The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (7 page)

Demonstrations following the murder of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 (top) and attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke in 1968 (bottom).

The second guerilla tendency to emerge was more clearly a product of the student movement, for whom capitalism had been discredited, not so much by internal class oppression
but by its past and present complicity in military aggression and genocide around the world.
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This second tendency overlapped significantly with the first, with several individuals crossing back and forth, but it would ultimately develop along a separate path.

Those who followed this path constitute the subject of our study, the guerilla organization they established being the Red Army Faction.

The Red Army Faction first announced itself in 1970, when a small group broke a young man out of jail.

Andreas Baader was serving a three-year sentence for having set fire to two department stores to protest the war in Vietnam. One of his rescuers, Gudrun Ensslin, had also participated in this political arson, and, as such, was living underground at the time. Another rescuer, Ulrike Meinhof, was a well-known left-wing social critic, a journalist who had been putting the finishing touches on a docudrama about girls in reform school. Significantly older than the other guerillas, within the FRG she was in fact the best-known left-wing female intellectual of her generation; due to her role in Baader's escape she had no choice but to go underground.

The RAF made international headlines with this jailbreak, during which an elderly librarian was shot and seriously injured, and the operation was hotly debated on the left. All the more so when one year later at the annual May Day demonstration in West Berlin, supporters handed out copies of the group's foundational manifesto,
The Urban Guerilla Concept,
a document that not only made the case for armed struggle in the metropole, but also established the RAF's reputation as a group that took political theory seriously.

In this and subsequent texts, the RAF would develop a distinctive analysis of capitalism and the possibilities of resistance “in the belly of the beast,” addressing the difficult fact (as formulated by former RAF member Knut Folkerts), that “All revolutionary initiatives in [Germany] suffer—if they do not wish to resolve the question opportunistically—from the contradiction between the reality presented by this population and the need to find a base here.”
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Grappling with this, the RAF would combine insights from the Frankfurt School and other European Marxist intellectuals with the anti-imperialism of their day, arguing that the First World working classes suffered a unique form of psychological/cultural oppression, the “twenty-four-hour-workday,” saturated with “consumer terror.” That oppression notwithstanding, according to their subjectivist anti-imperialism, material issues in the metropole no longer qualified as the primary contradiction; the battlefield had shifted to the Third World, and the national liberation movements now constituted the global vanguard. While it was not exempt from contradictions and class oppression, for various reasons (social democracy, consumerism, and integration into the state, to name a few) the metropole, imperialism's “safe hinterland,” had become a place where people could only be mobilized for revolution through a personal breakthrough, for instance, the realization that life under capitalism is alienating, that commodities are no replacement for communities, or that living off the blood of others is unacceptable.
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While aspects of this analysis could be found in
The Urban Guerilla Concept,
a countervailing focus on poverty in West Germany was evident in
Serve the People: Class Struggle and the Guerilla,
released in May 1972.
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These ideas would find their ultimate synthesis in
The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle,
released in November 1972.
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In this document, material divisions within the FRG were acknowledged, but described as secondary to the question of consciousness, of each person's capacity to make a personal and explicit break with the dominant society. Although not ever stated as such, it was understood that part of this strategy was the idea that correctly applied violence could jumpstart such a process. Guerilla attacks were thus conceptualized as a way to demoralize the enemy and inspire people to make a break with the system. Although the goal was not to provoke repression, it was expected that the state's attacks could be turned to the guerilla's advantage, exposing imperialism's fascist core and leading to even greater disenchantment. As such, it was hoped that the guerilla would serve as a spark plug, if not as the flame that would start a prairie fire. Years later, Christian Klar would explain:

…I think that the RAF was active and provided inspiration at exactly the right moment. By that I mean, not acting from a base, but on the basis of the existing contradictions, acting to create a rift in society's ideology, an ideology that presents the bourgeoisie as representing shared political interests—creating a rift around that. In that regard the urban guerilla tactic was effective. The other thing, as far at the mass base goes, is, of course, the solidarity with anticolonial struggles occurring on other continents—and an identification with them.
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Or, more bluntly, as Helmut Pohl would later recall:

I have to say that we had no faith in agitation among the masses. We did not take this K-group
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revolutionary strategy seriously. Our project was different from that of traditional communist parties. We set about the process of developing the guerilla and of polarizing society through our actions. From our point of view, the guerilla was the small motor that would jumpstart the large motor. It was necessary to build and anchor this small motor.
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At some future point, when imperialism had been beaten back around the world, its chickens come home to roost, it was predicted that social divisions would reassert themselves within the metropole, and that these would once again provide a basis for revolutionary action. It was
then that the work done on the basis of this radical subjectivity would truly bear fruit. As explained in
The Urban Guerilla Concept:

[The urban guerilla struggle] is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.
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Shortly after Baader's liberation in 1970, RAF members traveled to Jordan, in the Middle East, where they received weapons training from Al Fatah, part of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout its existence, places where one could go not only for training but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.”

Upon returning to the FRG, the guerilla once again seized the public spotlight, carrying out a series of bank robberies and preparing for campaigns to come.

Successfully evading the police, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many students and leftists who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. Thousands of people secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets. Time and time again, as the cops stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them as they were welcomed into people's homes, including those of not a few middle-class sympathizers. Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”

Shortly after a firefight in July 1971, in which RAF member Petra Schelm was killed by police, one opinion poll found that 40 percent of young people were prepared to describe the RAF's motives as political, not criminal; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent stated that they themselves would be willing to conceal a fugitive.
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Then, in 1972, immediately following the release of
Serve the People
at that year's May Day demonstrations, the group turned things up a notch, carrying out a series of bombings that would come to be known as the “May Offensive.” Targets included police stations and U.S. army headquarters, to protest killer cops and the ongoing war in Vietnam, as well as an attack on the Hamburg offices of the Springer Press, accused of racism, Zionism, and inciting violence against the New Left. Four American soldiers were killed, and dozens of other people, including civilians, were injured. The attacks were not only unprecedented in West Germany—Western Europe itself had not seen anything like it in the postwar period.
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While many people may have been turned off by this escalation, others saw it as an inspiring example of what could be done.

There followed a wave of repression, as an army of police, supported by both West German and U.S. intelligence units, set up checkpoints and carried out raids across the country.

Within a few weeks ten members of the RAF—almost the entire guerilla—had been captured. Besides the alleged leadership (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ulrike Meinhof), the police arrested Klaus Jünschke, Irmgard Möller, Gerhard Müller, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Bernhard Braun.
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A supporter, Katharina Hammerschmidt, also ended up behind bars after she chose to turn herself in. These eleven joined several other combatants from the RAF and 2JM who had already been picked up over the previous two years.