Jeremy Varon (57 page)

306

Conclusion

Such assaults, it suggested, no longer served a political purpose, mandating a cease-fire while it reassessed its identity. In August, the RAF issued a “discussion paper” titled “We Must Search for Something New.”60

In the wake of the “Aprilërklarung,” a dizzying series of recantations, debates, deals, schisms, arrests, trials, and releases followed, culminating in the end of the RAF.61 As the RAF was contemplating its cease-fire, the state was developing a new plan for freeing inmates. The so-called Kinkel initiative (named for the Federal justice minister), announced in early 1992, allowed for the release of imprisoned guerrillas if they had severe health problems or had served two-thirds of their terms or at least fifteen years of life sentences.62 Four longtime prisoners were soon freed, followed by a flood of others. Crucially, the state softened the tacit requirement that those freed renounce armed struggle. Among those released was Irmgard Möller, a member of RAF’s first generation convicted for the 1972 bombing of the U.S. army base in Heidelberg, who had been held in Stammheim at the time of the 1977 prison deaths. After twenty-two years in prison, Möller was finally let go on December 1, 1994. Möller endorsed the RAF’s cease-fire, but she consistently defended the group’s early bombings, expressed no fundamental regrets over her political choices, and never wavered in her insistence that Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe had been murdered in Stammheim, and that government agents had tried to kill her too.63

The release of prisoners was, however, far from a seamless process.

Many Germans questioned whether convicted murderers should go free.

Some inmates, by contrast, felt the Kinkel initiative did not go far or fast enough, and that it continued to reward those with a conciliatory attitude while punishing alleged “hardliners.” They argued that behind the maneuvering of politicians eager to claim that they had put an end to the terrorist conflict, the iron will of the state security apparatus continued to be enforced in the prisons with unbroken intensity. Finally, even as the state released prisoners, it pursued new prosecutions for crimes long past.

Much of the inmates’ anger was directed at the RAF itself. Some prisoners had tried since the early 1990s to broker their freedom for the negotiated resolution of the conflict; the 1992 cease-fire, they claimed, was an initial step toward this end. But some in the underground apparently failed to follow through on the plan, choosing instead to leave the option of more armed assaults open and the prisoners in the lurch. By 1993, most prisoners had broken with the RAF, with some claiming betrayal.

Yet other inmates accused these of betraying the armed struggle, and as Conclusion

307

some in the underground sided with each prison faction, the dispute became a drama of almost Byzantine complexity.

The bitterness of those remaining in prison was palpable. Helmut Pohl had been incarcerated since 1984 for his involvement in the 1981 Ramstein bombing. Asked in 1996 whether the RAF had not moved away from a narrow militarism to a more probing and inclusive dialogue, he answered,

Yes, but only when it fit with their political concept. That’s why these discussions always failed. I think the fundamental mistakes made by everyone, from groups on the radical-left in general to the RAF itself, was that we weren’t based enough in reality and were too obsessed with ideology. There were meetings, papers, concepts, discussions, events, campaigns—but they weren’t reality. . . . The white European left, and the German left in particular, was more clever than anyone. No one read more or talked more than the left here did. But that’s not politics.64

Aimed at the stagnant discussions of the 1990s, his comments could equally apply to much of the debate over armed struggle since the RAF’s inception.

In March 1998, the RAF finally disbanded, declaring in a communiqué: “The urban guerrilla in the form of RAF is now history.”65 Assessing its nearly thirty-year existence, the RAF both admitted grave errors and defended its basic impulses. The fascist past still figured heavily in the RAF’s self-appraisal:

Despite everything we could have done better, it was fundamentally correct to . . . wage resistance to the continuity of German history. . . . Those who struggled in the Jewish resistance, in the communist resistance . . . were right to struggle. . . . They were the few glimmers of light in the history of this country since 1933. . . . The RAF broke with German tradition after Nazi fascism [by waging] a struggle whose praxis rejected the conditions in the ruling state and attacked the military structures of its NATO allies.66

Attempting to eke from its history some inspiration for the future, the RAF insisted that “calling the system into question was and still is legitimate, so long as there is dominance and oppression.” With poetic optimism, the statement concluded: “The revolution says / I was / I am / I will be again.”67

Within a year of the statement, only a handful of guerrillas were still incarcerated, and the long arc of the conflict appeared to be at its end.68

Germany’s collective task was now somehow to assess its meaning and ultimate cost. Some affiliated with the armed struggle remained unim-308

Conclusion

pressed by the RAF’s attempt at closure, charging that the final communiqué had come way too late and only weakly confronted the RAF’s failures. Til Meyer, released in 1998, asserted that by 1989 there was

“no basis” any longer for the RAF to exist; in truth, she felt, the armed struggle should have been abandoned in 1977. Rolf Clemens Wagner, still imprisoned in 1998, derisively rejected the RAF’s parting claims, insisting: “There never was revolution here, there is no revolution here, and there will not be one here in the foreseeable future. That is the continuity of history, the reality we must face.”69

The German urban guerrillas suffered from a surfeit of history. Their burden, in a sense, was history itself. They tried to compensate for the relative absence of German resistance to Nazism, but in their obviously intense confrontation with the past, they sought an unacknowledged escape or redemption from it. And seeking liberation from the past, they repeated undesirable dimensions of that past, contributing to another extended episode of trauma, another case of
Tod und Traurigkeit,
ending with regret on all sides. In this way, the West German armed struggle experienced its ultimate continuity with the German past.

.

.

.

One way or another, this darkness got to give.

The Grateful Dead, “New Speedway Boogie”

(lyrics by Robert Hunter)

Weatherman’s and the RAF’s armed struggles clearly did not succeed in creating revolutions. It is possible to read in that failure something more than the intrusion of reality upon an audacious fantasy, or the resilience of a powerful imperialist system, or the predictable consequence of a false political turn. Their failure signaled the broader collapse of an orientation to revolution that helped define the 1960s.

To Renate Riemeck, Ulrike Meinhof’s foster mother, the totalizing rage and liberatory longings Ulrike felt amounted to “social-ethical-utopian ecstasy, a contourless vision of the Coming Time.”70 As her words suggest, 1960s radicals were driven by an apocalyptic impulse resting on a chain of assumptions: that the existing order was thoroughly corrupt and had to be destroyed; that its destruction would give birth to something radically new and better; and that the transcendent nature of this leap rendered the future a largely blank or unrepresentable utopia. This idea of the creative power of destruction had appeal worldwide. “The passion to destroy is a creative pleasure,” French students proclaimed. “De-Conclusion

309

stroy that which destroys you,” Germans urged. The Black Panthers often spoke enthusiastically of a final, violent showdown with white America.71

A radical newspaper titled reports of Weatherman’s bombings: “Our humble task is to organize the apocalypse!”72 A communiqué accompanying a bombing by the “Volunteers of America” declared, “Out of the Bankruptcy of AmeriKKKa will come a new country and a new people.”73

And as if to welcome a cataclysmic confrontation, a Berkeley newspaper printed on its cover California Governor Ronald Reagan’s message to student demonstrators: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”74

The optimism of American and West German radicals about revolution was based in part on their reading of events, which seemed to por-tend dramatic change. They debated revolutionary strategy, and their activism in a general way suggested the nature of the liberated society to come. But they never specified how turmoil would lead to radical change, how they would actually seize power, or how they would reorganize politics, culture, and the economy after a revolution. Instead, they mostly rode a strong sense of outrage and an unelaborated faith that chaos bred crisis, and that from crisis a new society would emerge. In this way, they translated their belief that revolution was politically and morally necessary into the mistaken sense that revolution was therefore likely or even inevitable.

The quixotic quality of revolution led to piercing tensions for those who turned to violence. Robin Palmer confessed, “Even though in my essence I was a Weatherman, in my quintessence I said, ‘It’s all bullshit, we’re never going to take state power.’” He speculated that it is was the Yippie in him, the taste for the absurd, that permitted him to commit bombings while ultimately doubting that revolution was possible. Palmer also buoyed himself with the desperate thought: “If the winter of our bombing discontent is here at last, can spring be far behind?”75

The demise of the New Left’s last, highest ambition of revolution—

one pushed to its limit in armed struggle—was followed by the near-total abandonment in the developed West and large parts of the world of revolution as a structure of longing, desire, and faith. The “revolutionary”

1960s may therefore be seen as a threshold for the establishment in the decades following of a “postmodern condition,” virtually defined by the exhaustion of utopian energies. Jean-François Lyotard, in a seminal postmodern text, described the totalizing impulse behind utopian quests for

“final solutions” as a “dangerous fantasy to seize reality.”76 Slavoj Zizek characterizes the desire for a New Man and a New World, beyond antagonism or contradiction, as a fundamentally fascist longing.77 Such 310

Conclusion

sentiments were reflected, not in the disappearance of progressive movements—some thrived as never before—but by the move of activists away from the “grand project” promising to “change the world” to the more modest goal of changing at least parts of the world in small but meaningful ways. Russell Jacoby, lamenting this shift, recently observed

“a utopian spirit—a sense that the future could transcend the present—

has all but vanished.”78

At the height of postmodern quietism, it was tempting to look back at the “radical 1960s” and ask, “Where have all the angry young men and women gone?” For all their volatile conceit, 1960s activists took as the task of their lives nothing less than the complete remaking of their societies along lines both fairer and more just. Weatherman and the RAF, within this appreciative gaze at the era’s activism
as a whole,
recede behind a more robust image of the 1960s in terms of their world-changing optimism.

The antiglobalization movement that took shape in the United States, western Europe, and other parts of the developed world toward the end of the 1990s seeks to address the inequities of the world economy in ways strikingly parallel to the militant radicalism of the 1960s. The phenomenon of antiglobalization calls for—or even demands—a new look at 1960s protest, especially its violent edges. Now, as then, the core perception is that the prosperity of the few presupposes the exploitation and misery of the many. The catalyst for this awareness is a not a single, galvanizing “event” like the Vietnam War, but the grinding persistence of staggering levels of poverty, disease, and despair in a world capable of dramatically diminishing them. And now, as in the 1960s, the conclusion is that true justice must be global justice, making international solidarity the paramount value.

Militancy has made a comeback as well, evident in the spirited protests in recent years at meetings of the leaders of wealthy societies and the institutions they control. Such demonstrations, which form a new geography of global activism, have once again showed the power of telegenic confrontational protest to command attention and, in cases, dramatically alter the terms of political debate. With this new militancy has come a revitalized language of commitment and courage, of how cops are and what the experience of jail is like. At the margins, a politics of

“Smash Capitalism” has also reemerged, as has some interest in Weatherman and the RAF, potentially seen as distant sources of contemporary radicalism. Yet this new movement, for all its utopian promise, also re-Conclusion

311

calls the weaknesses of 1960s radicalism, from the substitution of slogans for analysis to the granting of a shallow mystique to street fighting, and even to a reckless fascination with more serious forms of violence.

Weatherman and the RAF, as this new tide of radicalism rises, may indeed become relevant for the cautionary tales they embody.

There are, finally, the changes of circumstances and perspective wrought by September 11, 2001. Past “armed struggles” against the

“American empire,” however different in intent and kind from recent terrorism, may now appear in a harsher light—revealing how cultures of resistance can devolve into cults of violence. By the same token, the response of the U.S. government to “9/11”—from a resurgent militarism, to an attitude of suspicion of or hostility toward much of the world, to a cheapening of the lives of others in the purported effort to protect those of “one’s own”—has spawned renewed criticisms of America’s over-reaching power and imperial arrogance. Domestically, the restriction of civil liberties in the name of “national security” and the accompanying fear of state repression (evident in the increasing hostility of police toward demonstrators and harassment of foreign-born activists) have vividly raised for America issues West Germany struggled with in the 1970s and 1980s. In these added lights, the experiences of Weatherman and the RAF may appear, at least in part, as volatile expressions of a continuing conflict over the status and meaning of America—its military, economy, institutions, values, culture, and influence—in the world. The stories of Weatherman and the RAF, when seen as part of this larger, enduring narrative, have as yet no real end.