The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (19 page)

If the state had supposed it could keep a lid on things with its police deployment at Brokdorf, it would soon learn otherwise. Within a month, a national march on the site had been organized, with the insistence on nonviolence dropped. Thirty thousand people streamed in from across the country and beyond, many prepared for action. As they approached police lines, some two thousand broke away, fighting their way through. They waded across the moat that had been dug, and, braving water cannons, attacked the wall surrounding the building site.
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The response came as police helicopters indiscriminately tear-gassed the retreating crowds, including the vast majority who had not joined in the attack.
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For the first time in West Germany's history, units of the Federal Border Guard were deployed at a protest.
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Things continued to escalate. The next battle came in early 1977, in Grohnde, where another one of the Schmidt government's new power plants was being built. As the movement magazine
Autonomie
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reported, “A demonstration did not occur. Instead, the activists immediately attacked the fence with the necessary tools.” Joppke explains:

With “military precision” and “criminal energy,” and the help of blowpipes and electric chainsaws, the militant attackers struck a huge hole into a monstrous steel fence that had been considered indestructible. Eight hundred police officers and demonstrators were injured in this ferocious battle—the worst political violence ever registered in the FRG.
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Clearly, a section of the movement had transcended the normal bounds of democratic protest. As the movement radicalized it also made connections, growing beyond its single-issue origins. In the words of Jens
Scheer, a physics professor from Bremen university, and member of the Maoist
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
(KPD),

The escalation of violence originates not from us but from the state. Already the construction of nuclear plants is violence. Many citizens learn from Wyhl and Brokdorf that their real enemy is not a flawed energy policy or a dangerous technology but the state itself.
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Opposition to nuclear energy was radicalizing people by shining a light on the ugly face of repression in Model Germany. In the year after Grohnde, movement energies were spent supporting a number of arrested activists, eleven of whom would eventually be convicted of endangering national security. The state added insult to injury, taking legal action to force them to pay the costs for the police action (230,000
DM
), while eighty people who testified on their behalf were brought up on charges of perjury.
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Grohnde, March 19, 1977.

All of this was largely ignored by the RAF and the 2JM—most of their members being either in prison, or focused on freeing the prisoners—but not by the RZ. Members of the Revolutionary Cells had participated in the action in Grohnde, and in Brokdorf before that. Impressed by what they had seen—and coinciding with their move
away from the international terrain subsequent to the Entebbe disaster
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—they decided the time might be right to add the guerilla to the mix. The RZ carried out two such actions in August ‘77, against the MAN corporation in Nuremberg and against both Klein and Schanzlin & Becker AG installations in Frankenthal—all three targets were involved in nuclear weapons production, and MAN had important contracts in South Africa.
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If Grohnde represented a high point for the antinuclear movement, the pendulum would soon swing the other way. Construction was nearly complete at Kalkar, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia not far from Düsseldorf, by the time the movement's next national mobilization occurred. Protesters were particularly incensed as the Kalkar power plant was to be a “fast breed” facility—one which produces more radioactive material than it consumes, with byproducts that can be used to make nuclear weapons. A demonstration was planned for September 24, 1977: smack dab in the middle of the German Autumn, just a few weeks after the RAF had abducted Hanns Martin Schleyer.

Despite the tense political situation, between thirty and fifty thousand people gathered for the march. The police had been given a green light to proceed as they saw fit, and as many as ten thousand manned checkpoints throughout the area, all motorists and travelers being searched, and hundreds of foreigners being turned back at the FRG's borders. At one point, a police helicopter even forced a train to a halt and had its passengers disembark.
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Protesters were fingerprinted, photographed, and entered into the police computer files.
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The authorities would announce that thirty-three persons had been preemptively arrested and that thousands of masks, helmets, and protective shields, five hundred batons, forty-one walkie-talkie sets, as well as steel ball projectiles, catapults, steel rods, knives, and flare guns had been confiscated. Thus disarmed, the protesters were kept from the actual construction site by over a thousand police armed with submachine guns and protected by barbed wire, a moat, and a concrete wall.
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In the lead-up to Kalkar authorities had warned that the demonstration would likely turn violent, with the possibility of fatalities—not completely far-fetched as an antinuclear protester had been killed by police in France just a few months earlier. As it was, officials were left crowing about how they had managed to defang the protest before it could even begin, and the movement suffered a serious blow. In the words of one organizer,

At Kalkar, we ran into the machine guns of the state. The demonstration never occurred; it was already smashed in the forefield. The state used all means to demonstrate its power. We experienced a limit. It became clear we could no longer confront the state in this form. A long period of resignation set in.
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Here too, a movement had seemingly reached an impasse; but repression did not stop people—it polarized them. For some, the problem now became the “atomic mafia” and its “atomic state.” As one movement text would later explain,

The atomic State is not a temporary or reversible development. It is a symbiosis between the development of military strategy all over in Western countries which are increasingly going over to considering and treating their own populations as the enemy and the development of a destructive technology (atomic energy technology) that is to be put to use by the electricity concerns and the energy fetishes regardless of the consequences that could follow. Atomic technology has developed out of a social system which has often proven that it will even risk genocide for the sake of economic progress. Criticizing atomic energy thus becomes a basic criticism of the way of production in this society.
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It was a situation not without its possibilities.

The antinuclear movement brought together different political tendencies and generations and, as we shall see, would eventually provide a launching pad for new cycles of struggle. For the first postwar generation, those who had come of age in the 1960s, it served as a way station, a place to remain active as one's ideological reference points began to show their age. While the RAF had plunged the guerilla and
its supporters into the most dramatic crisis with its actions in ‘77, the fact of the matter is that all tendencies of the post-APO left were approaching various crossroads in their respective paths.

The German Autumn would serve as a synecdoche for this broader crisis. For while it fell to the guerilla to solve the problems of its own unique circumstances, others pondered a much similar quandary: how to break through the obstacles that faced them? Not an easy task, given that these obstacles could often be traced back to the ideologies and class trajectories of the groups in question.

The self-styled “antiauthoritarians” who had emerged from the APO had been exemplified by the
Spontis,
with strongholds in Frankfurt and West Berlin. As this scene experimented with increasing levels of violence, it fractured, some sections adopting out-and-out pro-guerilla positions, while others retreated into the so-called “alternative movement,” which was pioneering what would later be termed, somewhat reductively, lifestylism. Dissatisfied with these choices, others continued to look elsewhere for new places and ways to introduce and advance their politics.

If any single event can be credited for the antiauthoritarians transcending their time of crisis, it would be the Tunix Conference, held in West Berlin on the last weekend of January 1978. A month earlier, a group of friends had issued a wistful call out for this gathering of the countercultural left:

We are fed up with this country! The winter is too sad, the spring too contaminated, and the summer too suffocating. The smell from the offices, the reactors, the factories, and the highways is unbearable. The muzzles no longer taste good and neither do the plastic-wrapped sausages. The beer is as flat as are bourgeois morals. We no longer want to do the same work and make the same faces day in and day out. We have been ordered around long enough. We have had our thoughts, our ideas, our apartments, and our IDs controlled. We have had our faces smashed in. From now on, we refuse to be arrested, insulted, and turned into robots. We are leaving for the beaches of Tunix!
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Organizing under the names Quinn the Eskimo, Judas Priest, and Frankie Lee (all characters from Bob Dylan songs), they would later explain,

During the fall of 1977 a political discussion took shape among us that encouraged us to initiate Tunix. We experienced the reaction
of the left to the events surrounding… Schleyer and Mogadishu as a cringing before an imaginary attack on the part of the state. Many were taking cover as they would from an approaching thunderstorm and were crying, “Don't get wet!” Pessimism had spread even among us. We no longer believed it possible to accomplish a revolutionary project.
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No sooner had they announced the conference, the three left on vacation to Sweden. As one of them admitted years later, “We didn't even know if anyone would show up.” When they returned from their holiday, however, they found that thousands had signaled they would be attending—suddenly the scene prepared itself, almost overnight, to host one of the most important political gatherings of the decade.

Tunix—a play on words that means “Do Nothing”—attracted thousands of people from both the counterculture and what was known as the undogmatic (meaning non-Leninist) left. Workshops discussed setting up a new ecological political party and a new left-wing national newspaper, while political theory was debated with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Johannes Agnoli, and other intellectual superstars of the day.
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The conference ended with a march through the streets of West Berlin, as noted in the
Tagesspiegel:

For the first time in years, a demonstration in Berlin turned violent. When a crowd of about five thousand people gathered to end the three-day TUNIX meeting at the Institute of Technology, paint bombs were thrown at the police outside the women's prison in Lehrter Straße and cobblestones outside the court house in Moabit's Turmstraße. The protesters included Spontis, Urban Indians, and other nonorganized leftists. They came from Berlin, West Germany, and Western Europe…. Swastikas and SS runes were painted on police vehicles…. The American House in Hardenbergstraße was bombarded with rocks…. A huge German flag saying “Modell Deutschland” was pulled through the streets by a sound truck. At the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimstaler Straße, the flag was burned with police and passers-by watching…. Anarchists carried banners saying, “Stammheim Is Everywhere,” “Away with the Dirt!” and “Gross!” Graffiti was painted on houses along the marching route, for example, “Free
the Agit Printers” and “Anarchy Is Possible.” Outside several prisons, the protesters chanted, “Free the Prisoners!”
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Defiant rhetoric notwithstanding, Tunix did not augur any escalation of resistance as such. Rather, it was another sign of the gravity of the RAF's conflict with the state in ‘77 that anything organized in the months following was obliged to refer back to the German Autumn. What did end up coming out of Tunix were a series of concrete plans to build left-wing infrastructure, and there followed a period of dramatic growth in the already-important West Berlin alternative scene—health food stores, co-ops, bike shops, etc. As one historian of the period explains, “West Berlin turned into the secret capital of the alternative movement. A 1979 survey claims that about a hundred thousand people in the city counted themselves, at least in a wider sense, among the alternative scene.”
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