Jeremy Varon (43 page)

order versus chaos, good versus evil, truth versus falsehood,” as well as

“a defense of basic identity and dignity.”100 The saga of suffering and death is made ultimately meaningful within the terms of cosmic war; though the martyr may be vanquished in the here and now, his or her death nourishes that larger struggle, settled in some greater scale of time.

Martyrdom, in converting the “failure” of death “into a victory,” is therefore a form of symbolic empowerment, much like terrorism itself.101

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Though the RAF certainly had no overtly religious dimension, the group did assert the utter corruption or fallenness of the capitalist world and promoted socialism as a near-redemptive ideal of perfect justice. It likewise gave its struggle a near-sacred cast as a battle between good and evil, between the great defenders and enemies of life. The RAF’s sense of being locked in a cosmic struggle intensified as its “real power” diminished and its situation grew more desperate. Nearly delirious from starvation, Meins wrote from his deathbed: “The only thing that matters is the struggle—now, today, tomorrow, whether we eat or not. . . . Either a pig or a man / Either survival at any price or struggle unto death / Either problem or solution / There is nothing in between. . . . Everyone dies anyhow. What matters is how, and how you lived. It’s simple. Fighting the pigs as a human being for the liberation of man . . . , fighting to the last, loving life, disdaining death.”102 With these variously sad and severe pronouncements, Meins makes his own “struggle unto death” the ultimate sign of the triumph of his humanity and his limited victory over death.

The apparent suicides of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe—though denounced by some in the mainstream as cynical ploys to make the state
appear
murderous—may be also be viewed in sacrificial terms. By taking their own lives, the inmates potentially sought both to affirm and symbolically overcome their powerlessness in the face of a hopeless situation. That their deaths, and by extension their lives, were locked in a struggle over the sacred was confirmed by their fate in death. Public contempt for Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe was so great that some Stuttgart residents clamored that their bodies be left to rot or thrown into sewers.

Gudrun Ensslin’s father encountered great difficulties as he searched for someone in the city willing to provide a burial plot for a proper funeral.

Behind the desire to deny the RAF’s dead a conventional burial, it seems, lay a wish to deny them, not only whatever sanctification and forgiveness the grave might bring, but their humanity. Stuttgart’s mayor, Manfred Rommel, son of the famous World War II general Erwin Rommel, feared an extended debate over the matter, and so he quickly decided to have the three buried in a cemetery just outside the city’s limits. This compromise appeared to have its own ritual purpose: to ward off whatever impurities their bodies represented. At the funeral, police mounted on horseback chased angry mourners through forest roads, while police helicopters circled overhead. At the actual burial, surrounded by a thicket of police, the caskets of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were unceremoni-ously dumped in the ground, while Gudrun’s sister and young child looked grimly on.103

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.

.

.

The death of Holger Meins and the decision to take up

arms were one and the same.

Volker Speital, “Wir wollten alles und gleichzeitig nichts”

(“We Wanted Everything and Nothing Simultaneously”)

Whatever the objective merits of the prisoners’ complaints, their fate had a powerful subjective impact on those forming new guerrilla cells. Some in these cells were established RAF members who, having been successful in hiding, or been themselves released from prison, were intent on freeing their friends and comrades. Remarkably, within months of serving more than a year in prison, Schiller rejoined the underground, where she conspired to engage in “liberation actions.”104 But others among the reemergent underground, called RAF’s “second” and “third generations,” were younger than the RAF’s founders and had not passed as thoroughly through the activism of the 1960s. To a great extent, they became radicalized through the issue of the prisoners’ treatment.

Siegfried Haag had by no means endorsed the RAF’s methods when he began working on the long-awaited trial of the RAF’s leaders in the mid 1970s as a court-appointed attorney. Immersion in the plight of his hunger-striking clients, and Holger Meins especially, soon changed his views. Haag, who was at Meins’s bedside just before he died, described his sense of powerlessness: “I shall never be able to forget this experience all my life. I was so intensely involved [with his situation] at the time and I felt that as a lawyer I could not defend him the way he needed to be defended . . . [nor] do anything to prevent [his] death.”105 Nine months after Meins’s death, Haag was arrested for allegedly trying to procure arms for the RAF. He promptly fled Germany, after which he conspired to free RAF members.

Hans-Joachim Klein came from the working class and became politicized while serving in the late 1960s as a conscript in the army. In the mid 1970s, he went from working with Rote Hilfe to joining the semi-clandestine Red Cells, with whom he engaged in violent actions. He too described the death of Meins as a “trigger” that forced him to see “the impotence of legality.” Thereafter, Klein carried in his wallet the grotesque autopsy photograph of Meins, who at his death weighed less than 100

pounds. Klein confessed keeping the picture with him so as “not to dull the edge of my hatred.”106

Volker Speital, born in 1950, entered the “anti-authoritarian rebel-232

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lion” on the countercultural side. In the early 1970s, he lived with his wife Angelika in an “alternative” house, where he took drugs, read Timothy Leary and Wilhelm Reich (not Dutschke or Marcuse), and “dreamt of a farmhouse in the country, of nature, love, and freedom.”107 Though he knew little of the RAF, he felt “oppressed by the pressure to conform,” so he cheered the group’s assaults on the established order.

Speital eventually began working in Stuttgart with Rote Hilfe, whose members’ intense political convictions deeply impressed him. Soon he became involved with the Stuttgart Committee against Torture, run out of the office of the RAF’s lead attorneys, and began carrying messages between prisoners.

Years later, he described how this work led him underground: I saw prisoners in silent cells being literally tortured and slowly destroyed through scientifically researched methods. One felt one was in enemy territory. The opponent was no longer just [Federal Prosecutor] Buback . . . but practically anybody who did not actively protest these methods. I saw only the hunger strike and did nothing else . . . than agitate for fourteen to sixteen hours a day with leaflets, press releases [etc.] in support of it. Then came the day Holger Meins died. . . . For us his death was a turning point.

Partly because we had never been so close to such drastic misery and death, and, more important,—truth be told—because we felt morally responsible for his death. Responsible because our strenuous activities to help him could not prevent his death. The death of Holger Meins and the decision to take up arms were one and the same. Reflection was no longer possible; one simply reacted to the emotional power of the prior months.108

In addition to describing vividly his sense of despair, Speital indicates the extent to which the focus of the armed struggle had narrowed. Speital employs the near-standard trope by which New Left radicals described their turn to illegality. He recounts working tirelessly through legal means to stop a perceived injustice; sensing himself encircled by the state and isolated within the left; turning contemptuously against anyone not equally consumed by concern; and, crucially, feeling
personally
responsible for suffering and death he was unable to prevent. His decision to adopt violence, at which point emotion replaced reflection, came with the piercing recognition of the apparent inadequacy of conventional forms of protest. Yet the object of Speital’s outrage differed from that of radicals, including the RAF’s founders, of just a few years prior. It was not the persistence, in spite of peaceful protest, of great global injustices, such as the war in Vietnam. It was not prompted by the murder of an innocent protester, such as Ohnesorg in 1967, or the shooting of a leader, Deadly Abstraction

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such as Dutschke, in 1968. Rather, Speital’s rage stemmed from the circumstances of a small number of prisoners who had been captured after committing lethal acts in what they saw as conditions of war.

Merely working on behalf of the prisoners, Speital suggests, reproduced some of the peculiarities of underground existence, by which the world both was and wasn’t the way it appeared. Baptist Ralf Friedrich, who was also involved with the Committees against Torture, explained that surveillance of underground activities was such that one “couldn’t take a single step without the police knowing [about it]. For us, the Federal Republic
was
in fact a police state.”109 By the same token, the intensity of the work deformed his perceptions. “We were a closed circle,”

he allowed. “It was always the same people talking about the same things.

A group dynamic set in that blocked certain ways of thinking. We were no longer able to apprehend reality.”110

The violence designed to free imprisoned guerrillas signaled not only the narrowing of the politics of armed struggle but also the further loss of its moral ballast. The killing on November 10, 1974, of West Berlin’s
Kammersgrichtspräsident
(Supreme Court President) Günter von Drenkmann by the June 2 Movement in a botched kidnapping attempt was a chilling case in point. Von Drenkmann was a liberal SPD judge who had had no judicial dealings with guerrilla groups. The day after Meins’s death, his killers came to his house posing as flower deliverers (he had just celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday) and shot him when he resisted capture.111 Von Drenkmann’s role as a leading member of the judiciary and, hence, his “exchange-value” as a hostage, would appear to account for his having been the J2M’s target. After the shooting, the J2M insisted that its violence hurt only those who “exploit, deceive and betray the people” and portrayed von Drenkmann as a villain who
deserved to be
murdered.
112 To the J2M, he was among the “hard core” of those responsible for Meins’s death simply because he was West Berlin’s highest-ranking judge.113 It added by way of justification that, like his father, he had been a judge during the Nazi period, which presumably made him an embodiment of the persistence of fascism.

Other grisly acts of violence followed. The occupiers of the German embassy in Stockholm on April 25, 1975, called the “Kommando Holger Meins,” executed two diplomatic staff members and pledged to kill a hostage every hour to convey the seriousness of their demand that twenty-six prisoners be released. The raid ended abruptly when bombs the RAF had placed in the embassy accidentally exploded, killing two RAF members. On May 9, 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead by 234

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hanging in her Stammheim cell. Though officials stated that she had committed suicide, leftists charged that she had been murdered by the state.

The RAF’s Jan-Karl Raspe, standing trial in Stammheim-Stuttgart with RAF’s other leaders, announced in court, “I don’t have much to say. We believe that Ulrike was executed. We don’t know how, but we know by whom and we can imagine the nature of the method.”114 Demonstrations both larger and more militant than those following Meins’s death took place across West Germany. In a Frankfurt protest, a policeman was seriously injured. On May 15, some 7,000 people, many with heads covered to avoid identification by police, attended Meinhof’s funeral in West Berlin. The following April, the RAF exacted revenge. In Karlsruhe, the

“Kommando Ulrike Meinhof” assassinated Chief Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, the official broadly responsible for the prosecutions of the RAF, also killing his driver, Wolfgang Göbel, and a justice official, George Wuster.115

With its murder in late July 1977 of Dresdner Bank’s Jürgen Ponto, the RAF reached new levels of shocking aggression. Susanne Albrecht and two male companions came with flowers to the door of the Pontos, who were friends of Susanne’s parents. Once inside the house, she and her companions pulled guns in an effort to take Ponto hostage. When he resisted, Albrecht and her accomplices shot him five times. His wife watched him die. The fall of 1977 brought more victims. On September 5, in an attempt to free eleven prominent guerrillas from prison, RAF’s “Kommando Siegfried Hausner” kidnapped in Cologne Hanns Martin Schleyer, the current president of the Employers Association of West Germany and a former SS
Hauptsturmfürher.
In the process the RAF killed Schleyer’s driver, Heinz Marcisz, and three police guards, Reinholf Brändle, Roland Pieler, and Helmut Ulmer. (Schleyer had feared he might be a target for the RAF and traveled with a special security detail.) Following the GSG

raid in Mogadishu of the hijacked plane and the deaths in prison of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe on the evening of October 17–18, the RAF

executed its prisoner, shooting him three times in the head in a forest on the German-Belgian border (pine needles were found in Schleyer’s mouth). In a communiqué sent to the French newspaper
Liberation
on October 19, Schleyer’s killers declared that they had ended his “miserable and corrupt existence” and instructed police where they could find his body. Schleyer’s corpse was recovered the following day in Mulhouse, France, from the trunk of a green Audi.116

Public statements issued by the “commandos” committing these acts are striking in their near-total absence of explicit political content. Those Deadly Abstraction

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accompanying hostage takings mostly listed demands, made threats, and discussed the mechanics of the proposed exchange of the hostages for the prisoners.117 Ponto’s killers remarked: “In a situation where the Federal Prosecutors’ Office and Secret Services are preparing to murder their prisoners, we don’t have much time for long statements. As for Ponto and the bullets that hit him . . . we will say that we didn’t realize clearly enough how powerless such characters, who instigate war in the Third World and wipe out whole nations, are in the face of violence when it confronts them in their own homes.”118 This statement starkly reveals the mind-set of the most brutal among the armed struggle’s new generations, whose actions even the prisoners did not necessarily support.119