The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (4 page)

This is by no means a complete list of German words and terms used in this volume, most of which are explained in the text or by means of footnote. What follows are simply some of the more frequently recurring words the reader will encounter.

Bundestag:
The fedaral parliament of West Germany.

Bundeswehr:
The armed forced of West Germany, re-established in 1954.

Jusos: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Jungsozialistinnen und Jungsozialisten in der SPD
(Workers Association of Young Socialists in the SPD); the SPD’s youth wing.

Kripo:
Short for
Kriminalpolizei
(Criminal Police); the principal German police force.

Land/Länder:
The singular and plural for the German equivalent of states or provinces.

Ostpolitik:
the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.

Rote Zora:
the independent feminist affiliate of the RZ. Its members were originally active as the Women of the Revolutionary Cells in 1975. The last Rote Zora action occurred in 1995.

Stasi:
The
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
(Ministry for State Security), better know as the
Stasi,
was the East German secret police force that tracked both internal dissent and foreign threats. It was similar in some ways to the FBI or the BKA, but played a more central role in policy decision-making.

Verfassungsschutz:
Literally “Protection of the Constitution” or Guardians of the Constitution; the German internal intelligence service, primary police force for intelligence actions against the guerilla and the left.

P
ROJECTILES
for the P
EOPLE

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REALLY
understand the rise of the New Left or the development of armed struggle in West Germany in the late sixties and early seventies without understanding the nature of the country and the role it played within the hegemonic, anticommunist strategy developed by the United States in the period following World War II.

The Federal Republic of Germany was a hybrid state, some elements— its institutions, some legislation, many personnel—seamlessly persisting from the Nazi period, and others grafted on by the Americans. As a nation almost constitutionally defined as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism, West Germany remained subordinate to it in the first postwar decades in a way that even Britain or France were not. Making matters even worse, in return for their allegiance, the West German ruling and professional classes were given free reign to negotiate their own stiflingly conservative and authoritarian post-Nazi culture and identity.

All of this was built on a post-genocidal basis; dead Jews remaining the elephant in the corner, alternately ignored or explained away as a tragic consequence of the “lack of morals” under Hitler. Many Germans growing up after the war would not know any Jews personally, and would be only vaguely aware of the horrors that had befallen them: bitter testimony to the way in which the dead, precisely because they are dead, have no say over how their murderers explain or ignore their absence.

At first, the defeat of Nazism in May 1945 seemed to spell the end of Germany’s national sovereignty, its territory occupied by France, Britain, and the United States in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East.

In this Soviet Zone, which would eventually become the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) held power. The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had borne the brunt of Germany’s war, and so for many years rehabilitation took second place to reparations in the GDR. Throughout its existence, East Germany bore many of the hallmarks of “real existing socialism”: compared to the capitalist west, there was less abject poverty and less involvement in the pillage of the Third World; at the same time, there was next to no room for political dissent or protest. Even communists suspected of differing from the dominant party line could find themselves arrested and tortured by the
Stasi
, the secret police. Society and culture were not frozen, yet they were certainly chilled, creating a distinctly “socialist” kind of conservatism.

Yet more than a few lifelong Communists felt that this was an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay to fetter the German aggression that had defined the first half of the century. As Markus Wolf, head of the dreaded
Stasi
during the period covered by this book, would explain in his post-wall apologia:

We East German Socialists tried to create a new kind of society that would never repeat the German crimes of the past. Most of all, we were determined that war should never again originate on German soil.
¹

In the Western Zone too, initially the United States had toyed with the idea of deindustrializing the country, so as to cripple its development and preclude any future German wars. Very soon, however, this approach was rejected, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive of June 1947 finding that, “An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.”

It didn’t hurt that corporations such as Ford, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, and Standard Oil had had huge prewar investments in Germany and were all lobbying for a rapid resumption of business-as-usual.
²

The geopolitical goals of the United States, always foremost amongst the western occupiers, combined with the interests of the German middle and upper classes, effectively sabotaging any real efforts at denazification in the West. In no time at all, important sections of the establishment that had helped maintain the Third Reich were being welcomed into the new pro-American administration. As the late William D. Graf observed:

Almost all the representatives of big business labeled as war criminals by the American Kilgore Commission in 1945 were back in their former positions by 1948; and of roughly 53,000 civil servants dismissed on account of their Nazi pasts in 1945, only about 1,000 remained permanently excluded, while the judiciary was almost 100% restored as early as 1946.
³

The result, much as desired, was a political system which remained significantly tilted to the right.

This period marked the beginning of the American “Cold War” against the Soviet bloc, in which Germany was to become an important chip. In keeping with the Truman Doctrine, the zone occupied by the western Allies was built up as an anticommunist bulwark. The vehicle for this project was the European Relief Program, a blueprint for the economic and military reconstruction of Western Europe, which U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall convinced the U.S. Congress to pass in 1948. Almost one-and-a-half billion dollars were pumped into West Germany through the Marshall Plan, its economy rebuilt in such a way as to guarantee the expansion of U.S. economic influence in Europe, to serve as the foundation for the military and political integration of West Europe into the anticommunist bloc, and to facilitate the cultural and technological Americanization of European societies, especially West Germany itself.
⁴

In short, demolished by war and in social and economic chaos, West Germany was offered reconstruction, rapid economic growth, and integration into the Allied Bloc in exchange for offering its support to
international capitalism and the use of its territory as a front line position in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.. This was an appeal aimed not only at the ruling class, but also at “ordinary” Germans, who may have benefited from the Third Reich’s policies of plunder and genocide, but who now, in defeat, found themselves thrown into economic insecurity
¹
An early propaganda document from the western occupation government, issued just weeks after a pro-Soviet coup in neighboring Czechoslovakia, explained what was at stake:

The fate of the Marshall Plan will determine who is to be the victor in the great ideological conflict of democracy versus totalitarianism. Unless the Germans can get enough to eat and decent homes to live in, no amount of fine words about the benefit of democracy and no amount of repression will prevent them from going over to Communism.
²

Former Nazis, provided they were not personally too notorious or unwilling to play by the new rules, appeared to the Americans as far preferable to communists or their presumed fellow travelers. Indeed, it has been noted that for much of the West German establishment, “anticommunism provided a point of common cause with the Western victors and hence… a means of avoiding being called to account for their complicity” with the Hitler regime.
³

By the time the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was granted semi-sovereign statehood in 1949, this set of common interests had become embodied in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), under the iron fist of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Ruling for almost twenty years, normally in coalition with the much smaller liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the slightly more rabid Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, the CDU soon became almost synonymous with the state itself.

SHOWPIECE CAPITALISM

West Germany was to be more than just a shield against the “encroaching red menace”; it was to be western imperialism’s visible model of economically and socially “progressive” capitalism.
Modell Deutschland
(“Model Germany”), as it became known, was to serve as an example to other West European states and as a taunt to the working class on the other side of the “wall.”

As an anticommunist showpiece, the FRG soon payed for itself in a time honored capitalist fashion—on the backs of the proletariat, especially the most desperate and oppressed layers.

Heightened levels of exploitation combined with the financial assistance offered by the Marshall Plan made the FRG the envy of other western capitalist states. By every measure of the ruling class, the West German economy shone. Real wages in the period 1948-1958 were at the level already established by the fascist regime,
⁴
roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,
⁵
while the working week in 1955 could go as high as fifty hours, longer in key sectors like the steel industry. In that year, West German industrial workers had a work-week two and a half hours longer than their counterparts in Britain and eight hours longer than industrial workers in the United States and Canada.
⁶

The profits made possible by this arrangement encouraged an extremely high rate of investment, which grew from 19.1% in 1950 to 26.5% in 1965; even with the recessions of the seventies, it wasn’t until 1976 that it had fallen back to 20%. In 1960, when France was showing a rate of investment of 17.4% and both Britain and the U.S. only registered 16%, West Germany was already showing an investment rate of 24%.
⁷

As Werner Hülsberg notes:

The ‘economic miracle’ merely indicated the existence of ideal conditions for the exploitation of wage labor and, as such, is somewhat of a cynical myth. The long-term upswing in the economy, however, did lead to a continuous rise in the living standards of the West German population. While net wages and
salaries during the period 1950 to 1962 grew by 143 per cent, the income of independent entrepreneurs during the same period grew by 236 per cent.
¹

This boom was also based on real divisions in the working class, with German men in their prime being lifted into higher status and better paying jobs than the “pariah layers” which included young and older German men, but were fundamentally built around immigrant and female labor.

In the immediate aftermath of German defeat, working class women had borne the brunt of reconstruction unpaid and off the books, but absolutely necessary for survival, to the point that the term
Trümmerfrauen
(“women of the rubble”) was coined for those who hauled away the debris of bombed out buildings with their bare hands. At the same time, in October 1945, the Allied Control Council had declared it a duty of all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to also work in the official economy: the female labor force, which had already earned only 86 cents to the male dollar under the Nazis, now saw its relative wages dropping, until in the 1950s and 60s women’s wages were on average just 60% of those of their menfolk.
²

Throughout the 1950s, seven million refugees and displaced persons, many of whom were highly skilled, streamed into the country from the East. The German industries which had been structured around the use of forced labor during the Nazi period soon found they could fill this same niche with immigrant labor.

As New Left historian Karl Heinz Roth has remarked, from the point of view of big business, “this exceptionally mobile subproletariat compensated completely for the loss of the slaves condemned to forced labor in the Nazi era.”
³
Yet, with a crucial difference: unlike the slave labourers, who were literally worked to death under Nazism, these new immigrants were to be highly favored. They were overwhelmingly loyal and politically reliable in the eyes of the ruling class, seeing as they came from the “Communist East” where more than a few of them had lost real privileges as ethnic Germans when the Nazi occupation came to an end. Indeed, these expellees and refugees from the East, exploited as they were, were naturally drawn towards the most virulent
anticommunism, and catalyzed shopfloor and grassroots resistance to the left within the working class.
⁴