Jeremy Varon (56 page)

(None had been convicted for involvement in acts of murder, and they generally were serving sentences many times longer than their actions, such as the possession of firearms, would dictate in normal, “nonpolit-ical” cases.) And on his last day in office, President Clinton used his pardon power to free two former Weatherwomen, Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg. Conversely, the U.S. government has continued to hunt and prosecute fugitives from the 1960s and 1970s. Notably, five former SLA members were convicted in early 2003 for the death of Myrna Opsahl, killed in a 1975 bank robbery while she was depositing a church collection.

Most recently, in August 2003, Kathy Boudin was granted parole after serving twenty-two years for her involvement in the Brinks murders. (She had eventually entered a guilty plea on a single act of murder and was sentenced to twenty years to life.) The parole board appeared both impressed by her work in prison to expand access to education and health care and moved by her testimony. Boudin expressed great remorse over the loss of life and described her participation in the robbery as a massive error in judgement rooted as much in her personal “weaknesses” as in her politics. Elaborating, she echoed early critiques of Weatherman’s vulnerabil-Conclusion

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ity to a “politics of proving” and to “white guilt.”42 At the time of Brinks, Boudin still saw armed struggle as a way to help the poor and oppressed.

But, with anguished hindsight, she confessed, “I feel I was there to prove to myself that I was somebody who was committed. . . . I said to myself every day, I am an important person, because I am not just going to rejoin middle-class society.” This self-assurance masked profound self-estrangement. She continued, “It was unreal. . . . I wasn’t an important person. And I was doing nothing on a day-to-day level actually related to the things I really care about,” as being underground severely restricted her political activities. Defending to the parole board her claim that she knew almost nothing of the details of the robbery, and simply waited in the getaway car as instructed, she explained, “I thought as a white person involved in supporting . . . essentially a black struggle that it was wrong for me to know anything.” This ignorance, she felt at the time, represented

“the highest level of . . . commitment.” Now free, she has a new world of opportunities to serve the people and the causes she cares about.

Efforts to free other prisoners, some of whom claim they were framed, have been the cause for the coalescence of a kind of community of armed struggle veterans, their comrades from years back, and a growing number of young activists. At periodic events, they praise and celebrate the struggle, pay tribute to those still incarcerated, distribute literature written by the prisoners, and organize legal and political strategies for their release.

.

.

.

The urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now

history.

1998 RAF communiqué

Unlike Weatherman, the RAF remained active throughout the 1980s, during which the emphasis shifted from near-exclusive concern with its imprisoned members back to opposition to imperialism. In June 1979, after a nearly two-year lull in armed actions, an RAF bomb narrowly missed killing NATO Commander Alexander Haig in Brussels.43 What was left of the June 2 Movement, crippled by arrests, folded into the RAF in early 1980. In 1981, the RAF bombed the headquarters of the U.S Air Force in Ramstein, Germany, injuring two dozen people. The following year, the RAF issued the strategy paper “The Guerrilla, Resistance, and the Anti-imperialist Front,” which explained the rationale for its recent actions and its attacks to come. The RAF then built an alliance with the 302

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French group Action Directe, with whom it engaged in a deadly bombing of a NATO school in 1984 and the assassination of a French general the following year.44

The Red Cells remained active as well, seeking to link their violence to such popular movements as opposition to nuclear energy, the deployment of cruise missiles, and attacks on the rights of asylum seek-ers.45 Between 1984 and 1987, the numbers killed (25) and wounded (367) in guerrilla attacks surged to new highs not seen since the mid 1970s.46 Armed struggle, by the mid 1980s, appeared to be a permanent feature of West German political life, carried out by a host of clandestine cells and supported by a loose network of radical bookstores, legal collectives, independent militants, and semi-legal groups like the Autonomen, who used low-level violence as a street tactic. If anything, the armed struggle movement, broadly defined, had grown since the 1970s both in size and sophistication. For years the Bundeskriminalamt dia-grammed the RAF’s organizational structure in pyramidal form. By the end of the 1980s, it showed four levels. At the top were the “commandos,” estimated at between fifteen and thirty people, who lived under false names and engaged in “attacks on persons.” Below were the “illegal militants” and then the members of the “militant RAF environment”

(“Militantes RAF-Umfeld”);
thought to number in the hundreds, they provided logistical support and sometimes engaged in lesser acts of violence such as attacks on property. At the base were the 2,000 or so people in the “‘legal’ RAF environment,” responsible for “agitation and propaganda” through such things as advocacy for the prisoners.47

To the guerrillas, the persistence of the armed struggle had a political basis; none of the injustices the RAF had originally targeted had been eliminated, dictating that violent resistance continue. Equally important, the survival of the guerrilla movement reflected its continuing denial of political realities. Despite their populist rhetoric, the RAF and the Red Cells remained insular subcultures. Their voluminous statements, though claiming to address past failures and changed conditions, mostly recirculated crude axioms asserting the evils of imperialism and the heroism of the guerrillas.

As the RAF committed brutal acts of violence in the mid 1980s, its already limited support eroded further. In August 1985, in a forest near Wiesbaden, the group killed a twenty-year-old American soldier, Edward Pimental, so that it could use his ID to infiltrate and attack a U.S. air base in Frankfurt. That attack, committed by the “George Jackson Commando,” came the same day, killing a U.S. serviceman and a soldier’s Conclusion

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wife. Even groups like the Autonomen denounced the killings as cynical, politically counterproductive, and without moral justification.48 A year later, the RAF killed Gerold von Braunmühl, a liberal voice in West Germany’s Foreign Ministry. His brothers shamed his killers by publishing an open letter in the left-wing newspaper
taz.
In it, they paid tribute to their brother’s humanity, condemned the RAF’s communiqué, which “justified” the act in leaden slogans, and challenged the RAF to explain how their brother’s death conceivably advanced its cause.49 The RAF never responded. The brothers also gave money they had received from a literary award for the letter to the legal defense of the RAF prisoner Peter-Jürgen Boock, convicted of multiple murders for his role in the killings of Ponto and Schleyer. Pointing to irregularities in his trial, Boock maintained his innocence and rallied international support to have his case reheard; one of the von Braunmühl brothers personally appealed to the Bundespräsident for Boock’s pardon. In 1992, Boock ended his audacious lie by confessing that he was, in fact, guilty and announced,

“I have brought shame on myself.”50 With his declaration, the RAF

reached a new ethical low.

The state, for its part, continued to hunt down, arrest, and at times kill RAF fugitives. Stefan Wisniewski was captured in France in May 1978, becoming the first RAF member to stand trial for the murder of Schleyer.51 Several months later, two fugitives died in firefights, followed by the lethal shooting in 1979 of Elisabeth van Dyck, wanted in connection with the 1975 Stockholm embassy raid. Between 1982 and 1984, police captured nine leaders of the RAF’s active commandos. The news for the state was both good and bad. With the arrests, it had seemingly incapacitated another of RAF’s “generations.”52 But the RAF’s attacks in the wake of the arrests showed how quickly the group could regenerate itself. The harsh treatment of RAF prisoners continued as well, prompting additional accusations of “isolation torture” and hunger strikes (in a 1981 strike, the RAF’s Sigurd Debus died), pleas for compassion from family members, and international censure of the Federal Republic. (In 1981, ten individuals were indicted under section 129a simply for painting slogans supporting the hunger strikes. Amnesty International highlighted the drawn-out cases in annual reports on human rights abuses.)53 As the conflict ground on with seemingly no end in sight, members of the German public criticized both the RAF and the state anew.

The violence of the 1980s and the reaction it provoked entrenched more deeply a pattern of conflict that had been established in the mid 1970s—one that had as much to do with the poorly processed fascist 304

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legacy as it did with the justifications each side gave for its conduct. The state’s struggle against terrorism was far from being a simple expression of the desire to protect democracy. The RAF was very different in its goals, methods, and capabilities from the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s, and Bonn was not nearly as unstable as Weimar. Yet neither was the antiterrorist campaign evidence of the systematic
Faschisierung
of West Germany. On the contrary, West Germany grew more open and democratic in the 1970s and 1980s, evidenced by the increasing acceptance of public protest; the flowering of progressive movements, such as environmentalism, feminism, and peace activism; the left’s enjoyment, with the emergence of the Green Party, of unprecedented influence within the political establishment; and even the partial acceptance of low-level violence—such as ritually occurs on May 1, when radicals and police do street battle in major German cities. Those leftists frustrated in the 1980s with the “resiliency of capitalism” might well have complained more of

“repressive tolerance”—the acceptance of nonthreatening forms of dissent, described by Marcuse as the greatest barrier to radical change—

than of naked repression.

The eventual easing of the conflict was an uneven process, driven by both local and global circumstances. The first opening came with the call in the late 1970s and early 1980s by RAF prisoners, their attorneys, and some Green Party politicians for “amnesty” for longtime inmates.

The premise behind amnesty was that the conflict had, in essence, been a civil war; when a war is over, amnesty advocates reasoned, captured combatants are released. Nearly all of those prisoners calling for amnesty voiced criticisms of armed struggle or repudiated violence outright. Amnesty, some argued, would be a crucial part of a broader, sorely needed reconciliation—a “working through” of the terrorist trauma as itself an effect of the trauma of the past. For the longtime RAF inmate Klaus Jünschke, such a reconciliation ideally demanded that both sides overcome the German “inability to mourn.” He insisted: “RAF members must recognize that all those they killed because of their roles in the state and the economy were human beings, over whom relatives cried and mourned. The other side must acknowledge that the RAF prisoners also have their dead to mourn, friends whose deaths have been considered of lesser importance.”54

In the late 1980s, although it did not grant a comprehensive amnesty, the government nonetheless began releasing key prisoners before they had completed their sentences. The first release came in 1988 when Nordrhein-Westfalen’s
Ministerpräsident
Bernhard Vogel granted a pardon
(Beg-Conclusion

305

nadigung)
to Jünschke, serving a life sentence for murder.55 (At the time, sixteen RAF members were serving life sentences.) Other so-called
Aussteiger
(dropouts) who forswore armed struggle were soon granted pardons.56 The inmates sought their freedom, above all, while the state could claim their recantations as a political victory—one that promised to weaken the RAF by deterring potential recruits and forcing divisions between the prisoners and those still underground. But beyond self-interest, both sides recognized the benefit of diffusing a conflict that had been a destructive stalemate for years.

In 1989, Soviet communism fell, followed quickly by the collapse of the East German state and the reunification of Germany. The dissolution of communism was a blow for the RAF. The “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc—however imperfect or even anathema from an “authentic” socialist standpoint—had at least demonstrated that a systematic alternative to capitalism was possible.

With communism’s fall, the RAF’s hope of instigating a socialist uprising in western Europe became even more remote. The demise of the DDR

threatened the RAF in a more immediate sense. Starting in 1978, RAF

members had received military training and logistical support from the DDR, and from 1980 on, RAF fugitives had found refuge there, resettling with the help of East German authorities. Now West German police aggressively pursued former guerrillas in the territory of the former DDR, arresting ten highly sought fugitives in 1990, among them Susanne Albrecht, Ponto’s main killer.57 Nearly all had long abandoned the guerrilla life (as a condition for their asylum, the DDR had required that they pledge not to engage in violence) and now sought leniency. Their arrest brought the risk that in exchange for lighter sentences, they might share information that could aid in the capture of members still at large. Indeed, Albrecht turned state witness, and the trials of these new captives led to both additional arrests and the prosecution of RAF prisoners for additional crimes.58

In April 1991, shaken by the arrests and adrift in a postcommunist world, the RAF tried to reassert its relevance by assassinating Detlev Rohwedder, the head of the Treuhand organization, who had been broadly responsible for liquidating or privatizing thousands of unprofitable enterprises in the former DDR, resulting in massive job loss and bitter protests. Yet rather than marking a new phase in the RAF’s armed struggle, the assassination was virtually its last gasp. In a stunning declaration, the “Aprilerklärung” of 1992, the RAF announced that it had suspended violence against “representatives of business and the state.”59