The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online

Authors: J. Smith

This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of anti-imperialist politics. “Volume 1: Projectiles for the People” provides a history of the RAF’s development through the words of its letters and communiqués. What makes the book especially important and relevant, however, is the careful research and documentation done by its editors. From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a “democratic” country on a level that met their needs. While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people. Students interested in this historic era would do well to study this book and to internalize both the successes and failures of one of the largest organized armed anti-imperialist organizations operating in Western Europe since World War II.

—
Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Clear-headed and meticulously researched, this book deftly avoids many of the problems that plagued earlier attempts to tell the brief but enduring history of the RAF. It offers a remarkable wealth of source material in the form of statements and letters from the combatants, yet the authors manage to present it in a way that is both coherent and engaging. Evidence of brutal—and ultimately ineffective—attempts by the state to silence the voices of political prisoners serve as a timely and powerful reminder of the continued need for anti-imperialist prisoners as leaders in our movements today. At once informative and inspirational, this is a much-needed contribution to the analysis of armed struggle and the cycles of repression and resistance in Europe and around the world.

—
Sara Falconer, Toronto Anarchist Black Cross Federation

This first volume about the RAF is about a part of WWII that did not end when the so called allies defeated the nazis. The RAF warriors come from a strong socialist history and knew they were fighting for the very life of their country. Many victories and many errors were scored which provide this important look into REAL her/history lessons. A must read for all serious alternative history students who then in turn can use it as a teaching tool towards a better future.

—
b
(r.d. brown), former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Starting in the Sixties, a new revolutionary strategy began to plague the capitalist metropolis—the urban guerilla. Warfare once waged by peasant armies in the countryside of a Cuba, a China, or a Guinea-Bissau, was suddenly transferred to small cells of ex-students in the imperialist centers of Berlin, Rome, and New York. No urban guerrillas became more famed or more demonized than West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF). We knew their signature bold actions in the headlines: from the damaging bombing of the u.s. army V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt in 1972, in response to Washington’s mining of Hanoi’s harbor in an escalation of the Vietnam War, to the kidnapping and later execution of the head of the West German industrialists’ association, in an effort to negotiate for the release of revolutionary prisoners.
But we never heard their political voices
. Since the RAF’s political statements, debates, and communiqués were untranslated and unavailable in English even within the left.

Now, at last, a significant documentary history of the RAF has come into the spotlight, complete with a readable account of the postwar German New Left from which it emerged. Even better, this work was done by editors/translators who reject the obedient capitalist media’s trivializing of the RAF as “pathological” death-wishing celebrities. In their hands, the words of the RAF are revealed as serious responses to the failure of parliamentary reformism, trade-unionism, and pacifism, to stop the solidification of Germany’s own form of a neofascist capitalism (lightly cosmeticized with a layer of that numbing “consumer democracy”). The young RAF fighters hoped for liberation in their dangerous experiment but were willing to accept tragic consequences, and their story is emotionally difficult to read with eyes open. Controversial as the RAF was, their systematic torture in special “anti-terrorist” facilities stirred worldwide unease and even protest. In fact, those special prisons were the eagerly studied forerunners for the u.s. empire’s own latest human rights abuses, from Guantanamo to the domestic “maxi-maxi” prisons. We all and the RAF are much closer than the capitalist public wants to believe. It is all here, in this first volume of the Red Army Faction documentary histories, and we should thank all those who worked on this book.

—
J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat

THE RED ARMY FACTION:
A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

VOLUME I
P
ROJECTILES
for the P
EOPLE

THE RED ARMY FACTION:
A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

VOLUME I
P
ROJECTILES
for the P
EOPLE

forewords by Bill Dunne and Russell “Maroon” Shoats

introductory texts and translations by
André Moncourt and J. Smith

the red army faction: a documentary history
volume 1: projectiles for the people

introductory texts and translations by André Moncourt and J. Smith

The opening epigram on page v is from Karl-Heinz Dellwo “Kein Ankommen,
kein Zurück” in
Nach dem bewaffneten Kampf
, Angelika Holderberg ed. (Gießen:
Psychsozial-Verlag, 2007).

ISBN: 978-1-60486-029-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008929110

Many of the translated texts in this book
are available online at
www.germanguerilla.com

Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution
CP 63560
CCCP Van Horne
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3W 3H8
www.kersplebedeb.com

PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org

Layout and Index by Kersplebedeb

Cover Design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
The photo used on the front cover is of the funeral of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in 1977.

Printed in the United States on recycled paper

dedicated to the memory of Jim Campbell

“We are a projectile,” Andreas Baader wrote to the group,
thereby articulating an ethical point of view in which the
subject and his objective became a single thing. It also meant
that if no further separation existed between the “subject” and
“object” it was obvious how it would end: in death.

Karl-Heinz Dellwo

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY BILL DUNNE

A WORD FROM RUSSELL “MAROON” SHOATS

1 “DEMOCRACY” COMES TO DEUTSCHLAND:
POSTFASCIST GERMANY AND THE
CONTINUING APPEAL OF IMPERIALISM

not wanted in the model: the kpd

2 THE RE-EMERGENCE OF
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN WEST GERMANY