Authors: Bringing the War Home
It describes the West German state as literally murderous and the situation of the prisoners as so desperate that it constitutes a self-evident justification for Ponto’s murder. It employs a perversely general standard of political guilt, whereby Ponto’s status as a prominent banker made him an agent of genocide. With their evasive construction of “the bullets that hit him,” the RAF members fail to properly name or assume responsibility for their act. Finally, Ponto’s killers appear to take morbid pleasure in their victim’s powerlessness.
The RAF began its armed struggle with exalted, if impossible, ambitions. It had hoped to instigate an uprising in West Germany that, in concert with revolutionary movements worldwide, would usher in a global, socialist utopia. Its violence was to be discriminating in its targets and strictly guided by principles, winning the public’s acclaim. Yet the group received little support and was overmatched by security forces. Its violence, even in its early phases, was not nearly as circumspect as its rhetoric suggested. Over the course of the 1970s, the struggle against imperialism became more and more a “private war” against the state, and the noble anti-imperialist fighter—always in part a figure of RAF’s myth-making—gave way to the “free-the-guerrilla guerrilla,” whose modus operandi was hostage taking, extortion, and murder. Following the kidnapping of Schleyer and the murder of his driver and three guards, Jochen Reiche asserted that the people of West Germany “now fear, no longer without justification, being killed by those who once sought to free them.”120
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, individual guerrillas experienced doubt about the value and legitimacy of armed struggle. Some renounced violence and spoke out about the need for a comprehensive reconciliation of the conflict between the guerrillas and the state. Among an enduring “hard core,” however, the sense of the validity and even ho-236
Deadly Abstraction
liness of the armed struggle persisted. In the 1975 RAF trial, Meinhof repeated the group’s mantra that “the actions of urban guerrillas are never, never directed against the people. They are always directed against the imperialist machine . . . [and] the terrorism of the state.”121 The RAF’s history, with its deaths of civilians and moments of heedless cruelty, belied her self-righteousness.
The June 2 Movement illustrates just how strong the guerrillas’ powers of denial and rationalization could be. The group was composed mostly of West Berlin anarchists, some of whom had working-class backgrounds.
Like America’s Yippies, they combined an absurdist hippie sensibility with militant politics. Horribly out of place in the colorless world of West Berlin and chronically disgusted with German society, J2M members nicknamed themselves “the Blues.” With the name, they seemed to admit the futility of armed struggle and the doomed nature of their lives as improbable “urban guerrillas.” Even while underground, some members wore flamboy-ant clothing and long hair, as if to tempt police to capture them.
The J2M felt that the RAF, despite its socialist rhetoric, was essentially a group of elitist intellectuals. The J2M fancied itself, by contrast, the champion of the common man and woman and made on occasion special gestures to demonstrate its populist bent.122 In the wake of the RAF’s murderous Stockholm embassy takeover, J2M bank robbers gave chocolates to the frightened bank customers to indicate that they meant them no harm. The J2M kidnappers of the CDU official Peter Lorenz treated him with respect in captivity, for which he publicly thanked them after his release. Just days after Lorenz was let go, dozens, if not hundreds, of West Berliners risked arrest in distributing 50,000 copies of the J2M pamphlet
Die Entführung aus unserer Sicht
(“The Kidnapping As We See It”).123 The statement was styled as a tribute to everyday people and to the resentment of the rich by the poor and the working classes.
The J2M explained: “We believe that words and arguments are no longer of any use in changing what is rotten in our society. . . . [W]hat does it mean when a man toils all day and comes home so exhausted that all he can do is sit in front of the TV? Where do child abuse, domestic violence, and suicide come from? And why don’t we find such things in Berlin’s wealthy suburbs but in its low rent districts?”124 The pamphlet then publicized, based on documents found in Lorenz’s briefcase, his considerable salary (20,000 marks a month, earned mostly through his corporate dealings) and the plight of a poor, single woman with a handicapped son whose pleas for help Lorenz had ignored. In Robin Hood–like fashion, the J2M sent the woman the 700 marks Lorenz had in his wallet.
Deadly Abstraction
237
Yet it was the J2M that killed the German shipbuilder Erwin Berlitz when it bombed the British Yacht Club in Berlin in February 1971 in protest of the “Bloody Sunday” killings by British forces in Londonderry.
Though treating Lorenz with respect, his captors had planned to execute him should the government refuse to release imprisoned guerrillas. Following its killing of Justice von Drenkmann, the J2M had charged that
“the outcry at [his] death . . . is the outcry of the ruling class over the death of one of its own.”125 With this claim, it ignored the fact that the act drew sharp criticism from across the political spectrum, including the far left. Young radicals massing in Berlin following Meins’s death typically denounced both the state and von Drenkmann’s killers.126 The left-wing newspaper
Berliner Extra-Dienst
insisted: “The death of Holger Meins demands from every leftist unconditional solidarity with a victim of bourgeois class justice. The attack on the president of the Berlin Court demands unconditional protest against the exercise of violence against a human being.”127 Finally, on the night of June 4–5, 1974, a J2M cell murdered a twenty-two-year-old student, Ulrich Schmucker, as a “traitor,” for allegedly having given some mildly sensitive information to the police while in custody. After a cursory review of the “evidence,” a J2M
“tribunal” found Schmucker guilty and sentenced him to death.
Schmucker’s body was found in a forest outside of Berlin, where he had been shot in the back of the neck. Echoing the RAF’s rhetoric, a J2M
flyer denounced left-wing criticism of the act as “whiny, moralistic, pacifistic, and divisive.”128
.
.
.
The goal, free human beings, must already be evident
in the means.
Herbert Marcuse, “Mord darf keine
Waffe sein” (“Murder Cannot Be a Weapon”)
For much of West German society, the guerrilla movement evoked fear, intense loathing, and concern for the nation’s security; the overarching imperatives were to find, indict, prosecute, and imprison its members, while incapacitating their networks of support. For leftists sharing some of the guerrillas’ broad goals, the RAF and similar groups posed a different set of challenges and questions: how to turn political and moral outrage to constructive ends; how to develop a militant practice that was consistent with one’s values; and how to maintain the integrity of one’s 238
Deadly Abstraction
resistance. As they debated these questions, leftists discerned not only the strategic failure of the armed struggle but also its problems as a politics and ethics of resistance.
Leftists of all kinds denounced the RAF’s violence for its ineffectiveness as a political strategy. The RAF mostly alienated those it meant to mobilize and, by provoking state repression, worsened the political climate in which all leftists had to operate. This negative verdict on the
efficacy
of RAF’s violence implied a larger judgment on its legitimacy.
Herbert Marcuse made this criticism with special force.
In a 1977 editorial following the killing of Schleyer, Marcuse asserted that there exist circumstances in which the murder “of the agents of repression,” like Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the Spanish prime minister (assassinated in 1973 by Basque separatists), or, hypothetically, Hitler,
“truly changes the system—at least in its political manifestations—and mitigates oppression.”129 He also argued that “tyrant murder”
(Tyran-nenmord),
such as that of the SS leader Heinrich Heydrich in Czechoslovakia in 1942, is justifiable on both instrumental
and
symbolic grounds by virtue of the “tyrant’s” direct involvement in horrendous crimes.130 The RAF’s violence clearly failed to meet these criteria. Though implicated in a capitalist system Marcuse deemed oppressive, figures such as Buback and Schleyer were hardly villains in any immediate sense, and their deaths could not conceivably help to topple the power structures of which they were a part. In a relatively stable, prosperous society such as the Federal Republic,
The physical liquidation of individuals, including the prominent and the powerful, does not upset the normal functioning of the capitalist system.
Rather, it strengthens its repressive potential, without (and that is decisive) activating or bringing to political consciousness potential opponents of repression. Indeed, these people represent the system: but they only
represent it.
That means, they are reproducible, exchangeable, and the reservoir for their recruitment is inexhaustible.131
Given this reality, the RAF violated what Marcuse called the “law of revolutionary pragmatism” that must guide socialist practice. Marcuse additionally rejected the notion that the
structural
guilt of capitalism’s representatives necessarily translates into their individual culpability. He pointed out that the idea of structural guilt, taken to its logical extreme, makes workers the chief culprits in oppression, because their labor is singularly indispensable for the reproduction of capitalism.132 In its facile approach to questions of guilt, the RAF also violated the “law of revolutionary Deadly Abstraction
239
morality” that in essence requires that “the goal, free human beings, must already be evident in the means.”133
Iring Fetscher was a liberal professor who in the late 1970s assumed the role of the Federal Republic’s semi-official critic of the RAF. He consistently defended West German democracy and identified the numerous
Denkfehler
—“errors of insight”—that doomed the RAF’s efforts. The RAF’s misreading of Marxism was one such error. In
Capital,
Marx describes individuals as
Charactermaske
(“character masks”), insofar as they personify and bear particular functions within a social division of labor. But for Marx, the notion of a character mask is an
analytic,
not an existential, construct. It describes people only with reference to their socioeconomic roles, not in their totality. (Indeed, one RAF member later confessed that though his cell dutifully studied Marx and Kant, they had not understood what they read terribly well.)134 Furthermore, individuals assume particular roles through pressure exerted by the division of labor, thus mitigating their responsibility for the roles they play. Fetscher protested, “one cannot kill a character mask, but only a living human being in his many-sided complexity. . . . The terrorist who intends to kill a character mask outdoes with his crime the inhumanity of a system that he allegedly fights and wants to change.”135
More radical voices accused the RAF of a deeper betrayal of socialist principles. The University of Hannover psychology professor Peter Brückner, like Marcuse, vigorously supported New Left protest and was embraced by young radicals as an intellectual patron of their cause.
Though not an advocate of armed struggle, he publicly criticized the treatment of RAF prisoners, warned of fascist tendencies in the Federal Republic and, in a biography of Meinhof, situated her rage in relation to what he saw as the hypocrisy and failed potential of West German society. In 1972, at the age of forty-seven, Brückner was suspended from his university post after having been accused at the trial of the RAF’s Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who turned “state’s witness,” of having lent RAF’s leaders material support when they were in hiding.136 Brückner was, however, deeply troubled by the left’s violence. In 1974, he and Barbara Sichermann published reflections on the J2M’s killing of Schmucker, which implicitly condemned the kinds of political murder more commonly practiced by the RAF and other guerrillas.
Brückner used the assassination to state a kind of first principle of political morality: that “a human being is always an embodiment of hope, of expectation.”137 To Brückner, it is precisely this vision of humanity informed by freedom and possibility that justifies the killing of arch-240
Deadly Abstraction
oppressors like Heydrich. Far from embodying hope, they “live as the death of others, as their hopelessness.”138 This view of humanity should also preclude reducing people to categories and assuming dominion over their fate, as in the Schmucker tragedy. Brückner decried the rhetoric used by both the J2M and its left-wing critics: the description of Schmucker as a “traitor” by his executioners; as a “little pig,” not worth killing, by one group; and as a “petit bourgeois,” scarcely responsible for his transgression, by another. For Brückner, this kind of abstraction—deplorable in its own right—was quintessentially a quality of the left’s adversaries, as the “fascists, the state forces, the executive powers readily reduce humans to abstractions. We demand of the left, which lives by abstraction in its intellectualizing, not to abstract in this case. . . . [T]he left has, in contrast to the right, scruples about death, and knows the relationship between means and ends.”139
Brückner conceded that not all self-described leftists obeyed the principles he outlined. To Brückner, it was Stalin who had above all practiced a lethal “left-Manicheanism.” Brückner, like Fetscher, observed that Marx denounces capitalists only for the economic functions they perform, such that “‘capitalist’ does
not
mean ‘not-human,’ and even less ‘bull’ or
‘pig.’” Yet Stalin, by equating one’s economic function with one’s identity, divided people into a “‘world and counterworld,’ into a good portion [and] an evil part,” for whom “there is truly no place in the world.”140
Essentializing political conflict in this way, Stalinist Manicheanism “is in reality racist [and] turns the class conflict into a race conflict.”141 With their murders of “traitors” and “capitalists pigs,” the RAF and the J2M