A poster of his depict-ing a flower with a grenade at its center and the names “Vietcong,” “El Fatah,” “Black Panther,” and “Weatherman” shooting from the petals, with the words “Free All Prisoners” below it, had been widely used in the 1970 May Day demonstration in Berlin. The poster was also left at the site of an anonymous bombing of an IBM office, and it was soon condemned as a criminal incitement to violence, leading to the prosecution of its publishers,
833.
66

Former friends and associates uniformly describe Meins as sensitive, sympathetic, and warm—quite unlike SDS’s ideologues and the others in the RAF, who seemed obsessively focused on their dangerous work.67

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As if alluding to his character, in prison the RAF gave Meins the nickname “Starbuck” from Melville’s
Moby Dick.
Described by Melville as

“earnest” and “conscientious,” Starbuck had tried in vain to keep Ahab from seeking revenge against the whale.68 Though Meins’s experience in the RAF and in prison hardened him, he apparently retained a certain softness and abstract longing, evident in his art; beside his deathbed sat a very accomplished collage he had made in prison in which simple colored shapes floated over a black background.

In response to Meins’s death, angry protests took place in Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and other cities, in which demonstrators charged that Meins had been murdered by the state. Central to this claim was the charge that Meins had deliberately been force-fed an insufficient amount of calories; medical evidence marshaled by the RAF’s defenders suggested that the intake of small amounts of nutrients was actually more debilitating than no intake at all, and that force-feeding had therefore hastened his death.69 In West Berlin, up to 2,500 people gathered in university auditoriums to discuss possible responses, while demonstrations—

despite being officially banned— choked sections of the city.70 A resolution circulated at the Technische Universität asserted: “The motive behind the special treatment of political prisoners in the FRG is clear: to silence them . . . to make them renounce their political beliefs and, as a necessary means to that end, to destroy their souls and rob them of their identities.”71 Rudi Dutschke, though not a supporter of the RAF’s violence, attended Meins’s funeral and, standing over the grave, exclaimed:

“Holger, der Kampf geht weiter! (“Holger, the struggle continues”).72

More radical voices still, such as the Committees against Torture, insisted that Meins “died for the liberation of the people from imperialist exploitation” and unequivocally endorsed the RAF’s “armed struggle against the imperialist system of the multinational corporations, which sustains itself through open fascism and genocide.”73 At the extreme, guerrillas responded to Meins’s death with violent retaliation.

For the prisoners, the ultimate purpose of the hunger strikes was to sustain their political struggle with the only mode of resistance left to them. The RAF described the strikes as “the last weapon of our prisoners for the propagation, mobilization and organization of anti-imperialist politics.”74 Underlying this assessment of the strikes was the RAF’s belief that repression inside prisons epitomized the oppressiveness of the West German state and imperialism as a whole. The RAF inmate Siegfried Haag charged that “the direct violence of the state is carried out in your cell”; to resist in prison was therefore to take on the state in the most di-Deadly Abstraction

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rect manner possible.75 The RAF and its supporters also linked the campaign against prison conditions to a larger sense of struggle in other ways: by attributing Meins’s death to “class justice”; by portraying Stammheim, the high-security prison where the RAF’s leaders were eventually lodged, as the densest concentration and most vivid symbol of state power; and by lauding Meins, Baader, Meinhof, et al. as heroes of the “international class struggle” for their defiance in prison. The RAF thus asserted the continuity of its resistance in prison with its founding vision of revolutionary anti-imperialism and of the guerrilla as an icon of unending resistance. Far from destroying the RAF’s sense of collective purpose, the prison experience provided a new context in which it carried its politics forward and crafted a heroic self-image.

The state and its defenders dismissed the RAF’s allegations of mistreatment as exaggerations or outright fabrications, whose shrewdly instrumental purposes were to draw new recruits into terrorism, manipulate public opinion, and provide justifications for more acts of terror. The state defended any “special treatment” of the prisoners on the basis of its suspicion that they conferred from their cells about violent plots on the outside. Much evidence supported the state’s skepticism about the complaint of torture. Only small numbers of prisoners experienced severe isolation and only for limited periods of time. After objecting to the absence of stimuli, inmates were allowed to have radios, phonographs, and television sets in their cells. They were also permitted newspapers and extensive libraries, which included even manuals on the technical aspects of guerrilla war. At the start of 1975, Baader had more than 400

volumes in his cell.76 Neither was human contact in short supply. Baader had 58 meetings with lawyers in January 1975 alone and more than 500

such visits from November 1974 to January 1977.77 According to one account, imprisoned terrorists (convicted or alleged) received a staggering 12,664 visits from lawyers and others between 1975 and 1977, during which charges of “isolation torture” raged.78 Moreover, RAF members in Stammheim and other facilities were eventually allowed to meet with one another for portions of the day. One conservative commentator, observing all this, remarked wryly that if RAF inmates were subject to any “special treatment,” it consisted of the enjoyment of immense privileges.79 The liberal news weekly
Der Spiegel,
which investigated prison conditions in advance of an interview it conducted with prisoners during the third hunger strike, came to a similar conclusion.80

The prisons themselves proved quite porous. Through the semi-secret

“Info-system,” lawyers shuttled messages among RAF inmates and from 222

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the inmates to the world outside; with these, the group was able to engage in collective discussions of political and strategic matters, maintain some sense of cohesion, and, for a time and to a degree still unknown, give instructions to the underground. The most dramatic security breaches took place in Stammheim prison. Starting in 1974, officials began moving RAF’s leaders, among them Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader, into the newly refitted, high-security wing of the Stuttgart facility. The state also built, at a cost of millions, a special courthouse next to the prison capable of handling what officials saw as the stringent security demands of the impending trial.81 Eerily drab and designed for maximum efficiency, Stammheim earned the reputation of being West Germany’s most secure prison, in which techniques for the control of inmates had been perfected.

Yet the RAF’s attorneys managed to bring in all manner of contraband: first, messages from other prisoners; then cameras, with which the inmates photographed their Spartan cells to document their alleged abuse; and, finally, the Colt revolvers that Baader and Raspe presumably used to commit suicide.

In addition to misrepresenting the extent of their isolation, RAF members made what seemed incompatible accusations against the state. They denounced, for example, both the denial of water to
and
the forced feeding of inmates as inhumane attempts to break the hunger strikes (drinking water, the inmates claimed, greatly enhanced the ability to survive without food).82 Moreover, RAF members in prison
had
in fact conferred—

at least in 1973 and 1974—with those on the outside about possible violent acts to win their freedom. And to those in the underground, their freedom was initially thought essential to the
continuation
and
strengthening
of the armed struggle.83 Finally, some on the radical left contended that the campaign against “torture” was politically driven deception, more or less as the state had asserted. In 1978, Horst Mahler, who had split from the RAF while in prison, described the charge of torture as a

“propaganda lie” intended to “morally blackmail” the left and “legitimate the brutal form of struggle” employed by guerrillas trying to extort the prisoners’ release. With the chiding and, some prisoners felt, conde-scending remark that “an Indian brave doesn’t cry,” Mahler recommended that imprisoned guerrillas accept the consequences of their actions without specious complaints.84

The government’s position had, however, its own profound biases and blind spots. The state consistently downplayed or dismissed outright the damaging effects of isolation broken only by intermittent visits and highly mediated “contact,” such as that which radio listening offered. It refused Deadly Abstraction

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to accede to demands for more conventional conditions of confinement whose fulfillment—while hardly threatening “national security”—would have alleviated the prisoners’ hardships and might have prevented the prison deaths. The state also failed to understand the hostility that its techniques of discipline and punishment bred in the prisoners. In force-feeding, doctors strapped inmates to their beds, pried their mouths open with painful clamps, and pumped nutrients into them through tubes running through their nostrils or down their throats.85 Some force-feedings, Schiller alleges, were administered with deliberate brutality, leaving the mouths of the inmates bloodied.86 The inmates found more subtly offensive such things as the placement of extra locks on their cell doors; the mandatory taking of meals in isolation; the barring of timepieces from the cells; and the maze of procedures—described in numbing detail in official prison documents distributed by the prisoners’ advocates—

governing their confinement, observation, and movement.87 Such practices formed the experiential basis of the prisoners’ denunciations of the Federal Republic as a terroristic state, determined to destroy them by means of torture. There was, in short, a Foucauldian subtext to the inmates’ broadly Marxist charge that their treatment showed the lengths to which a capitalist society would go in liquidating militant communist resistance. More than anything else, the prisoners seemed to resent and rebel against the highly nuanced and invasive ways that power functioned in the prisons as “total institutions.” Betraying no appreciation of the ordeal of the prisoners and how it might affect their mind-set, the Christian Democrat leader Helmut Kohl announced before the Bundestag just after Schleyer’s murder that “the suicides in Stammheim were no admission of defeat. . . . They were only an expression of the boundless fanaticism driving the terrorists’ assault on every humane and peaceful order.”88

The RAF’s dubious presentation of its campaign against “isolation torture” as the epitome of an “anti-imperialist” politics testifies, in part, to the group’s self-absorption. Consumed by the issue of prison conditions, the RAF failed in the mid 1970s to address imperialism in anything other than a highly general sense. Nor did it articulate exactly how its battle against prison conditions would help the peoples of the Third World. For the most part, the RAF simply asserted that since it was, in its self-description, an anti-imperialist group, support for the group necessarily advanced the anti-imperialist cause. By this logic, RAF prisoners virtually equated their fate with the destiny of global anti-imperialism. The shift in the RAF’s language was an index of the group’s involution. By the mid 1970s, the RAF had virtually ceased producing anything ap-224

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proaching a systematic geopolitical analysis or program of action.89 Its statements had become increasingly shrill, defensive, fragmentary, repetitive, and jargon-laden. Asked by a
Der Spiegel
interviewer in 1975 to describe the Federal Republic, RAF prisoners responded: “Imperialist center. U.S. colony. U.S. military base. Leading imperialist power in Western Europe, of the European Community, second greatest military power in NATO,” and so on.90 Speaking in this blunt, semi-private language, the RAF increased its internal cohesion at the expense of its ability to apprehend, and communicate effectively with, the outside world.

In broadly political terms, the RAF’s self-absorption in prison was an outgrowth of a problem that had long afflicted the New Left in both West Germany and the United States: its lack of a strong connection to “the masses” or “the people.” In developing a radical politics not rooted strictly in class conflict, New Leftists in both countries sought to liberate themselves and their movements from narrow Marxist conceptions of how social change happens. Yet in this freedom, they faced the prospect of operating without the benefit of a sizable and energized base—of being self-appointed leaders without a large mass of followers.

Efforts to make their revolts fully popular ones repeatedly failed, however much they may have tapped into common dissatisfactions and desires. The more dogmatically, or desperately, New Leftists insisted upon their connection and service to “the people,” the more awkward their separation from “the people” became.