The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (34 page)

I saw people take up rocks who never would have had a stone in their hand in a million years. You have a situation where the softer ones see their interests defended by the “no future people” who are ready to take any kind of risk.

There's a tremendous potential there, because everything is so poorly defined, for everyone to attach their grievance to the movement and feel linked together through their disillusionment. Among the young people I know, the Social Democrats, who used to have strong contacts with youth, are completely discredited now.
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In the months that followed, squatters repeatedly squared off against police, clashes leading to riots in cities across the Federal Republic, as hundreds of buildings were occupied. In West Berlin, night patrols, a telephone chain, and a radio system were set up in order to guard against attacks by police and right-wing groups. Independent medics were also trained in order to provide first aid to those injured in street confrontations.
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The West Berlin Social Democrats were put on the defensive. Already tarnished by the Garski scandal, with the Senators for Finance and the Economy being forced to resign,
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they now lost support to the right for their inability to stamp out the squats, and to the newcomer
Alternative
Liste
for even attempting to do so. When voters went to the polls on May 10, 1981, the SPD lost control of the Berlin Senate for the first time in twenty-five years, and power passed to a CDU-FDP coalition. Far more significant, though, was the rise of the AL, which, benefiting from a resurgence of the far left, doubled its support from 1979 and won seats in government for the first time ever.
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In this polarized municipal arena, the new CDU Senator of the Interior, Heinrich Lummer, threw down the gauntlet, declaring that ten of the largest squats would be cleared by the end of August.

The summer was set for a serious showdown. Squatters responded to Lummer's threats by calling for a month of resistance dubbed “Tuwat,”
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initially expected to attract hundreds to West Berlin. The callout itself was banned, and organizers had to go underground to avoid arrest, but the repression and media fearmongering worked to spread the news.
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In the end, three thousand people gathered to resist the promised police offensive.
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At the same time, the
Autonomen
remained active in the antinuclear movement—they would be present at new mobilizations against the power plants at Gorleben (1980, 1982), Brokdorf (1980, 1981), Kalkar (1982), and beyond
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—as well as in other struggles, many of which had ecological and antimilitarist overtones. Perhaps the most famous of these was the resistance to the expansion of Frankfurt's airport, the so-called Startbahn West, which would require significant logging in an area of untouched forest. Despite local opposition, this expansion had been approved by the courts in 1978.
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As Freia Anders recounts, while the local Citizens Initiatives appealed the decision, “in 1980 the Hessian Minister for Economic Affairs Heinz Herbert Karry (FDP) confronted the public with a fait accompli and ordered an immediate start of construction without waiting for the decision of the Hessian Superior Administrative Court.” There followed “the construction of tree-houses and wooden huts in the neighboring Flörsheim forest, a hut
village that developed into a popular place for outings and a symbol of resistance.”
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Demonstrations and gatherings held in the hut-village regularly attracted thousands of people, bringing together hippies, locals, and
Autonomen.
It lasted for over a year, until police carried out a violent early-morning raid on November 2, 1981. People resisted, and even as police drove some off, others moved in, attempting to reoccupy the site. It took not hours or days, but two weeks for the police to gain control, and even then they were constantly being challenged. Although the hut-village had been cleared, the projected runway site would become the scene of weekly “Sunday strolls” attracting hundreds or even thousands of protesters, for years to come. The
Autonomen
were a regular feature at these “strolls,” and introduced a useful element of low-level violence and clashes, in what has been dubbed the “war of the fences.” This rise in tactical militancy was accompanied by a deepening of analysis, as people began to recognize how the new runway would fit into NATO's war plans, extending its reach further into the Middle East.
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Whether in the antinuclear demonstrations, at Startbahn West, or in the squats, the
Autonomen
attracted young people who felt both culturally and economically alienated from the system. Whereas the sixties generation had grown up at a time of increasing material wealth, fighting against former Nazis and inflexible conservatives, this new generation had come of age in a period of economic decline, facing repression that often wore a social democratic mask. The result was less hope, more angst, and a different kind of anger. This was reflected in the movement's embrace of punk rock and its slogan “No Future.” As
Spiegel
observed in its special issue on youth riots, the eighties generation would have simply laughed at anything like Rudi Dutschke's famous long march through the institutions.
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Or as Sabine Lenk of the
Liste aktiver unorganisierter Studenten
put it, “What was previously an extra-parliamentary opposition has become an anti-parliamentary opposition.”
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Oskar Lafontaine, at the time mayor of Saarbrücken, feared the youth revolt was “spreading like a wildfire across the Federal Republic,” while North Rhine-Westphalia Labor Minister Friedhelm Farthamm bemoaned the fact that it had reached “even the most secluded provincial areas”—evidence that their less middle-class and student base,
as well as their antireformist (or even antipolitical) ethos, allowed the
Autonomen
to reach further afield than the more famous APO ever had.
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One poll conducted by
Stern
magazine in early 1981 found that 64 percent of West Germans between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one viewed the squatters with approval.
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The squats in turn provided a base for all manner of progressive projects: solidarity with Third World liberation struggles, women's liberation, gay and lesbian rights, anti-militarism, and, of course, support for the prisoners.

Despite the RAF prisoners' having reminded people of their situation through the 1981 hunger strike, it was the RZ that enjoyed the most popularity among the
Autonomen.
The Cells' fluid strategy and structure appeared better suited to this scene, while the RAF was viewed in a much less favorable light (see sidebar on next page).

As for that minority who did identify with the RAF's struggle, they developed a separate identity, becoming known as anti-imps (short for “anti-imperialists”). Not for the first time, a major part of the RAF's appeal to these new supporters was the impression that theirs was an uncompromising, “fundamental” struggle; their willingness to go head-to-head with the state described as “posing the question of power.”

This distinction, between anti-imps and
Autonomen,
was further complicated by the militant women's movement, sections of which remained hostile to the RAF, while others were finding inspiration in its struggle.

Radical women's blocs had begun to appear at demonstrations, and both anti-imperialist and
Autonomen
women's groups now appeared in various cities, trying to connect questions of violence against women, reproductive freedom, and patriarchy with the new wave of antimilitarism, youth revolt, and prisoners' struggles.
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This was part of a broader phenomenon, as those who had been marginalized by the trends toward professionalization and mysticism in late-seventies feminism created new spaces to struggle as women (and often in women only groups) around a wide range of issues. A leaflet distributed in Heidelberg in 1980 was typical of this trend; in it, the authors explained,

We want to finally put an end to the split between work in women's groups and centers against oppression specific to women, such as rape, and political work against prisons, nuclear arms, and nuclear power plants in mixed groups. For us, this split is alienating. As women/lesbians, we are oppressed, despised and hated from morning to night. From morning to night, we struggle to break through all forms of oppression, whether their source is the police, state security jerk-offs, the media, Helmut Schmidt and his big brother Jimmy Carter, or tediously typical men.
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For many radical women, opposition to state violence in the form of nuclear missiles and isolation prison cells—and even support for the guerilla—was already a logical extension to resisting everyday male violence. As a flier released after the German Autumn had declared, “Stockholm, Drenkmann, Buback, Ponto [were] an unbroken chain of screams. Screams of women…. The consciousness of patriarchal society prevails everywhere. And then suddenly it breaks down. It's perfectly clear why women are attacking. As always. There are many kinds of self-defense.”
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Writing as the Revolutionary Feminist Cells, women from the RZ milieu had made a similar point years earlier:

We are sick of the daily oppression and destruction and we will assault them before they assault us. The concept of the Revolutionary Cells developed through many years of experience with West German imperialism and patriarchy. Experiences like these: The walk home at night. The fear of being raped. The experience of a woman confronted not only with an economic-clique, but with the oppressive thinking of men. “I'm less than men,” etc. Finally, I defend myself. At night I hit his face. The next time I shall defend myself better; teargas—jiu jitsu. I defend myself because it is my only chance, I use violence. Violence against violence.
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Such views were held by many women in the radical left, and seemed to take their most exemplary form with the Rote Zora guerilla formation emerging from the RZ as an autonomous women's armed group. At the same time, for some of these women, the RAF was particularly important, as its prisoners (many of whom were women) were facing the heaviest repression, and its struggle remained the most intense.

The prime expression of aboveground feminists grappling with the RAF's brand of anti-imperialism was the group Women Against
Imperialist War, which as we have seen had been active during the 1981 prisoners' hunger strike. WAIW consisted of groups active in several cities, including Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, which brought together women from the anti-imp and
Autonomen
scenes. As explained in the call-out for a Hamburg WAIW meeting in September 1980, “We are women from throughout the FRG, who are engaged in a common struggle against imperialist and patriarchal domination and who, as a result, want to live and struggle with women with whom we can develop a revolutionary perspective.”
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As they explained elsewhere, in a document translated into English as part of WAIW's work to build ties with the North American antiimperialist left:

When we got together as “Women Against Imperialist War” two years ago, it was very important for us to discuss the politics of the RAF and of the prisoners from the RAF. It was our aim to develop a new political offensive out of the women's movement, a movement most of us came from. An offensive that brings our fight against male violence and male supremacy together with our fight against the state and imperialism. We knew that we did not want for ourselves quiet islands within the system, because doing that would mean not to attack male violence and the state, not to abolish it, but to just bypass it. This is why the RAF's politics are so important to us: the comrades from the RAF and their politics do not bypass reality, do not bypass imperialist structures of violence, do not bypass alienation. This is because it is a politics that does not lie and deny reality by making compromises, that does not align itself with the system, but takes the perspective and possibility of liberation from imperialism, our liberation as people, very seriously and fights.
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